Where Have All the Geniuses Gone?

I've had an idiosyncratic but highly useful definition of the word 'genius' since I was a little kid thanks to my mother. She taught me that a genius is an intuitive/rational thinker-feeler-person who was lucky enough to somehow line it all up for humanity in his/her mind and bring something big into the world that changes it for the better. If you think about all the real geniuses-- that criteria holds.

There is not much academic research into genius these days but there is research into intuitive people and intuition. And there is also related work in psychology about self-actualization and the other mental-processes.

But eventually it all comes down to someone doing something breathtakingly interesting-- you can't really roll that step off an assembly-line.

I percieve one of the problems with the world right now is that lots of the most highly-competent/skilled people are sort of holding off doing big things, esp. with technology. The number of intuitive man-hours that have been poured into the subject of online advertising is staggering. Those people working on that are capable of actual works of genius. But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems. But I understand this: if you look at what the last waves of true high-tech are i.e. computer/communication/aerospace/nuclear vs. what their "fruits" have been i.e. surveilance-state/police-state/military-industrial-complex/mass production and mass proliferation of WMDs. It's quite disgusting.

Anyway, I know why I'm working on "social technology" and "consumer technology" instead of "high technology."

There is no genius, just various levels of domain expertise. We call geniuses those who concentrate most of their time and passion into one niche, and that niche has to be one that's popularly thought of as requiring smarts to fill. I approach genius levels of juggling a tennis ball with my feet, but I don't think there are Nobel prizes for that.

If there truly is a fall in the rate of "geniuses", I would venture to guess that it's because it's so easy to take an interest in so many different areas these days.

The question is really "Where have all the famous geniuses gone?" The answer is that you can no longer get famous just by being intelligent. It's just not a sexy story people want to read. People just want to shop and read about fabricated drama.

I think a strong argument could be made that they're still there, they're just non-notable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

As a primary example - I'm pretty sure he knows better than to become famous for his work.

This article should be taken as seriously as Derrida is.

They're where they always were: hindsight. There are tons of brilliant people, but it takes a good chunk of temporal separation to be able to spot them through history and see their world-changing contributions. And mistakenly attribute things to them, and forget the shoulders they stood on, making them into even bigger geniuses.

  When we consider it at all, we're inclined to deny it, 
  deconstruct it, or explain it away as an "ideology of 
  genius." Geniuses of the past seem to have been perched on 
  their pedestals so that we might drag them down. "People 
  love to come up with reasons for saying Shakespeare was not 
  a genius,"

Rihanna, Jay-Z and Serena Williams all make me squirm. When I consider them at all, I'm inclined to deny her or reconstruct her. When I read her twitter account about the Indonesian sex show or the illegal photo shoot in front of the Taj Mahal I'm inclined to deny him/her or explain them away as an "ideology of genius". Geniuses of the past seem to have been perched on their pedestals so that we might drag them down. "People love to come up with reasons for saying Rihanna was not a genius,"

I think the "genius" is kind of a byproduct of transition from faith-centered worldview to knowledge-centered worldview. At the time of mentioned geniuses people were just starting to tend away from the faith in god, so the faith in higher powers partially persisted, and labeling people with great achievements as "geniuses" and making it feel like they have something others don't felt like a common sense and intuitive thing to do. So the "genius" might just be a temporary placeholder for the void that left when god was gone. As the void shrank with time, because the religion lost influence and people got better education, the need for people to have something greater then them, i.e. "geniuses" shrank too.

The flame war underneath that article is very entertaining

Maybe the whole concept of genius is a bit aged, weird and odd to start with? A glorified genius-concept comes uncomfortably close to the concept of a führer.

I think all men are created equal and when someone looks way smarter than the rest, most often he is just faking it?

I don't really believe in geniuses, but I believe in works of genius. Works of genius are at least potentially producable by a large proportion of the population, but not with any reliable frequency. Perhaps then a genius could be defined as one who is a prolific creator of works of genius.

Many of us have experienced that rare feeling of self-amazement of the result of the creative process. In could be in doing a drawing, composing a piece of music, proving a novel theorem, or writing software. When you create something, stand back and say; "how on earth did I do that?", "where did that come from?". That is a work of genius.

Fabrice Ballard.

Enough said.

they are just dying all around us, literally. modern societies do not appreciate and actually reject them

Your society is so insufferable that they've died out.