
Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? (2008) - wslh
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-2
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simulate
In another New Yorker piece, Steven Milhauser explores aged genius in his
short story, "In the Reign of Harad IV"

Excert: _he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days,
that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be
difficult and without forgiveness._

Link: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-
of...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-of-harad-iv)

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Xcelerate
This may be a little off-topic, but as I was reading the article, I started
wondering about something. The author uses examples of genius in art and
literature, and noted how Cézanne's early works weren't "very good" and how
his later one's were much better, whereas Picasso's early works were
considered his best.

So I googled paintings of both artists, and I'm perplexed. I have absolutely
no clue what is considered "great". Obviously this is because my work is in
science and I know next to nothing about art, but I'm still kind of curious
what makes a work great in art and literature.

For instance, there's thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of painters in the
world right now. And if you select the top 100 and showed me their paintings,
and then showed me a Picasso, I wouldn't be able to point out why Picasso's is
"better".

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also mentioned as one
of the best poems of all time. I'll admit, it's very beautiful, but I just
don't understand what makes it _that_ much more amazing than a contemporary
poet's work.

Imagine if you took the world's population and wiped everyone's memories of
great artists, and then asked them to reevaluate which which works are the
"greatest". Would we arrive at the same conclusions? Without the bias of
knowing "this is a famous artist, therefore his work must be good", would the
rankings of art remain the same?

Unlike my literature teachers in high school, I don't believe in "magical
qualities", so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate
the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily
calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field
of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)

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vanderZwan
The thing about a work of art being "good" is that it also largely depends on
the surrounding art traditions of the time. Picasso's early works contributed
most to new aesthetic thinking and the discussion of the nature of art, and
within that context they are revolutionary and genius.

To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius
piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics
and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as
they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted
the Fountain as art and proof that _their_ readymades are therefore also
valuable art.

Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get
the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would
expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how
the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied
experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a
painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG.

As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the
external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to
art. Art is about (partially shared) _subjective_ experiences, which can still
be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same
meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work
mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the
input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective
experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited.

I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice
empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical
insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you
a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.

~~~
monocasa
And as an engineer, this makes sense to me. True innovation in the field is
respected just as much as if not more than implementation details.

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jgill
This is a really good link to share. Thanks, I also ordered Thinking, Fast and
Slow the book because of this posting and the comments. This thread has been
pretty interesting to me even from an "at speed of thought" perspective.

Certainly in lower levels of education, "fast" thinking against known problems
and problemsets is the norm (at least in the United States). I worked with a
few "fast" thinkers that fell into a strange, at the time to me, category of
people that I could recognize as intelligent and could solve a certain class
of issue or problem easily, but when it came to a more difficult problem space
or perhaps one that requires delayed gratification (or no real external
recognition/validation/praise) they would give up. The "deep" thinkers seemed
to give equal or near equal weight to the validity of options in many cases.
There's a time, place, and type of problem that can benefit from each mode of
thinking.

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sesqu
Prior and subsequent to reading the book, I suggest you read some of the
critique the book has recieved, as the topic is quite anecdotal.

~~~
jgill
Thanks, I'm going to read it with a skeptical but open mind.

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VLM
Its interesting to analogize thinking with athleticism.

There are some athletes who just outperform most people in all areas as a
class.

There are athletes who are experts in certain fields and useless in others
(don't enter a football defensive lineman in an ultra-marathon, etc)

Some athletes peak very young. Some train very slowly, some develop very fast.
Some athletes start training late in life.

It is mystifying if you're trapped in the dead/dying idea of mind-body
dualism, but if the mind and brain are just another pile of nutrient consuming
protein just like muscle, it makes sense that the observations are similar.

I would imagine if it were easy to measure, we'd find similar performance
trends WRT pancreas or kidney function.

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squozzer
To me, the question of precocity vs. late blooming can be summed up thusly:

1) The 70-year lifespan is a recent development. Producing great work in one's
20s and 30s was a necessity because one's 40s and 50s weren't guaranteed.
Social inertia took over from there.

2) The young also have greater marketability (looks, energy) and can usually
be controlled more easily. This makes them more attractive to backers. This
matters a lot in many fields, but in the arts especially, where the artist
receives as much attention as their art.

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otakucode
I can think of 2 reasons very quickly - #1, the brain is far more capable and
plastic and active in adolescence than it is in adulthood or later. #2, human
beings have a finite lifespan. If you wish to get further than others, you
have to surpass their development at all stages.

Until we can change biology, no one is going to have a brain that works better
than an adolescent, that's just how we evolved.

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zb
Edward Tufte does a pretty entertaining takedown of Galenson's work in his
book _Beautiful Evidence_. The excerpt in question is online:

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001Zl)

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anomie
When I read the title I assumed it was an article about the unfairness of the
education system, and the whole-life impact of an assessment carried out at an
arbitrary point in your 18th year. Perhaps that's an even more pernicious
example of the problem.

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imjk
I read this years ago and thought he had a great premise for a book. I guess
it kinda ties into Gladwell's Outliers and David and Goliath, but I still hope
he writes more on this topic in the future.

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davidw
Offhand remark regarding the title: everyone can recognize the brilliance of a
5 year old doing calculus, because it's still sort of in the realm of
something people may have encountered, and can compare to their own
experience. Compare with someone who is, say, 30, and doing some topological
quantum lattice tensor dilithium crystal quark extractor thing, it's just
"blub" \- it's so far beyond most of us we can't tell much more than that
person is quite smart at something we know nothing about.

~~~
VLM
I would agree with and extend your remarks that it takes a certain level of
competence in a field to correctly evaluate someone at a higher level in the
field, and as the level of the evaluated person increases, the required level
of the evaluator increases.

Someone with a BS in physics level of knowledge or maybe grad degree can
possibly evaluate Feynman vs Einstein as per the debate in the comments today.
However, I suspect most people can't do a useful evaluation of those two.

There are obvious HN on topic analogies with coding, system design, database
design, network design.

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Mz
Excerpt:

 _Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with
precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires
the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth._

It is also tied up with the idea that "geniuses" are fast. It was nice to see
profiles of Maryam Mirzakhani indicate that she was a deep thinker, not a fast
thinker. Maybe we can start changing some of these popular mis-conceptions.

~~~
toehead2000
Do you or anyone else have any further sources studying this split between
"fast thinkers" and "deep thinkers"? I would be very interested in a way to
find people who were "deep;" it seems like most of the technical interviewing
techniques screen more for "fast" people.

~~~
mahyarm
I think a better distinction are qualities of intelligence. For example a
meticulous person will do well in a hard pattern matching puzzle, but ask them
to do symbol substitution and they will be relatively slow and get a low
score.

~~~
mrexroad
interesting. the "fast vs deep" comment intrigued me; i find i can go
exceedingly deep when i can let things "simmer." to your comment, i had an
intelligence test administered as a teen and the two outliers were basically
symbol substation (< avg) and pattern matching (high).

~~~
mahyarm
It's a common pattern with engineering types. In programming you have to be
highly detailed and accurate because computer languages are not forgiving, and
you have to notice tricky patterns to fix bugs. It's called being meticulous
officially I think. This is why you need someone trained to interpret your IQ
test, you cant just feed them into a scantron.

There is a skill component to those things although. You could practice them a
bit and improve your scores significantly. But is that really intelligence or
just skill? It will always be a combination.

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aaron695
I love the meta.

It's pretty obvious as time goes on, unfortunately it's not better. For some
who didn't maximise their earlier it looks like they did, but no, they didn't
get better.

But it's great art to think it does. So perhaps it's true after all. It's a
nice artistic article.

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dominotw
older ppl can be genius too. Is that the tldr?

~~~
moultano
If you find yourself wanting tldrs, maybe this isn't the site for you.

~~~
jessriedel
That's completely mistaken. Everyone has finite time, and we need a way to
find out what's worth reading. HackerNews and the Internet in general is
filled with unnecessarily bloated articles.

Folks have been using tldr's in the academic sphere for centuries; they're
called 'abstracts'.

~~~
panzagl
Right, so you need a site that provides tldrs, whereas HN was built for
discussion of the finer points of a topic. Neither desire is wrong, but you
can't criticize the New Yorker for not being Reader's Digest.

