[ExI] high quality minds

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 21:03:56 UTC 2018


 would not use genius for anything other than an achievement of thought.
There are no genius actors, musicians, dancers, athletes, painters, etc.
They can be fantastic but they're not geniuses.  lubkin

I would certainly like to know how these achievements were done without
thought.

bill w

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 2:40 PM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com>
wrote:

> I am stingier about the word genius. If I can get there but they get there
> faster, it's not genius. A genius does what I can't fathom doing. And IQ is
> never a measure, except that I'd guess there's a threshold minimum below
> which someone could not possibly be genius.
>
> I would not use genius for anything other than an achievement of thought.
> There are no genius actors, musicians, dancers, athletes, painters, etc.
> They can be fantastic but they're not geniuses.
>
> Looking at the history of achievement, I'd say a genius is someone who is
> decades or centuries ahead of the rest of their field. That odds are enough
> lesser minds would eventually hit on the ideas; the genius short-circuits
> it.
>
> I stand by my previously shared canonical example of Lev Landau. His
> "Theoretical Minimum" exam, through which he determined if someone knew
> enough to be worth talking physics to, was so rigorous that only 43 people
> ever passed. It required a thorough knowledge of the whole of physics.
> Nobel Laureates were prouder of passing his test than of their Nobel. He
> didn't write many papers but each of them was Nobel-worthy. When he won,
> the prize was for his work on superfluidity, but it could easily have been
> for another area.
>
> In math, I can't help but look to precocity and to independent effort.
> Folks like Galois or Ramanujan.
>
> The only clear chess genius to me is Fischer, if only on the basis of his
> game at age 13 against IM Donald Byrne. He made, especially, two brilliant
> moves that for sixty years grandmasters have marveled that he could have
> spotted.
>
>
> -- David.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20180911/c10e2a69/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list