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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.
Re: Intelligence is confusing (2/2)
Date: 2021-07-02 10:58 pm (UTC)>>Gifted people in particular often have a low tolerance for boredom, are constantly asked to do work far below their level, and drag through it; or they finish the stupid assignment before the teacher finishes passing it out and then are bored for the 30 minutes it takes everyone else to flounder through it;<<
I was so wrapped up in getting everything about school CorrectTM that I would check things ad nauseam. Or I'd be trying to write without constant feedback, which is damn near impossible for me. But there were times when I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for everyone else to finish the test. Probably not for a whole half hour though. And most of my teachers probably would have let me leave class or get out other homework or something, because my schools were extremely chill in a lot of ways.>>but they can work quite intensely for long times at things they are passionate about and don't even feel like that is work.<<
That's a mood. I mean, scripting and spreadsheet stuff and all that take effort, but it doesn't generally feel sloggy, which I think is what people mean? And it's super full of dopamine hits when I get everything just so. I actually got a little serious about HTML and CSS because I want pretty formatted text messages (and post-its, and notebook paper, and emails, and inline translations...) that also are comprehensible in Creator's Style Off mode and I got Into It last summer. Now if only I could finish the fics... I'm poking more at really learning it and looking for work in web design. It's a way to tackle accessibility that I might actually be able to get into professionally without going to school formally (with some luck and volunteer projects), and optimizing UX is a way easier thing to talk about than "how may I direct your call" especially when I'm under orders to not so direct the damn call. And everyone who wants a scanner person wants a lot of ability to cope with weight.
>>Not always, especially with a resource shortage; but in general, many problems are solvable with information that are not solvable without it.<<
That makes sense. Also, I like knowing stuff. Still, human interaction is a slippery beastie. And my brain tends to default to "well obviously you didn't explain it right or simply enough", which has been known to cause problems.