Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore
nautil.us
nautil.us
When I decided to quit my job and create a company I went against everybody. My parents, my girlfriend, my friend, all them thought I was crazy quiting a good position for something so risky.
E.g My girlfriend told me that if I was doing my company the relationship was over, so I said to her, ok, go away. The next week she wanted to come back, but I preferred to risk this alone.
Of course, when whatever you did works, everybody believes you are a genius, and they always remind you how much they KNEW that. Success is contagious, and once the media says that, you are a genius for everyone.
People like Newton, who was a geek, had to suffer isolation all his life in order to do what he felt right.
Fortunately today there are two differences with Newton's time:
1-There is Internet. Whatever you do you are not alone. There is a 1 per cent or 1 per thousand people like you, and with Internet you can find them, meet them. In the past getting enough critic mass was only possible in cities, with millions of people.
2-We know a lot more about psychology, you have amazing educational materials to improve your live, be happy and not getting in holes like suicidal thoughts.
It's easy to be bitter or resentful of circumstances and opportunities -- I think of all the people entering the job market in the past 10-12 years. Get the wrong year in the wrong industry and you'll stagnate at just the wrong time.
For myself, I do not regret the past. I accept responsibility for not capitalizing on my talent, which is itself a talent. I am not bitter for not being luckier in opportunity as I have been luckier than so many. Today, I will sit down and accomplish what I can.
The way I look at it is that if you start a business in your 20s, the odds are against you. You may be young and full of energy, but you don't know shit about the world yet and will make a ton of mistakes. If you do it in your 30s, the odds are neutral. You are more seasoned and possibly have some domain experience under your belt that you can leverage. If you do it in your 40s, the odds are in your favor. You probably have significant domain expertise as well as connections you have established earlier in your career that can help you. It's only in your 50s that you can justify feeling like you're past your prime. Then again, that hardly stops some people.
Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety, by Kelly G. Wilson [http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/d...]
Shawn Smith - The User's Guide to the Human Mind - Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It [http://www.amazon.com/The-Users-Guide-Human-Mind/dp/16088205...]
Russ Harris - Getting Unstuck in ACT - A Clinician's Guide to Overcoming Common Obstacles in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Unstuck-ACT-Clinicians-Overcom...]
Both by Jeffrey E. Young: Schema Therapy - A Practitioner's Guide, and Reinventing Your Life [http://www.amazon.com/Schema-Therapy-A-Practitioners-Guide/d...]
Steven C. Hayes, - Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life [http://www.amazon.com/Get-Your-Mind-Into-Life/dp/1572244259]
Charlotte Kasl - If the Buddha Got Stuck [http://www.amazon.com/If-Buddha-Got-Stuck-Spiritual/dp/01421...]
Convince a few influential people you're a genius and the odds of your success goes up. Then as you become more successful, the threshold for convincing people you are a genius goes down.
It can even happen posthumously: Herman Melville was a nobody loser when he died. A few decades later his work was "discovered" and he became a genius overnight.
Bootstrapping this process is an unsolved problem, although the kind of blatant self-marketing that characterizes Jobs or Edison certainly helps (although self-marketing still has to be backed with actual capabilities, as it was in those cases.)
I feel like I'm missing a reference here. Was Isaac Newton ostracized for heretical beliefs during his lifetime?
[1] http://jqtil.blogspot.com/2012/03/isaac-newton-was-jerk.html - I haven't run the rabit hole on his citations, but at least this article has some
"Mathematics requires a small dose, not of genius, but of an imaginative freedom which, in a larger dose, would be insanity. And if mathematicians tend to burn out early in their careers, it is probably because life has forced them to acquire too much common sense, thereby rendering them too sane to work. But by then they are sane enough to teach, so a use can still be found for them."
--Angus K. Rodgers
(The word genius seems to be rather ill-defined, as evidenced by Rodger's reluctance to use it in a context that seems identical to that of the article.)
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."
[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/RV4Y43WKRK6LO
[2] Dr. Simonton is the UC Davis professor who authored the article.
I'd add that it's not only paying attention to these things, but questioning them.
Noticing something no one else does is useless unless it incites action. Deciding to act upon something can only happen if there's sufficient curiosity. Curiosity comes from questions. Why? What if? How might one...?
Questions are so fundamental to everything from creativity to innovation, management, sales, relationships...I just had my eyes opened by A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger.
Personally, I feel the rebellious aspects of intellectualism are far, far overplayed to the point of absurdity. It leads to buying into marginalized, if not discredited, ideas and not doing a proper investigation into mainstream knowledge. I mean, how many more reddit posts about the "evil" Federal Reserve or how terrible of a person Thomas Edison was do we need? Especially when these opinions are tied to politicized propaganda from the opposition and not remotely tied to a legitimate interest into monetary policy or late 19th century industry.
I don't think young geeky introverts need to be told to be more rebellious, if anything they should learn to conform more, learn better social skills, understand the power of teams and collaboration, etc. I really wish someone told me this when I was younger. These attitudes did me a big disservice in life and I imagine I would have been much more successful otherwise.
I think that a lot of younger, geeky types are always looking for or being told of reasons why they're better than their more socially-outgoing classmates. It's comforting to sit back and feel like you're winning because you see things that other people don't, but what really puts people ahead in the long run is being willing to confront the things which make them uncomfortable.
Is that rebellion or groupthink? Either way, yes, most of it probably is useless.
But what about the rebelliousness that brought about the hyperlink, the mouse, and the iPhone? Surely those inventions were rooted in questions that sought rebellion against established ways of doing things?
There's a time to rebel and a time to conform. Rebellion without conformity leads to thinkers who have great ideas but no output. Conformity without rebellion leads to complacency and no progress.
As with everything else, one needs balance.
Are those really rebellions? TBL was a pretty milquetoast guy who built on top of a lot of things before him: TCP/IP, server OS, interconnected networks, and of course text-based predecessors to the web like Archie. He didn't wear all black and call everyone an idiot and magically produce something wonderful. He stood on the shoulders of giants and reached a little further.
Of course not.
But you need to observe reality, question it, and then act on your question. That's it. Milquetoast guys can do it too.
It's groupthink, because if you ask why, then try to answer the question you'll soon come to understand that it is actually a really good institution for the economy, and not the opposite.
Does balance come from dismissing the other side of the argument as "probably useless"?
Sure, if you just want to get by in life and be moderately happy then your advice is reasonable.
If you want to surpass the norm your perspective must be radically altered.
Rebelliousness is typically a shortcut to thinking. Its not actual thinking. From my experience, most self-styled intellectual rebels are dilettantes who are socially rewarded for their loudmouth views. From a scholarly or historical perspective, they believe and preach garbage.
The successful types, even in fields we agree tend to be rebellious, are almost universally the more milquetoast and calm personalities able to work with others who took interesting but usually incremental turns. This is why we all know who, say, Lou Reed is and accept his contributions to rock, but may not feel the same about guys like G.G. Allin or Marilyn Manson.
"Compared to Godzilla? Yes."
:-)
As many as it will take for mainstream thinking to be more aligned with reality.
You do understand that the Fed being necessary and Thomas Edison being a good guy is what is already taught in schools?
And you're saying people should investigate these mainstream ideas even more than what they're being taught in school?
In other words, it seems you're saying school is not educating people enough; and therefore students should keep focusing on the side the schools chose to take, but just study that side further; no need to consider the other side because... why?
I don't understand your position. You have a bigger speech around these ideas, that you then used as an excuse to dismiss those two ideas out of hand, because you don't like them. But have you studied them further or have you just chosen to dismiss them because you interpret disagreement and debate as "rebellious aspects of intellectualism"?
very meta of you :)
i imagine writing the thought down in vim, then moving the file to a USB stick, then taking the usb stick into a zip-lock bag, putting that into a specific pocket of my backpack, getting on my bike, and riding from my apartment down 101 to the NASA base at AMES, throwing the backpack into a red bin which is loaded into a rocket and shot into space.
the visualization is so detailed and specific that it takes all my attention to render that internal movie; after having expressed the thought syntactically (i actually imagine writing the thing down in vim and moving my fingers accordingly), it gets moved from "the thing actively afflicting my consciousness now" to "a thing i was thinking about". often after the rocket takes off, i can remember i was thinking something that bothered me, but i can't remember what it was. my mind will sometimes grab after it, trying to remember - and if it surfaces i get agitated again - but i can usually stay focused enough to distract myself by going for a walk or establishing a small, easily obtainable goal to fire up the ol' task positive network again.
I sometimes use imagery of a toilet flushing and the thought going down, several flushes if necessary (imaginary water is free!) Also, imagining white noise (visual and auditory) washing out the thought, increasing in power until it wipes away the thought like waves on a beach erasing patterns traced in the sand and then fading out, seems to work well. (I suspect using (imaginary) noise might have some actual biophysical basis for why it works, but that's just speculation.)
I see myself on top of a miles high cliff, standing next to a safe. I somehow extirpate the thought by breathing it out into the vault, which I then lock and push off the cliff. I then have to wait and when I "hear" a distant noise, I can't remember the thought, even though my mind perversely tries to remember.
Anyway, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having to resort to such tactics...
Here are a few ideas I don't have time to pursue.
1. Make extruder-type 3D printing work better by heating the material just laid down, just ahead of the weld point. Use hot air or a small, maybe 5W laser diode. Use 3 heat points 120 degrees apart so you can heat ahead of the direction of travel. Modulate the laser with pulse-width modulation, then read the temperature during the off period with two photodiodes with different IR filters. Go closed-loop on the temperature.
2. Initial application for automatic driving - airport auto rental. Book rental in advance. When customer's phone shows up at destination airport, dispatch car to terminal, timed to show up just after luggage pickup. Use phone to direct customer to car. On return, customer drops off car at terminal, and it head back to rental lot on its own. Self-driving is limited to low speed in known areas. Expand system by adding parking garages at likely car rental destinations, such as convention centers.
3. Conference room automation. Video projector should have camera, find screen, put up test pattern, focus, correct for parallax. Room lights should sense projector/external lighting situation. Microphone system should automatically track speaker from a distance (this exists, using a hemisphere with a large number of microphones and a lot of CPU power) without any effort by speaker. Video feed of talks and classroom should have people tracking and automatically generate a useful video feed. The whole thing should Just Work. Internet of Things crowd, get busy.
4. Integer overflow, both signed and unsigned, should trap in CPUs. If you want modular arithmetic modulo the word size, you should write "x+= (x % 65536)", and the compiler should understand that as an idiom, generating an cheap unchecked unsigned add.
5. Set import duties to recover about half the wage difference between the exporting and importing countries. This escapes the "race to the bottom" problem. Half, so as not to have too much protectionism. Politically difficult, but the current ratio for the minimum wage in Shentzen to the US is 5.6. China is getting close to where this is feasible.
Idea generation is easy. Implementation is hard.
Free trade reduces wage differences. By stymying trade, you slow down the process. You sustain local wages at the expense of many more poor people elsewhere.
Policy attention is better spent addressing workforce mobility and skills gaps. If we could magically fix American policy, I'd raise the taxes and fund programs which address the aforementioned issues. Although an easy hack for improving mobility would be to 1) kill the home mortgage interest tax deduction and 2) government guaranteed mortgages. It's both a blessing and a curse that so many non-skilled, low-wage Americans can be homeowners in this country.
We'd need some kind of replacement model which promoted wide-scale access to capital, however. Homeownership is the only way most Americans can get access to cheap financing for small businesses, education, etc.
Bill Gates possesses a genius level intelligence, has the accomplishments and mental demonstrations to back it up, and is apparently fully aware of it. What's the problem exactly?
Let's define genius:
"exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability."
or
"a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect."
As though it should be difficult for a genius to recognize that their abilities far exceed those of other people.
I would argue that being oblivious to that level of blatant genius - having no idea you're so much better than most others - would be more of a negative mental trait vs being aware of it. You'd have to be incredibly ignorant, and almost entirely non-self-aware to miss such a thing across a lifetime.
If you can reasonably be defined as to be in possession of X trait, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing that. It is not an ego problem to do so. If my brain is capable of great feats of mathematics, and I can tell that I'm drastically better at math than my peers, there is nothing irrationally egotistical about recognizing it. With there being a critical distinction between recognizing your capabilities, vs. obnoxiously promoting them to others.
And I do think it's ego problem if somebody goes around defining themselves as a genius. One of the things I'm always struck by is the fact that many of the smartest people I know are incredibly humble. They're smart enough to realize all the things they don't know.
He claimed that any genius could win a Nobel prize, but that he'd done really well to have won one as a non-genius!
Put another way, I consider both of those guys geniuses, but if either of them made that claim about themselves, I would have to reconsider the position.
Put another another way, no good can possibly ever come from acknowledging your own genius, even if that was something a person was capable of perceiving about themselves, which I don't think it is.
Or maybe I'm just talking about highly intelligent people != genius.
For example, I'm not sure what you're seeing in Bill Gates. I don't want to have a discussion about him, just offering an example of how nebulous any definition 'intellectual power', 'creative power', 'natural ability', 'general or particular intelligence' and 'general or particular creativity' is, and to second the opinion that definitions of genius are primarily social rather than operational or falsifiable.
edit: apologies for distributing your definitions but still using quote marks.
Probably a majority of HN readers qualify based on that measure. We can all be geniuses together! ;)
In any case, while I'm not foolish enough to believe IQ isn't a useful measurement of intelligence, I certainly don't think any given number indicates "genius", which is something else again.
http://www.psmag.com/blogs/news-blog/narcissism-breeds-belie...
Van Gogh very likely did not kill himself.
But how many sedatives are they on?
> Psychopathy, noun
> mental disorder especially when marked by egocentric and antisocial activity [1]
> Antisocial: adjective
> hostile or harmful to organized society; especially : being or marked
> by behavior deviating sharply from the social norm [2]
Not being accepted or understood by the society that you excel above would also be expected.
The definition of psychopathology still indicates "disorder," though, which in the case of science in general indicates a departure from a generally observed and accepted order.
In other words, they do what they want, when they want, and don't care about how it impacts anyone else, not during the act, and not after they finish. Correctly believing yourself to be smarter than most other folks is barely a nudge from the normal end of that spectrum.
But if I were to guess, r is probably very slightly positive when correlating genius with psychopathy, psychopathology, and several other "that guy's a little odd" disorders.