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Comment by tokipin | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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