The Making of a Genius
A friend asked me today why a handful of people seem to make all the difference in the world. The history of humankind could be summed up in a book of 100 pages or less and a handful of individuals that made the most astonishing discoveries. Nonetheless, this particular assumption is erroneous and can be explained easily with the concept of the tipping point.
Every single thing we build, every tool we use is an indirect outcome of someone else's work. Human innovation works much like our DNA. Information gets carried out from one generation to the next. Environmental conditions shape our tools (and genome) in order to meet current challenges. The current "set of tools" is carried out to the next generation.
No single person discovered the wheel or fire or the ax. Many individuals worked different versions of the same concept until generation after generation it got refined. In the same respect electricity, the telegram, computing and all other modern innovations did not just pop-up because of the genius of some individuals. Many others have done the hard work before them adding a little bit at a time. The "geniuses" just happened to give the last extra push of the totality of accumulated work — described as the tipping point. More or less the term describes the series of small changes or incidents that become significant enough to cause a larger, more important change. A genius always finds themselves at the top of the tipping point.
Take for example scientific research. Thousands of papers get peer reviewed and published on a daily basis. Many people work on the same problem at the same time and in all likelihood they are referencing each other. At some point one of them happens to stumble upon something revolutionary. The individual gets all the glory while all the people that worked before them get forgotten.
We do the same mistake in our daily life. Someone might fuck up many times but one good act at the very end is all we remember. The opposite is also true. You might be doing good deeds all your life and then fuck up with something bad in the end. The human mind is incredibly gullible and superficial. It cannot comprehend too much information and ends up shaving most of the content. This is why we get so awestruck with first appearances. This is why looks matter so much.
In some respect, we are all geniousness. The only problem is timing at the top of the tipping point.
I guess this is where that "being able to see further by standing in the shoulders of giants" quote referenced by Newton comes into play.
Not everyone is so modest (or honest with themselves), though. There's many factors that determine if you will be included in the "textbook hall of fame", and one of them is notoriety: how loud about promoting your own ideas and how well positioned you are relatively to others pushing the same or similar idea. Like the case of Darwin and Wallace, for example.
Sometimes idealism also keeps some people in the dark, like the case of the original inventor of a key component of the radio, Bose, who refused to patent it and then his invention got appropriated, expanded and then patented by Marconi later on.
Interesting food for thought in your post, @kyriacos
..or Elisha Gray arriving 2 hours before in the patent office than Graham Bell. Or Newton summing up all mathematical discord and making his own publication after Leibniz invented calculus.
History is riddled with such examples but at the end one figure dominates all others.
This is so true!
Great post and a very nice read. I liked the picture showing the definition of a Ph .D, never thought about it that way.
And the of course, the world looks different for you, that was a laughter :)
The combined human collective mind is terrible on recalling anything than the tips of things. Like, who helped Albert Einstein in his research, or who invented gun puder so Alfred Nobel could make the dynamite?
precisely. I gave some more examples in the comment above.
meep
Then there are those that expand human knowledge in a particular area by pure accident like the 1st xray picture.
yeap, like the discovery of penicillin.
Nonesense. The geniouses grasped something noone else did. Einstein had unhuman understandingbof the universe
Read this and you will be editing your comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity
Thank you! I did not know that. Talk about PR. Maybe its not just being the tipping point but also PR
This is a long known fact. It is not what you know but who you know.
Opportunity defines the "tipper". Without opportunity, the "genius remains anonymous.
true
Very well, people always forget the person , but use their idea to be applied in daily life . It's just how mind and society works , we don't credit those who have came up with the idea but think it's alright just to go on with it . Society is just fucked up . We remember 100 bad over 1 good
We are animals much like every other one. The only difference is that most people in our species are in denial, refusing to see the evidence from our primitive brain.
Humans deny everything , it's just out of their nature
We're basically sheep with thumbs! Humans remember what they want to remember and comprehend what's convenient to them. Really good post by the way. @trendhobo
precisely
Geniuses are also people that even if they work on similar topics as others, will be able to make some advances in a field which may need 50 extra years without them. General relativity of Einstein is one of these examples (note that I did not say special relativity).
Gauss, Riemann, Mach...
Do you think that at the time nobody else was working on the problem? ...and remember he didn't even get the Nobel prize for that. He had plenty of disagreements about general relativity and one can argue that the content emerged through the debates as collaborative discord.
This is actually not what I said. The others could have done the same, but they would have taken much more time. I know there was no Nobel prize for that, but for a very good reason: at that time this was speculative, and the last prediction of GR was only discovered last year. Geniuses should not be connected to the Nobel prize.
This is at least my opinion (this is an opinion that must be taken as it is),
Yeap, the Nobel Prize is a joke in my opinion. I am still not sure if they would have taken more time. Some predictions of Einstein came right, others wrong. I mean, sometimes is about hits and misses.
Buddhism works much the same. There is such a vast array of philosophical enquiries that when a scientific discovery happens they are able to associate it. Einstein's time was really a boom era for physics.
The golden age, indeed. :)
Nice post. Who has heard about Alfred Russel Wallace for example? But when I say Darwin.. :)
yeap!
Isnt that the guy who made a "What does the fox say- Dance" outside of the House of Commons in London? :')
And i actually made the fox song first! It was called what does the beetle say! I missed with the creature :(
If you can't beat em'..... join em' at the top!