Einstein: Curiosity trumps intellect | Hacker News Reader

Einstein: Curiosity trumps intellect

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24 pointsnaish21 comments

A good friend of mine is infinitely curious. Whenever he comes around he always finds something that he doesn't quite know how works, or that is broken in an unexpected way. And he never stops before he has learnt how it works, or fixed it.

Since he now has roughly 38 years of experience (his age...) in finding out how things work and how to fix them he is almost unimaginably good at it.

For this reason he is the greatest hacker I have ever come across.

So yes: Imagination and curiosity are more important than intellect.

But maybe imagination and curiosity requires intellect.

Of course, this is coming from one of the most intelligent people to walk the Earth, someone who never had to deal first-hand with a lack of smarts. On a similar note, I just heard that attractive women with rich, good-looking, intelligent, humorous husbands all agree that the only thing important in a man is a sense of humor. As luck would have it, we all have a bit of that and a bit of creativity. I'm inspired.

he wasn't really insanely intelligent. what set him apart was his creativity and persistence. famous are his thought experiments and the ten-year gap between his special and general relativities

there are many people who are very intelligent, far more so than Einstein was, but aren't inclined to originality

of course you are free to define intelligence how you wish, but i think for the definition to be useful creativity should be included in it

Yeah, IQ unfortunately doesn't take free will into account.

There's not a lot of room for free will in a deterministic universe. I've found it is best not to dwell on it.

Ok, taking airy metaphysical arguments out of the picture, is this true in your experience? Do you do best assuming you have no control over your future, or by assuming you have control over your future? That's what I mean.

I hear he originally had to get a job as a postal clerk because at university he was really stuck up about his intelligence and pissed everyone off.

Patent clerk. And while he certainly was hung up on himself to an extent (in the Isaacson biography, there was a letter that Einstein sent to a professor basically saying that the job should automatically belong to him), it is a little unfair--the fact that he was a Jew had a lot to do with his struggle to get a job in the German academic system.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an imaginative (read fictional) adventure into how Einstein might have come up with his paradigm-making ideas while working as a patent clerk in Bern.. Good coast-to-coast airplane read.

As much as I want to agree with you, I have to challenge you on this -- what makes you say this?

I have a physics Ph.D. friend who is quite brilliant himself, and when I asked him about Einstein he said something like Einstein had a particularly good, intuitive grasp of physics principles in a way most people weren't capable of. Actually I don't remember if this was Feynman or Einstein; I was asking him about the two, and basically he said that each of these people had some uncanny ability.

Daniel Tamment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet isn't insanely intelligent but due to a different brain structure, has a supernormal memory, which makes him appear abnormally intelligent and creative. When he talks about shapes of numbers you can say he is particularly creative, but I find it impossible to dispute that this comes as a result of a brain anomaly he was born with.

Both Feynman and Einstein had a terrific physical intuition, but Feynman had more of an appearance of one since he was quite a showman, whereas for Einstein it was essentially his core asset.

Feynman also had incredible facility with calculation: he was one of the first Putnam fellows. He left the exam early!

As much as I admire Feynman, the stories about his magician qualities are, honestly, so far beyond most people and end up being more entertaining than inspiring.

Enthusiasm will get you very far. I've seen young, euthusiastic people without much knowledge or intelligence exceed the ability of old cynics.

yeah - those who change the world are those that do not know that it is impossible.

Rather, those who know what is impossible.

I have a theory: You can learn to be smart.

Granted some people are gifted with intellect just as others are naturally handicapped and there exists an entire range in between, but I suggest that those with normally functioning brains who actively strive to increase their knowledge and understanding will discover that they are getting smarter.

The post goes along with this theory, in a way, by stating that curiosity - an active attempt to understand things - is above natural intelligence.

This is just a theory I came up with when comparing certain friends who haven't made the greatest choices in life or gotten the best grades in school (not a good intelligence indicator, by the way). I'm interested in hearing what others think about this.

He also said "Imagination is more important than knowledge" which is also deeply cosmically true, especially for startups.

If we could foster that sort of thing in American schools, it would scarcely matter whether India and China better prepared their students for engineering (referencing another article that was on the front page the same time as this one)

Curious like a cat?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1098316453585764384

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