41–50 of 101 posts
> Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122). I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I think I just found it.
First of all, IQ tests are bullshit. Second, everyone can be a "genius" as long as they put a lot of work into anything. It doesn't take much to become better than the average person - you just have to be slightly better. Once you start working on something for a long time and thinking about it more than 50% (arbitrary, but about right) of all your waking time, your brain will dedicate a big part of its new neurons a…
P.S. Just my opinion, please don't downvote (or downvote just this comment, it's separated for that reason): I don't believe creativity in arts equals genius. I find that most of the expensive pictures of old plain and simply suck and are only popular/expensive because of their exclusivity and because the people who can afford them are willing to pay that price (I understand that - I would probably want to buy the fi…
> Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122). I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I think I just found it.
Think of 'genius' as something you get for free. You can make up for that lack to a certain extent by applying yourself. A person applying themselves with merely average innate ability more often than not will outperform a person born with some windfall. This goes for money, brains, the lot. Apply yourself, that's half the battle. Plenty of people never learn to apply themselves and that includes plenty of geniuses a…
IMO that's the best section of the article. Einstein learned by failing and reiterating. That's exactly the type of mentality that entrepreneurs should have.
Genius is a sort of myth. For example, people seem to have the idea that before Charles Darwin, biology was in a dark age without any ideas other than intelligent design or some such. Well, no, Darwin was actually relatively unoriginal in his ideas about evolution, which was already commonplace in biological circles. He really just added a bit of sciency-but-not-quite-scientific rigor and coined the term "natural sel…
There are many other canonical examples of geniuses that serve as a good foundation for the myth of Genius. Think about how daring it was to propose some of the most unconventional scientific insights when there wasn't even enough experimental evidence to justify them (why would light speed ever be constant? why would anyone ever think light is emitted in discrete packets?). Those ideas sounded crazy enough as it is,…
1849: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizeau%E2%80%93Foucault_apparat... "Fizeau's value for light's speed was about 5% too high." which is not that bad for a first stab. And good enough to show that water slowed the speed of light vs speeding it up.
vs 1900 to 1905: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
> Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122). I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I think I just found it.
If you search hard enough, you can find a one-line anecdote to support any position.
-Voltaire
(Hey, it works!)
It's often not even about working hard, training hard, or something. It's just having a proper state of mind, and the right conditions.
As simple as it sounds, it's complicated. If it was simple, we'd all be happy right now. Not because we'd feel like geniuses but because we'd be able to achieve _anything_ we want.
Even thus, some points of the article correlate with having a proper state of mind, for example, you need to be able to think out of the box (note: you don't need 3 f. paragraphs to express that idea). You need to attempt to have a complete understanding of things, from every angle.
But all this still boils down to will power and proper conditions.
My 2 genius cents anyway.
I don't know what a "genius" really is, unless it just means someone who's a) prolific in an intellectual field, b) releases high quality work and c) maybe contributed to a fairly "revolutionary" understanding of their field. But it's unlikely that Feynman is "the last great American genius". Maybe the most well-known example is Chomsky (but there are no doubt many others), and he answers his emails quickly. So, it's…
Au contraire, i think, just like really great art, it's easy for an average person like me to identify genius when we see it.
It is easy for the average person to believe that building Twitter was hard, though surely it was. Our ability to understand things decidedly maps to things we can already understand.
To give a completely made up scenario about how this might have gone:
Stupid person: "Wow. Building twitter is hard. You type on a website and something comes to my phone. AMAZING."
Average person: "Eh. They probably just use some sort of service. I mean, if I can send a text, why is it amazing that somebody else can?"
Smarter-than-average person: "Twitter is down again? WTH? How hard is it to keep a website up? My Wordpress blog has never crashed, and all the posts in it are WAY more than 140 characters."
Smart person: "Yeah, I can see how scaling to x-thousand reads and x-hundred writes per second IS a big task. I guess you have to put in a really beefy database server to handle the writes and distribute the reads out to slaves, then do all your queries from there."
Smarter person: "If we get rid of relational database stores altogether, we can scale these records much better, and our only upper limit is memory."
etc.
Yes, it's a completely contrived example and I'm sure I probably insulted everyone who's ever done any Twitter-based naval-gazing, but that's what it is.
In short though, the average person is more easily fooled into thinking things are brilliant when in reality, they're made by equally average people who have studied in that particular field more than they have.