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 genius is. Some people, like this article's author, try to limit the term just to those people in history that have made significant advances in some field or another. But, then they cherry-pick their examples, usually from a list of their personal heroes, and then try to draw some conclusions from that.
Feynman wasn't a household name until really just a few years ago. Citing him as an example of a genius, and then going further to say that he was ("acknowledged by many to be") the last great American genius, is supremely silly. There are brilliant people right now working in every field; what do you think the odds are that, many years from now, after their death, at least one of them might be regarded as a genius by someone writing next century's version of this same article?
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses, who even have a very serious test to keep out all of the non-geniuses. Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?
If we're going to spend any time on utterly vacuous navel-gazing like this ... I think we ought to at least agree first on a useful definition for the thing we're trying to discuss.
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.
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.
Yeah, I think "genius" is a romantic notion which is meant to be mysterious. (That is, a genius has a mysterious superhero quality, and you're not really supposed to understand what's going on, unless you too are a genius. Personally, I think it has to do with intellectuals' desire to spread mysticism about the nature of their work.)
I mean, there is no end of literature by highly skilled people who offer general opinions on how to do a good job. Noam Chomsky, Rich Hickey, Jerry Lettvin, George Polya, Bertrand Russell, and Terence Tao are common examples. (Well, Chomsky is a bit different in that he shies away from individual advice, believing in diversity and improved societies, but if you look closely, he does offer advice like, maybe paraphrasing a little, "Allow yourself to be confused.") But I suppose "Ideas on doing a Good Job" doesn't poke at people's desires for validation as much as "How to be a Genius."
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 and people born into wealth.
The best part: whether or not you apply yourself is under your control. What you're born with is the luck of the draw.
And knowing a few things will make it that much easier to learn a bit more, knowledge begets more knowledge and insight.
Not disagreeing but I think the story is more complicated than that. I think Applying yourself is necessary but not sufficient for even half the battle. Self Application is itself a skill that is randomly distributed across the population. Applying yourself is hard and takes constant training. It also requires a level of determination that itself might be influenced by genetics and certainly aspects of the environment from your pivotal formative years that were outside your control. As you go through your life, events outside your control will influence (positively or negatively) your ability to apply yourself and your mental environment will influence the direction and magnitude of the impact these events have on your ability to self apply. The interplay is intertwined.
And where you are born matters too. If the valley is deeper then it takes more energy to escape. So the same person born on a different continent has to apply themselves more to succeed. They have to apply themselves more to meet the right people and have to work far harder to increase their "luck surface area". They have to spend more energy and do so without becoming bitter.
So there is some backplay of innate ability there. It really does take a lot of talent, intelligence and grit to manage to escape being born to a poor family with no money in a country without clean water, electricity, free education or workers rights. To say: I can't expect to find a job nor afford to pay for school books, let alone to attend school. But I will make it somehow instead of giving up and feeling sorry for myself. My father was one such person. He started his first business at 9 to pay for school and help his family. His only luck was in having a teacher that allowed him to memorize the days notes after school. Seeing the expended efforts and incredible lengths he had to go through just to be level to those born to a better position, it takes a special person to be able to go through that.
It should be clear nothing I said contradicts what you said. But I feel you paint a picture that simplifies things overmuch. The worse your starting point, the more boxes you need to tick. In short, I do not see the same clear linear separation you do.
Many of the greatest people in arts, sciences, mathematics are simply people who worked hard and thought outside the box. There's a little bit of luck there too as it's random if another will recognise a person for their hard work. Even after they die, for example Gregor Mendel: a monk who discovered the principals of genetics was realised to be brilliant posthumously.
Simply measuring a score on an IQ test isn't good enough. Someone who can't actively use intelligence might as well not have it.
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 selection", then got famous for it.
I know several drastically unsuccessful people who exhibit the traits in this article. None of them have stumbled upon an idea or work that would cause society to label them a genius.
I don't think a genius is very different from any other person. It's just that a genius gets lucky with their novel ideas. Society calls them geniuses really just because people know their names.
I guess my gripe is simply that genius is a social phenomenon, not a trait of an individual, and that it's really quite embarrassing that everyone goes around licking the metaphorical feet of everyone they can think of who did something interesting, or "genius".
That said, I do think this is an interesting article, and knowing how to think like a "genius" is probably worth quite a lot.
It isn't that we should dismiss the unique contributions of people like "Einstein, Edison, daVinci, Darwin, Picassos, Michelangelo, Galileo, Freud, Mozart et all". These individuals certainly made contributions beyond what be measured by a number-of-manipulations-per-second IQ test and some of these approaches can even be somewhat systematized as "lateral thinking", "wholistic thinking" "getting outside the box" and variety of others.
But lumping these high-performing individuals together with the single glittering generality "genius" leaves us less enlightened for the trouble. Edison and Einstein, for example, were worlds apart and while we can find commonalities between them, we can find commonalities between any two people. And there we are. At another logical level, a "genius" confronted with some given problem might say "what do these things have in common" yes but a moron, an opportunist and a lazy thinker might do the same. One more try folks.
Do you disagree with the effort in trying to find the commonalities between high-performing people, or merely the stated results?
I agree that they may not have the whole answer here, but it's a whole lot better than any random commonality between any two people (e.g. they both like the color blue, or they both lived in the US).
I think there's some insight here, even if you just take the idea of how high-performers think ("productively" rather than "reproductively"). I definitely believe most things I see are a result of reproductive thinking (many of my own thoughts included), and I have many times more respect for things that have come out of "productive" thinking.
But lumping these high-performing individuals together with
the single glittering generality "genius" leaves us less
enlightened for the trouble.
I think that was precisely the author's point: viz., the word "genius" is vacuous, amorphous, and altogether a meaningless label affixed to people whom the plurality deem exceptional in some manner. I believe the author's intended message is that it's the producer/consumer dichotomy combined with divergent thinking that's ingenious, rather than raw brain power.
If the IQ test is bullshit, this anecdote and your reasoning aren't good reasons to conclude that for several reasons, and to mention a few:
1. It may not be true that he had an IQ of 122
2. A score of 122 is still kind of high
3. If it were wrong in one case it doesn't invalidate it, especially since we're talking about a Nobel prize winner in physics
4. If he did take a test, that was several decades ago and I'd imagine the test has evolved from then
5. This test may have not been good for Feynman since he is much better in science and math
On another point, I think the author is incorrectly using Feynman as a person of average intelligence when it's obvious he was very much well above average in math being that he was a Putnam Fellow.
>He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did rather poorly on the history and English portions. [0]
How can there be a "last great American genius." Assuming genius is a statistical percentage of the population born every year, wouldn't there be just as many if not more currently than in the past?
What I'm finding in several places is that the fiqure was 125. But more importantly the low IQ figure was self reported by Feynman and done in high school. Who knows if that is the correct figure and who knows if he was sick the night before or tired or if there was an error etc. I'm not defending IQ tests but it's important to realize that the fact that Feynman said his IQ was X doesn't mean that the test or testing or reporting was flawed or he got someone elses score by accident.
In the text it states that "Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken".
I think this is clear and people not even considered geniuses can also perform this feat. The defining part is that geniuses seem to come by those alternatives so easily, its just always there. So for example if we devote years to programming we can tell ourselves OK, if i have a problem invoke all my years of experience and look at this problem from many different angles, we can formulate and combine our thinking into something unique that even surprises ourselves because the combination of all the data we we know to get this new idea is far greater then adding the single idea's and pieces of data that we have. Over time we can build on that to get better ideas.
But if i say ok, i know the method of thinking like X helps me do great things when im programming and i try to do the same for say math problems, if i havnt had the experience no matter what I tell myself, i just can not look at the problem from different perspectives or if i do, its not such a great leap, its incremental. Its still step by step, A->B not to A->C, it still follows a logical thought process and we do not surprise ourselves by our solution
For the genius it seems after reading something once or by some method unknown (and having no experience) they can still have all those different perspectives. Then it leaves us normal people thinking, how did they get from A->C without going through the normal steps A->B->C ... this is specially the case when the individual is very young and has managed to soak that information without college or any formal learning ...
I think a lot of people have their difference of perspective socialized out of them at a pretty young age. My oldest son has a long list of differences from the norm. I was very tolerant if his oddities. Then I got really sick and a) actively avoided being inculcated with the conventional view of my problem and b) bounced a lot of ideas off my son, who knows way more science than I know and was never broken to fit the normal social mold. Then I gradually got well. So I think it is very possible to cultivate that different point of view.
I've long thought that the model of "genius" as a "really smart person" was a hopelessly flawed model. There are simply too many different kinds and measures of "smartness" to collapse all of them under such a simple umbrella.
For example, consider the notion that IQ is a measure of capacity. To wit, let's use an extended and natural analogy -- a container.
Consider a notional container measured only by its depth.
A yard of beer is 36 inches (~91.5cm) tall and most people would consider this a lot of beer. This plays out in people who are extreme specialists -- extremely knowledgeable in only one or two areas. But are they geniuses?
So we have to consider breadth. I have a large mixing bowl I use when marinating meat that's about 26 inches (66.04cm) across, and most people would consider it to hold a lot of meat. This plays out in people who are extreme generalists, not particularly good in any one area, but can cut across disciplines easily.
Yet both containers pale when compared to a 55 gallon (~208.2L) drum in terms of volume. Yet the drum is not as tall as the yard of beer and not as wide as my marinating bowl!
But volume is not the only thing that matters!
I wouldn't pour molten steel into any of the containers above. And I've used stoneware that cracks when used with extremely cold liquids.
What about containers with different compartments that can hold both?
We also know about people who have perfect recall but almost no creativity, and creative geniuses that can barely remember their own name.
Can somebody who is a generalist only know about several topics or can they synthesize it into something new and novel?
How about the person that, regardless of depth or breadth, can see far reaching implications -- second, third, forth degree effects -- when new information is presented? Or the extreme tactical thinker that can react to new things with extreme speed?
Napoleon and Einstein are both commonly regarded as geniuses, but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.
I totally agree and in fact I would go further to say that the notion of 'genius' is nothing more than an inchoate, rudimentary classification system used to group together successes or extremes in the realm of mental pursuits. Handy when you want to evince notions of extreme-ness but since there are thousands of different possible mental pursuits, the term is basically meaningless.
> but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.
This statement is false. They could be more different in ways you can't even imagine, for no one currently completely understands the nature of intelligence.
First you have to define what you mean by "genius", preferably in some way that is at least generally consistent with the commonly understood meanings. Then you have to assemble an unbiased set (very difficult) of people that fit your definition. Then you have to see what styles of thought that you didn't explicitly or implicitly filter for by your definition are also largely (and disproportionately) present in your set of geniuses.
Then after you have found you styles of thought dominant among geniuses, you have to see if they actually work as predictors.
I don't feel that the author of this article did these things.
This article lists a few characteristics that intelligent and successful (for some definition thereof) people have. The characteristics seem to be neither necessary nor sufficient and the examples are clearly cherry-picked. If there's any scientific or research basis for asserting them, the author hasn't shared.
It's like the author looked a some intelligent people and superficially extracted their secret. It's like looking at a successful company and concluding that the reason for their success is that almost everyone is titled an Associate rather than their flat hierarchy.
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm not sure why people just assume that what this author says is true. The author never shows that "geniuses" even think the way the author claims they do. Did Richard Feynman use this approach? Do a majority of people who have influenced their fields in large and meaningful ways also do this? Who knows, the author provides no evidence. I think a much better exposition on problem solving strategies is George Pólya's How to Solve It [0] and without the pseudoscientific analysis on genius.
The author states:
>Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life.
Again, there is no evidence that this is a common thinking strategy and there is no evidence that if you were to mimic it, you too would benefit from it.
I hope the author and people who too easily agree with the author are aware of confirmation bias [1].
I thought it was good that the author restricted himself to a description of genius traits, instead of implying that applying these traits would make one a genius. At least, until the summary, where he threw that out the window.
It's important to not engage in some kind of magic thinking here: altering your behavior patterns to match "genius" behavior is self-defeating. When one is dealing with the kind of outlier that a genius represents, wholesale emulation is an insufficient strategy to duplicate their success.
Well, in the summary he cites some evidence that "geniusness" can be learned, at least if your teacher himself is a genius. "J. J. Thompson and Ernest Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates" - quite a coincidence.
i wonder though -- if geniuses think a certain way, will training yourself to think along those lines increase your brainpower by teaching you to think more critically? I've read a lot of stuff recently on the ability humans have to actually increase their intelligence (though it's still a pretty controversial subject).
No emulation doesnt make you a genius; but maybe it can help to bring you just that tiny step closer?
I have been working and thinking in many of these ways but as I am not prolific at creating revolutionary ideas I suspect that this mindset is not enough for genius to arise. The article also lacks consideration over the positional requirements for acclaim.
There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance. You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.
Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in thought, biology, architecture and nature?
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 and synapses towards that, leading to new thought that would've otherwise never occurred.
Genius also directly relates to discipline - if you don't have the self-control (whether through willpower or some sort of OCD-like disorder) to learn and create something, anything, you'll be just average.
The "making lots of stuff whether it's good or not" is my biggest issue - frankly, being prolific results in faster iteration on ideas, which contributes to genius.
I find that I tend to self-edit before I've even started on something, which prevents me from doing what I want. I chalk this up to over-ambitious perfectionism, which is a negative trait in this case.
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.
Re finding a needle in a haystack: On an email list for parents of gifted kids, some folks shared the unconventional "mom, you are a retard" reactions of bright kids to this proverbial problem. The one I recall: Set the haystack on fire. The needle will survive but the hay will not.
Genius is just a word. As someone said before, we're all geniuses. It's all about your willpower to use it, train it, or not.
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.
All these comments seem to be missing the point.. Sure these aren't the traits that make up 'genius, sure 'genius' probably can't even be quantified or reduced to this level, but nonetheless these are all qualities we can learn from and adapt as we pursue our own paths.
You have to consider how things were before Freud before dismissing him. Before Freud there was no idea that the mind subconsciously processed information. Although his ideas of how psychology works were very "infantile", they were the first attempt to investigate the subconscious, thus revolutionary.
I think Genius is the ability to take two different ideas, merge them, and come up with a new idea: invention through prediction. Children are amazing at this until it is torn out of them via the education system, peers and adults (in general).
I think a lot is due to side effects, such as the need to fit in / be like everyone else. The easiness of following what's already there, basically, the laziness of the mind.
The laziness of the mind which so many of us are taking advantage of to control people, as it's so easy to let others think on your behalf.
And then again, this makes you right: the education system was made precisely for this. The education system might be actually one of those "genius" ideas.
By formatting people and putting some barriers in their minds, you make them controllable and productive, and thus, you may actually advance humanity in some ways. But at which cost?
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|14 years ago|reply
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 genius is. Some people, like this article's author, try to limit the term just to those people in history that have made significant advances in some field or another. But, then they cherry-pick their examples, usually from a list of their personal heroes, and then try to draw some conclusions from that.
Feynman wasn't a household name until really just a few years ago. Citing him as an example of a genius, and then going further to say that he was ("acknowledged by many to be") the last great American genius, is supremely silly. There are brilliant people right now working in every field; what do you think the odds are that, many years from now, after their death, at least one of them might be regarded as a genius by someone writing next century's version of this same article?
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses, who even have a very serious test to keep out all of the non-geniuses. Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?
If we're going to spend any time on utterly vacuous navel-gazing like this ... I think we ought to at least agree first on a useful definition for the thing we're trying to discuss.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ntkachov|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crntaylor|14 years ago|reply
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Membership_...
[+] [-] mark_integerdsv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calibraxis|14 years ago|reply
Worth reading: (http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to...)
I mean, there is no end of literature by highly skilled people who offer general opinions on how to do a good job. Noam Chomsky, Rich Hickey, Jerry Lettvin, George Polya, Bertrand Russell, and Terence Tao are common examples. (Well, Chomsky is a bit different in that he shies away from individual advice, believing in diversity and improved societies, but if you look closely, he does offer advice like, maybe paraphrasing a little, "Allow yourself to be confused.") But I suppose "Ideas on doing a Good Job" doesn't poke at people's desires for validation as much as "How to be a Genius."
[+] [-] jacquesm|14 years ago|reply
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 and people born into wealth.
The best part: whether or not you apply yourself is under your control. What you're born with is the luck of the draw.
And knowing a few things will make it that much easier to learn a bit more, knowledge begets more knowledge and insight.
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|14 years ago|reply
And where you are born matters too. If the valley is deeper then it takes more energy to escape. So the same person born on a different continent has to apply themselves more to succeed. They have to apply themselves more to meet the right people and have to work far harder to increase their "luck surface area". They have to spend more energy and do so without becoming bitter.
So there is some backplay of innate ability there. It really does take a lot of talent, intelligence and grit to manage to escape being born to a poor family with no money in a country without clean water, electricity, free education or workers rights. To say: I can't expect to find a job nor afford to pay for school books, let alone to attend school. But I will make it somehow instead of giving up and feeling sorry for myself. My father was one such person. He started his first business at 9 to pay for school and help his family. His only luck was in having a teacher that allowed him to memorize the days notes after school. Seeing the expended efforts and incredible lengths he had to go through just to be level to those born to a better position, it takes a special person to be able to go through that.
It should be clear nothing I said contradicts what you said. But I feel you paint a picture that simplifies things overmuch. The worse your starting point, the more boxes you need to tick. In short, I do not see the same clear linear separation you do.
[+] [-] pippy|14 years ago|reply
Simply measuring a score on an IQ test isn't good enough. Someone who can't actively use intelligence might as well not have it.
[+] [-] harscoat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ez77|14 years ago|reply
That assumes free will... It may seem an absurd topic, but it's far from closed [1].
[1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl (search "free will")
[+] [-] mvzink|14 years ago|reply
I know several drastically unsuccessful people who exhibit the traits in this article. None of them have stumbled upon an idea or work that would cause society to label them a genius.
I don't think a genius is very different from any other person. It's just that a genius gets lucky with their novel ideas. Society calls them geniuses really just because people know their names.
I guess my gripe is simply that genius is a social phenomenon, not a trait of an individual, and that it's really quite embarrassing that everyone goes around licking the metaphorical feet of everyone they can think of who did something interesting, or "genius".
That said, I do think this is an interesting article, and knowing how to think like a "genius" is probably worth quite a lot.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
It isn't that we should dismiss the unique contributions of people like "Einstein, Edison, daVinci, Darwin, Picassos, Michelangelo, Galileo, Freud, Mozart et all". These individuals certainly made contributions beyond what be measured by a number-of-manipulations-per-second IQ test and some of these approaches can even be somewhat systematized as "lateral thinking", "wholistic thinking" "getting outside the box" and variety of others.
But lumping these high-performing individuals together with the single glittering generality "genius" leaves us less enlightened for the trouble. Edison and Einstein, for example, were worlds apart and while we can find commonalities between them, we can find commonalities between any two people. And there we are. At another logical level, a "genius" confronted with some given problem might say "what do these things have in common" yes but a moron, an opportunist and a lazy thinker might do the same. One more try folks.
[+] [-] aik|14 years ago|reply
I agree that they may not have the whole answer here, but it's a whole lot better than any random commonality between any two people (e.g. they both like the color blue, or they both lived in the US).
I think there's some insight here, even if you just take the idea of how high-performers think ("productively" rather than "reproductively"). I definitely believe most things I see are a result of reproductive thinking (many of my own thoughts included), and I have many times more respect for things that have come out of "productive" thinking.
[+] [-] law|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I think I just found it.
[+] [-] mangodrunk|14 years ago|reply
1. It may not be true that he had an IQ of 122
2. A score of 122 is still kind of high
3. If it were wrong in one case it doesn't invalidate it, especially since we're talking about a Nobel prize winner in physics
4. If he did take a test, that was several decades ago and I'd imagine the test has evolved from then
5. This test may have not been good for Feynman since he is much better in science and math
On another point, I think the author is incorrectly using Feynman as a person of average intelligence when it's obvious he was very much well above average in math being that he was a Putnam Fellow.
>He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did rather poorly on the history and English portions. [0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Early_life
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html?...
"Q (Deborah Solomon for the New York Times): What is your I.Q.?
"A (Stephen Hawking): I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
[+] [-] AngryParsley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|14 years ago|reply
Also, you don't need quick, one-line, anecdote to explain why 1 (one) is not statistically significant. It's actually pretty obvious.
[+] [-] EricDeb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arvinjoar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmelaich|14 years ago|reply
There's something to the IQ scores, but error bars are large and the meaning controversial.
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
What I'm finding in several places is that the fiqure was 125. But more importantly the low IQ figure was self reported by Feynman and done in high school. Who knows if that is the correct figure and who knows if he was sick the night before or tired or if there was an error etc. I'm not defending IQ tests but it's important to realize that the fact that Feynman said his IQ was X doesn't mean that the test or testing or reporting was flawed or he got someone elses score by accident.
[+] [-] Daniel_Newby|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidman|14 years ago|reply
I think this is clear and people not even considered geniuses can also perform this feat. The defining part is that geniuses seem to come by those alternatives so easily, its just always there. So for example if we devote years to programming we can tell ourselves OK, if i have a problem invoke all my years of experience and look at this problem from many different angles, we can formulate and combine our thinking into something unique that even surprises ourselves because the combination of all the data we we know to get this new idea is far greater then adding the single idea's and pieces of data that we have. Over time we can build on that to get better ideas.
But if i say ok, i know the method of thinking like X helps me do great things when im programming and i try to do the same for say math problems, if i havnt had the experience no matter what I tell myself, i just can not look at the problem from different perspectives or if i do, its not such a great leap, its incremental. Its still step by step, A->B not to A->C, it still follows a logical thought process and we do not surprise ourselves by our solution
For the genius it seems after reading something once or by some method unknown (and having no experience) they can still have all those different perspectives. Then it leaves us normal people thinking, how did they get from A->C without going through the normal steps A->B->C ... this is specially the case when the individual is very young and has managed to soak that information without college or any formal learning ...
[+] [-] Mz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|14 years ago|reply
For example, consider the notion that IQ is a measure of capacity. To wit, let's use an extended and natural analogy -- a container.
Consider a notional container measured only by its depth.
A yard of beer is 36 inches (~91.5cm) tall and most people would consider this a lot of beer. This plays out in people who are extreme specialists -- extremely knowledgeable in only one or two areas. But are they geniuses?
So we have to consider breadth. I have a large mixing bowl I use when marinating meat that's about 26 inches (66.04cm) across, and most people would consider it to hold a lot of meat. This plays out in people who are extreme generalists, not particularly good in any one area, but can cut across disciplines easily.
Yet both containers pale when compared to a 55 gallon (~208.2L) drum in terms of volume. Yet the drum is not as tall as the yard of beer and not as wide as my marinating bowl!
But volume is not the only thing that matters!
I wouldn't pour molten steel into any of the containers above. And I've used stoneware that cracks when used with extremely cold liquids.
What about containers with different compartments that can hold both?
We also know about people who have perfect recall but almost no creativity, and creative geniuses that can barely remember their own name.
Can somebody who is a generalist only know about several topics or can they synthesize it into something new and novel?
How about the person that, regardless of depth or breadth, can see far reaching implications -- second, third, forth degree effects -- when new information is presented? Or the extreme tactical thinker that can react to new things with extreme speed?
Napoleon and Einstein are both commonly regarded as geniuses, but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.
[+] [-] calydon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustafa0x|14 years ago|reply
This statement is false. They could be more different in ways you can't even imagine, for no one currently completely understands the nature of intelligence.
[+] [-] sopooneo|14 years ago|reply
Then after you have found you styles of thought dominant among geniuses, you have to see if they actually work as predictors.
I don't feel that the author of this article did these things.
[+] [-] casca|14 years ago|reply
It's like the author looked a some intelligent people and superficially extracted their secret. It's like looking at a successful company and concluding that the reason for their success is that almost everyone is titled an Associate rather than their flat hierarchy.
[+] [-] mangodrunk|14 years ago|reply
The author states:
>Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life.
Again, there is no evidence that this is a common thinking strategy and there is no evidence that if you were to mimic it, you too would benefit from it.
I hope the author and people who too easily agree with the author are aware of confirmation bias [1].
[0] http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
[+] [-] delluminatus|14 years ago|reply
I thought it was good that the author restricted himself to a description of genius traits, instead of implying that applying these traits would make one a genius. At least, until the summary, where he threw that out the window.
It's important to not engage in some kind of magic thinking here: altering your behavior patterns to match "genius" behavior is self-defeating. When one is dealing with the kind of outlier that a genius represents, wholesale emulation is an insufficient strategy to duplicate their success.
[+] [-] m_for_monkey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] horsehead|14 years ago|reply
No emulation doesnt make you a genius; but maybe it can help to bring you just that tiny step closer?
[+] [-] lhnz|14 years ago|reply
There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance. You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.
Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in thought, biology, architecture and nature?
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|14 years ago|reply
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 and synapses towards that, leading to new thought that would've otherwise never occurred.
Genius also directly relates to discipline - if you don't have the self-control (whether through willpower or some sort of OCD-like disorder) to learn and create something, anything, you'll be just average.
[+] [-] zdw|14 years ago|reply
I find that I tend to self-edit before I've even started on something, which prevents me from doing what I want. I chalk this up to over-ambitious perfectionism, which is a negative trait in this case.
[+] [-] Zaheer|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drumdance|14 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...
[+] [-] Mz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] repos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrofinch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcrh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericHosick|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|14 years ago|reply
The laziness of the mind which so many of us are taking advantage of to control people, as it's so easy to let others think on your behalf.
And then again, this makes you right: the education system was made precisely for this. The education system might be actually one of those "genius" ideas.
By formatting people and putting some barriers in their minds, you make them controllable and productive, and thus, you may actually advance humanity in some ways. But at which cost?
[+] [-] mikaelcho|14 years ago|reply