Geniuses

[ysabetwordsmith]

This 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.

 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

>>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.<<

Sounds like the old "Make everyone equal" argument.

I'll believe it when they start treating CEOs and waitresses the same... "Well if he wanted a better job he'd go back to school and get a real job!"

>>...which is useful for things like software development, where you need smart coders making products for mostly much-less-smart end users...<<

Also for any project reliant on widely divergent skill, regardless of intelligence. I run into this with languages - it is often easier for each person to do whatever work [research or paperwork] in their own language, then communicate a simplified version across the language barrier.

If not fluent, it is also often a good idea to have a native speaker glance at output produced in a second language (pronunciation, writing-copied-as-imgage, or original written output).

This might mean that some tasks (like filling out forms) are best assigned by language fluency, rather than intelligence of red-tape-ninja skills.

Also worth noting, any product that will be used by persons widely different than the producer, should be reviewed by one (or several) people in the end user demographic. Applies to intelligence, gender, skill levels, education... the list goes on.

[caera_ash]

They mention several people who are thought of as 'genius inventors' who really just got the right smart people together to invent or improve things...first of all, that is a kind of intelligence, so just because their genius wasn't the kind that makes inventions doesn't make them not a genius. Second, that doesn't mean that the people who did make the inventions were any less geniuses.
The fact that they do mention some things that are problems but look at them completely wrong! ARgh! Yes the othering is a problem! That doesn't make geniuses less real, it means we need to work on inclusion! Yes, it is good to involve a variety of people in creative processes and listen when non-experts have ideas! Again, work on inclusivity!

Also, while collaboration is a good thing, a great thing, not everyone is going to be able to do that. Some very intelligent people with really good ideas need to be able to do the first step, then you can pass it off to other people to work on other parts.

Seriously, if there weren't geniuses (is that the correct plural? I don't language well) so many things wouldn't exist. Little known basement inventors and people who couldn't be bothered to market their devices are still geniuses!

SIGH

[dialecticdreamer]

The whole thing reads like the application for the Handicapper General.

They can go screw themselves.

Fifty years of being erased for being disabled, plus fifty years of being erased for being "gifted" equals a hundred years' worth of gaslighting and worse.

Why, exactly, would I want to volunteer for MORE abuse? Because it's expected?

Yeah. Not. Happening. Any. More.

[heron61]

Myth number one, the lone inventor. This is very dangerous because there is no such thing as a lone inventor.

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.

[siliconshaman]

I could list any number of 'lone wolf' inventors throughout history, but it's simpler to refute that rancid bullshit by pointing out that if you're smart enough, it's a whole lot quicker and easier to do it yourself than explain why and how to your lab partner! BTDT and I'm not that much smarter than the average. (on a good day)

Also, intelligence only fits on a smooth curve statistically. From a neurological PoV there are distinct groups, or bands, with some overlap on the margins of those. Evidence would suggest that those that fall within the band that could be loosely labelled Genius, have a distinct functional difference in the way they think on a biological level as well as cognitive.

[cmcmck]

Being trans and gifted has its moments..............

Intelligence is confusing

[heartsinger]

>>Labeling thinkers like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs as "other" may be stifling humanity's creative potential.<<
I am so fucking tired of this idea that the solution to the fact that people are different from each other and have different needs is pretending that isn't true. Like, I don't know how to make accessibility-by-options work when we're so bad at providing equal opportunity for multiple options, but that doesn't make it any more possible to use the exact same methods with every student, doesn't make it possible for a severe dog allergy and a person with a guide dog to not have problems, doesn't change the fact that people can't always manage in a space with lots of people. Doesn't change the fact that kids need to make noise and some can't tolerate it.
We've gotta figure out a way to get humans to deal with the other without being awful, because "stuff everyone together and pretend that will work" is not workable.

Also the idea that people can be less smart is really hard to internalize, even though I know I'm very smart, it's funny.

[acelightning73]

One thing that always bugged me, and still does, is that we genii are treated as Weirdos who must be Outcast - or else people act as if being a genius makes you EXCELLENT AT EVERYTHING. I suck at math, but I have a factory-installed spelling and grammar checker that corrects me every time I catch myself making a mistake. And I have a lot of random information in my brain, and I'm good at making it useful. My husband has been trying to fix a spackled seam in the sheetrock ceiling in the dining room (which was damaged by a water leak). The spackle isn't drying properly, because he's putting one wet layer on over another. So I told him to turn on the air conditioner in the room to lower the humidity, and the spackle is now beginning to dry the way it's supposed to.

I always wondered why everybody wasn't admiring my intelligence and skills, and knowledge, because I'm so obviously superior to the other hairless apes, and they should look up to me with respect. Instead I got (and still do get) told I was "too weird" for anybody to like me, and I should try to hide my superior intelligence and suppress my weird behavior and "try to fit in". I can no more "fit in" than I can reach escape velocity by wiggling my ears.