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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.

I like your comment about the eye of beholder. It captures the obstacle I find when trying to form a complete argument why, say, studying chess is a pursuit inferior to studying information theory.

Adjusting it closer to your comment, can we say that a chess genius is better than an information theory genius? Counter arguments would question the way I'm using "better".

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.

This is the same underdog story every geek romanticizes for that never quite seems to match the biography of most known geniuses. Known geniuses seem to figure out how to fit into society and make it work for them.

I remember reading in Nikolai Tesla's biography how he didn't fit in the "way of Americans" feeling alienated and how his "correspondence" with women in USA felt odd.

It's not always about fitting into broader society. Tesla fit into a small niche of people who were into the same things. That's very similar to Shannon's story.

It could easily be argued that known geniuses are known because they, for some reason, managed to fit in well enough, and not that they managed to fit in because they were geniuses.

There are known and measurable negative social effects that is strongly affecting people with high intelligence as measured by standard tests. Some fraction of highly intelligent people will certainly also be highly socially skilled - as skills really don't appear to be exclusive, a few will have an exceptionally strong drive to succeed, and some fraction will be in the right place at the right time. It is likely that those we know of have some measure of either, of those characteristics, and that the others simply never rose from obscurity however talanted they might have been. There are exceptions, as there is to all generalisations.

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).

Could you recommend some research papers on learning, motivation and general cognitive science?

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/896/ (on becoming the next Marie Curie):

"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.

Fair enough regarding the status.

> Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying a genius a bad thing?

The authors can do whatever they want with their time. But people who buy books and read articles on geniuses would be better served buying and reading science-based books on intelligence. They mostly have all the same advice without the fluff of big names. Also they are actually empirical science, which can't always be said about studies on "famous" people (which to me seem more akin to profiling).

That's not to say you can't enjoy a good biography. But titles like these and what they imply just rub me the wrong way. We're not Einsteins, we'll never be geniuses, and that's fine.

I concur. As a teacher and mentor to students, I find that assigning the label of "genius" to anyone famous for their accomplishments can have a negative affect on young learner's goals. They often think "oh, they're just a genius, that's how they've accomplished X". I try and dispel this, giving them examples of how most "geniuses" just worked really hard on one thing, and that if they focus and work hard on the one thing they are passionate about they will find that someday they may be referred to as a "genius".

Yes. They worked to get to the limits of their abilities, and that's how they accomplished so much. Without that work, their potential would have been wasted.

Everyone's limits are at a different location for different tasks, and they can be pushed to some extent, but not indefinitely. (If nothing else, people eventually die.) Finding how far your limits in a useful or fun area can be pushed is a worthwhile task as well, and progress is measured by change relative to your past, not someone else's.

So we sit between two tragedies:

On the one hand, we have people who believe genius is magic, and unapproachable, who never work to find what their level is, and never work to push it out.

On the other, we have people who think any level can be attained through hard work, who work themselves into burnout or worse trying to reach goals their lives aren't long enough to attain, and who never appreciate the progress they have made.

> But people who buy books and read articles on geniuses would be better served buying and reading science-based books on intelligence.

I'd say they'd be even better served buying and reading actual science books. Suddenly they could realize they're smarter than they thought.

Perhaps, but not necessarily. Sadly I've found most people have reasonable innate intelligence but were never taught logic. They were never given the subtle tools need to even figure out basic problems on a logical basis, instead relying on intuition and some basic pattern recognition. Dealing with vast logical abstractions, even if put in layman's terms, simply overwhelms them.

You first have to teach them analysis, how to break things down and recombine them. A good example here is teaching beginning computer science students how to divide a large, complicated task into a long list of small tasks. Or teaching derivations in basic physics. It's something that's not really formally taught outside of the sciences, and that's a shame.

Any books to get improve my logic muscle?

Bump, I'm curious about this aswell.

There are plenty of good books on Mathematical logic and set theory, but they're pretty dense, dry and tend to lack context.

Honestly I'd recommend the more complex puzzle games. Top recommendation there would probably be SpaceChem: https://www.gog.com/game/spacechem

Solutions to each problem are readily available on youtube, and while it starts off extremely basic the mid and upper level puzzles force you to break things down into distinct parts and have them work together. Best part is there's theoretically thousands of solutions to every puzzle, so even if you crack and look one up, you can then challenge yourself to make a better solution in some way. In fact the game shows you metrics at the end of each puzzle, showing how your solution compared to other players in terms of time, number of parts used, etc.

It's also a lot more entertaining than a textbook as has a pretty awesome soundtrack. :)

If the books are dense and dry then how we teach them about logic.

I'd still be interested if you had any books to recommend.

But nonetheless, this is exactly the kind of thing that will open the door for me! Thanks.

I really hope Chandrasekhar realized he was a genius. Anything less would be tragic.

If I hold this hope for someone who is a genius but sadly not a household name, I should probably hope the same for people who happened to become famous as well.

This topic runs close to home for me in a a couple of ways. First, my research is broadly in the area - not geniuses, but individual differences. Second, as a scientist, in professional capacity I've come into personal contact with a couple of giants in the field who have been called geniuses, some who most people here would recognize, others who might be less well-known.

I've grown very disillusioned with the term "genius." Part of this has become because of how painfully obvious randomness plays in all of this, from a scientific perspective - not all, but a lot of it. Another part of it, though, is from seeing how social factors shape our labeling of geniuses from others, and the consequences that has. Maybe they're the same thing, but to me they're a bit different, in that you can ask "why is this high-ability person the way they are" but you can also ask "how is that this high-ability person becomes singled out"?

It's not so much that those labeled geniuses haven't made contributions. But in the couple of cases I'm aware of, it's almost as if there's a cult of personality surrounding them, that amplifies the apparent importance of what they did, far beyond the person's actual contributions. So that their mistakes, and the sometimes serious consequences of those mistakes are conveniently forgotten; also forgotten are others in the field who contributed the same ideas or findings, but at the wrong time or in the wrong outlet. There's dynamic patterns, too, in that the person who proposes the same things, but to the wrong audience or at the wrong time is literally discouraged and punished, and the other is encouraged and rewarded. Is a framework that includes the concept of genius even accurate then?

I think one needs to take very seriously in life whether or not they believe in a just world and why.

I agree with your sentiment, however I would extend it beyond genius to success in general; and our tendency to conflate the two makes it substantially harder to study either, I think.

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.