Compete , survive and reproduce❤

My opinion. Almost all successful people stand on the shoulders of others. I no longer accept the practice that all the rewards should go to who publishes first. That's too simplistic and unfair. Regarding Darwin's fame, Alfred Russel Wallace deserves to stand alongside him, and probably others too. Having said that, we shouldn't ignore the role discipline plays in success. Determination matters, maybe more than smarts. For how many years did Darwin study barnacles? That's a dedication I'm not capable of. Barnacles? -- jeez.

@@user-ov1rq4kx8t Exactly. It seems like the consistency mattered a lot more than any alleged smarts.

thanks!

Works of of brilliance definitely exist, I agree with that. This to me is actually what qualifies someone as a genius, they produce a master piece. I think the raw intellect thing is mostly a meme, because in sports where there are no performance enhancing drugs, like chess or e-sports, the best players are just consistently good. And whenever I read the biographies of "geniuses," there is almost always something that makes them more human. For instance, Einstein was approached by a 20something grad student who had a mathematical proof for an atom bomb. Einstein rejected it as nonsense, it was only his colleague who some years later was shown the same paper who said it was important. In otherwords, even the smartest humans are just human, they are not THAT much beyond regular people. The question, of course, is "how much beyond". Like I said elsewhere, a giraffe obviously cannot learn calculus, but can someone with an IQ of 120 produce a work that is more brilliant than someone with the IQ of 140? In which case, we can ask about these people we call geniuses, how much smarter were they?

Thanks for the thought out response! I love history of mathematics, as well. Just received God created the integers yesterday! In the video I mentioned that in popular culture many geniuses sound above and beyond, but when a biographer looks at their life in full detail, these geniuses frequently downplay the sources they copy from, make terrible blunders, and are portrayed as just being really consistent. Like with Newton, there is a famous story that he would read Descartes' Geometry until he failed to understand, and then he would restart the book. He would fail at page 2, then page 3, and etc. Or with John Nash, for instance, who self-admits, after losing at a math competition, that he spent everyday one summer studying because he insisted he win next time; so we he worked very diligently. I haven't read biographies of all the people you mentioned, but I have read on Einstein, Leonardo, Darwin, B. Franklin, Steve Jobs, Euclid, Leibniz, Spinoza, Proust, and Voltaire. And none of their ideas came out of nowhere. For instance, Einstein had a tutor who had some pretty interesting ideas, many of which were quite similar to the ones Einstein became famous for. No one mentions the tutor though. To me, it seems consistency does play a major part. Like with the example I gave with chess, Magnus Carlsen plays better more consistently, he's "sharper". It's not that no one can beat him. I imagine, in the most romanticized case of those mathematicians you mentioned, they are just consistently doing math, to an extent more than most people. Consistency and raw intellect. In a more realistic image, these mathematicians built off of ideas they came across before, in some cases downplaying influence from others; and what they became famous for is not accurate. Meaning, they are good at math because they are consistent, but their ideas are not leaps and bounds ahead like everyone says they are. Because they are just such consistent mathematicians, they likely read an idea you have yet to come across, or have applied an idea that not many people have heard of. Like with Darwin, evolutionary theories of his sort were not heard often, but 90% of his style of evolutionary theory can be found in his grand father's works and Lamarck's works. In other words, consistency and copying the works of others. I think this "raw intellect" thing is mostly what Hollywood perpetuates. I could be wrong, but biographies seem to always portray humans while textbooks, academics, and movies portray Gods.

@@IdeasInHat I think there is some nuance to the whole ordeal. As I said before, I can only speak to math, I know of the philosophers you mentioned, but I don't know nearly enough about their works or if philosophy in general to have an opinion on this, so I shall stick to math. There are mathematicians who were simply better or more successful than their contemporaries and are thus considered to be geniuses, I myself wouldn't consider Euclid a genius, it is widely accepted that his elements weren't a collection of his works but rather an organization of mathematics from his time, though many proofs are his own, if anything Euclid is credited with the introduction of an axiomatic system to build deductive reasoning (it was this that later influenced Descartes to write i think therefore i am, Descartes wanted an axiom of sorts that he could use as a building block for epistemology) getting back to Euclid i guess the axiomatic method could be revolutionary enough to call him a Genius but I would definitely place him in the first category I mentioned. There could be made an argument that Newton too belongs to the same category, his works in physics were built off of the contributions from Galileo, Torricelli, Tyco Brahe, Kepler, and the core concepts of calculus had already been introduced by Nicole Oresme, Cavalieri, Fermat, Descartes, Pascal and a few Bernullis, there is no denying that the time was right for the advent of calculus and as a matter of fact Leibniz indipendently developed the same basic ideas, but Calculus isn't all need did, what he did was a major leap forward in what we consider to be science today, to the point where one could argue Newton rather than Galileo is the true father of modern sciences, as while Galileo surely appreciated the value of math in sciences he was quite simply limited by the fact that calculus is THE tool to study physics but he wasn't able to develop the mathematics needed to study any motion more complex than free fall, similarly Brahe and Kepler laid the ground work for Newton's theory of gravitation but Brahe simply wasn't a mathematician, and Kepler wasn't able to make mathematical sense of his laws, it was Newton who put everything together and allowed science as we know it today to be born. Beyond that there is a category of those who I consider to be undisputed geniuses, people in a class of their own who i simply believe are extraordinary and a gift to the rest of humanity (or at least to those in the same field of study) Achimedes, Euler and Gauss surely belong to this class and I will shortly elaborate on why I believe this to be the case. What Archimedes was able to achieve was lost to time until the late 1800s/early 1900s as most of his works were simply lost with the decline of the greek civilization and it took the collective efforts of Europe's brightest mathematicians over 300 years to achieve his same results. Euler literally invented new branches of math and developed them to a point where it took science and technology over a century to catch up and find an application for the concepts he came up with, the prime example of this being graph theory, Euler simply had an intuition like no other and made huge leaps in ready existing fields of study and then literally invented new fields of study that to this day over 200 years later are very prolific and relevant for modern sciences. Last but not least Gauss similarly to Euler was a talent like no other, at the tender age of 18 he was already a more accomplished mathematician than any of his contemporaries, he revolutionized arithmetic with the introduction of modular arithmetic, he was the one to solve the problem of which polygons could be constructed with ruler and compass after 2000 years of mathematicians trying to find an answer, he pioneered the fields of geometry and analysis, expanding on the work of Descartes and others to show the links between geometry and algebra and was the first to realize the very intimate connection between complex numbers and geometry, the field of geometry was essentially reinvented by Gauss, to the point where he could very well be considered the father of modern geometry. I could go on, but i hope to have made my point by now, by showing how Euler and Gauss especially weren't just lucky or consistent, they didn't simply get all the credit for other people's ideas, they pretty much reshaped all of mathematics and without their contributions math today would be very different.

@@LorenzoWTartari I would have to look into it. I get that you are emphasizing the importance of their ideas. But with Gauss, for instance, I already found some sources that other mathematicians independently discovered ideas similar to his; in some cases they were less formal but 20 years before Gauss, and in other cases they were more robust but 10 years after Gauss. Gauss also took a lot of inspiration from other mathematicians. So it's not that he was pulling ideas from thin air, and it is not that other mathematicians didn't have similar ideas. I believe if I actually went through the publications of his teachers and contemporaries, I would find even further evidence. ChatGPT already pointed me to a few mathematicians in specific who all independently discovered ideas similar to Gauss. Not to say Gauss is dumb. But he is not a God. He was a human who was obsessed with calculations. Again, Magnus Carlsen is considered the greatest chess player of all time, people still beat him and his ideas are not beyond what other GMs are doing. I am deeply suspicious of this claim that he is THAT much further than the other mathematicians in intellect. He was just obsessive, and as a result, published more. Again, to be clear, my stance isn't that Gauss is dumb. Its that even the smartest humans are not leaps and bounds ahead in raw intellect, when compared to appropriate populations obviously. Someone who has a PhD in math with a 130 IQ can publish more and better works than someone with an IQ of 160. This is closer to my claim; hence my push back on fetishisizng raw intellect. There isn't anyway to really know for certain how smart these guys were, but whenever I look, I do not see someone who invented things from nowhere. It's always a progression from previous ideas. Which deflates the raw intellect claim, a lot, imo. I can give you some criteria that would change my mind: 1. Provide evidence of something a genius did that was 100% novel; as in, there were no similar ideas, sources of inspiration, or core elements taken from somewhere else. 2. Provide me evidence of something a genius did where no one else discovered something similar or had a similar idea within a 10 year timeframe. 3. Show me a genius who did not spend thousands of hours studying before producing a notable work. I think those would persuade me. Again, I would say someone's with an IQ of 130 who spent 50,000 hours doing math will be far more notable than someone who spent 6,000 hours and has an IQ of 160. The raw intellect claim would immediately be proven if you found someone who published something notable with next to no training.

@@IdeasInHat 1&2: Archimedes used the concept of vertical slices of 2D shapes or 2D slices of 3D shapes having a weight of their own, small as it may be to guide his intuition and find the area of hyperbolic and parabolic segments, as well as the volumes and surface areas of the sphere, spheric segment, paraboloid and hyperboloid, this idea is the basic concept of measure theory and you'd have to wait until the late 1600s when Bonaventura Cavalieri would come up woth the principle now named after him, and even then it took mathematicians 200 years to fully grasp this concept. Euler quite literally invented graph theory and the field of topology and further contributions by other mathematicians were only made because he had a lot of correspondents whom he quite literally would pester to work with him, but the idea was novel and completely his own. Gauss came up with the method of least squares to correctly guess the position of Ceres with only two recorded sightings, an unprecedented feat and this wasn't the only original idea of his, the classification of the regular polygons that can be built with ruler and compass is another one, which lies on the basic premise of modular arithmetic, another novel idea of his that completely revolutionized a lot of difficult calculations. 3: I don't think it's fair to ask that for someone to be called a genius they need to effortlessly outclass experts, the thing is that out of the many people that dedicate their lives to their craft some are quite simply better and sometimes by a great margin, the fact that to excel in your craft you need years of experience doesn't discredit the fact that some people are simply better, fundamentally i believe in the idea of hard work beats talent until talent works hard, the fact that the mathematicians I mentioned dedicated their whole life to their craft doesn't take away from the importance of their ideas, and the fact remains that many other contemporaries studied math their whole lives too and still couldn't compare. Separated from math another example that comes to mind is Mozart: he was a prodigy that could masterfully play multiple instruments and effortlessly compose music since he was very young. As he became older he would improve, his music would become more complex, more layered and he quite literally worked himself to death, but his obsessive dedication to music composition doesn't take away from the fact that he still completely outclassed his rival Salieri who was just as industrious if not more with his studies and lived much longer, yet never matched that quality of Mozart's work.

@@LorenzoWTartari I think you are missing the nuance of my point. I am not discrediting their work. I am discrediting the meme of "raw intellect". In the case of euler and gauss, I would need to read the works of their contemporaries. ChatGPT already showed me a few mathematicians that had VERY similar ideas to Gauss that were independently discovered but never became famous. But I think you have a made up mind here, so I won't ask you to be skeptical towards your own view here. I will just find the time to read the works of their contemporaries and compare for myself. I already own a few old math books that fermat took a lot of inspiration from, so I would love to find the ones Euler or Gauss studied as well. Maybe some questions can clarify this. 1. Who do you think would publish more brilliant works? Someone with an IQ of 130 and 50,000 hours studied, or someone with an IQ of 160 and 6,000 hours studied. A raw intellect worldview, in the purest sense, would say the person with a 160IQ would require no time to study. Since we know that is not what any genius has done, then we know effort (consistency) plays some role. Moreover, here is another thought experiment to clarify my view. John doe a) has a 160IQ and studied 50,000 hours b) has a 130IQ and studied 50,000 hours Here, we need to answer: Is the quality of work produced between situation a) and b) significantly different? That is, if all else were equal, would we see night and day results? My inutition here was no. Why? Because from all the geniuses I have seen, none are significantly beyond their peers. To be sure, they are better. Just not beyond human. As a side note, I don't find it persuasive to say that only Euler, Mozart, and etc. are the only people born beyond human, because it also committs us too strongly to the idea that demigod geniuses cannot fail - or that those who do not contribute are not demigod geniuses. In other words, some demigod geniuses have been born and have failed, miserably. Meaning, hard work and talent are not always going to translate to brilliance. So, in the cases of Mozart and others, though hard work and talent mattered, it was not NECESSARILY the only factor because we accept that SOME people still fail even with their hard work and talent. (Again, unless you just by defnition say failures were never truly geniuses with talent - which would put at an impasse). And even more interestingly, that also allows for the possibility of someone with a 130IQ making more contributions than their smarter peers, especially if they were more obsessive, lucky, and etc. Which is also why I don't want to use achievements as the only metric. I would instead prefer to sample from a large category of people who are widely held to be geniuses and see what factors were most common to their success (not fool proof, but arguably more robust). And this is where we diverge heavily. You will look at the works published of one person and conclude they are above and beyond. But, though I have not yet done this for Euler, in every other case I have looked into, the genius was never leaps and bounds ahead, pulling ideas from thin air. As another side note, the claim that Euler has more raw intellect than Einstein is, probability wise, not an argument I find persuasive; in part because Einstein's actual brain was extremely deviated from the mean, among other measurements we have of him. We also have people alive today who do score extremely high on IQ tests. So, I am fairly confident that Euler, if he took an IQ test, would not score higher than Einstein. Hence, my sampling method is fine, as far as I can tell, since Euler and Einstein are commensurate insofar as we are considering the role played by raw intellect in achieving works of brilliance. Again, not discrediting the works of anyone here. Simply trying to determine the role of raw intellect in their achievements: only because biographers often paint works of brilliance as being more than just raw intellect. I will look into Euler, but if I had to bet money, I will find core elements of his thinking sprinkled throughout the books he read.

Luckily, Darwin wrote an autobiography where he denies the influence of his grand father and Lamarck, even though he literally said verbatim what they said! A. N. Wilson caught flack for calling Darwin someone who sought glory and fame. Which, to be honest, after seeing the direct quotes from Darwin, I cannot disagree with Wilson here. Darwin was after fame. This is what I meant by, in popular culture, we hear one thing; but when an expert writes a biography and goes through all the letters, publications, and etc., we get an entirely different image. Darwin also failed at math and other subjects, although he eventually passed. Not because of raw intellect, because he applied himself. I think there might be something to innate differences, like a giraffe can never learn calculus. But, are the ideas that come from someone with an IQ of 150 that much different than someone with an IQ of 110? If a PhD with an IQ of 120 spends 20 years studying, and a PhD with an IQ of 140 spends 5 years, who will have the better ideas? These kinds of questions leave me puzzled.

I think change due to natural forces was the popular idea he latched onto. He was reading books at the time when geology became a science, and when botanists were expanding into other areas of biology. Both fields rely on the idea of natural forces changing the structure of things over a period of time. In our modern time, I feel like the ideas popular in academia are emergentism, relativism, and systems philosophy. I think the "everyday" or "ordinary" ecosystem of ideas will always be filled with content that entertains more than explains.

You have to measure anything from a frame of reference, and usually attributes (including intelligence) are measured with respect to the average person, so saying that Darwin was really smart or that he was average and we are really dumb is the same thing measured from different viewpoints, although I would say that it makes more sense to measure things with respect to the average, in which case Darwin is really smart (regardless of how exactly you want to define "smart"). I guess I'm rambling but my point is that we have to measure from a point of reference, and the only reference we know is our own. We have no idea if our knowledge ecosystem is truly garbage or if it's not. For all we know your average person on earth might be smarter than every hypothetical alien in the universe. Personally I don't think people are generally dumb, just that many don't share the same interests as me, so in my fields of interest they might seem incompetent, but I bet I look the same way in their eyes, so I put it down as a matter of personal difference and not something more underlying like intelligence.

​@@xenoduck3189 Yeah, intellectual pursuits are often portrayed as being "smarter". But I am willing to bet, top performing gamers have IQ scores similar to top performing mathematicians; or even pianists and what not. So, there is definitely some biases in the interests you adopt, with respect to how smart people think you are. I love that people think chess players are smart, inherently; that way everyone thinks my absolute blunders are actually good moves, as long as they don't know chess, lmao. (I am soo bad at chess 😂)

Yeah, that is the book. Just looked up some reviews, people seem upset about Wilson's opinions about Darwin. But, to be fair, none of the reviews I am seeing cite any counter-evidence or relevant paragraphs. So, I am not too sure what they are even complaining about. Could be bots. I am loving the book so far, Wilson writes well and the narrative is good. I haven't stumbled across anything too biased so far. I am 1/3rd finished the book.

Slightly off topic but just wanted to share this thought. I feel like the IQ has been used as a tool in pop culture to artificially elevate "geniuses" because it makes for good content for newspaper articles. The IQ test has its uses in medicine, for sure, but in my ideal we should measure a person by the size of their prey, not by the sharpness of their sword. In other words it doesn't matter if you have an IQ of 300+ if your whole life revolves around your IQ and you don't achieve anything. It's part of the reason I have a sort of irrational visceral disgust at "geniuses" who are renowned only because of abnormally high IQ scores, and also the reason why I hate articles that make up IQ scores for people who never took such a test. When I search for Einstein's IQ on the internet I get: "Einstein never took an IQ score test. However, based on his historical records, academics have estimated his score to be around 160." WHICH FUCKING ACADEMICS? Articles like this have influenced us into believing that unless we are born with insane genius, we will never amount to anything, and it's a prevailing undertone in soooo many articles that it's now just a part of our culture. If we look at the only example I am aware of of a world leading scientist taking an IQ test, Richard Feynman, we see that he scored a great but not crazy 125. He was not Einstein level, but he was for sure in the top 5-10 physicists of his time. Out of the billions of people alive at the time, he was the among the absolute best in his domain while having an IQ that 5% of people beat. But in reality, I believe that his talent was not even as good as top 5%, which leads into my second point: IQ tests can be trained for! I don't know WHY there is this notion that IQ is purely birth given talent when there is so much evidence against this. Logically speaking, for one, IQ relies a lot on pattern recognition and deduction, which are very obviously trainable; if they weren't nobody could ever become a better chess player, meaning that you could theoretically beat the world chess champion without ever training before if you had enough talent. A great example of IQ trainability is the fact that poorer countries always have lower average IQs than the richer countries, even if said countries are next to each other = practically same genetics. Why? Because the people get less education, and therefore train their IQs less. So realistically since Feynman was very much into math and physics from a young age, he studied hard, meaning that he would have increased his IQ more than the average person, and that his actual birth talent was not in the 5% zone. I am now realising that I have been writing for a good 15 minutes when your comment isn't really about this. I'm still gonna post this cause idk it would be a shame to delete it since it's what i really think.

How did I not know about Isaiah Berlin, will buy some of his books. This is the zeitgeist theory, that there is something in the culture at the time which makes certain intellectuals famous, and it is instead not the quality of their ideas.

Hmm. Well, what is super human about him?

@@IdeasInHat I would say the combination of his thought experiments and physical intuition! In the Einstein biography, Isaacson repeatedly shows how Einstein's biggest achievements in physics followed a sort of formula: he wrests some principle from nature, visualizes this principle through thought experiments, and finally makes some testable conclusion. I think any scientist who was able to follow this process and have just ONE of Einstein's discoveries would be marveled at by his contemporaries, Einstein's consistency through this process is what I would say makes him genius!

@@thechosenoneforyou I can name a few children who can do that, what's super human about that? Consider this. The smartest human to ever live might have achieved nothing or might have never been recognized for what they did achieve. Given that those situations are a real possibility, doesn't this make you reconsider Einstein's intelligence? (My personal view is that the smartest human is not that much smarter than the average human, when we actually look at their outputs compared machine outputs. Chess is a great example, where the worlds greatest chess players all have similar outputs and all get blown away by machines. And when chess pros are given puzzles, sometimes complete amateurs solve them quicker. Humans, imo, are dumb. And the word genius is often fetishsized to a point beyond human.

@@IdeasInHat I completely agree with you on chess players, I do not believe they are inherently super intelligent, maybe just a bit higher than average with their visual calculus. I think I saw a study at some point that said starting chess at an early age has a serious correlation with how good u become, something like if u start chess too late in life, u can never really develop into a fantastic player. I think it is likely that the smartest human achieved nothing in life, they were most likely born into poverty and thus never had the resources to achieve success. Reading a lot about past historical intellectual shows that they usually come from the middle and upper class (same with Einstein). Despite this, I feel we can still assess certain individuals as being extraordinary, in comparison with their peers who were well equipped/trained for similar professions. Humans are very dumb! I think Einstein was very dumb when it came to dealing with his relatives and social circle. However, I do believe that in certain departments he scores highly on the bell curve. I have read a lot less than you so I could be wrong and will probably change my opinion eventually!