I think that there is a lot of revisionism in the concept of "genius".
Just look at the movie "Amadeus". It looks like Mozart genius is the envy of the mediocre Salieri. In fact, Salieri was an incredible composer himself.
Then you have people like John Carmack. He is a figure in the game industry. But one of the best Doom ever has been developed without him.
The solitary genius creates an interesting narrative, but it is just a simplification of the reality. Too much get attributed to individuals once they achieve fame. This is similar to the "survivor bias", where we also attribute more to the individual and his ideas and abilities than it really is worth.
> Hailed for his “otherworldly ingenuity,” Tao won the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 at the age of 31. Yet he rejects lofty notions of genius. What really matters, he writes, is “hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”
This is for me, a more down to earth, realistic explanation.
>I think that there is a lot of revisionism in the concept of "genius". Just look at the movie "Amadeus". It looks like Mozart genius is the envy of the mediocre Salieri. In fact, Salieri was an incredible composer himself.
That's not a "revisionism in the concept of "genius"" -- just a misrepresentation of Salieri (at best). A revisionism in the concept of genius would involve redefining what genius itself means. And in any case, nobody really thinks of Salieri as a big a genius as Mozart, movie or not.
>Then you have people like John Carmack. He is a figure in the game industry. But one of the best Doom ever has been developed without him.
So? John Carmac being a gaming genius or not doesn't preclude other geniuses, or other people being able to do equally good work (even less so since he already laid much of the groundwork for them for 2+ decades).
>The solitary genius creates an interesting narrative, but it is just a simplification of the reality. Too much get attributed to individuals once they achieve fame.
i personally have never understood john carmack's "genius" role. smart guy for sure. but in many ways, i tend to think of a genius being without a peer in their direct domain, and for john carmack, that's simply not the case. the most prominent example is tim sweeney. it's just that he isn't as big into marketing himself as carmack is. tim sweeney has arguably outdone carmack in many ways.
I would say Tao had everything this article talks about. Innate intelligence, a great environment where his parents made sure of his opportunities, and the hard work and persistence required to succeed.
The trouble is it's hard to know how many other people had exactly the same characteristics but not the luck. Without knowing that, we don't know how useful this definition of "genius" is.
In the case of mathematical accomplishments, there is an objective way to predict people's future possibilities: How young and how well does the person do in International Math Olympiads?
These Fields medalists all fit the pattern: Maryam Mirzakhani, Grigori Perelman, Terence Tao. Check out others at IMO Hall of Fame--all top listers I checked are doing very well, although many of them are still young and studying. [1]
So it does seem most top math prodigies who stay in the field or adjacent ones continue to produce exemplary works, and luck does not seem to play a huge factor there.
I mean, luck may contribute to a given single accomplishment, but it also happens because the person works on the problem from many different angles, using creative approaches based on sufficiently deep understanding. If someone tackles several problems with such ingenuity, at least one of them is bound to get solved.
In other fields, we have fewer objective measures, but from my years of experience teaching and mentoring gifted and highly gifted kids, you can tell how well they will do academically at the university level by the time they are in grade 3.
I am not an expert and I don't have the numbers, but not all "gifted" are talented in mathematics. Also the study of the field of mathematics is a task of endurance and slow but steady work, this is something the highest tier gifted (profoundly gifted) tend to suck at even with proper disipline training, but the profoundly gifted is so few in number that they don't really have an effect on the percentage.
Gifted often have one or more of the five overexcitabilities, one of those are Intellectual overexcitability, one can guess that a notable part of gifted who participate got Intellectual overexcitability, then you can make a guess that ca 20% of gifted got Intellectual overexcitability, that 50% fail to get that far in school because of the problems gifted face, then 30% from those gifted living in shitty enviroments that stops them from learning about the joy of mathematics and then 50% of those in turn actually puts in the time to learn mathematics, then 25% is actually good enough to enter so maybe: 0,375%
The education system really sucks for gifted kids, especially highly giften, exceptionally gifted and profoundly gifted, the mildly gifted and moderately gifted can be helped alot by the imperfect solution of being moved up a few classes.
>This is for me, a more down to earth, realistic explanation.
It's called modesty. Tao is the quintessential genius. Certainly hard work is a necessary condition for works of genius, but it's not in itself a sufficient explanation.
Then you have people like John Carmack. He is a figure in the game industry. But one of the best Doom ever has been developed without him.
Carmack has never been famous as a game designer. How good or bad his games turned out to be had a lot more to do with Romero, who actually did the game and level design work.
Carmack is worshipped as a game technologist. The legendary stories about him are all based on achieving things with limited hardware. For that he has few modern rivals.
Just look at the movie "Amadeus". It looks like Mozart genius is the envy of the mediocre Salieri. In fact, Salieri was an incredible composer himself.
Then you have people like John Carmack. He is a figure in the game industry. But one of the best Doom ever has been developed without him.
The solitary genius creates an interesting narrative, but it is just a simplification of the reality. Too much get attributed to individuals once they achieve fame. This is similar to the "survivor bias", where we also attribute more to the individual and his ideas and abilities than it really is worth.
> Hailed for his “otherworldly ingenuity,” Tao won the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 at the age of 31. Yet he rejects lofty notions of genius. What really matters, he writes, is “hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”
This is for me, a more down to earth, realistic explanation.