3 ms·

I don't believe in any kind of genius, secret or otherwise. People of "normal" cleverness, i.e. smart but with many equals, don't find it difficult to estimate

I don't believe in any kind of genius, secret or otherwise. People of "normal" cleverness, i.e. smart but with many equals, don't find it difficult to estimate the smartness of people less smart than they are. We can understand their thinking, and sometimes even predict their mistakes. And we can think faster than they can. When we look at people smarter than ourselves, that doesn't work; they can solve problems faster than us, they can solve problems we can't solve at all, and we can't grok their mental processes. They appear to us to have magical powers. They don't have to be a lot smarter than us for us to place them in a different category. We see them as qualitatively different. Also, we can't distinguish between people who are just a bit smarter than us, and those who are a lot smarter than us. We lack the measurement tools. "Genius" is like "demon" - it's a magical classification that we use for things and people we don't understand. That is, when we call someone a genius, we're talking about what we are, not what they are.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
> Also, we can't distinguish between people who are just a bit smarter than us, and those who are a lot smarter than us. I don't think that's true at all. I can easily distinguish between, say, my classmate who got (slightly) better test scores than I did in calculus class, and Isaac Newton, who invented calculus from scratch.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I meant a priori; judging the people you meet. Judging Newton by his posthumous reputation is different. I think if I met Newton, I'd have judged him a self-promoting bullshitter. He was ultra-paranoid, and wouldn't share his work. Even when he published, it was written like a modern patent - more to conceal than to reveal.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    > I think if I met Newton, I'd have judged him a self-promoting bullshitter. He was a thoroughly unpleasant man. However, even people who hated his guts (e.g., the Bernoullis) recognized him as a genius quite early on.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

> Also, we can't distinguish between people who are just a bit smarter than us, and those who are a lot smarter than us. I don't think that's true at all. I can easily distinguish between, say, my classmate who got (slightly) better test scores than I did in calculus class, and Isaac Newton, who invented calculus from scratch.

denton-scratch 4y ago
I meant a priori; judging the people you meet. Judging Newton by his posthumous reputation is different. I think if I met Newton, I'd have judged him a self-promoting bullshitter. He was ultra-paranoid, and wouldn't share his work. Even when he published, it was written like a modern patent - more to conceal than to reveal.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  > I think if I met Newton, I'd have judged him a self-promoting bullshitter. He was a thoroughly unpleasant man. However, even people who hated his guts (e.g., the Bernoullis) recognized him as a genius quite early on.