I know and have known many very intelligent people, ever since I was child. Some of them were students of Einstein. Some people on this board are certainly genii. None of them would I describe as scary. Their intelligence exposes itself in many different ways, but not in pulling radical breakthroughs out of their assii. The common factor in those who have accomplished the most can be found in the words of another genius.
So what is it like to work with people like this? It’s like working with anyone else. They are moody, loyal, unflappable, obnoxious, anxious, steadfast, sloppy, independent, unimaginative, intense, reliable, dishonest, open, accomodating, entertaining, creative, weak, grateful, and dull, among other things.
My BIL in the late seventies worked for McDonnell Douglas and was a real rocket scientist. He would bring small lasers to Christmas and blow cigarette smoke into the beam so it would be visible. He was designing something I vaguely remember as “Elmo Bumpy Torus” that had something to do with plans for terraforming Mars.
He was a lovely man, but had no common sense. We had to teach him how to use a can opener.
Although Einstein was before his time, I know an individual who has worked with some of the most famous physists of our time, many of whom would be on the same level as Einstein. Men like Wigner (who worked with Einstein), Teller, and others I’m forgetting at the moment. He’s not famous himself (although his name is well recognized in his field), but he, as a Roman Catholic, decided to have a large family and has based his career on his family rather than success. He’s relatively normal, although not the best with social skills. Don’t ask him math or technical questions unless you are prepared to have your head spin.
I think Todd Rundgren is a musical genius, and I have met him (twice!) I know it’s not as impressive as a physicist or something like that, but I do think the man has revolutionary ideas about music and has created some unparalelled works, as well as just producing some incredible pop music.
Malcom Gladwell talks about this in his book Outliers. Academic or professional success does not necessarily equate to genius. Zuckerberg and Gates are very smart, but I would not say they are in the same league as Hawkings or Einstein. Probably closer to Edison with his 99% perspiration. Genius just has a raw intellectual horsepower and creativity than you can’t create through studying and hard work. Properly focused and guided, you have Robert Oppenheimer. Not so much, you could end up with Ted Kaczynzky.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
On an unrelated side note. One of the things I have always hated about working in management consulting / technology startups is this pompous cult of psuedo-intellectualism and faux-genius worship that surrounds it. Every socially retarded nerd thinks they are the next Mark Zuckerberg or that their company is the next Google. Here are a few hints. Bill Gates wasn’t a “successful start-up junkie who founded five companies”. He just built the one. Zuckerberg didn’t toil away for years as an analyst at Accenture next to a thousand other identical analysts. No revolutionary world-changing idea ever came out of Mckinsey or Booz Allen. They just resell and repackage ideas that someone else told them would make money.
I agree with the distinction between real tech business geniuses and folks who flop around in their wake.
I agree that most consultants fall into the “those who can’t, consult” type of category.
I disagree that nothing comes out of consulting firms - too many different forms of analysis have been adopted from consulting shops - read The Lords of Strategy, a fascinating history of the evolution of Strat Planning. I would assert that entrepreneurial geniuses are more likely to use the tools better than consultants, who are typically looking to use their analysis to scare clients and sell more work.
**Stranger **and **msmith’s **references to Gladwell make key points - if a genius exhibits intelligence but never delivers results commensurate with their intelligence, are they a genius? i.e., the “If you’re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?” argument. As Gladwell notes, Nurture provides a context within which Nature can be maximized to its fullest potential…
But back to the concept of delivering results, Thales of Miletus - held as the first western/Greek philosopher, is legendarily regarded as an example of an Applied Genius:
Actually, there is. Statistically, nature takes more risks with the male of the species. There are more outliers, in every spectrum, in men. Far more failures, but also more positive extremes.
For math, for instance, in an ordinary class the girls will have a slightly higher point-average. The best math pupils in a school will likely be just as much girls as boys. But when you look at math competitions at state level and higher, the proportion of men will increase steadily, and at the very top almost all will be male.
I know two highly intelligent women, one has passed a mensa entry test, but didn’t join. She taught herself to speak Irish. Which is just scary. For her birthday I sent her some lotto scratchcards, she won €10 on them and tried to cash them in - she lives in England and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t collect money from Irish scratch cards in England.
(Now you understand why I find her ability to speak Irish scary!)
The other woman has a “towering intellect of such might as to make mere mortals tremble in fear and awe before her” according to a mutual friend - I’ve seen glimpses of her towering intellect and it is awesome. She suffers from a form of bipolar disorder and “disappears” for days or weeks on end. She’s currently “off grid”.
I’ve worked for one genuine genius. He hired me to build an early ecommerce site back when that was an interesting thing to say. He has a whole bunch of patents, and was an invited guest at a number of the early TED conferences. His genius was in seeing the possibilities of a technology and extrapolating. For instance, he was given a preview of the DVD and came back to the lab to tell us. But he said that it was just a stop-gap measure, that eventually movies would all be served on-line.
Some of the best experiences of my life have been to sit in a conference room with him and a couple of other people and brainstorm, tossing ideas back and forth.
Another was a co-worker at a small computer graphics company back in the early 90s. He understood hardware and software. He designed a motherboard and a video card, writing the bios and firmware for both, then wrote an operating system for them, drivers and utilities…he was running a computer where he created everything short of the chips.
I’ll second that. When he got interested in computer graphics, he had a second career in that field to the extent that he was respected by people who had no idea that he is a musician. But, like a lot of geniuses, he tends to lose interest in things, and his past is littered with the broken remains of revolutionary projects (Patronet anyone?)
I’m convinced that the concepts behind his No World Order system could be the savior of the music industry, the way to get people to resume buying music.
My husband’s working with a Renaissance man, a mechanical engineer. This guy holds the secret to manufacturing the now-familiar plastic liter pop bottles with the five nobbins on the bottom. (Previously the bottoms were separate end caps, and more costly to manufacture.) He’s moderated disagreements and such for GM and AC Delco. He’s currently working on developing movable, adjustable communication towers, biofeedback devices to help with rhumatoid arthritis and pain receptors, and who knows what all else.
And he thinks my husband is the most talented electrical engineer he’s ever met.
A couple of my grad school professors were Nobel prize winners, a couple more received the award after I left, and another one will probably receive the award at some point in his life, so I figure at least one of them is a genius.
I think people are bad at spotting geniuses. If I had had to pick, based purely on my interactions with them, which of my professors was a genius, I wouldn’t have picked any of the Nobel prizewinners. Given that receiving the Nobel is the best objective measure of intelligence in this case, that means I would have ended up overestimating someone’s intelligence simply because he had an acerbic personality, weird habits, bad hair, etc. I bet a lot of the respondents to this topic are doing the same.
I met Richard Feynman a couple times. One of my close family friends, Dick, worked with him. Dick was a physicist. Dick also apparently got caught by Fenyman in a practial joke. I never got the details but everytime you memtioned Feynman around Dick, Dick would go off about how Feynman wasn’t really all that smart. This was odd for Dick, Dick was a totally nice guy. Dick was also a genius. Full professor of physics at BYU, iirc, worked for a national lab and started his own rent a phyicist company. Dick did all kinds of work, from geology (how oil flowed through different rocks) to defense work (I found a paper of his online that had to do with the radar cross section of an infinite cylinder in space. The math was way over my head, in the paper he made the comment that the math was ‘merderously hard’) The last time I spoke with Dick he told me that he had, for fun, been working on quantum physics and relativity. He had an idea
I met Stephen Hawkings before he was famous. It was at a conference my Dad went to.
Luba, a woman who was a close friend of the family, is apparently one of the worlds best impact physicists. She is crazy smart and fairly odd.
Eh, I think that standard IQ tests are kind of a terrible way of measuring genius. Within a “normal” range…say, 100 to 130-140ish, they will give you some idea of relative smartness. Beyond that, genius is too esoteric of a quality to capture with that type of test. 130-140=pretty darn smart. But as far as being a genius? Nah, there’s something more to it than being good at analogies and number sequences.
One of my best friends is a woman who was tested as having an I.Q. of 152 while still in high school in the sixties. She is very smart. I never have to repeat myself when I’m talking to her, and she immediately gets whatever esoteric or subtle point I’m making when I say something to her or make a joke that would be lost on most people. We sometimes go to local arts festivals where we occasionally run into someone we knew in high school, and she not only recognizes them instantly despite the changes that forty-five years have wrought, but she remembers their names and history from that time. She decided in her mid-twenties to go to nursing school and aced it, finally landing in an executive role as manager of a dozen or more kidney dialysis clinics.
Still, as smart as she is, she is far, far, far from being a genius. I’d peg her intelligence as being about the same level as most physicians, CPA’s and so forth.
So my guess is you’d have to go considerably higher than the 150 range to qualify as a genuine genius despite the common belief that an I.Q. of 140 is entry-level I.Q. for geniushood.
Just to move this thread away from Physics and such, and even though it’s not me, one of my best friends met Werner Herzog at a film festival. I seriously think that guy is a genius.
