4 ms·

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

rnewme 3y ago
What does being competent enough mean? Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?
- aerophilic 3y ago
  Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science. He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose. It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time. This was his MO. Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software… My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time. There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.
  - caminante 3y ago
    Great at writing programs, but doesn't know how to debug? You're pulling our leg or in denial.
    - aerophilic 3y ago
      This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release. Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
      - caminante 3y ago
        > this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.) They are fun to tell!
        aerophilic 3y ago
        lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories. Two alternate stories I didn’t tell: First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree. The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him. While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-mellon-dean-of-computer-science-on-the-future-of-ai/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...
  - rnewme 3y ago
    I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.
doesnt_know 3y ago
What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - NateEag 3y ago
    I've known people who appeared to be in the category you're describing on first blush. In the cases where I got to see them work later, I found that they weren't nearly as impressive as they looked at first. Yes, there really are people like Wozniak in the world. They seem to be around 1 per hundreds of millions, though. The odds of meeting one are ludicrously small.
    - ccnmncc 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - DSingularity 3y ago
      Take this how you will but in my mind most of them are intellectual yet idiots. Little empathy and no social awareness. They may be technically smarter than their peers but so what? These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
      - syndicatedjelly 3y ago
        sheesh how insecure can you sound there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed
neilk 3y ago
In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality. There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight. Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts. I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.
- ioblomov 3y ago
  I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Ramanujan is particularly interesting because he repeatedly claimed that divinity gave him his results. I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      How would you confirm either way? Assuming you don’t have a direct line to divinity yourself, you would need to have that profound genius in the first place to evaluate…
  - neilk 3y ago
samatman 3y ago
Even introductory materials cover the difference between "your" and "you're" rather thoroughly.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  So?

rnewme 3y ago

What does being competent enough mean? Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?

aerophilic 3y ago
Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science. He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose. It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time. This was his MO. Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software… My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time. There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.
- caminante 3y ago
  Great at writing programs, but doesn't know how to debug? You're pulling our leg or in denial.
  - aerophilic 3y ago
    This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release. Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
    - caminante 3y ago
      > this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.) They are fun to tell!
      - aerophilic 3y ago
        lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories. Two alternate stories I didn’t tell: First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree. The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him. While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-mellon-dean-of-computer-science-on-the-future-of-ai/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...
- rnewme 3y ago
  I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.

doesnt_know 3y ago

What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".

MichaelZuo 3y ago
[flagged]
- NateEag 3y ago
  I've known people who appeared to be in the category you're describing on first blush. In the cases where I got to see them work later, I found that they weren't nearly as impressive as they looked at first. Yes, there really are people like Wozniak in the world. They seem to be around 1 per hundreds of millions, though. The odds of meeting one are ludicrously small.
  - ccnmncc 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - DSingularity 3y ago
    Take this how you will but in my mind most of them are intellectual yet idiots. Little empathy and no social awareness. They may be technically smarter than their peers but so what? These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
    - syndicatedjelly 3y ago
      sheesh how insecure can you sound there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed

neilk 3y ago

In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality. There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight. Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts. I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.

ioblomov 3y ago
I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Ramanujan is particularly interesting because he repeatedly claimed that divinity gave him his results. I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    How would you confirm either way? Assuming you don’t have a direct line to divinity yourself, you would need to have that profound genius in the first place to evaluate…
- neilk 3y ago

samatman 3y ago

Even introductory materials cover the difference between "your" and "you're" rather thoroughly.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
So?