The ‘Mad Genius’ Mystery | Hacker News Reader

The ‘Mad Genius’ Mystery

psychologytoday.com

I think it’s often a forgone conclusion that mathematical brilliance not born of a just hard work and normal ability often comes as a specialisation rather than as a superhuman power. I.e. genius to normal intellect is what a GPU is to a CPU.

Isaac Newton was doing chemistry with a range of nasty heavy metals for years. A sample of his hair was analysed some time ago and found to contain significant levels of lead [1].

Boyle, Cavendish and their cohorts investigated a variety of sources and were not empiricists in the modern sense. Remember that they had e.g. no concept of yeast, bacteria, and yet saw the daily baking of bread and brewing of beer. Not surprising perhaps that they saw similar processes in the chemical realm? A flavour of the times slightly earlier can be seen in the use of astrology for medical purposes [2]

[1] https://web.pa.msu.edu/courses/2008spring/ISP213H/welcome/we...

[2] http://theshakespeareblog.com/2014/06/shakespeare-and-the-al...

One thing that fascinates me how their 'mechanistic' viewpoints reflects into their morals and ethics.

People like Grothendieck and Grigori Perelman, and others often stand alone against customs and norms and they get really disappointed at some time when they realize that other people don't just act morally against all odds if they know it's right thing to do. People with mentalistic viewpoint have inclination to follow the opinions, lifestyles and prejudices of their time and place even if they have the clarity to see the wrongs.

You can see the same in more functional form in people like Einstein or Bernard Russel. Bernard Russel spend a year in China because his clarity of perception was hurting all causes and alienated him from everyone.

The parts about Grothendieck are interesting.

I think it's just entropy in action. Structures invariably show their cracks, whether it's a marriage or a society or any other institution. Age beats idealism into place. The world is more and more tiring the more time we partake in it. We grow weary of our jobs, our politicians let us down, and our religious leaders let the hypocrisy slip. Sometimes it leads to defeatist thinking, and sometimes it leads to drastic changes, like the proverbial midlife crises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltschmerz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acedia

>> Age beats idealism into place.

This is true. Also, it's practically impossible for idealistic people to make an impact in this world. Nobody who has power trusts idealists because they are difficult to predict and impossible to control. You can't just throw money at an idealist to keep them in line with your financial interests; they are unreliable cogs in the engines of capitalism.

Those who succeed in this society are opportunists who pose as idealists. They are people who can selectively signal idealism when engaging with the masses but who can also clearly signal opportunism when engaging with the powerful few.

That's why hypocrites rule the world.

Don’t you think that we got things like women’s suffrage, paid vacations, democracy, public healthcare, free public education, modern medicine, engineering, etc precisely because idealists can have an impact?

I would argue that every one of these things came into existence not by the benevolence or common sense of idealists, but because somebody somewhere saw a chance to profit, like keeping workers satisfied just enough to distract them from tossing monkey-wrenches, etc. How great is public healthcare when it amounts to 2/3 of the population being over-medicated? Or public education, when so much of it boils down to indoctrination? I can't help but to see paint-jobs over catch-22s everywhere.

Yes exactly. If billionaires could abolish weekends and public holidays without risking a massive backlash, they would take it all away in a heartbeat. They would lobby to reinstate slavery if it would give them a risk-free competitive edge.

The only thing that these people cannot moralize is the stock price going sown.

"Women’s suffrage, paid vacations, democracy, public healthcare, free public education" are just results of societies getting richer. Luxuries that become affordable for regular people.

There has been some idealism in tech, and I don't mean just modern tech, even long before the first flight, but you can't say that it's wasn't also being beaten into place.

If it’s just the result of societies getting richer, then why doesn’t a rich society like the USA have free higher public education/healthcare like most wealthy countries (that are yet less wealthy than the USA), or why doesn’t the UAE have a democracy?

And if being rich isn’t enough but it also requires the will of some people to push these ideas through and realize them, then wouldn’t you call those people... idealists?

If not, I’d love to hear what definition of “idealist” people are using in this thread, because it just sounds like a no true Scotsman argument.

Why don't all rich people own luxury cars? Yet many do obviously because they're rich.

And US has free, universal healthcare. Hospitals cannot turn anyone away. Its financing is pretty nutty so there's definitely some path dependence.

Emergency rooms are only required to treat immediate life-threatening conditions, that is, so long as someone is breathing enough and keeping enough blood inside to remain somewhat conscience as they're wheeled out or propped in the parking lot, they've fulfilled their obligation under the law. And then there is what exactly counts as an emergency. Things not categorized as emergencies: death from rattle snake bites, death by rabies (both very painfully). And all of that is only if it's actually enforced[1][2].

[1] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/refusal-emergen...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-federal-law-some-...

Much of what you said doesn’t have idealistic roots. Democracy is by nature pragmatic, for instance. Engineers and physicians will generally employ whatever tool works best as well.

"Much of what you said doesn’t have idealistic roots. Democracy is by nature pragmatic, for instance"

Democracy looked a lot more idealistic and less pragmatic when the mainstream thing was kings and whatnot. When you are ruled by an absolute monarch, the pragmatic thing is to try to work within that system.

> Engineers and physicians will generally employ whatever tool works best as well.

That’s a common myth amongst people who fetishize “science”. Boltzmann committed suicide over the pushback on how outlandish his theory of the atom was. Ignaz Semmelweis was ignored and ridiculed when he pushed for surgeons to wash their hands before operations and finished his life in an asylum.

Engineers and physicians will only employ whatever tool works best as long as it fits their conception of the world and what is socially acceptable at the time.

As far as claiming that democracy is by nature pragmatic, that’s a statement that’s going to need a lot of arguments to support it, in a time where many support eg China’s communist party as an example of “pragmatic” government.

It's refreshing to hear this point of view with some notable cases to back it up.

I'm tired of hearing people saying how efficient the markets are and how great the system is at rewarding talent and hard work and all that "you make your own luck" bullshit. History books are littered with examples of mathematicians, scientists and engineers who were being ignored or ridiculed for purely social reasons.

In fact, it almost seems to be the norm. It shows just how stupid we all are and that we all ought to eat humble pie.

When we come up with new laws and regulations, we should always factor in our collective stupidity.

I don't think we can say that markets are objectively efficient when a bunch of monkeys operating under shared social delusions get to set the price of all things based on those delusions.

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