The Myth of Genius

This video was brought to you by War Thunder. What's happening? A Jared joke. I'm not sure if you've noticed a trend lately, but a lot of very smart people are acting incredibly dumb. Elon Musk made some very bold and very wrong statements about the coronavirus. Musical

genius

Kanye West has announced his candidacy for president without even submitting the proper paperwork, and I can't seem to go a day without discovering some award-winning scientists hawking strange pseudoscience. Professor Montagne is above all a doctor, a pragmatist of whom he is convinced. that memory of water opens a new area of ​​research for medicine this is not the hatred of musk or kanye one is in my humble opinion a musical

genius

and the other changed the landscape of cars with tesla but what if some of the antics Stranger things about people like Musk isn't just a normal human error, it speaks to a larger problem about how we understand intelligence;

In other words, why do geniuses act so stupid? Welcome to this clever edition on the genie

myth

and no spoilers ahead, but before we continue I want to give a shout out to this week's sponsor, War Thunder, from the creators of Crossout and Star Conflict, comes War Thunder, an mmo free large-scale combat game that is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. In the game you can fight the most iconic battles in history by air, land or sea, take your T-80 on a world tour and shoot down some helicopters or send a massive cruise ship to the bottom of the sea with War Thunder's high-end graphics.

It's like being in the middle of history. There are more than 1,500 combat vehicles and more. 350 unique planes to choose from in the flight simulator is one of my favorite parts, as they don't skimp on the details of what it's like to fly a plane. You can customize your vehicles with modifications, upgrades and even custom skins and once you're ready you can choose a battle from world war 2, the cold war or a modern conflict anywhere in the world, war thunder always updates the game, so there's always something new to explore. You can download the game today for free using the link in the description when you download the game.

Using our link you will get amazing bonuses that guarantee some winnings right from the start, so download the game today and now come back to the program to really understand the strange paradox of the genie. I want to tell you the story of Linus Pauling, born in At the beginning of the 20th century, Linus Pauling was a titan of science in his 30s. He proposed a third way that atoms could bond together, called orbital hybridization. He then identified several key features of DNA structure. He created a formula to measure electronegativity and discovered the basis. mechanism behind sickle cell anemia Despite all his work, Pauling has the distinction of being only one of four people in history to win two Nobel Prizes, although one was the Peace Prize, so if someone gets the title of genius, it's pauling, well, maybe not, pauling made another contribution.

For science, orthomolecular medicine coined by Pauling in the late 1960s, the term refers to the practice of treating everything from the common cold to psychosis, cancer and even AIDS with vitamins taken in extremely high megadoses. Now I don't think it takes a genius to know that. that vitamins will not cure cancer, but at that time this idea gained a lot of strength, after all, one of the smartest living scientists not only defended it, but even published several books about it, but the scientific and medical community in I generally didn't believe her. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, wrote a scathing report in 1973 questioning why niacin, Pauling's preferred vitamin, never seemed to provide the results he claimed when the experiments were performed by independent researchers.

The APA's main concern was that his claims were, at best, unprovable and, at worst, dangerous. Although they called the practice and its claims deplorable and the American Academy of Pediatrics called it a cult, Linus Pauling only doubled down until his death in 1994. After his death, a 1996 study on the effects of vitamin A and beta-carotene in heavy smokers had to be discontinued after lung cancer rates skyrocketed 28 and the death rate rose to a horrifying 17 among participants, all of which raises the very simple question of how one of the most smart people of the world ended up being so dumb and why we still love it.

Despite this, he even catapulted his pseudoscience to the New York Times bestseller list, as it turns out that the idea of ​​genius is a relatively modern concept, the Latin word genius originally referring to an individual spirit that inhabits and protects a person from birth, thus determining their character which is not so surprising when we consider that the Latin root for genius is gigner or to be born or beget, so when you grew up and became a tough-as-nails general or a talented bard , the ancient Romans would attribute your talents to your individual. genius and there is a certain appeal to this this roman sense of the word can explain why someone excels in a certain area without committing ourselves to believing that he is great at everything using this sense of the word we can immediately see the problem with linus pauling Guy was a brilliant chemist and biologist who analyzed the proteins in deformed blood cells, but he wasn't exactly a shoo-in for cancer doctor of the year.

It was not until the 17th century that our modern notion of genius began to emerge and the word began to refer to a specific individual with a natural intelligence or talent and an exalted natural mental capacity and this is where the problem begins, where genius begins to gain the revered overall status it has today. The evolving definition of words corresponds with the broader cultural shift of the European Enlightenment. This was a time of unparalleled intellectual growth in Western Europe, manifesting itself from the birth of modern science to the creation of calculus, astronomy, and economics, although central to all this intellectual progress was the idea that man could, Through your intellect, unlock the keys to the universe and change our world for the better.

This occurs when we begin to see glimpses of our modern warship genius. The 18th-century French philosopher Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, for example, claimed that progress only occurs when an individual genius makes advances in his field in accordance with Turgot states. the responsibility of nurturing these geniuses and allowing them to flourish before your eyes there would probably be nothing wrong with the government subsidizing tesla or solarcity through lucrative tax credits or giving kanye yeezy's fashion brand a small business loan in the wake of from covet 19. all in the service of continuing to develop his genius. The 19th century Scottish philosopher and mathematician Thomas Carlisle takes this idea of ​​genius worship a step further in his book on heroes.

Hero worship and the heroic in history. Carlisle claimed that the history of the world is nothing more than the biography of great men. From Carlisle's point of view, a select few geniuses were responsible for all the major developments throughout history, while we laymen were simply agree, after all, history will not remember the original founders of tesla, the engineers martin eberhard and mark tarpening, much less it must be recognized that many other designers or technicians who have worked to achieve the company's success, But we will not forget Elon Musk, the American philosopher Sydney Hook perhaps best encapsulates this perspective, arguing that genius is not the result of combining talents.

How many battalions are the equivalent of a Napoleon? How many minor poets will Shakespeare give us? How many ordinary scientists will do the work of an Einstein? But although they praised geniuses, they still distinguished between different types of geniuses. Thomas Carlisle, for example, divided his great men into six. categories, for example, I would not compare the genius of a priest like Martin Luther with that of a poet like John Milton. Likewise, Francis Galton, the father of meaning, the extremely discredited theory of eugenics divided the star-studded world of geniuses into categories ranging from judges and statesmen to scientists, painters, poets and even rowers, now Galton and Carlisle aren't exactly the standard for current scientific exploration of genius, but if you want to look at the world of smart people saying dumb things, a pretty good red flag is when people venture outside. of his specialty, that's not to say that multi-platinum artist Kanye West isn't allowed to have political opinions or that scientists haven't excelled in multiple fields, but in today's world of hyper-specialized knowledge, nothing about understanding how propulsion works. jet. makes one an expert in epidemiology.

Nowhere is this more evident than when you venture into the world of pseudoscience, there you will see a crop of doctors and physicians who venture outside their specialty and claim to be some revolutionary thinker despite their lack of training or peers. The publications reviewed on the subject take, for example, someone like Ivar Yaver, who despite having received a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that electron tunneling occurs in superconductors, is also among the biggest climate change deniers in the scientific community, on the one hand, a genius, on the other, a Dum-dum, there are also people who go off the rails, like Luke's montage, which proved that a retrovirus causes AIDS, only to turn around and publish two articles claiming that DNA can produce electromagnetic signals when deceived, also known as basically homeopathy.

Montier's claims were met with scorn by the scientific community, but this is only half the story. There is another reason why modern society values ​​geniuses like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk, assuming that they somehow have special brains capable of tackling any problem regardless of the topic, which brings us to iq. In the countryside at the beginning of the 20th century, universal education has just become a reality, and as your classroom is flooded with children from all types of backgrounds, you need to identify which ones have special educational needs so they can receive extra attention. How can you do it right if your psychologist Alfred Binet and his assistant Theodore Simon decide to evaluate each child to determine what her mental age is.

A child who could answer all the questions expected of a typical eight-year-old would be said to have the mental age of eight, but the next eight-year-old could answer the questions of a typical nine-year-old. They would have a mental age of nine. Now it is important to note that Bene did not think that this number could fully quantify a child's intellectual ability or potential. Simply because he could predict how a child would perform in school at that time just because a young Linus Pauling built a chemistry lab from scratch and probably had a higher mental age than his peers, in Benay's mind it wouldn't mean that the other children I couldn't catch up to even though Binet was not trying to quantify genius two psychologists independently took up Benay's model and tried to do just that the first was Louis Turman if Binet was against the idea of ​​classifying people according to their intelligence Turman was totally in favor inspired by Galton's theory of hereditary genius and Benay's mental ages.

Turman decided that he was going to scientifically quantify intelligence. To do this, he applied a simple formula: mental age divided by physical age multiplied by 100 equals IQ, so if you can answer a question, a 10-year-old can old and you only have 5 ten divided times five is two percent is two hundred you're a genius with this simple calculation turman instituted the modern IQ testing regime as we know it today by ranking and ranking everyone from school students to army recruits, but this massive wave of Testing brought an interesting fact to light when English psychologist Charles Spearman first noticed that scores on different parts of different IQ tests were positively correlated;

In other words, children who were good at pattern recognition, for example, were also good at vocabulary and memorization intelligence, it seemed, was not tied to specific topics or areas; Instead, this statistical correlation implied what Spearman called a general intelligence, better known as g. We now had a modern conception of genius. A genius was someone with a high IQ which made you smart. Almost all by committing to this view, we, as a society, had taken a 180-degree turn from our pre-Enlightenment views,Genius was no longer something in which everyone possessed a characteristic or quirk to explain their personality, but rather it is the domain of the hyperintelligent and us.

We should revere them for it, so don't criticize Elon Musk for diving into predictive modeling in Cobit 19, even if he's catastrophically wrong and don't you dare think that selling vitamins as a cure for cancer is essentially a multi-level marketing scheme. with fewer steps we often give these people the benefit of the doubt just because they are apparently much smarter than us or at least that is what the cultural narrative wants us to do is why abert einstein with zero political experience He was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 because he is very intelligent, but Einstein, realizing that his genius was not universal, rejected him citing his complete and utter lack of experience in the matter and this is where we can understand how Turman and Spearman met. were wrong about many things about intelligence despite their prominence in popular culture the IQ test and the concept of monolithic g have been under sustained attack by psychologists for decades the problem is that intelligence tests, whether they Whether they deal with logical or spatial reasoning, they only measure intelligence in a certain sense, it is difficult to see how an IQ test will detect the person who will make the next great contribution to music or how a child with impeccable spatial reasoning will fare. on the ground is lava, according to psychologist Robert Sternberg, this is where most intelligence tests fail, they refuse to analyze the context.

From what they measure in Sternberg's opinion, we are suffering from a confusion in the prediction criteria, that is a fancy way of saying that we are using IQ tests to reflect intelligence rather than real-world problem solving, for Sternberg. intelligence has to take into account intentional adaptation to the configuration and selection of real-world environments relevant to one's life; In other words, intelligence does not occur in a vacuum, but what is considered intelligence changes dramatically between cultures, environments and situations, at the same time that it can be expended. Hundreds of hours studying for the S.A.T. they could make you smart by college standards for a hunter-gatherer.

Intelligence could be related to the ability to orient yourself and your surroundings while tracking your prey. In both cases, our intelligent human being is adapting to real life scenarios to get what they want even if these forms of intelligence are very different, going back to Kanye, the only way to measure his specific brilliance is to listen to his music, so So here's the big, funny question, if our modern conception of genius is based on IQ tests that are kind of funk and a concept of g that might mean nothing in the broader sense of intelligence, is there really something called genius?

Sure elon musk has had moments of genius just like linus pauling before him, but what if they're actually just smart people who stumble upon some innovative ideas, as it turns out there's some evidence that this could be the case. Turman, in his search for geniuses who study, embarked on one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in history in partnership with the California public school system. He used IQ tests to identify the most gifted children and then followed them for the next 35 years, while Turman hoped to find the great men who, according to Carlisle's theory, moved history. Instead, most of his approximately fifteen hundred geniuses continued to live normal lives in a A devastating analysis by sociologist Peter Himsoricon showed that Turman's geniuses fared as well in life as a random sample of children from a grade level. similar socioeconomic;

In other words, the genius's level of intelligence produced no Linus Paulings or Elon Musks, in fact, as journalist Malcolm Gladwell points out. Herman actually tested and ultimately rejected two people who won Nobel Prizes, maybe genius is not a number, but rather the happy accident of a hard-working, lucky, and ultimately normal person, and maybe they get a boost of specific types of reasoning skills. terence tau, winner of the 2006 Fields Medal, kind of like the Nobel Prize in mathematics, except much more unique. He adopts precisely this point of view and defends the popular image of the solitary and possibly slightly crazy genius who ignores literature and other conventional knowledge and manages through some inexplicable inspiration to find a strikingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts.

It is a charming and romantic image but also wildly inaccurate for tau genius is not the result of the great men that Carlisle proposed instead, genius stands on the shoulders of those who came before, whose small incremental advances led to the advancement of the genius, it's not brilliant, it's simply progress obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work directed by the literature of intuition and a little luck, but what do you think made the joke? The simulation gives us the intelligence necessary to fully appreciate the legend of Elon Musk. Let us know in the comments how smart or dumb you think we are for writing this.

Thank you to all of our amazing sponsors for supporting the channel and our podcast. Hit the subscribe button. to show how smart you are or not and as always thanks for watching the peace guys.