
The Curse of Genius - sohkamyung
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-curse-of-genius
======
friedegg
A decade ago, my niece went in for pre-K testing, and the teacher showed her a
list of animals, asking her to name them. Picture of a dog, spot. Picture of a
cat, whiskers. Picture of a rabbit, hoppy, etc. The teacher tells her parents
that she failed that section and needs to work on being able to identify
animals. They point out to the teacher that she had asked her to name them,
not identify them, and that's exactly what she did. Even now, she's a very
smart, but very literal thinker, and it's fair to say it has caused her some
conflict in school.

~~~
kthejoker2
Anecdotes are fun.

In first grade my sister had to write the first letters of pictures. The
teacher corrected her: "No, no. Fff.Fff... Flower starts with F."

My sister: "No, no. Tuh ..tuh .. tulip starts with T."

Teacher had the nerve to call my mom and tell her my sister had been
disrespectful.

~~~
taneq
Reminds me of a joke I read once.

Teacher: OK, who can start a sentence with "I"?

Student: I is...

Teacher: No, no no, it's "I am..."

Student: I _am_ the ninth letter of the alphabet.

------
Mikeb85
The 'curse' of genius is more the fact that society is designed to function
for average people. The average person goes to school, gets training in
something, works their job at an average pace, etc...

'Genius' goes one of two ways. Either they have a good support system around
them (usually meaning money) and advance, then later have chance for
entrepreneurship and a career they can advance at their own pace (meaning
quicker than average). Or they are stuck in a system designed for average
people and they get bored then act out, become depressed, etc...

I can relate somewhat. I could speak very young. Could read at 2. Could speak,
read and write two languages and use computers (we're talking old IBM PCs pre-
Windows, when hardly any normal people used computers) at 4. Was always in
advanced classes through school. Built (somewhat crude) robots and did
computer programming in elementary school.

Of course, none of this provided me with particularly great social skills, so
eventually I gave up on intellectual pursuits and plied myself with drugs and
alcohol. In adulthood wound up working several careers, playing poker
professionally and travelling for awhile, did some day-trading, did a bunch of
university, but I mostly enjoy eating, drinking, travelling, and hanging out
with my girlfriend.

Anyhow, the gist of it is that being on an 'advanced' path in my youth wasn't
particularly great. Not sure if I'm was 'cursed' genius or a somewhat
intelligent person with a mental disorder (ADHD, bipolar?). Building a
business now so wouldn't say I'm unsuccessful, but certainly not what I
imagined when I was younger. Then again, I'm also far happier today.

~~~
yhoiseth
Thanks for sharing. Glad to hear that you're happier today.

I'd be interested in hearing what changes to society you think you would have
made things better for you. Also, in the absence of any societal changes, do
you think your parents should have done anything differently?

~~~
Mikeb85
I'm not sure society would be better if everything was geared towards people
who are outliers or more productive earlier. It might be worse for everyone
else. Several Asian societies seem hyper concerned with academic achievement
and work productivity, and have a fairly toxic work culture with poor work-
life balance as a result.

------
Fellshard
One thing that helps is the lightbulb moment: The most interesting thing you
can know is other people. Not as objects, curiosities, but real, truly
unfathomable beings. You'll never truly understand what's in someone else's
head, but you can still spend your life striving to get to know them better,
and to perhaps know them well enough to try and make their lives better.

There is the age-old cliche of intelligent people finding 'normal people'
dull. That idea starts to fade when you really, truly embed yourself in
another person's life, or they manage to embed themselves in yours before you
realize that's what's happening.

Regardless, it's not all hopeless. It's a harder path, for sure, but it can be
traveled.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _There is the age-old cliche of intelligent people finding 'normal people'
> dull. That idea starts to fade when you really, truly embed yourself in
> another person's life, or they manage to embed themselves in yours before
> you realize that's what's happening._

Does it, though? I mean, the part when you're discovering another human's
story is interesting, but for me, that was always modulated by the feelings I
had that made this person feel special. Beyond that, once the feelings fade or
when there are none involved, I've always found the - to quote 'bartread -
""average" life lived well (partner, children, family, home, job)" to be very
dull. Soap-opera level boring. IME, people get boring once they start living
this average life. They forget their dreams, their own insights about the
world, their own goals - everything that made them interesting and special -
and engage in the age-old pattern of "partner, children, family, home, job,
retirement, death".

Or maybe I'm saying it wrong. People do get interesting with enough effort. It
takes _a lot of effort_ to dig through these layers of "average life well
lived", to find and remind them of their old-forgotten passions and thoughts,
and only then you get to have interesting conversations about molecular
biology, or anthropology, or that time they wanted to be an actor, or how can
we improve our community - as opposed to talking about diapers, who married
whom, who just had a kid, and how we all don't have money.

I'm probably an outlier here. I don't claim above-average intelligence, but I
do find "normalcy" boring and sort-of pointless, in a recursive, self-
propagating way.

~~~
noonespecial
"partner, children, family, home, job"

I found all of these "ordinary" things in life to be quite extraordinary when
they happened to me!

~~~
jdietrich
That's rather the point though, isn't it? _Your baby_ is fascinating because
it's yours, but babies in the abstract aren't actually very interesting. They
pass through the same developmental milestones at roughly the same rate and
have the same (very limited) capacity for novelty. I've never met a baby with
a unique perspective on the Israel-Palestine problem or a fabulous collection
of golden age comic books. It's a bit like following someone else's baseball
team - unless you're emotionally invested, it's really rather dull.

Maybe I'm just a cynical misanthrope, but I'm not very interested in the
mundane minutiae of other people's lives, nor do I expect them to be very
interested in the mundane minutiae of mine. It would be quite weird if all
seven billion of us were innately fascinating.

An interesting question is how interestingness is distributed. A normal
distribution seems plausible, but while I can think of people who are three-
sigma interesting, I'm not sure I could think of someone who is three-sigma
dull. Mass media would seem to suggest that a power-law distribution is more
likely - most of us are really rather boring, but there's a long tail of
exceptionally interesting people.

~~~
camjohnson26
Yeah I think any random baby is more interesting than a comic book collection
but maybe that’s just me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, it's just you. A random baby below 2 y.o. is slightly less interesting
(and less mentally developed) than a kitten. Unless you have an interest in
medicine/psychology, there's not much to see there. It's also perceived a bit
weird/creepy to be overly interested in other people's babies.

Seriously, were I to be given a chance to spent an hour with a random baby (!=
_my_ baby, that's a different thing) vs. an hour with a random comic book, I'd
pick the comic book every time.

Can we admit that just because we're socially expected to consider something
the cutest and most best thing in the world, doesn't mean it's _actually_ all
that interesting?

------
dusted
(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of
classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I
liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names",
class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me.

grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this
is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other kids
point and laugh at me before starting class.

Was evaluated by psychologist, I remember I was given stupid puzzles, the kind
you played with in kindergarten, asking me to complete them, I was offended by
this and refused, she pushed me and I did a few before breaking down from
being treated like an imbecile. Test showed I was probably not.

grade 3, handed in assignment in basic, we were supposed to write a story, and
I wrote a small program with arrays of words, and arrays of indexes to print
the story.. Teacher told me it didn't count to "write some hieroglyphs", I
told he it was a program, she explained to me "it's not possible to just make
a program".

These set the tone of my further education. Still working to get past those
(and so many more) events. I still feel like I'm worthless. Thanks school! I
still got to be a software developer though.

~~~
derp_dee_derp
> grade 3, handed in assignment in basic, we were supposed to write a story,
> and I wrote a small program with arrays of words, and arrays of indexes to
> print the story.. Teacher told me it didn't count to "write some
> hieroglyphs", I told he it was a program, she explained to me "it's not
> possible to just make a program".

yeah, i'm with the teacher on this one. you didn't complete the assignment. At
grade 3, a lot of the value in homework is simply in learning how to do
homework correctly. You didn't do the homework correctly, so it absolutley
shouldn't have counted to "write some hieroglyphs".

~~~
dusted
Well, she told us to write it down, not how, she could have asked me to run
and print it instead. At that age, I still had a sense of wonder about the
world, and I thought exploring it was why we were here. I didn't understand
that conforming was more important that exploring, but I understand that now.

~~~
camjohnson26
There’s a time and a place for both. If you’re going through security at the
airport, conform. If you’re learning something in your free-time, explore.

------
newman8r
Makes me think about the intro to Huxley's Doors of Perception[0] - genius is
probably a pretty lonely place. Fortunately that's one problem I don't have to
deal with.

> From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
> Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of
> inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into" ...
> But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even
> nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the
> insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where
> ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of
> memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling.

[0]
[https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerce...](https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf)

------
ungifted
I went through a gifted program starting in 3rd grade but I don’t think I’m
gifted.

Most of what I think seems obvious. For example, the ability to ask simple
questions in the moment is a skill anyone can learn. For the highest level
poker player, analytical thoughts are rather systemic but require emotional
and intellectual control.

Had I focused on any one thing, I think I could had been a brilliant
programmer, physicist, poker player etc. But I haven’t. I’ve been cursed by
entrepreneurship, activism, esoteric ideas and other things that have had low
utility.

While I’m ambivalent about most people’s intellect, for truly gifted people
I’m somewhat intimidated by them. (Like many yc founders.) Like, oh I could
never execute that life plan and business in the way they did because it’s
perfect.

My point is I think it’s all about process. Asking questions, reasoning from
first principles, obsessive focus, curiosity and resiliency will make any
person gifted.

~~~
everdrive
Gifted might just mean top 10% of society. Which means that if you're in the
10th percentile there are still very many people who are more intelligent than
you. Further, for any given field of expertise, you'll still bump into people
who can intellectually wipe the floor with you (in their topic of expertise)
unless you stick around and learn enough to surpass them.

Additionally, a lot of people mistake learned knowledge or implicit social
values for intelligence, and so it can take a long time in a new environment
to be able to actually demonstrate to anyone that you're intelligent.

I know this isn't the primary point of your comment, but it can quite easy to
not feel very intelligent in a lot circumstances.

------
Nasrudith
I am somewhat of a mixed bag myself - certainly not to those extremes but
above average. On the autistic spectrum and - withim normal developmental time
tables but I had a habit of unthreading myself from infant car seats
repeatedly and an unusually far back memory. I always remember being able to
read but lacking much of an attention span for it.

I will refrain from the "G"-word and say I went to college at 16 and skipped
trigonometry because I knew enough about SOH CAH TOA to work around the other
details - it was just a subset of geometry so I didn't get why it was
considered the more advanced class. B-average Computer Engineering student.
Not the best luck with careers or self starting with side projects - late ADHD
diagnosis which in retrospect made sense didn't come up too much because I
found most of the stuff interesting.

Anyway my personal suspicion is that much of the curse comes from mismatch
with society and its paradigms and the difficulty of finding kindred spirits.

It often feels like the masses are barking mad and yet you are the crazy one
for pointing out it makes no goddamned sense.

Like charging a teen as an adult - especially for status offenses like
sexting. Practically nobody questions the hypocrisy of "treated as a minor
until we find it convenient otherwise" or takes the "insufficiently
functioning brain argument" to give a cut off age to elder votes because we
can't trust them to be fulky functioning mentally.

Or the interviewing process judging people on suits and posture is batshit
insane, that they find people incapable of or not mimicking their tone less
trustworthy for being insufficiently deceptive and more.

~~~
whatshisface
> _Or the interviewing process judging people on suits and posture is batshit
> insane, that they find people incapable of or not mimicking their tone less
> trustworthy for being insufficiently deceptive and more._

If the G factor if intelligence is really "general," won't it also improve
your ability to posture and choose suits?

------
happy-go-lucky
> Even Albert Einstein, one of the most emblematic examples of genius, wrote
> in 1952: “It is strange to be known so universally and yet be so lonely.”

Really so strange. I'm just trying to see how lonely he must have felt having
to keep to himself.

~~~
cryptonector
Feynman didn't have that problem, so it's not universal, but it does seem like
most geniuses are afflicted with loneliness.

~~~
donecarejustsav
I don't agree with that given his lifestyle. He wanted to connect but rarely
could, hence an abundance of mostly shallow affection beyond his first wife.

~~~
HNLurker2
Here is a morbid thought, the loneliest thing is that we didn't get to hear
his last words.

------
netwanderer3
Through the game of tennis, I quickly learned that in order to achieve a state
of equilibrium or balance, everything must be in moderation. When you hit a
tennis ball, it's always a trade off between power and precision. You cannot
gain in one area without losing in the other. Same principles applied to most
things in life.

The problem with current methodology is we mostly measure intelligence
strictly through very few standard categories like mathematics. Sure,
mathematics is a universal language for everything in life, but to thrive in a
human society it requires many more skills than just math. It's almost a given
that when you have a gifted child measured by one of those standard
categories, this kid often would have some types of deficiency in other areas
that have not been measured because they are unestablished.

10% of human population have the genetics that provide them with much higher
capabilities than the rest in some certain areas. Though this would take
enormous effort, but if we provide adequate support to compensate for the
areas where they lack, this should help raising them to a level matching the
areas where they really excel, and thus achieving a higher overall equilibrium
state. However, because the rest of our society is still operating at a much
lower baseline, so even then it's always going to be a challenge for these
individuals to fit in. Maybe they are just ahead, or behind, of our time in
terms of evolutionary development?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _in order to achieve a state of equilibrium or balance, everything must be
> in moderation. When you hit a tennis ball, it 's always a trade off between
> power and precision. You cannot gain in one area without losing in the
> other. Same principles applied to most things in life._

You mention "higher equilibrium" further in the comment, but I think it needs
to be said explicitly: the trade-off only exists if you're at 100%
utilization. If all the aspects you're balancing add up to less than 100% of
your capabilities, you can improve all of them simultaneously without having
to trade anything off.

------
geggam
Having worked in Silicon Valley with some really really smart people. I wonder
how many people think they are genius because their circle is limited?

When you work in the valley for any period of time you think you might have a
shot, and you might. If you get a chance to meet one of the founders of a well
known valley company and have a conversation the realization that luck had
nothing to do with their success should happen. Its truly humbling to meet a
genius and get a glimpse of how their brain works.

~~~
peteretep
> the realization that luck had nothing to do with their success should happen

Convince me.

~~~
Nasrudith
The strong version is trivially disproveable - if they had got eaten by a
dingo as an infant you would never seen any success regardless of how smart
said poor illfated baby would be.

That said talent, genius, and drive certainly are factors even with
priviledged upbringing like needing money for education, seed capital and
ability to dedicate their timr without side jobs. While self-made men, women
and nonbinaries are rare and rarer still without posers - there are some who
if they were born poorer would only have had their rise delayed by a decade at
most.

In contrast others who are peak "idiot heir" prove that it isn't /just/
privilege that brings success as they find ruin no matter their connections,
starting wealth, and a futile attempt by their parents to teach how to
perpetuate their birthright.

~~~
geggam
Being eaten by a dingo is a strawman.

Given two people in the same place with the same opportunity you will see the
difference. Yes chaos can happen and create challenges. Genius rises above it.

~~~
Nasrudith
It was a point about survivorship bias in the most blunt and literal way. Not
all challenges may be risen above. I agree that they can rise above but not
always.

~~~
geggam
If you want to compare yourself to dead people... so be it ?

------
0815test
Sounds more like the Curse of /r/iamverysmart...

------
Moxdi
>We don’t yet know why this is, or whether it’s down to nature, nurture or
both. One study shows that among members of Mensa in America, the rate of ADHD
(attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is almost twice that diagnosed in
the general population.

>Among these individuals, the incidence of depression, anxiety and ADHD is
higher than in the average population.

how is adhd linked to gifted children?, i find this fact interesting...

~~~
jcora
That's such obvious selection bias. People who join Mensa have something to
prove.

~~~
throwawaymath
Is your alternative hypothesis that ADHD is twice as prevalent in people who
feel they have "something to prove"?

~~~
taneq
Maybe they ended up taking MENSA entry tests when they were meant to be doing
their taxes or something.

~~~
elcritch
Now _that_ sums of much of ADHD experience. More seriously, there are
indications that aspects of ADHD affect information processing in potentially
beneficial ways. I have a hunch that given the overall detriment ADHD has to
many life skills that ADHD genes would be selected along with genes for higher
IQ as a counterbalance, with both combined together conferring unique
advantages.

------
gwern
This damn Mensa survey again! The Mensa data which is the only empirical
support for this claim of a 'curse' is doubly self-selected, the claimed
effects absurdly strong, and contradicts pretty much all research on unbiased
high-IQ samples:
[https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1](https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1)

------
jason_slack
A kindergarten screening question that was given to my child:

What is a pair?

Most kids say either “socks” or “a fruit” (because hearing pair in this
sentence is indeed ambiguous...)

The answer they really wanted was “two of something”.

~~~
dTal
I wonder how many adults would give the desired answer, with no context. I
don't think I would.

------
leoc
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional)
.

~~~
dusted
Interesting! Does sound like a spectrum.

------
Haga
The curse of the genius is that when you are hyper recombinativeinventive
every problem looks like a need for a new hammer and that your first success
silences all opposition permanently. The other extrem is that cooperations
beloved mediocrity, produced by systemic processes, risk avoidance and
intrigant politics today prevent game changers from even reaching entry level.

~~~
taneq
So wait, do these cursed geniuses "silence all opposition permanently" or are
they "prevented from even reaching entry level"?

~~~
Haga
The successful ones silence opposition until they fail big time. Then they
become ammunition to prevent hiring their kind at entrance level?

------
calebgilbert
Curse of the genius: "F*cking brilliant"

------
sixQuarks
I remember understanding people talking but not knowing how to speak when I
was very little. I guess I’m a genius

~~~
cheesymuffin
What's your IQ? Mine is 163. It would be tough to argue that I'm not a genius.

~~~
cm2012
Considering your apparent lack of social awareness...

~~~
asdf21
Yes, knowing your IQ score and saying it outloud is badthink.

~~~
collyw
Everyone I have known who has bragged about their IQ has been a knob.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Well this guy who bragged to me one time that he had an IQ of 100 was
definitely something.

