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ysabetwordsmithThis article asks if geniuses are real. Gee thanks, assholes. It's not enough to be treated like a vending machine, now you want to play the erasure game. So just to be clear, every species has a range of intelligence, and whatever top portion you want to set is "genius." Sometimes it's pretty smooth and you just pick the top 10% or 1% or whatever. Other times there are sharp peaks and you're better off drawing lines based on those.
Labeling thinkers like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs as "other" may be stifling humanity's creative potential.
No, telling people it's good to be smart, and then picking on them for being or acting smart, is stifling humanity's creative potential. Some of the differences are very real and tangible. It'd be nice if people bitched about it less and cooperated more. Everybody just has a different mix of mostly the same traits. But some of the combinations do create pretty dramatic differences.
There are myths of creativity and these myths are usually propagated by people that have romantic notions about heroes, romantic notions about eureka moments. And these myths of creativity keep people from collaborating and it causes them to be a lone wolf.
No, what undermines collaboration is that it's hard for people on very different levels to work fluently together on the same problem. They aren't interested in the same problem. If they're forced to work on the same problem, they approach it in different ways. The dumber kids who picked on the smarter kids the rest of the day suddenly want to take advantage of them. Most smart kids get sick of this and say, "Do your own fucking homework." Very few adults actually teach teamwork skills like figuring out what each person is good at and dividing tasks that way, let alone enforce cooperation so that each person does their fair share. And then the same thing happens at work.
Kids figure this out pretty fast, and decide whether being taken advantage of is worth it in order to make people pretend to like you, or whether they'd prefer to work alone. Most nerds prefer to work alone. They accomplish more and faster alone than doing a whole team's worth of work for others who can't keep up.
To get a really good, integrated team -- which is useful for things like software development, where you need smart coders making products for mostly much-less-smart end users -- you have to find people with diverse skills, good teamwork, and not already soured on working together. That is not easy, and most companies don't bother.
Myth number one, the lone inventor. This is very dangerous because there is no such thing as a lone inventor.
Bullshit. There are plenty of lone inventors. This is because the nerd experience of working with others, or even telling them about your current project, is often bad. There are also people who invent things in teams. That's great too. Ideally, we should have and value both approaches. If you say lone inventors don't exist, they are quite likely to agree with you and keep their cool inventions to themselves. So then society gets less than if it was nice to them.
Labeling thinkers like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs as "other" may be stifling humanity's creative potential.
No, telling people it's good to be smart, and then picking on them for being or acting smart, is stifling humanity's creative potential. Some of the differences are very real and tangible. It'd be nice if people bitched about it less and cooperated more. Everybody just has a different mix of mostly the same traits. But some of the combinations do create pretty dramatic differences.
There are myths of creativity and these myths are usually propagated by people that have romantic notions about heroes, romantic notions about eureka moments. And these myths of creativity keep people from collaborating and it causes them to be a lone wolf.
No, what undermines collaboration is that it's hard for people on very different levels to work fluently together on the same problem. They aren't interested in the same problem. If they're forced to work on the same problem, they approach it in different ways. The dumber kids who picked on the smarter kids the rest of the day suddenly want to take advantage of them. Most smart kids get sick of this and say, "Do your own fucking homework." Very few adults actually teach teamwork skills like figuring out what each person is good at and dividing tasks that way, let alone enforce cooperation so that each person does their fair share. And then the same thing happens at work.
Kids figure this out pretty fast, and decide whether being taken advantage of is worth it in order to make people pretend to like you, or whether they'd prefer to work alone. Most nerds prefer to work alone. They accomplish more and faster alone than doing a whole team's worth of work for others who can't keep up.
To get a really good, integrated team -- which is useful for things like software development, where you need smart coders making products for mostly much-less-smart end users -- you have to find people with diverse skills, good teamwork, and not already soured on working together. That is not easy, and most companies don't bother.
Myth number one, the lone inventor. This is very dangerous because there is no such thing as a lone inventor.
Bullshit. There are plenty of lone inventors. This is because the nerd experience of working with others, or even telling them about your current project, is often bad. There are also people who invent things in teams. That's great too. Ideally, we should have and value both approaches. If you say lone inventors don't exist, they are quite likely to agree with you and keep their cool inventions to themselves. So then society gets less than if it was nice to them.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-30 04:57 am (UTC)The other two points they attempted (badly) to make were junk, but there's definite some truth in this one, in large part because most (but definitely not all, Hawking managed some very impressive discoveries) things that one really brilliant person can discover have been discovered, and an even higher percentage of impressive or world changing inventions that one superlatively brilliant person can invent have been invented. Instead, especially in engineering, inventing is now all done by teams of people. Bell invented the telephone working with one other person. In vivid contrast, everything I've read about the development of mobile phones or later smart phones involved large teams of dozens or hundreds of people. Sure, one person can invent a new type of packaging or a new way to fold a map, and those can be awesome, but *big* inventions like computers, phones... those now require lots of people.
Also, replacing individuals with teams changes things a lot. IIRC, people in general have difficulty working with people whose IQ score is more than 30 points from theirs (in either direction), and so if you have a brilliant inventor with an IQ north of 160, they are going to have a lot of trouble with team work, since you'd need everyone they are working closely with to have IQs north of 130, which is going to be difficult.
Thoughts
Date: 2021-06-30 05:15 am (UTC)I doubt that. There are whole fields that modern culture barely touches. There's always more to discover.
Teams and corporations and colleges will flock to the stuff that everyone already knows can be made profitable. That's the refinement phase. They may come up with some fantastic new things to do with that stuff, but they are sharply limited to popular things.
Loners are free to explore whatever they want and can afford. They don't have to explain it to anyone else or convince people to go along with it, unless they want something like funding which can be useful. And not every field or type of intelligence requires expensive gear.
>>Also, replacing individuals with teams changes things a lot. IIRC, people in general have difficulty working with people whose IQ score is more than 30 points from theirs (in either direction), and so if you have a brilliant inventor with an IQ north of 160, they are going to have a lot of trouble with team work, since you'd need everyone they are working closely with to have IQs north of 130, which is going to be difficult.<<
That means you lose a lot of talent. The smartest people often find it difficult or impossible to work in teams. Same with introverts. So you're left getting by with the gifted range who are smart enough to be useful, but not so smart that everyone hates them. If they're not sick of being treated like vending machines, they may do well there. But there are probably things they won't notice or discover that a super-genius might have.
If you don't provide a place for the smartest people, and the loners, they will find somewhere else to do their thing. And they probably won't share it.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-06-30 12:33 pm (UTC)It is possible to buffer this a bit, but it requires skills many people do not have and might not wish to develop.
(Yes, hanging around and be emotionally supportive is work - it just happens to usually be women's work which adds a whole 'nother set of problems.)
...Also, this provides a plausible reason why a particular film character hates dealing with people (especially since they keep trying to bond by inventing him to boring extrovert stuff).