Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore

I started to work on improving my life one step at a time. Wanting things to happen overnight but knowing that takes time. Sometimes losing faith but never losing focus on the end goal. I want to to not waste my life. Forget being smart or doing something big. I don't want to regret wasting it.

Ive recently realized that things worth doing are worth doing well. That means its going to take time before anything good happens. Having patience is paying off.

I do stumble. Sometimes choosing to not work and relax. Whatever. My way to deal with this is to not see this as a loss but as an inconvenience. I can still (and often do) work for 10 minutes after wasting an hour or two. Its better than nothing.

Lastly, if you want to accomplish something noteworthy, go and jump off the empire state building. If you want to do something worth doing, look inside and figure out what makes you tick. Then go do it. Its not wether you can or cant. Its wether you want or not. Good luck.

I'm not proud of my intelligence, why would I be? (much of it) is determined by genetics and the environment you grew up in and I had little control over either of those.

I also point out she is the one who speaks 3 languages fluently, has a degree in finance and qualified as a shipbroker, I just explain things really slowly and simply to a very fast idiot for a living.

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 tissue? It can't; genius isn't about your brain, but the context.

Geniuses are like prospectors who get intrinsic credit for striking it rich... but they didn't put the gold there. However, it is right to celebrate them, to encourage prospecting...

I propose to blog anonymously about those “interesting ideas” then. That way you can achieve something, but get none of the personal recognition you seem to want to avoid.

> Then, as a general rule, I start drinking if I have no obligations for the evening.

Please stop drinking alcohol regularly, especially when you feel depressed. It may make you feel good for a short while, but drinking alcohol regularly can result in liver failure, mental illness, and an increase in the risk of cancer, among other diseases.

I'd recommend starting writing a journal with ideas you want to execute and instead of drinking / watching tv crack your habit and design something cool.

There's truth in the genius of mainstream and average too.

You're good at lying to yourself, too. Bush and Gore weren't the same. Clinton and Trump weren't the same, either. Had Gore won, we'd literally live in a different world. The Middle East might not be as stable as the US, but it would be vastly more stable than it is now.

And, looking back in 4 years, I'm pretty sure the world will be very different than it would be had Clinton gotten elected.

Between you types (the apathetic) and the Trump voters, we are so fucked.

If you accomplish some great work of genius, but no one can understand it, what then?

It's also interesting to see some people to think that I'm judging them or remotely care about their existence, when in reality I simply don't care about them at all; I think I told my parents that once, which was met by a strange reactions (guess I won't say it again).

To me it seems all perfectly rational and normal; Why would you care about other people? Why not live for yourself? Why not take advantage of other to further your interests? Life has to meaning, so any meaning you assign is just as equally valid. As I continue to interact with people that have no ambition, that are afraid to do something because it might hurt other people the more I fall into the idea that most people are cattle to be taken advantage of by the likes of GP, Trump, Bankers, and others;

And yeah in the end you do realize that you are broken and ugly, that you will never be like the others. If I had any regrets I'd say its not being able to enjoy love as others do, especially when I was younger. But I simply can't see the reason why I would want to do that, there is very little utility, and I feel like it would only slow me down (although having a partner that shares my world view would be nice -- a la Mr Robot's Evil Corp CTO -- but finding that person is difficult since that would require us both disclosing our true personalities).

I come from a different starting point, with similar results though.

I'm very emotion driven most of the time, getting out of my way to understand how people feel or think, empathizing with their angst. However I soon learned that many of these characteristics are seen by many as 'weak', and this was impairing my ability to get social advantages.

At the same time, the process of hearing and trying to understand leverages your advantage, as you may grasp the hidden desires of people. If the other person is not engaged in the same profound way, of understanding the dialogue, you end up in a position of power.

I identified very much with the expressions 'robot' and 'playing a character 24 hours a day' because that's how I learned to be more comfortable.

It's really hard to break this chain, that keeps reinforced by the narratives you create yourself, of how you should be seen or perceived, and used as a rationalization (just or not) of happenings on your environment (e.g. as a self-fulfilling prophecy).

I was often wondering whether it is possible to communicate with a psychopath. Communication requires trust, i.e. that the person you are speaking with isn't lying. With non-psychopaths this is achieved by the complex play of empathy, guilt etc. However, given that psychopaths lack these feeling the mechanism just doesn't work. It's an epistemic and, actually, quite terrifying problem: You have this human being and no chance to ever know what they think of feel.

And if there's no chance to communicate, there's no way to truly solve problems.

And now I hear the problem is experienced even from the other side. And note that I believe you because the comment was posted from a throwaway account and thus you have very little to gain from it.

So maybe, in the end, there's a chance to communicate over the chasm, possibly using some techniques from game theory?

Given that short context, your post is interesting to me partly because, from my perspective, it sounds like you're searching for some empathy from me so that the channels of communication will open.

So either you aren't wanting us to empathize with your way of life being exhausting, in which case the purpose of the post eludes me, or you do wish for us to empathize. And finally, you certainly don't wish that you had the ability of empathy to minimize your (potential; real or theoretical) damage to other people's life experiences or feel other people's joy.

In other words, this logically deduces to being entirely self serving. You wish for us to empathize with you so that you can make a personal gain, not because you wish to do better by other people.

Isn't everyone self interested? To an extent, yes. I "selflessly" help someone, which increases my fitness as an organism because I experience their positive experience. If this goes both ways, it's a 4x net gain vs. 1 self interested individual. Two self interested individuals with aligned goals still only get 2x net gain, which is half as much as two selfless individuals.

Maybe I completely missed the mark but that's my evaluation. I'd be interested in hearing more on your perspective.

I have one question: can sociopaths express altruism?

Thanks for your valuable time!

Why?

> It's tiring as hell to live this life.

So don't live it. In your opening sentence you say you must hide your identity and in your last sentence you say it is tiring to live like that. So don't hide behind the "mask of sanity" and then you don't need to be tired.

It won't be easy, but nothing worthwhile is.

Your perspective resonates as very plausible.

Not having empathy with others can be a variety of illnesses, one of which I'm suggesting to look into is schizoid personality disorder. Schizoid personality disorder is an illness in which a person doesn't feel empathy or emotions, has restricted affect. Schizoids can often function as you described above (merely responding based on how they understand other humans to be emotionally like a robot) and often don't feel the need to seek treatment due to their capability to function in this way.

Note: I have schizotypal, a related illness to schizoid (has more delusions etc) and many of your descriptions that you ascribe to psychopathy also describe how I function in reality. Would you be interested in having a conversation about yourself and the limits of your self?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/hospital-guns-mental-h...

"Crazy" is a bad word. There's "crazy" and crazy. Hemingway was touched with unique ways of thinking, but he wasn't John Nash (with all due respect to Mr. Nash).

I guess that may or may not have been particularly abnormal in Britain at the time, though.

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 a time.

Well, I've read many very convincing arguments that it is (including statistics pertaining to how children perform in school, with which I have my own problems, but which nonetheless need to be accounted for), how have you found that it is not?

One of the hardest things to learn, for example, is a foreign language. If the language is drastically different from one's mother tongue, then it generally takes adults about 10 years of casual study, or three years of intense study. I think this qualifies learning a second language as an outstanding achievement. Many adults try and give up, and the vast majority never progress past fluency to native-level (partly for lack of trying). By many objective measures too, it's a difficult task; I have probably stored many dozens of thousands of unique pieces of information in my brain related to my chosen language of study. Languages are complex in ways we don't even know we understand; Clifford is a big red dog, not a red big dog.

And yet, for the most part, every single person ever born learns language. Even people born with severe cognitive disabilities generally succeed at learning language.

So while I accept there is a strong correlation between genetics and measures such as IQ, I really do find it hard to believe that there is anyone who is truly incapable of learning basic calculus, or Python, or how to play the guitar. In practice, it doesn't seem this way, but every time I think about this issue I can't help but consider that out of a sample size of 1 billion people randomly born in China, pretty much 1 billion of them successfully learned Chinese.

I disagree with this statement but is difficult to debunk unless 'genius' is nailed down. Nominally if a large part of socially communicable (and thereby recorded) analytical or creative capacity ("genius") is experiential rather than genetic, then it is heritable in the sense that it can be taught. If it is taught to many, however, then by some definitions it becomes non-genius.

Are the large number of documented ascetic/hermit traditions teaching genius? Preserving an alternative worldview? Simply crazy?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

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.

All of the studies to date have used the criminal population as the sole source of research for psychopathy - as your reference does.

The point I was making with my lengthy post is that, in fact, genius level psychopaths don't become murderers; they become Presidents, Dictators and Hedge Fund managers.