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How a Genius Is Different from a Really Smart Person
- Nzen 10y agotl;dr an interview with five mensa members about how they perceive genius and their hi IQ peers. They mostly associate genius with accomplishment or creativity that expands a frontier.
- HiroshiSan 10y agoI would also like to add that they saw their intelligence as a very specific one well tuned to doing IQ tests/logic puzzles.
- espeed 10y agoThere's no such thing as an idle genius. An idle genius is an oxymoron. I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is. Genius is the extreme form of insight. It's really not a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps. Getting to a rare perspective is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen. A high IQ gives you more ability to build the mental framework needed to see these associations, and a genius has actually applied it.
- dacompton 10y agoGenius is a dynamic thing rendered via the lens of social value. If scientific progress is our goal, then I would argue that forming cliques around a clique-governed definition of "most likely to elicit genius" is not only wrong, but dangerous. Heuristics can be ugly things. Also, MENSA reminds me of church. Church is boring.