The myth of ‘mad’ genius

On a related note, I think this idea explains the appeal of smart jerk god characters (Doctor Who, Doctor House, Rick Sanchez, Sherlock Holmes...) to a sizeable portion of nerds (including me). "So smart they can't help but need you" is not a healthy goal, but damn if it isn't seductive.

I’d be considered eccentric. It’s not discipline or the lack thereof. There is a piercing focus that overwhelms the demands of normalcy.

But I won’t talk about me. I’ll talk about a friend of mine. He stepped away from his role with the US Gov’t and spent the last year wandering through Africa and Eastern Europe. I don’t concern myself with him having a roof over his head, because he always will. He just doesn’t define himself by living in SF and putting a roof over his head; nor does he bemoan what could have been. He just is.

Are people brilliant because they don't care or do they not care because they are brilliant? Seems to be a little of both...

I think I behave in an eccentric manner because I was raised by two liberal parents and am an only child. Although I always made friends just fine. I'm bright, but no genius. At least not yet. I often feel somehow that the eccentric behavior and intelligence are the result of a latent property, like some kind of general freedom of mind. Also I have (will inherit) some assets that generate money on their own. So I guess I can "get away" with it.

power corrupts, or... powerlessness conceals?

I catch myself often wanting to behave more eccentric, but then somehow societal laws keep pulling me back. I wish I had the guts (like Steve had) to be blunt to anyone

It's related to conformity. If you automatically, naturally and agreeably fit in with what everybody else does, you won't tend to think outside the orthodoxy.

But if you question everything, try to work things out from first principles, and wonder what happens if things are done differently... well, you're "eccentric", at best.

It seems logically possible for a person to be a perfect conformist socially, and a wild free-thinker intellectually, but it wouldn't usually happen that way.

https://xkcd.com/242/

That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't explain why this phenomenon is (somewhat) unique to art. The explanation you gave applies equally well to say, Basketball players and business tycoons. And for the most part, there's no social wisdom i'm aware of that says you have to be a drug addicted asshole to be one of those things.

That was a cutting analysis; a pleasure to read and important to consider.

You're on the money. Tesla, Emily Dickinson, and likely Van Gogh all had schizotypal personality disorder. Which is not so much a personality disorder in the sense most people think of them so much as it's the Aspergers analog of the schizophrenia spectrum. I've seen it suggested that Einstein may have had it, which I find a lot easier to believe than the notion that he had Aspergers given that his son had schizophrenia and these things tend to run in families. (He may well have had nothing, though.) I strongly suspect that Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid, was schizotypal.

There IS actually a proven connection between schizotypal traits and creativity where there really isn't with mood disorders (except bipolar to an extent), since you're "mad" but not so much so that you can't function well enough to execute your ideas. It's worth googling about.

It's also not what most people mean by "genius"; I was hoping for something about Tesla, Nash, maybe Einstein and Feynman.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, you're right (although the definition of 'genius' is always up for debate). This is just one of a million opinion articles on the same questions which happens to have a regression line behind it.

In what way is life bigger than that? You'll be dead in the blink of an eye relative to any meaningful timescale. And so will everybody and everything you know. All that will be left is what you create and leave behind.

Okay for some this is children, but that's hardly a legacy in many cases. You have greatness born to fools and fools born of greatness, so in the end you're just leaving your mark as a roll of the dice which is hardly unique in any case.

But what we create and help bring to light are things that can reshape and redirect humanity, changing our path forever.

Good that you're better. Maybe try to work lightly (2 hours a day) on a project someday and see if you can complete it without herculean focus or dedication.

Have you ever experienced or met someone with schizophrenia?

It is hell.

Not only for them but often for those who care about them. It's not about a rosy, whacky persons that the society whimsically outcasts. It's often legitimately tortured people that almost always need serious treatment and constant care, otherwise they risk falling into a very dark abyss.

They often wind up hobos or sometimes in prisons/asylums because they don't have treatment and a very supportive family available, falling in disrepair, not because an evil plot of society.

If this condition were the price to pay for breakthroughs, I'd consider the price too high. But indeed it isn't -- there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work. It's a massive hindrance, fogging your view of the world and yourself. Often cited cases like John Nash actually stopped being able to conduct any good work once the disease got hold of them. There are countless examples of extremely brilliant people productive through their lives that never showed signs of delusion, and almost no cases of delusional persons doing good work.

This disease largely embodies the obscurantism, mysticism, fear, distrust, that scientific enlightenment was idealized to fight against. I can't wait for its root causes to be found and it completely eradicated (along with MS, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, please).

I can't discern your point. Are you saying that there is some kind of "equality" since the geniuses are doomed to suffer from mental illness?

This is part of the reason why "mental illness" is a broken term for certain applications. Unevenly-matched skill (coping, etc) vs. circumstance (group psychology, social standards) is one alternate POV that better explains why a "mentally-ill" person could create genius works. They have become conditioned to exploring extremes by dint of circumstance and personal history; their liabilities, struggles, and even periodic victories in these contexts allow them to produce works the likes of which are rarely seen or even contemplated in "non-genius" company. The audience knows intuitively that they are experiencing some fundamental truth, though they cannot in a small number of steps arrive at the sequence that allowed the truth to emerge.

>Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on repeatable observations.

That's confusing the scientific ideal, with how actual scientists operate. Actual scientists hope that they get something right, they feel strongly about their research like the mother of a child, they're just as clouded by emotions as any other human being. And if you add corruption into the mix, then yes, what we call science is not as solid as it looks, but it still provides useful results sometimes.

But we can still talk about a scientific reason to believe. Because the reason might be scientific, but it still might be something which we can believe or not. Because scientific reasons are about as flawed as their creators.

The replication problems in many fields are evidence that science is only as ideal as the people producing it.

Well, the general take is that average intelligence combined with well-above-average drive (motivation, work ethic, etc.) has significantly better results than "smart but lazy". So you'd expect someone who's smart and also fanatical about something to get outstanding results in that field. Monomania also generally comes across as 'mad'.

I used to go to a gifted education class once a week when I was around 13 years old.

Probably half the class or more had some form of condition, Autism, ADHD, depression, etc.

Looking back at it now, I don't think it was the case that gifted people are generally "mad". I'm a fairly normal person, and so were a lot of other people in the class. I think that rather, it was that these kids didn't integrate well into conventional education, but this gifted education class was very understanding and accepting of people's "quirks", and had a much more open learning environment where people could grow in their own way. I ended up there because I struggled with the structured nature of normal school.

I've met plenty of people over the years who could be considered gifted (in this case, top 5% IQ), most of them are completely normal and probably just dealt with the overly structured nature of normal school.

I wonder if this is a link between 'madness' and 'genius' or if this is the result of pressure put on kids to succeed at a prestigious middle school.

Reminds me of a differing but related idea. Society at large is already crazy but nobody notices because it has been so normalized being rational is looked upon as crazy.

The promoter of doctors handwashing wound up instituionalized. And it isn't a in the past problem. I mean look at interviewing etiquette and ideals for one. They distrust people who can't or won't put on a mask convincingly enough as untrustworthy. Not even as "unsuited for a job where it is relevant like sales or acting". That is frankly barking mad to only trust those capable of faking.