Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? (2008)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Excert: he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-of...
So I googled paintings of both artists, and I'm perplexed. I have absolutely no clue what is considered "great". Obviously this is because my work is in science and I know next to nothing about art, but I'm still kind of curious what makes a work great in art and literature.
For instance, there's thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of painters in the world right now. And if you select the top 100 and showed me their paintings, and then showed me a Picasso, I wouldn't be able to point out why Picasso's is "better".
Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also mentioned as one of the best poems of all time. I'll admit, it's very beautiful, but I just don't understand what makes it that much more amazing than a contemporary poet's work.
Imagine if you took the world's population and wiped everyone's memories of great artists, and then asked them to reevaluate which which works are the "greatest". Would we arrive at the same conclusions? Without the bias of knowing "this is a famous artist, therefore his work must be good", would the rankings of art remain the same?
Unlike my literature teachers in high school, I don't believe in "magical qualities", so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)
Sports where competitors are measured against a clock or a tape measure are easier to compare across eras but even then equipment changes make it difficult. Pole vaulting, for example, became a completely different sport when flexible fiberglass poles were introduced. Major track events were still being run on cinder tracks into the 1970's.
To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted the Fountain as art and proof that their readymades are therefore also valuable art.
Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG.
As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to art. Art is about (partially shared) subjective experiences, which can still be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited.
I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.
Lets extend this to an easier subject we all have extensive experience with... evaluating the taste of the food we're eating.
If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes flavor balance, the "winner" will have an amazing balance of flavors but perhaps the texture will resemble dog food or clam chowder.
If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes texture, or heat, or visual appearance, or smell, or sweetness (well, food critics don't like corn syrup but walmart shoppers certainly do...).
Even worse, fads aren't binary either, its all a big ratio. That's at least partial explanation why some authors go in and out of favor in lit over centuries. Its actually a lot of work in lit to keep up with who is supposed to be cool and who is supposed to suck based on changing tastes.
Then dog pile a ton of groupthink on top with some politics and inevitable cultural issues (racism, nationalism, etc) and you can see how faddish some of this is.
On the other hand, if you have an agreed upon definition of impressionism, then you can evaluate who makes the best impressionist painter under that set of carefully defined rules. I think it would be hard to argue against Monet. Someone could claim Sisley but I think on long enough study that Monet beats Sisley overall. (edited to emphasize, beats Sisley at the defined rules... nothing wrong with liking a set of rules where Sisley beats Monet, just don't name that set of rules impressionistic painting)
Or, you can compare your Robert Frost to this dude named Robertson who wrote similar, yet somewhat inferior poems. I think it would be a lot of work or outright impossible to compare Frost to Kipling or to T S Elliot beyond sorta "and heres a different genre"
And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news.
There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it.
And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.
I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving.
It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".
Here's an analogy: imagine you found an artist who had almost no background in science, and gave him a bunch of scientific papers to read. Would he be able to identify the significant or groundbreaking papers? By what criteria would he make his decisions?
From the wikipedia article: "The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."
Try to do anything in art without a mastery of that and you're probably not going to produce good work.
Also, it's important to say that what constitutes an artist is very, very subjective. Virtually anyone can say they're an artist, because there aren't any objective criteria that would pass muster with someone skilled in ... critical thinking.
Not everyone can say they understand everyday reality and can function within it, because that claim can be easily proven or falsified. But anyone can say they're an artist who hasn't found their audience yet. Such a claim appeals more to the charity of the listener than to a meaningful comparison with reality.
Or maybe it's contemporary conceptual based art you're thinking about? A lot of it requires the artist to think critically about human social structures in order to create commentary on it.
Sure, anyone can claim they're an artist and produce work that is not well thought out or executed, but that's not a reason to conclude that artists lack critical thinking skills. Every professional working artist I know here in NYC is exceptionally good with critical thought.
Just because you don't use a logic based language to reason doesn't mean you're not thinking critically.
Scientific knowledge affects all of us, but it is only one of a number of domains of knowledge. If you judge art based on scientific understanding, of course you're going to have trouble. It would be like trying to score a baseball game with football rules.
Maybe someday we'll be able to apply the equations of science to art--I do believe in a mechanical, causal universe (i.e. I don't believe in crystal magic). But art is a product of culture, which is itself an abstraction of incredibly complex interactions of incredibly complex systems: human beings.
Edit to add: artists have trouble with understanding science because they are attempting to judge it with their artistic understanding of the world. It's the inverse of my sports analogy above--they are trying to score a football game with baseball rules, so they get it wrong.
My point is that does not mean they are dumb or ignorant or incapable of critical thinking. Just differently trained and coming from a different context.
For what it's worth, there are plenty of engineers and programmers who also have trouble with scientific knowledge (see discussions of climate change here on HN or Slashdot). I think that is because engineering and science are two closely related, but ultimately different domains of knowledge.
Having been to the Picasso museum here in Barcelona, it maybe because he could actually paint, as you can see in his earlier work, as opposed to his later stuff - which looks like it is done by a 5 year old.
I personally believe there is a lot of "celebrity culture" in art, even Banksy said something along those lines.
"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."
Sure, there's a high degree of subjectivity inherent to art. But we can look to the originality of a given work of art, and and cultural impact that it has had.
If you wiped everyone's memories of great inventions, scientific discoveries, etc., and then asked them to compare the Model T to a Ford Focus, they'd of course say the Focus is a much better automobile. And an understanding of the impact and importance of the Model T would be lost on them.
I knew where this was headed as soon as I read the first three -- rather passive aggressive -- words of your reply. Yours seems to be the only comment among many implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. You're looking for a fight that doesn't exist, so I flagged your post since it detracts from the discussion. Please abstain from these sorts of comments in the future.
Weird, I wonder where I got that notion from?
> so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)
That's where I got confused. I thought you were being sarcastic when you said that that art can be converted to a number.
I think it's possible (or very likely) that no such metric exists, and that if it did, it would be of little value. For instance, do you rank art based on aesthetic value, or the visceral effect it has had on viewers (mean or max?), or societal impact? Perhaps all the factors, but how do you weight them? Is there an objective measure of aesthetic value? It's more likely that different individuals/groups/cultures have different aesthetic tastes that vary over time, so perhaps you average over these variables? By averaging over these variables, will the "best art" be the perfectly pleasant art you might find hanging in a hotel lobby? Or will it be bolder art that a subset of people will revile? Who gets to decide?
There's always a chance that art can be converted into a meaningful and objective number. But if this metric does not exist, then by your logic, "art and literature criticism would be nonsense."
In my personal opinion, art is by its nature subjective. Aesthetic value is rather arbitrary. Art criticism is probably mostly a sham. But without them, how would rich people know which paintings to buy? Most people like being told what to like, what to wear, and when to laugh, and so they provide a useful service.
Cézanne was famously bad at perspective, but kept painting anyways.
Essentially they were both doing interesting things with color and shape at the moment that became trendy.
Certainly in lower levels of education, "fast" thinking against known problems and problemsets is the norm (at least in the United States). I worked with a few "fast" thinkers that fell into a strange, at the time to me, category of people that I could recognize as intelligent and could solve a certain class of issue or problem easily, but when it came to a more difficult problem space or perhaps one that requires delayed gratification (or no real external recognition/validation/praise) they would give up. The "deep" thinkers seemed to give equal or near equal weight to the validity of options in many cases. There's a time, place, and type of problem that can benefit from each mode of thinking.
There are some athletes who just outperform most people in all areas as a class.
There are athletes who are experts in certain fields and useless in others (don't enter a football defensive lineman in an ultra-marathon, etc)
Some athletes peak very young. Some train very slowly, some develop very fast. Some athletes start training late in life.
It is mystifying if you're trapped in the dead/dying idea of mind-body dualism, but if the mind and brain are just another pile of nutrient consuming protein just like muscle, it makes sense that the observations are similar.
I would imagine if it were easy to measure, we'd find similar performance trends WRT pancreas or kidney function.
1) The 70-year lifespan is a recent development. Producing great work in one's 20s and 30s was a necessity because one's 40s and 50s weren't guaranteed. Social inertia took over from there.
2) The young also have greater marketability (looks, energy) and can usually be controlled more easily. This makes them more attractive to backers. This matters a lot in many fields, but in the arts especially, where the artist receives as much attention as their art.
Until we can change biology, no one is going to have a brain that works better than an adolescent, that's just how we evolved.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Someone with a BS in physics level of knowledge or maybe grad degree can possibly evaluate Feynman vs Einstein as per the debate in the comments today. However, I suspect most people can't do a useful evaluation of those two.
There are obvious HN on topic analogies with coding, system design, database design, network design.
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.
It is also tied up with the idea that "geniuses" are fast. It was nice to see profiles of Maryam Mirzakhani indicate that she was a deep thinker, not a fast thinker. Maybe we can start changing some of these popular mis-conceptions.
I thought this was mostly a myth. Do you have source for that?
Einstein to Feynman: "Please explain things slowly"
You could call Schwinger "slow", but he "saw" very deeply. After all, he found and corrected problems with the Dirac equation.
Also, Darwin:
"At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience, and industry." [2]
On a personal note, I entirely relate to the slow thinker. Most smart peers of mine are fast thinkers and I'll usually lose to them on puzzles and tricky math problems when it is a matter of speed, but then I'll solve problems that these same people give up on and claim too difficult if I can sit in a quiet room with my fists on my head.
I have a suspicion that fast thinking involves a developed ability to filter out (quickly) what seem like dead end avenues -- so the fast thinker can hone in on the promising avenues and get to a local maxima solution faster. But for some problems -- especially ones that require very non-traditional paths to solutions -- this filter fails and prunes away avenues that actually lead to a solution to that "impossible" problem or global maxima solution.
I realized a long time ago the danger in pruning away the "obvious" dead ends, so I think my slow thinking comes from a refusal to categorize anything as a dead end until it is provably so -- because of a worry I'll prune away the solution. A bunch of avenues will present and I'll need to consciously sort through them. So my filter is slow and requires me to retreat to that quiet room to go sort through all the possibilities. But then I'll come up with gold.
I have a theory that I'll put out here... that slow and fast thinking are developed tendencies not innate qualities. In my experience most of the smart people I know are fast thinkers. Which makes sense if this is developed, because there's an ego reward involved -- especially in our educational systems -- for developing that way. And the only reward for slow thinking is solving a hard problem, but as a kid in school, where's the external reward in that? And how often is the opportunity for solving really hard problems given? Basically what I'm saying is that I'd like to see more slow thinkers in the world. (I'm not kidding.)
[1] http://www.unmuseum.org/einstein.htm [2] http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/the-questioning-mind-n...
As for whether it's a developed vs innate quality, I don't remember ever thinking differently and being trained to think the way I do because of my environment. I would agree that in our system fast thinkers are rewarded more, but that doesn't mean that our system develops fast thinkers at the expense of slow thinkers, or that its any less innate. It just means that slow thinkers have more difficulty being recognized earlier (hence "late bloomer" or missing the "precocious" label.
There is a skill component to those things although. You could practice them a bit and improve your scores significantly. But is that really intelligence or just skill? It will always be a combination.
It is a detailed 900 page exploration if a lifetime of research from the famous behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman on the topic
As elsewhere mentioned, our educational system often ties success to fast thinking. I've always known I am not a fast thinker and, in fact, had often been the slowest thinker in my classes. This made school difficult and I struggled accordingly. Ultimately, I offset this by studying harder than my peers. For me, it has never been about reading the material and repeating, for example, some mathematics system from memory, but in truly understanding that system.
I consider myself a deep thinker that can easily connect concepts, graph relationships, and see the big picture. This is why I prefer to work as an architect, on security projects, and inevitably play the right stocks on the market. I suppose, anecdotally, if I'm any model, that deep thinkers might be better suited to certain roles and might naturally gravitate toward them.
Finally, and now a bit off-topic: The fact that deep thinkers might be equated with "late-bloomers" might have to do less with "figuring out what they're good at", and more to do with a society and a system which is prejudiced against them. If deep-thinkers were better nurtured and led through the educational system, they may not spend their thirties, or even 40's, learning how and where to apply their talents.
"Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class and an unspecified school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick;"[2]
I think people with extremely high IQ tend to be "fast thinkers" and they seem to rely more on logical thinking while those who have sufficient IQ tend to be "deep thinkers" and rely more on intuition/epiphanies.[3]
John von Neumann would the "fast thinker" type of Genius.
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#CITEREFGleick1...
[3] “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking” ― Albert Einstein
First of all, most IQ tests do not go above 140. So anything anywhere near 140 may only be telling you the person is at about the limits of what the test can measure. Even for those tests that do go above 140, it requires a qualified assessor to interpret it properly. The smartest kids often do not measure as being all that smart by standard measures. "Genius" is, basically by definition, someone who thinks differently from others. So measuring the kid who is radically different by standard measures has a track record of missing a lot.
In recent years, there is increasingly research into and available literature on the idea that gifted kids have different minds. They are not merely "more" of something, they are fundamentally different. The correlation of "speed = intelligence" is a rubric which assumes gifted kids are simply "more" of something. Yes, they do tend to be faster than average, even if they are slow compared to other gifted students, but it's really a lot more complicated than that and I think the emphasis on speed does a huge disservice to the gifted community.
The "fast = smart" paradigm is a really major metaphor for giftedness in the world. For example, Stephanie Tolan's essay "Is it a cheetah?" is very popular: http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm I once wrote something of a polite rebuttal to that which used redwoods and gazelles as other metaphors. I am not terribly important in the world and it did not become popular (and is no longer online, unless it got captured on The Way Back Machine). I think the cheetah metaphor does a disservice to the gifted community in part because of the unstated assumption that smart people are all dangerous predators. Gazelles are just as fast and are not predators. Why not use that as a metaphor?
Anyway, I am quite busy today so I don't plan to argue this or dig up detailed supporting links. If you really want to look into it, HN's member who goes by the handle tokenadult is a good resource on the topics of intelligence and education. I believe his profile contains links to resources and his posting history, both comments and articles, is likely to be enlightening. (Though I have no idea if he would agree with any of my views above. He and I are not close. We haven't talked in quite a long time. But I have reason to believe he remains far more current on these subjects than I am.)
Deep thinkers tend to be more original and there is actually a negative correlation between extremely high IQ and creativity.
Extremely fast thinking is the name of the game in the IMO and similar competitions. In fact, the emphasis is so much on speed that there are often doubts as to whether the medalists will also be good at research.
An IMO takes place over two days. On each day the candidates get a question paper with three questions on it. They have 4.5 hours to attack the questions. The threshold for getting a gold medal might be roughly equivalent to getting five of the six problems more or less completely solved.
The questions are always of the form "prove X" -- maybe occasionally "prove or disprove X, whichever is possible" or "find quantity X, with proof"; but it's always a matter of finding proofs -- where X is something no more than a few lines long.
So it's "speed math" in comparison with actual academic mathematical research, which typically takes place on a timescale from weeks to years and where there's no guarantee that any human-accessible solution exists. But it's a whole lot slower than pretty much anything else these (roughly) 16-19-year-olds are being asked to do in mathematics.
And, empirically, it does turn out that people who do well in IMOs tend to do pretty well in mathematical research, and in other mathematical things they put their minds to. (But yes, of course there are kinds of genius that have nothing to do with mathematics, and kinds of impressiveness that have nothing to do with genius; and there are plenty of first-rate researchers who never took to IMO-like problem-solving.)
(Random example of an IMO question, from this year's IMO, to give an idea of what a typical X looks like: "For each positive integer n, the Bank of Cape Town issues coins of denomination 1/n. Given a finite collection of such coins (of not necessarily different denominations) with total value at most 99+1/2, prove that it is possible to split this collection into 100 or fewer groups, such that each group has total value at most 1.")
It's pretty obvious as time goes on, unfortunately it's not better. For some who didn't maximise their earlier it looks like they did, but no, they didn't get better.
But it's great art to think it does. So perhaps it's true after all. It's a nice artistic article.
Folks have been using tldr's in the academic sphere for centuries; they're called 'abstracts'.
I'm not saying that I can't get deep into technical specs or literature, but when it comes to a form that is largely prose... forget about it. Breadth-first search takes over.