Arthur Lewbell, who knew Shannon personally, wrote a eulogy for him [1] and included photos of his "gadgeteers paradise" toy room[2][3] which is mentioned in the article.
I collected photos of the gadgets he built to play games (now in the MIT Museum) and put them on this list in boargamegeek[4].
I went to school with his grandson - incredibly, ridiculously, intelligent guy, who was the only person three years ahead at the school - I and one other were two ahead, and a dozen or so were a year ahead.
That said, I always felt for the chap, as socially inept didn't begin to cover it (as someone who graduated school two years early I can say with surety that it wasn't solely the temporal displacement that fettered his sociality - it was definitely a factor for us all, but he couldn't/wouldn't communicate even with other maths geeks), and I could only see him pursuing a career in academia - which he is.
I also felt for him as as a mathematically brilliant Shannon expectations couldn't have been higher - I was going to cap this off by saying I'm sure he'll do great things, but instead, I'll say I hope he has a happy life.
As a psychology enthusiast (and soon to be student), I'm quite annoyed with our fascination with "geniuses".
It seems obvious that people who are very famous in their field became "very intelligent" because of a combination of hard work and genetics. But it's as if these books capitalize on the faint hope of being a repressed genius of some sort. I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate. And the ego required to want to find your inner genius goes contrary to the enormous humility they seemed to display.
That aside, these books and articles all make the same mistake of studying a single person after the fact. It's similar to mimicking Steve Jobs: That's not how he became Steve Jobs. We literally cannot know how much luck was involved in his (or Einstein's) success. Might as well study the lives of lottery winners.
So if not that, how can we maximize our potential and generally better ourselves intellectually? Simply by referring to the very vast fields of learning, motivation and general cognitive science.
But "learn the science" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "how to be Einstein", now does it?
This is speaking about a life a lot of us wish we had. That we are special, that people will see us as special, that money and awards pile up so much we can't be bothered to accept them, while feeling free to do whatever we find intellectually interesting.
I find no value in the hero worship myself. I find the notion of getting all excited because (name of person) said something kind of offensive.
Hard work and genetics aren't nearly enough. Saying "luck" doesn't even describe it either.
We often ignore the social element - the people that helped along the way, the parents that supported them dropping out of college, the professor or teacher that took a particular interest in them. When we do talk about it, it seems the usual message is "they were kind of an asshole"(e.g. Jobs).
We ignore the emotional element even more. I don't mean "they failed 3 times but their 4th startup was amazing, keep trying!". I mean the headspace that lets them do that. The little thing that lets Woz show his computer to Jobs and not just say "oh, it's a stupid little toy, meh". There are tons of setbacks in life for everyone, and it's not fair to say "well, they kept trying!" Things made that possible.
As you said, motivation is supremely important. If you get rewarded and acknowledged for playing with things, then you will. If you're struggling to find your identity and your parents want you to get a "real job", well...
To be blunt, most "genius worship" is just another way for someone to feel like they're better than you. Genius lay in the eye of the beholder - one person's unsung genius toiling in obscurity is another person's fool following their folly.
Geniuses may have additional creative, productive, or other cognitive capacities, but they are still humans. Indeed, having greater capacity means geniuses can waste far more time than an average person can access.
Disclaimer: Was a Psych student. Now a programmer. :)
I have to agree that the word "genius" is just too loaded and misleading. There are many ways an individual can excel and many ways they fail to; most people are a mixed bag.
Shannon was gifted with a powerful curiosity and love of discovery, something not shared by all (and I'm not making a value judgment here at all; simply stating a fact). He never chose to have those motivations, so he should not be overly credited with the consequence of having them.
You might be interested in Walter Isaacson's The Innovators because it tries to show how collaboration rather than individual genius is at the heart of innovation. Isaacson writes about these ideas rather explicitly.
Maybe the genius is just that curious personality who never fit it and refuses to give in to society? That person would certainly have a sense of both their intelligence and creativity (and contrast it to most people's) and of how society treats them like complete blabbering fools on a hill.
I think there are two parts to the general idea of genius.
One part is the claim that some people are fundamentally more intelligent than others. I agree that this is good to discard.
But another part is that some people can make quantum advances in a given field. I think that is worth considering. It seems reasonable to think that some advances in a field are incremental and require simple effort and that other advances involves a jump - either digging very deeply into a still unsolved problem or taking insights from entirely different fields. Here, the term "genius" is good. Not implying an average person can't achieve a "genius insight" but that such insight may require reflection, a willingness to go down possibly blind allies, a willingness to take a different point of view from a different field, a willingness to challenge consensus views within one's own field and so-forth.
And this is also to say that "following your genius" may indeed be a great gamble. Combining a variety of seeming deep relations may result in something great or it may just result in a large project that falls apart on close inspection.
And here, one might say taste and temperament enter into what could be a genius approach (or oppositely, could be a disaster).
"But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."
I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate.
They may have kept it to themselves, but they were certainly aware of their status.
Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying a genius a bad thing? (And they are geniuses, if it's possible to compare one person to another at all.)
You've made some good points about how someone becomes a genius: it's mostly luck, especially in genetics and upbringing. But there's no reason that studying this is inherently useless.
People never really do accept the notion that success, genius, wealth, etc are not so easy to replicate. Meanwhile people selling these books have actually figured out a way to replicate the wealth aspect, hence the existence of a self help industry. It's not much different from people here goggling at Thiel or Musk.
Hindsight is a bitch, and our heuristics tend to fail in the face of it.
>But if his tendency to follow his curiosity wherever it led sometimes rendered him less productive, he also had the patience to keep coming back to his best ideas, over the course of years.
[snip]
>“He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.”
I think there's a connection here which reveals a common misconception about intellectual creation, namely that scientific theories are born in a legalistic fashion by criticism, argument and debate. In reality the role of criticism is to defend against ideas we don't like. Ideas we do like are shielded from explicit criticism, for instance by ignoring critics, and allowed to grow in our brains over time. It's a pleasure to return to such ideas again and again, while they remain interesting, so 'patience' isn't required either.
>Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article
Because many believe that if they just work or behave like a genius or successful entrepreneur they will be one as well. It's the mental equivalent of a trendy diet. It's not that there's not some interesting habits in the article, but people will focus on the easy bits and start riding unicycles, not reading their emails and leaving checks uncashed.
Like diets, people want to hear things like: Eat a lemon with every meal and only poop on Thursdays. Allowing yourself to be mentored is hard, if it doesn't come natural to you. Being patient and keep working on problem for years on end is equally hard. It's not bad advise, it's just really hard to implement.
Quite possibly. From what it sounds like, Shannon's job with Bell Labs was kinda his form of UBI. They didn't really make him "work"; they just kinda gave him money, and told him to do what he felt like. That lead to a bunch of impressive things, given the resources he had access to.
Granted, a lot of that came after some of his groundbreaking work on information theory, which is what earned him his fame.
If there were many more geniuses wouldn't all them considered normal? Geniuses are only geniuses because they have been perceived to operate several standard deviation above the average level of achievements. It's too bad that humans usually value themselves in relative to people near them. Like top students at bottom ranked schools probably feel really proud and happy on a day to day basis, but bottom students from top schools are often depressed and occasionally commit suicide. Even the top student at bottom schools feel depressed that they couldn't get into a better school out of college, when in reality most people in the world didn't have opportunities to go to college.
> During World War II, those friends included Alan Turing, with whom Shannon struck up a lively intellectual exchange during Turing’s fact-finding trip to study American cryptography on behalf of the British government.
This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a What-If perspective, because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did not discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence remained a secret until the 1970s).
How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?
There seems to be a lot of parallels in how Shannon lived and how Feynman lived. Obviously, Feynman was more gregarious, but they both found inspiration and solace in curious play. I think more than curiosity, which most people have, they both showed a profound disinterest in hiding their interests or fear of looking dumb.
That might be the biggest difference between smart guys who work jobs and geniuses who pave new paths. It is both sad and empowering because it means we simply get in our own way when we try to be "serious adults".
We all start from zero. If a person can't be knowledgeable after a bit of rigor, then no one can be trusted in any subject and we can see how everything will become "fake news" and "alterntative facts"
One thing that occurred to me is that if Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered their respective theories, someone else would have. It probably wouldn't have taken very long, either.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it seems true.
The same is true of most (all?) scientific discoveries. A good evidence for it the fact that most important breakthroughs were made independently, within the space of months or years, by two or more people/teams that didn't collaborate with each other.
My takeaway is that science is very incremental, and discoveries depend on what the state of scientific knowledge is at any given time, and not on particular smart individuals.
I also believe the same applies to social progress - e.g. if Martin Luther died as a child, someone else would start the Reformation; if Marx and Lenin decided to pursue art instead of economics/politics, someone else would invent communism anyway, etc.
The thing about Einstein, at least, is that he formulated a precise, compact framework that expressed a variety of results that had arrived already in his time.
Without Einstein (and maybe Shannon and other geniuses), all of the results might still be here but might be summarized in a much more difficult and confusing fashion. Perhaps someone later would discover the compact formulation but quite possibly would not be able get it accepted due to the more verbose and confusing formulations already being established.
Maybe not exactly equivalent but some claim that using a constant tau, equal to 2 times pi, would simplify a lot of math - of course good luck changing that now.
Could be, at the same time I would argue that those who had disproportional impact almost by definition thought very differently from others (defying convention is tough: imagine what is must feel like to question the multi century reign of Newton as a lowly patent clerk).
Very few minds have done the work to come within reach of the conclusions that these guys have been able to draw. From there I suppose it ought to be possible to approximate the likelihood of a Eureka moment probabilistically.
I'd be interested whether future scientific progress is so complex that it cannot be attributed to a single mind (some indicators are rising numbers of contributors for influential papers).
Most apparent with Darwin's theory of natural selection: He had to rush to publish because someone else had stumbled upon the same thing while he was still analyzing his data and compiling it together.
It steam engines when it's steam engine time, and I guess it theory-of-relativities when it's theory-of-relativity time.
It's still pretty remarkable that Einstein/Shannon were the ones to discover their respective theories though. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them? I've always envied genius. Genius always know exactly what it's supposed to do and just does. Recently I'm wondering whether I'm truly cut out for my chosen field (programming).
I read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and they had a few sections on Shannon. Honestly, from what I read, it sounds like the guy didn't want to work, or have a job. And the Fates were kind, and dropped him into a situation where not only was he able to make that a reality, but he was able to provide several meaningful contributions to the fields of programming and information theory while doing so. He was able to not have to "work", and get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff.
>he was able to provide several meaningful contributions
Don't you think that's severely downplaying his role?
He invented the field of information theory, not just made several contributions. He founded digital circuit design. The entire concept of being able to use electrical circuits to implement boolean logic, and proving you can use those circuits to solve any problem that boolean logic can. He also came up with sampling theory, bringing communications into the digital world (as well as signal processing).
And then sure, he made several (extremely important) contributions to the field of cryptography
[+] [-] JoeDaDude|8 years ago|reply
I collected photos of the gadgets he built to play games (now in the MIT Museum) and put them on this list in boargamegeek[4].
[1] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html
[2] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys1.jpg
[3] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg
[4] https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man...
[+] [-] madaxe_again|8 years ago|reply
That said, I always felt for the chap, as socially inept didn't begin to cover it (as someone who graduated school two years early I can say with surety that it wasn't solely the temporal displacement that fettered his sociality - it was definitely a factor for us all, but he couldn't/wouldn't communicate even with other maths geeks), and I could only see him pursuing a career in academia - which he is.
I also felt for him as as a mathematically brilliant Shannon expectations couldn't have been higher - I was going to cap this off by saying I'm sure he'll do great things, but instead, I'll say I hope he has a happy life.
[+] [-] omot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gboudrias|8 years ago|reply
It seems obvious that people who are very famous in their field became "very intelligent" because of a combination of hard work and genetics. But it's as if these books capitalize on the faint hope of being a repressed genius of some sort. I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate. And the ego required to want to find your inner genius goes contrary to the enormous humility they seemed to display.
That aside, these books and articles all make the same mistake of studying a single person after the fact. It's similar to mimicking Steve Jobs: That's not how he became Steve Jobs. We literally cannot know how much luck was involved in his (or Einstein's) success. Might as well study the lives of lottery winners.
So if not that, how can we maximize our potential and generally better ourselves intellectually? Simply by referring to the very vast fields of learning, motivation and general cognitive science.
But "learn the science" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "how to be Einstein", now does it?
[+] [-] JimboOmega|8 years ago|reply
I find no value in the hero worship myself. I find the notion of getting all excited because (name of person) said something kind of offensive.
Hard work and genetics aren't nearly enough. Saying "luck" doesn't even describe it either.
We often ignore the social element - the people that helped along the way, the parents that supported them dropping out of college, the professor or teacher that took a particular interest in them. When we do talk about it, it seems the usual message is "they were kind of an asshole"(e.g. Jobs).
We ignore the emotional element even more. I don't mean "they failed 3 times but their 4th startup was amazing, keep trying!". I mean the headspace that lets them do that. The little thing that lets Woz show his computer to Jobs and not just say "oh, it's a stupid little toy, meh". There are tons of setbacks in life for everyone, and it's not fair to say "well, they kept trying!" Things made that possible.
As you said, motivation is supremely important. If you get rewarded and acknowledged for playing with things, then you will. If you're struggling to find your identity and your parents want you to get a "real job", well...
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
Geniuses may have additional creative, productive, or other cognitive capacities, but they are still humans. Indeed, having greater capacity means geniuses can waste far more time than an average person can access.
[+] [-] pmarreck|8 years ago|reply
I have to agree that the word "genius" is just too loaded and misleading. There are many ways an individual can excel and many ways they fail to; most people are a mixed bag.
Shannon was gifted with a powerful curiosity and love of discovery, something not shared by all (and I'm not making a value judgment here at all; simply stating a fact). He never chose to have those motivations, so he should not be overly credited with the consequence of having them.
[+] [-] ruraljuror|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goldfeld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|8 years ago|reply
One part is the claim that some people are fundamentally more intelligent than others. I agree that this is good to discard.
But another part is that some people can make quantum advances in a given field. I think that is worth considering. It seems reasonable to think that some advances in a field are incremental and require simple effort and that other advances involves a jump - either digging very deeply into a still unsolved problem or taking insights from entirely different fields. Here, the term "genius" is good. Not implying an average person can't achieve a "genius insight" but that such insight may require reflection, a willingness to go down possibly blind allies, a willingness to take a different point of view from a different field, a willingness to challenge consensus views within one's own field and so-forth.
And this is also to say that "following your genius" may indeed be a great gamble. Combining a variety of seeming deep relations may result in something great or it may just result in a large project that falls apart on close inspection.
And here, one might say taste and temperament enter into what could be a genius approach (or oppositely, could be a disaster).
[+] [-] waivek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stared|8 years ago|reply
"But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
They may have kept it to themselves, but they were certainly aware of their status.
Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying a genius a bad thing? (And they are geniuses, if it's possible to compare one person to another at all.)
You've made some good points about how someone becomes a genius: it's mostly luck, especially in genetics and upbringing. But there's no reason that studying this is inherently useless.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
Hindsight is a bitch, and our heuristics tend to fail in the face of it.
[+] [-] icantdrive55|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stevenj|8 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-14/ed-thorp-the...
[+] [-] datashovel|8 years ago|reply
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425...
[+] [-] atsaloli|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roceasta|8 years ago|reply
[snip]
>“He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.”
I think there's a connection here which reveals a common misconception about intellectual creation, namely that scientific theories are born in a legalistic fashion by criticism, argument and debate. In reality the role of criticism is to defend against ideas we don't like. Ideas we do like are shielded from explicit criticism, for instance by ignoring critics, and allowed to grow in our brains over time. It's a pleasure to return to such ideas again and again, while they remain interesting, so 'patience' isn't required either.
[+] [-] zzzeek|8 years ago|reply
moving things to folders is... the definition of "inbox zero"?
[+] [-] ruraljuror|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danm07|8 years ago|reply
Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article, cherrypicking details to support whatever point the author stands to posit.
[+] [-] mrweasel|8 years ago|reply
Because many believe that if they just work or behave like a genius or successful entrepreneur they will be one as well. It's the mental equivalent of a trendy diet. It's not that there's not some interesting habits in the article, but people will focus on the easy bits and start riding unicycles, not reading their emails and leaving checks uncashed.
Like diets, people want to hear things like: Eat a lemon with every meal and only poop on Thursdays. Allowing yourself to be mentored is hard, if it doesn't come natural to you. Being patient and keep working on problem for years on end is equally hard. It's not bad advise, it's just really hard to implement.
[+] [-] petraeus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73ver|8 years ago|reply
Granted, a lot of that came after some of his groundbreaking work on information theory, which is what earned him his fame.
[+] [-] omot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|8 years ago|reply
This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a What-If perspective, because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did not discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence remained a secret until the 1970s).
How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?
[+] [-] tr1ck5t3r|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lubujackson|8 years ago|reply
That might be the biggest difference between smart guys who work jobs and geniuses who pave new paths. It is both sad and empowering because it means we simply get in our own way when we try to be "serious adults".
[+] [-] booleandilemma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathperson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devopsproject|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhuser123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Graziano_M|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it seems true.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
My takeaway is that science is very incremental, and discoveries depend on what the state of scientific knowledge is at any given time, and not on particular smart individuals.
I also believe the same applies to social progress - e.g. if Martin Luther died as a child, someone else would start the Reformation; if Marx and Lenin decided to pursue art instead of economics/politics, someone else would invent communism anyway, etc.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|8 years ago|reply
Without Einstein (and maybe Shannon and other geniuses), all of the results might still be here but might be summarized in a much more difficult and confusing fashion. Perhaps someone later would discover the compact formulation but quite possibly would not be able get it accepted due to the more verbose and confusing formulations already being established.
Maybe not exactly equivalent but some claim that using a constant tau, equal to 2 times pi, would simplify a lot of math - of course good luck changing that now.
See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-...
[+] [-] mxschumacher|8 years ago|reply
Very few minds have done the work to come within reach of the conclusions that these guys have been able to draw. From there I suppose it ought to be possible to approximate the likelihood of a Eureka moment probabilistically.
I'd be interested whether future scientific progress is so complex that it cannot be attributed to a single mind (some indicators are rising numbers of contributors for influential papers).
[+] [-] Graziano_M|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
It's still pretty remarkable that Einstein/Shannon were the ones to discover their respective theories though. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them? I've always envied genius. Genius always know exactly what it's supposed to do and just does. Recently I'm wondering whether I'm truly cut out for my chosen field (programming).
[+] [-] s73ver|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zild3d|8 years ago|reply
Don't you think that's severely downplaying his role?
He invented the field of information theory, not just made several contributions. He founded digital circuit design. The entire concept of being able to use electrical circuits to implement boolean logic, and proving you can use those circuits to solve any problem that boolean logic can. He also came up with sampling theory, bringing communications into the digital world (as well as signal processing).
And then sure, he made several (extremely important) contributions to the field of cryptography
> get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff.
He WAS a lot of that pretty amazing stuff.
[+] [-] petraeus|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asdfologist|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]