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How Geniuses Think

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Re: How Geniuses Think

#91

Post by chargrilled »

specialist wrote: post #81
ntkachov wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets "think like a genius" and reconsider this notion of a genius. I propose this definition: A genius is someone who, through their work, insipres the masses to take part in their field. Because lets face it, your not a genius until everyone agrees you are a genius. Therefore, in order to be a genius you must make affect the masses.

Just like there's different types of intelligence, beauty, taste, etc. So I'm cool with your definition. In one of the Feynman books, a colleague said something like: With most really smart people, when they explain something to you, you get can it and think to yourself "I could of thought of that, if I was smarter." But with Feynman's work, even after you understood it, you'd think "How in the world did he come up w…

Was Marc Kac:

"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre."

Re: How Geniuses Think

#92

Post by Retric »

zerostar07 wrote: post #82
Retric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the light speed thing backwards. People had already had a fair amount of evidence that the speed of light was constant, it's just one of those things that's hard to accept / build a reasonable model for why that might be the case. Think of it as an open question if the experiments where inaccurate or the universe was just strange. Until relatively came along and said, assume the speed of light is constant wh…

The genius leap (from which special relativity is derived) is the postulate that it's constant for regardless of the state of motion . The older research mentions nothing of the sort.

No, there had already been some experiments that should have been accurate enough to detect the orbital motion of the earth and it's effect on the speed of light.

Google '1890 speed of light experiments' and you should get Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers page 21 - 27. It talks about the interferometer experiments that suggested the speed of light was constant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry

Re: How Geniuses Think

#93

Post by zerostar07 »

Retric wrote: post #92
zerostar07 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The genius leap (from which special relativity is derived) is the postulate that it's constant for regardless of the state of motion . The older research mentions nothing of the sort.

No, there had already been some experiments that should have been accurate enough to detect the orbital motion of the earth and it's effect on the speed of light. Google '1890 speed of light experiments' and you should get Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers page 21 - 27. It talks about the interferometer experiments that suggested the speed of light was constant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry

I don't think anybody had postulated the invariance of the speed of light before Einstein (except perhaps the ballistic theory). The michelson-morley and related experiments were interpreted as a "failure to detect the motion of aether", not as proof for light speed invariance. What's more, we now know that the michelson-morley result is was not even what motivated einstein, but it was one of the first results explained by his theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment

Re: How Geniuses Think

#94

Post by jonnathanson »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

A reasonable book covering some of this topic is Origins of Genius by Dean Keith Simonton. Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is. Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better idea of what a geniu…

In discussions like these, it's useful to go back to the origin of the word, in the Latin gignere, meaning "to beget or create." Different cultures and different times have applied the concept of "genius" to different settings, but almost all of them involved the creation of something groundbreaking.

In this sense, I like to think of "genius" as the application of enormous potential to extraordinary effect. Someone who qualifies for Mensa membership has been gifted with great potential. But if he sits on his ass and fritters his life away watching television, he can't be called a genius. Conversely, someone like Richard Feynman, with his 122 IQ, would not have qualified for Mensa, but produced magnificent work.

IQ seems somewhat correlated, but hardly sufficient, to qualify someone for the calling (and label) of genius. Genius is the result of action. It is the realization of potential. IMO, we need to get back to using lower-case "genius" to describe people's work, and away from capital-G "Genius" to describe people.

Real artists ship, after all.

Re: How Geniuses Think

#95

Post by Retric »

zerostar07 wrote: post #93
Retric wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there had already been some experiments that should have been accurate enough to detect the orbital motion of the earth and it's effect on the speed of light. Google '1890 speed of light experiments' and you should get Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers page 21 - 27. It talks about the interferometer experiments that suggested the speed of light was constant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry

I don't think anybody had postulated the invariance of the speed of light before Einstein (except perhaps the ballistic theory). The michelson-morley and related experiments were interpreted as a "failure to detect the motion of aether", not as proof for light speed invariance. What's more, we now know that the michelson-morley result is was not even what motivated einstein, but it was one of the first results explai…

As a fleshed out theory, no. There is no privileged frame of reference in Newtonian mechanics, so that's not exactly a new idea. People had been measuring the speed of light for a while, so light having speed X and no privileged frame of reference is no great leap over the 50+ years they had been measuring the speed of light it had probably occurred to thousands of people as one of the possibility's. The aether idea and ballistic theory where a few of the many possibility's being considered back then.

Anyway, what Einstein did was deeper than just saying the speed of light was constant and there are no privileged frames of reference. Einstein got the math in all it's glory to work out.

Re: How Geniuses Think

#96

Post by Luc »

crntaylor wrote: post #90
thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

A reasonable book covering some of this topic is Origins of Genius by Dean Keith Simonton. Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is. Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better idea of what a geniu…

Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses ... Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not? The condition for membership of Mensa is that you score "at or above the 98th percentile on certain standardised IQ or other approved intelligence tests" [1]. I don't think it makes sense to refer to the 140 million potential members of Mensa as "geniuses" no matter what your definition of genius is…

> Also, if it's true that Richard Feynman's IQ was around 122, then he wouldn't have qualified for membership of Mensa.

Just for a second this gave a lesser mind like me some hope, but this IQ test may have been stressing verbal over mathematical ability.

"Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstei...

Re: How Geniuses Think

#98

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #95
zerostar07 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody had postulated the invariance of the speed of light before Einstein (except perhaps the ballistic theory). The michelson-morley and related experiments were interpreted as a "failure to detect the motion of aether", not as proof for light speed invariance. What's more, we now know that the michelson-morley result is was not even what motivated einstein, but it was one of the first results explai…

As a fleshed out theory, no. There is no privileged frame of reference in Newtonian mechanics, so that's not exactly a new idea. People had been measuring the speed of light for a while, so light having speed X and no privileged frame of reference is no great leap over the 50+ years they had been measuring the speed of light it had probably occurred to thousands of people as one of the possibility's. The aether idea…

[deleted]

Re: How Geniuses Think

#99

Post by rada »

crntaylor wrote: post #90
thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

A reasonable book covering some of this topic is Origins of Genius by Dean Keith Simonton. Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is. Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better idea of what a geniu…

Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses ... Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not? The condition for membership of Mensa is that you score "at or above the 98th percentile on certain standardised IQ or other approved intelligence tests" [1]. I don't think it makes sense to refer to the 140 million potential members of Mensa as "geniuses" no matter what your definition of genius is…

"On the trip home from the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman stopped in Queens, N.Y., and looked up his high-school records. 'My grades were not as good as I remembered,' he said, 'and my I.Q. was 124, considered just above average.' "

James Gleick. (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

Re: How Geniuses Think

#100

Post by larrys »

aik wrote: post #74
larrys wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People who boast about their I.Q. are losers" People boast, people brag, because in general it gets them more out of the world than not doing so and gets them special treatment and accommodations. There are a fair amount of people in the tech industry, and even here on HN, that are quite willing to boast about what they have done and are treated as royalty for their past accomplishments. Isn't this the same thing? S…

I believe the underlying idea in Hawking's comment isn't that people shouldn't boast, but it's that no information of value is conveyed in the act of boasting about one's IQ. This is due to an understanding that the IQ test does not (nor was ever intended to) be a standard and fixed measure of intelligence[1] or potential. Therefore it is a moot point to boast about. [1] Any measure of intelligence that doesn't take…

(I'm interested also in many of the things that your "about" says so I will take this one step further.)

What you are saying I think is that Hawking is saying "People who boast about their IQ don't understand what an IQ test is for".

If that is the case I would say:

a) A really poor choose of words for Hawking to be calling someone a "loser" b) Hawking doesn't realize that there are many legitimate reasons why someone might mention their IQ score to gain some benefit and still realize what Hawking realizes about the test.

To that end I've done a few things that I could mention that would generally be thought of as impressive but could also been seen as "bragging". I also recognize that while they appear to be impressive there are many (who have done the same thing) who may also see it as not as impressive as it appears. But I don't think of them that way (and certainly not "losers") for mentioning it and trying to derive value from the association.

While IQ tests are not dejure they certainly are viewed by the general public and certainly the media as defacto measures of intelligence.

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