121–130 of 208 posts
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I didn't say most progress, I said breakthroughs. Let's look back at some of the biggest breakthroughs in history. Newton was by all accounts a profoundly odd human being who was highly secretive and kept to himself. Faraday came from poverty and made his discoveries with no grounding in the math of the day. Einstein made his big breakthroughs as a patent clerk working on his own. Darwin was also an outsider who work…
I don't know if that is possible these days though. Ideas even from (relatively unknown) insiders are often termed "lacking in scope" and outright rejected. I can only think of one outsider having accomplished anything of value in math in the past 20 years (and even that guy wasn't really an outsider). Academia has turned into a social game that is painful, and where the rewards are terrible (unless you're in CS I su…
One of the better examples is the theory of continental drift, now known as plate tectonics. The suggestion goes back a while, though it was a German meterologist, Alfred Wegner, who made the first serious proposal in 1912. He was rejected by a large part of the geological establishment, and died without seeing his ideas accepted. But the evidence mounted, both of the record that drift had happened (fossils, geological structures, magnetic reversals), and most importantly, a mechanism and sufficient time both made apparent by radioactivity and radioactive decay. By the 1950s the age of the Earth was known to be 4.5 billion years, and by the mid 1960s, Wegener's theory was geological fact.
It's now considered the central concept of geology, by at least one account I've seen, which is quite a feat.
Naomi Oreskes, recently known for her work on the disinformation campaigns against tobacco, lead, asbestos, CFCs, and now CO2 regulations, Merchants of Doubt, wrote several papers and two books on this subject in the late 1990s and early 2000s, specifically about the history of science aspect, and the long rejection (and eventual acceptance) of the theory. Recommeded reading.
I don't disagree with you on academia, though there may be reasons for that as well.
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> This is why outsiders are so frequently the people who make major breakthroughs in a field, and "genius" is correlated with eccentricity. That would be nice, if it were true. But it isn't. Those are the stories that everybody likes though, a bit like the kid with a 25c fishing rod out-fishing adults with 100's of $ worth of gear. But in practice, most progress in most fields is made by insiders, one tedious bit at…
I didn't say most progress, I said breakthroughs. Let's look back at some of the biggest breakthroughs in history. Newton was by all accounts a profoundly odd human being who was highly secretive and kept to himself. Faraday came from poverty and made his discoveries with no grounding in the math of the day. Einstein made his big breakthroughs as a patent clerk working on his own. Darwin was also an outsider who work…
Newton, likewise, was in the university when he made his breakthroughs, IIRC.
Let's not forget that while all the pictures of Einstein are of an older professor, he was quite young when he made his biggest contributions, as was Newton. They weren't "establishment professors" or something because they were too young!
It has been argued, btw, that nowadays too much background is necessary for people to make breakthroughs so young.
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> This is why outsiders are so frequently the people who make major breakthroughs in a field, and "genius" is correlated with eccentricity. That would be nice, if it were true. But it isn't. Those are the stories that everybody likes though, a bit like the kid with a 25c fishing rod out-fishing adults with 100's of $ worth of gear. But in practice, most progress in most fields is made by insiders, one tedious bit at…
I didn't say most progress, I said breakthroughs. Let's look back at some of the biggest breakthroughs in history. Newton was by all accounts a profoundly odd human being who was highly secretive and kept to himself. Faraday came from poverty and made his discoveries with no grounding in the math of the day. Einstein made his big breakthroughs as a patent clerk working on his own. Darwin was also an outsider who work…
Evolution is probably the worst way to design anything and yet all of biology is driven by it. It is basically a random walk that just flips bits and every so often it is inevitable that some of those flipped bits will have something to do with the brain's default networks and modes of operation. But I think genius is an unstable optimum and things inevitably slide downhill. There is no such thing as heritable genius…
That's just off the top of my head, though searching for intergenerational or family genius turns up surprisingly few useful results.
Of course, disambiguating nurture vs. nature effects is a challenge, and I'd be interested in examples where neither prior fame nor economic advantage were particularly beneficial. Cases of twins or siblings raised independently would also be of interest.
Every time I read one of these articles about genius and madness, I become smug for a little while, then I get depressed because I realize that I haven't accomplished anything noteworthy, then I'm mildly reassured because occasionally my wife will spontaneously aver (contrary to all expectation) that I am a genius, then I get distracted and start chasing some ideas, then I get depressed again because, well, shit, I s…
There's that TED talk about an older meaning of "genius" is something that visits you, like a muse, and not something that you are. It's just up to you to be prepared when inspiration strikes, to notice it, and follow up on it. Noteworthiness is also very dependent on context. If you're too late, you're not a genius, even though you came up with it independently... how can what other people do affect your brain tissu…
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Well then you have a clear chance of being a genius, since according to other threads those who think they're a genius aren't!
This, my friend, is the well-worn path to the rabbit hole.
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We are all capable. Most of us just choose to drink our whiskey instead of leveling up to achieve something everyone will hear about.
The value of whiskey is pretty clear, the value of notability much less so.
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With the exception of the poet, who is quite conservative and traditional, they universally participate in the leftist hivemind. All of them (including the conservative) are quite eccentric sexually, and in different ways, based on what they have said and I have seen. Beyond that, they are only eccentric in the particular calculus of their flaws, as is each individual when closely observed.
I'm sorry, but I feel compelled to ask: "eccentric sexually"? Overactive libido or something else?