How Geniuses Think

Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is.

Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better idea of what a genius is. Some people, like this article's author, try to limit the term just to those people in history that have made significant advances in some field or another. But, then they cherry-pick their examples, usually from a list of their personal heroes, and then try to draw some conclusions from that.

Feynman wasn't a household name until really just a few years ago. Citing him as an example of a genius, and then going further to say that he was ("acknowledged by many to be") the last great American genius, is supremely silly. There are brilliant people right now working in every field; what do you think the odds are that, many years from now, after their death, at least one of them might be regarded as a genius by someone writing next century's version of this same article?

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses, who even have a very serious test to keep out all of the non-geniuses. Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?

If we're going to spend any time on utterly vacuous navel-gazing like this ... I think we ought to at least agree first on a useful definition for the thing we're trying to discuss.

You can make up for that lack to a certain extent by applying yourself. A person applying themselves with merely average innate ability more often than not will outperform a person born with some windfall. This goes for money, brains, the lot. Apply yourself, that's half the battle.

Plenty of people never learn to apply themselves and that includes plenty of geniuses and people born into wealth.

The best part: whether or not you apply yourself is under your control. What you're born with is the luck of the draw.

And knowing a few things will make it that much easier to learn a bit more, knowledge begets more knowledge and insight.

I know several drastically unsuccessful people who exhibit the traits in this article. None of them have stumbled upon an idea or work that would cause society to label them a genius.

I don't think a genius is very different from any other person. It's just that a genius gets lucky with their novel ideas. Society calls them geniuses really just because people know their names.

I guess my gripe is simply that genius is a social phenomenon, not a trait of an individual, and that it's really quite embarrassing that everyone goes around licking the metaphorical feet of everyone they can think of who did something interesting, or "genius".

That said, I do think this is an interesting article, and knowing how to think like a "genius" is probably worth quite a lot.

It isn't that we should dismiss the unique contributions of people like "Einstein, Edison, daVinci, Darwin, Picassos, Michelangelo, Galileo, Freud, Mozart et all". These individuals certainly made contributions beyond what be measured by a number-of-manipulations-per-second IQ test and some of these approaches can even be somewhat systematized as "lateral thinking", "wholistic thinking" "getting outside the box" and variety of others.

But lumping these high-performing individuals together with the single glittering generality "genius" leaves us less enlightened for the trouble. Edison and Einstein, for example, were worlds apart and while we can find commonalities between them, we can find commonalities between any two people. And there we are. At another logical level, a "genius" confronted with some given problem might say "what do these things have in common" yes but a moron, an opportunist and a lazy thinker might do the same. One more try folks.

I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I think I just found it.

I think this is clear and people not even considered geniuses can also perform this feat. The defining part is that geniuses seem to come by those alternatives so easily, its just always there. So for example if we devote years to programming we can tell ourselves OK, if i have a problem invoke all my years of experience and look at this problem from many different angles, we can formulate and combine our thinking into something unique that even surprises ourselves because the combination of all the data we we know to get this new idea is far greater then adding the single idea's and pieces of data that we have. Over time we can build on that to get better ideas.

But if i say ok, i know the method of thinking like X helps me do great things when im programming and i try to do the same for say math problems, if i havnt had the experience no matter what I tell myself, i just can not look at the problem from different perspectives or if i do, its not such a great leap, its incremental. Its still step by step, A->B not to A->C, it still follows a logical thought process and we do not surprise ourselves by our solution

For the genius it seems after reading something once or by some method unknown (and having no experience) they can still have all those different perspectives. Then it leaves us normal people thinking, how did they get from A->C without going through the normal steps A->B->C ... this is specially the case when the individual is very young and has managed to soak that information without college or any formal learning ...

For example, consider the notion that IQ is a measure of capacity. To wit, let's use an extended and natural analogy -- a container.

Consider a notional container measured only by its depth.

A yard of beer is 36 inches (~91.5cm) tall and most people would consider this a lot of beer. This plays out in people who are extreme specialists -- extremely knowledgeable in only one or two areas. But are they geniuses?

So we have to consider breadth. I have a large mixing bowl I use when marinating meat that's about 26 inches (66.04cm) across, and most people would consider it to hold a lot of meat. This plays out in people who are extreme generalists, not particularly good in any one area, but can cut across disciplines easily.

Yet both containers pale when compared to a 55 gallon (~208.2L) drum in terms of volume. Yet the drum is not as tall as the yard of beer and not as wide as my marinating bowl!

But volume is not the only thing that matters!

I wouldn't pour molten steel into any of the containers above. And I've used stoneware that cracks when used with extremely cold liquids.

What about containers with different compartments that can hold both?

We also know about people who have perfect recall but almost no creativity, and creative geniuses that can barely remember their own name.

Can somebody who is a generalist only know about several topics or can they synthesize it into something new and novel?

How about the person that, regardless of depth or breadth, can see far reaching implications -- second, third, forth degree effects -- when new information is presented? Or the extreme tactical thinker that can react to new things with extreme speed?

Napoleon and Einstein are both commonly regarded as geniuses, but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.

Then after you have found you styles of thought dominant among geniuses, you have to see if they actually work as predictors.

I don't feel that the author of this article did these things.

It's like the author looked a some intelligent people and superficially extracted their secret. It's like looking at a successful company and concluding that the reason for their success is that almost everyone is titled an Associate rather than their flat hierarchy.

I thought it was good that the author restricted himself to a description of genius traits, instead of implying that applying these traits would make one a genius. At least, until the summary, where he threw that out the window.

It's important to not engage in some kind of magic thinking here: altering your behavior patterns to match "genius" behavior is self-defeating. When one is dealing with the kind of outlier that a genius represents, wholesale emulation is an insufficient strategy to duplicate their success.

There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance. You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in thought, biology, architecture and nature?

Second, everyone can be a "genius" as long as they put a lot of work into anything. It doesn't take much to become better than the average person - you just have to be slightly better.

Once you start working on something for a long time and thinking about it more than 50% (arbitrary, but about right) of all your waking time, your brain will dedicate a big part of its new neurons and synapses towards that, leading to new thought that would've otherwise never occurred.

Genius also directly relates to discipline - if you don't have the self-control (whether through willpower or some sort of OCD-like disorder) to learn and create something, anything, you'll be just average.

I find that I tend to self-edit before I've even started on something, which prevents me from doing what I want. I chalk this up to over-ambitious perfectionism, which is a negative trait in this case.

IMO that's the best section of the article. Einstein learned by failing and reiterating. That's exactly the type of mentality that entrepreneurs should have.

http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...

It's often not even about working hard, training hard, or something. It's just having a proper state of mind, and the right conditions.

As simple as it sounds, it's complicated. If it was simple, we'd all be happy right now. Not because we'd feel like geniuses but because we'd be able to achieve _anything_ we want.

Even thus, some points of the article correlate with having a proper state of mind, for example, you need to be able to think out of the box (note: you don't need 3 f. paragraphs to express that idea). You need to attempt to have a complete understanding of things, from every angle.

But all this still boils down to will power and proper conditions.

My 2 genius cents anyway.

..others, look for other, strange, non traditional right answers. I like those people.

You get people who are bright, but have virtually no curiousity and who stay within their specialism of knowledge, often due to setting a high value on others views, so not wanting to look stupid.

Conversely you also get creative and determined slow people. And they will thrash the merely bright in almost any problem that contains significant depths.

But it's unlikely that Feynman is "the last great American genius". Maybe the most well-known example is Chomsky (but there are no doubt many others), and he answers his emails quickly. So, it's not like we necessarily have to pore through notebooks and quips of dead people, guessing at their mental states.