
Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives - seycombi
https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f
======
JoeDaDude
Arthur Lewbell, who knew Shannon personally, wrote a eulogy for him [1] and
included photos of his "gadgeteers paradise" toy room[2][3] which is mentioned
in the article.

I collected photos of the gadgets he built to play games (now in the MIT
Museum) and put them on this list in boargamegeek[4].

[1] [https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-
lewbel/Shannon.html](https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html)

[2] [https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys1.jpg](https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-
lewbel/toys1.jpg)

[3] [https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg](https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-
lewbel/toys2.jpg)

[4] [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-
man...](https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man-games-
and-machines)

------
madaxe_again
I went to school with his grandson - incredibly, ridiculously, intelligent
guy, who was the only person three years ahead at the school - I and one other
were two ahead, and a dozen or so were a year ahead.

That said, I always felt for the chap, as socially inept didn't begin to cover
it (as someone who graduated school two years early I can say with surety that
it wasn't solely the temporal displacement that fettered his sociality - it
was definitely a factor for us all, but he couldn't/wouldn't communicate even
with other maths geeks), and I could only see him pursuing a career in
academia - which he is.

I also felt for him as as a mathematically brilliant Shannon expectations
couldn't have been higher - I was going to cap this off by saying I'm sure
he'll do great things, but instead, I'll say I hope he has a happy life.

~~~
omot
Wow... what school is this, where everyone is years ahead?

~~~
madaxe_again
King's Canterbury. Out of 700 pupils, there were about 20 one or more years
ahead - I was skipped a few years when I was six, at a previous school, so
just continued from there - similar for him, I believe. No idea how it is
there now, I left 15 years ago.

I had the advantage of having always been tall for my age, so mostly hid the
fact that I was young - Alex, however, was a fairly small chap and I think
suffered for it.

Fond memories of celebrating my 18th at university, and the college bar being
like "lol what, we've been serving you for a year".

~~~
omot
Are the gifted students all in the same class?

~~~
madaxe_again
No, and oddly, kids who were years ahead weren't necessarily viewed as being
gifted - just ahead. The scholars were the gifted (grafters, bluntly, rather
than gifted) ones, and wore special gowns and got discounted fees.

Rather than having a number of classes for each year, they operated a set
system for each subject, so if you were great at maths and sucked at Latin,
you could be in the top set for maths and bottom set for Latin.

------
gboudrias
As a psychology enthusiast (and soon to be student), I'm quite annoyed with
our fascination with "geniuses".

It seems obvious that people who are very famous in their field became "very
intelligent" because of a combination of hard work and genetics. But it's as
if these books capitalize on the faint hope of being a repressed genius of
some sort. I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever
saw themselves as more than passionate. And the ego required to want to find
your inner genius goes contrary to the enormous humility they seemed to
display.

That aside, these books and articles all make the same mistake of studying a
single person _after the fact_. It's similar to mimicking Steve Jobs: That's
not how he became Steve Jobs. We literally cannot know how much luck was
involved in his (or Einstein's) success. Might as well study the lives of
lottery winners.

So if not that, how can we maximize our potential and generally better
ourselves intellectually? Simply by referring to the very vast fields of
learning, motivation and general cognitive science.

But "learn the science" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "how to be
Einstein", now does it?

~~~
sillysaurus3
_I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw
themselves as more than passionate._

They may have kept it to themselves, but they were certainly aware of their
status.

Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying a
genius a bad thing? (And they _are_ geniuses, if it's possible to compare one
person to another at all.)

You've made some good points about how someone becomes a genius: it's mostly
luck, especially in genetics and upbringing. But there's no reason that
studying this is inherently useless.

~~~
gboudrias
Fair enough regarding the status.

> Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying
> a genius a bad thing?

The authors can do whatever they want with their time. But people who buy
books and read articles on geniuses would be better served buying and reading
science-based books on intelligence. They mostly have all the same advice
without the fluff of big names. Also they are actually empirical science,
which can't always be said about studies on "famous" people (which to me seem
more akin to profiling).

That's not to say you can't enjoy a good biography. But titles like these and
what they imply just rub me the wrong way. We're not Einsteins, we'll never be
geniuses, and that's fine.

~~~
indlebe
I concur. As a teacher and mentor to students, I find that assigning the label
of "genius" to anyone famous for their accomplishments can have a negative
affect on young learner's goals. They often think "oh, they're just a genius,
that's how they've accomplished X". I try and dispel this, giving them
examples of how most "geniuses" just worked really hard on one thing, and that
if they focus and work hard on the one thing they are passionate about they
will find that someday they may be referred to as a "genius".

~~~
msla
Yes. They worked to get to the limits of their abilities, and that's how they
accomplished so much. Without that work, their potential would have been
wasted.

Everyone's limits are at a different location for different tasks, and they
can be pushed to some extent, but not indefinitely. (If nothing else, people
eventually die.) Finding how far your limits in a useful or fun area can be
pushed is a worthwhile task as well, and progress is measured by change
relative to your past, not someone else's.

So we sit between two tragedies:

On the one hand, we have people who believe genius is magic, and
unapproachable, who never work to find what their level is, and never work to
push it out.

On the other, we have people who think any level can be attained through hard
work, who work themselves into burnout or worse trying to reach goals their
lives aren't long enough to attain, and who never appreciate the progress they
_have_ made.

------
sillysaurus3
One thing that occurred to me is that if Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered
their respective theories, someone else would have. It probably wouldn't have
taken very long, either.

I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it seems true.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The same is true of most (all?) scientific discoveries. A good evidence for it
the fact that most important breakthroughs were made independently, within the
space of months or years, by two or more people/teams that didn't collaborate
with each other.

My takeaway is that science is very incremental, and discoveries depend on
what the state of scientific knowledge is at any given time, and not on
particular smart individuals.

I also believe the same applies to social progress - e.g. if Martin Luther
died as a child, someone else would start the Reformation; if Marx and Lenin
decided to pursue art instead of economics/politics, someone else would invent
communism anyway, etc.

~~~
yulker
This sort of determinism seems wrong. It implies that if you had a Monte Carlo
simulation engine of the universe and ran it 1,000 times beginning at the 20th
century through today, you would expect those iterations to look a lot like
our world. Only with some of the names and people being different, but
fundamentally, everything else would still have happened.

That seems unlikely, no?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, sort of. I'd say it's quite likely.

The thing about how engineering and the markets work - they are attracted
towards local optimas. So I'd expect each iteration to e.g. have cars that are
more-less like we know. I'd expect it to have soft drinks; maybe not Coca
Cola, but something very similar and recognizable to us, etc.

------
stevenj
Interestingly, I just listened to a decent podcast with Ed Thorp (an
interesting man in his own right) who briefly talked about his work with
Shannon.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-14/ed-thorp-
the...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-14/ed-thorp-the-man-who-
beat-the-dealer-and-the-market)

------
datashovel
Was curious enough about the thesis paper, I went searching for it.

[http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2)

------
atsaloli
Vint Cerf's article on Claude Shannon:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a.html?foxtrotcallback=true)

------
roceasta
>But if his tendency to follow his curiosity wherever it led sometimes
rendered him less productive, he also had the patience to keep coming back to
his best ideas, over the course of years.

[snip]

>“He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored
those people.”

I think there's a connection here which reveals a common misconception about
intellectual creation, namely that scientific theories are born in a
legalistic fashion by criticism, argument and debate. In reality the role of
criticism is to defend against ideas we _don 't_ like. Ideas we _do_ like are
shielded from explicit criticism, for instance by ignoring critics, and
allowed to grow in our brains over time. It's a pleasure to return to such
ideas again and again, while they remain interesting, so 'patience' isn't
required either.

------
danm07
Boy is this article filled with unwarranted hyperbole. And Tim Ferris, really?

Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article, cherrypicking
details to support whatever point the author stands to posit.

~~~
mrweasel
>Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article

Because many believe that if they just work or behave like a genius or
successful entrepreneur they will be one as well. It's the mental equivalent
of a trendy diet. It's not that there's not some interesting habits in the
article, but people will focus on the easy bits and start riding unicycles,
not reading their emails and leaving checks uncashed.

Like diets, people want to hear things like: Eat a lemon with every meal and
only poop on Thursdays. Allowing yourself to be mentored is hard, if it
doesn't come natural to you. Being patient and keep working on problem for
years on end is equally hard. It's not bad advise, it's just really hard to
implement.

------
zzzeek
> "Letters he didn’t want to respond to went into a bin labeled “Letters I’ve
> Procrastinated On For Too Long.” ... Inbox zero, be damned."

moving things to folders is... the definition of "inbox zero"?

~~~
ruraljuror
My thought exactly. The authors seem to have gotten it completely backwards.

------
s73ver
I read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and they had a few sections on
Shannon. Honestly, from what I read, it sounds like the guy didn't want to
work, or have a job. And the Fates were kind, and dropped him into a situation
where not only was he able to make that a reality, but he was able to provide
several meaningful contributions to the fields of programming and information
theory while doing so. He was able to not have to "work", and get to be part
of some pretty amazing stuff.

~~~
zild3d
>he was able to provide several meaningful contributions

Don't you think that's severely downplaying his role?

He invented the field of information theory, not just made several
contributions. He founded digital circuit design. The entire concept of being
able to use electrical circuits to implement boolean logic, and proving you
can use those circuits to solve any problem that boolean logic can. He also
came up with sampling theory, bringing communications into the digital world
(as well as signal processing).

And then sure, he made several (extremely important) contributions to the
field of cryptography

> get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff.

He WAS a lot of that pretty amazing stuff.

~~~
s73ver
Maybe I did downplay a bit. But the key takeway was, he was involved with all
of that, not because he was assigned to it, but because it was interesting to
him, and he wanted to do something with it. His work with digital circuit
design arose out of him playing with making maze solving robots.

He, of all people, clearly embodied the idea of, "Get a job you love and
you'll never work a day in your life." Of course, it doesn't help that he had
an extremely tolerant employer, one who realized that letting him do things
like play with the robots, would lead to such breakthroughs.

------
petraeus
I bet there would be many more geniuses with ubi

~~~
s73ver
Quite possibly. From what it sounds like, Shannon's job with Bell Labs was
kinda his form of UBI. They didn't really make him "work"; they just kinda
gave him money, and told him to do what he felt like. That lead to a bunch of
impressive things, given the resources he had access to.

Granted, a lot of that came after some of his groundbreaking work on
information theory, which is what earned him his fame.

------
AceJohnny2
> _During World War II, those friends included Alan Turing, with whom Shannon
> struck up a lively intellectual exchange during Turing’s fact-finding trip
> to study American cryptography on behalf of the British government._

This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a _What-If_ perspective,
because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did _not_
discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the
Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence
remained a secret until the 1970s).

How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?

------
lubujackson
There seems to be a lot of parallels in how Shannon lived and how Feynman
lived. Obviously, Feynman was more gregarious, but they both found inspiration
and solace in curious play. I think more than curiosity, which most people
have, they both showed a profound disinterest in hiding their interests or
fear of looking dumb.

That might be the biggest difference between smart guys who work jobs and
geniuses who pave new paths. It is both sad and empowering because it means we
simply get in our own way when we try to be "serious adults".

------
booleandilemma
I've seen 3 Claude Shannon articles on HN in the past 2 weeks. What's the
occasion?

~~~
hvass
There's a new biography on him, A Mind at Play

[https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-
Informatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-
Information/dp/1476766681/)

------
mathperson
Honestly it is hard for me to regard as very credible an author who openly
admits not knowing who shannon was before starting this book..

~~~
devopsproject
We all start from zero. If a person can't be knowledgeable after a bit of
rigor, then no one can be trusted in any subject and we can see how everything
will become "fake news" and "alterntative facts"

~~~
mathperson
I suppose. Another part of this I try to read science writers who have a bit
of a stem background, like the very good
[http://www.ericaklarreich.com/](http://www.ericaklarreich.com/)

I find people with no stem background, even when they mean very well and work
hard, just miss a lot when doing writing of this sort. They simply do not and
in a real sense cannot understand the process of creating new scientific
knowledge. Their impressions are merely metaphorical and not direct. Having
the words 'genius' in the title...ugh. I suppose I am maybe not the target
audience for this though.

------
lhuser123
Well, I find it very motivational.

------
Graziano_M
You lost me at "10'000 hours".

