More interested in why we need to believe in genius in the first place. I find it can be a kind of secular sainthood that has a mythology around it that serves

More interested in why we need to believe in genius in the first place. I find it can be a kind of secular sainthood that has a mythology around it that serves as a post-hoc justification of certain social outcomes. Few understand the contributions of minds like Feynman, Davinci, Einstein, but we hold them up as symbols of a kind of mystery cult around science, which should make people at least a bit curious. There are a lot of prolific artists who aren't included in the genius canon, and it's an almost exclusively masculine archetype, which means it either tells us something about who we are, or it's the noisy artifact of a crude model. My bet is on the latter. While the particular acumen for appreciating and operating on abstractions is probably pareto distributed (like everything), what it represents is much more interesting. When you believe in genius, you likely believe it is meaningful that there are people you will never compare to, who have advantages you are physically incapable of obtaining, who were chosen to receive a gift while you were not, that there are people whose nature or perceived potential means they should be held to different standards, or that someones success can be less legitimate because of a perceived intellectual advantage. Not saying any of those statements are true, but they are definitely the effects of how people relate themselves to the belief in genius. Without those beliefs, we've got some much harder questions to answer. Personally, I think precosity can be cultivated and refined into something great, but genius itself is an artifact reflected from others beliefs, and not an intrinsic quality.