My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent (https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about...). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" (http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html), and apocryphal stories indicate he may have written it from his own experience.
Beyond some point, being smart really isn't a good thing. You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you. You live on top of a cold, windy, snowy mountain while everybody else lives in a warm and fertile valley. Yet you choose to live on the mountain anyways, because after you lose everything, you realize that's just who you are, and there's really nothing you can do about it beyond accepting it.
And so you are insane. You don't care about being comfortable, or about being paid well, or about people liking you, or having fewer problems in life, or anything else that makes sense. You just care about obsessing over that something.
People always talk about genius like it's some good thing. Maybe sometimes, if you obsess over something society values. But few people talk about the price of genius, probably because we're taught from an early age that being smart is a good thing and so few people go that far off the deep end anyways. I think it should be said, especially for HN types, that there can always be too much of a good thing. That it's healthy to relax, not take things so seriously, have a sense of humor, and relate to other people. That a good life is worth living. Because to forget that is a life lost.
I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging.
I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an excuse for antisocial behavior.
Here’s the thing. If you’re so brilliant, you should be able to learn basic social skills, manners, and hygiene. It’s not that hard. And if you do find it hard, maybe it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.
One can be obsessive about a thing without being offensive about that thing or anything else. I think you are equating two separate issues. Social awkwardness is just not the same thing as anti-social behaviour.
And in my industry experience, having an encyclopedic knowledge of an obscure subject around a bunch of imposters does not go well, doubly so if their career depends on convincing others that they have skills on par with yours despite never putting the time into acquiring them.
To me it's like they demand everyone be fungible when the real power move is using comparative advantage to build a winning team.
> it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.
The problem isn't that savant's are above these things, but that they matter very little to them. They aren't helpless geniuses who don't know the path to learning social skills, but understand that the reward of those skills just isn't high enough for them personally as it is to most people.
Its hard to relate to that because most human beings are wired to feel good in social situations, but there are those who feel good only when they obsess over the things that they're interested in (and find deep satisfaction from). Put differently, the reward centers that guide most people don't guide them as much. They understand what they're "giving up", but while for others that might be something of great value, it means very little to them.
I might agree with you. People who are successful are able and willing to push that EQ bound, because they recognize all implementation achievements (e.g. businesses) are multi-person efforts. People who are "geniuses" oftentimes don't connect those dots.
I think the key to understanding insanity is that it's a visceral, primal thing. It is difficult for one to recognize, let alone control, let alone master. Insanity from genius even more so, because people are socially conditioned to "want to be smart" and that "bad things happen to people who are not smart", even though "being smart" is multivariate. It takes a lot of work to let go. Being able to understand the mental models of these people and empathizing with them is how we can build a kinder world, and maybe capture some of the surplus these people have to offer as a nice bonus.
10x engineers thing is a lot lot simpler than that. In vast majority of cases, it's just one normal engineer surrounded by a crowd of people who should have been flipping burgers, but ended up working as 0.1x engineers because of "talent shortage" which is in fact just some bosses being too greedy to pay normal wages. Over time, abysmal productivity and quality of their work becomes the norm, and one normal guy who randomly happened to be there is seen as a semi-deity.
Yes, and it's often enabled by the manager and the rest of the team who allow the 10xer to work from home several days in a row on a sprint until he's changed the code so drastically that only he can understand it
To be fair, if someone really does produce useful code that none of their peers or coworkers can understand, I wouldn't dismiss the notion that they are somehow "different."
I know you're railing against the Linus Torvalds man-child types, and I agree that I wouldn't really enjoy working with a person like that. The parent comment wasn't really about excusing poor treatment of others though, it was just describing the isolation that can be felt.
What makes you think it would be easier for that person to develop the social skills than for their peers to learn to understand their work? Maybe those people just neglected to develop their reasoning/coding skills? Or maybe people's brains actually can work in profoundly different ways.
The people who dominate the stereotype of "genius" are also those who have debilitating mental disorders, and far too many people can't separate those two things.
> You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you.
Given that this is not an experience which is at all unique to intelligent people, why should the assumption be that, when this happens to someone intelligent, somehow it was caused by intelligence?
I once worked at a place where one interview question was, "Imagine you were digging a hole x by y by z and it look q minutes. How much dirt was in the hole at time r"?
I instantly answered, "There's no dirt in the hole, because a hole is defined by there not being any dirt".
They were like, "Wow, that was fast. Most people we interview take five to ten minutes to come to that conclusion".
Me: "I have a really bad feeling about this".
Unfortunately, I was right. I don't think the people there were bad people or dumb people (both are subjective value judgments, and that just seems passé now), but it was a really bad fit for me because I couldn't relate to anybody, even professionally. It sucks because if I was able to relate to more people at that time, I would have had more options I would have been happy with, and choice is wealth. Instead, I had to burn cycles outside of work on professional development in order to feel like I'm not trapped, which inevitably causes burnout. It's a horrible feeling. I wish I was more ignorant and felt less pain about these esoteric, really meaningless matters. But I can't. And I'm nowhere close to being a genius, so they have it worse than I do.
This reminds me of how Piaget's theories of childhood development were discredited. The researchers would spread out three pencils, and ask the kid if there were now more pencils. The kid knew there weren't, but generously tried to understand what the adult might want? Perhaps there's a new meaning to the word here?
And also a recent Facebook puzzle, apparently outside the problem statement were instructions to return answers by Facebook Messenger, then the puzzle question was "to respond, what do you open first?" Trick question, except a bogus answer as my Facebook Messenger was already open.
As a research mathematician, one comes across as a complete jerk if one is too literal about a question one is actually smart enough to reformulate properly. We give others the benefit of the doubt all the time, math or life. Here, the only sensible interpretation is the volume of dirt remaining in what will soon become hole.
If they seriously meant "no the hole is empty" then yes cut the interview short, and run don't walk out of there.
This interview question sounds disingenuous, if this was the only correct answer. It’s sort of a poorly worded question, and I’d only ask it if I wanted to see how the interviewer poked holes in it. Even then I’d be sort of an asshole for it. But the main reason it’s disingenuous is the same reason HN has the rule to always be generous with your interpretation of comments. Words are ambiguous, and people take lots of shortcuts to save time at the expense of precision. ‘Hole’ in the context of this question can very reasonably be generously be interpreted as ‘the space where the final hole will be at time q’. It sounds like a ‘gotcha question’, and these have no place in an interview.
Meanwhile, keep your head up. You can sort of learn to turn down the literal interpretation impulses of your brain, if that’s something causing you pain. It’s something I’ve gotten better at over the last 30 years (though its still really hard when I’m tired or stressed). It makes casual encounters easier, and more enjoyable when I do.
Couldn't agree more. I also think that it's very easy for society to conflate genius and success. There are loads of folks I went to college with who, to me, were conventionally what I'd think of as geniuses. Extremely talented from a young age, remarkably fully formed, with a very well developed sense of intuition that many folks I've worked with will never achieve.
Regardless, ten years on, that doesn't always translate into self-awareness, happiness, or the ability to shape their lives into something fulfilling long term. For me, the early few years of my career were a very rude awakening of this sort, but once I accepted it, an entirely new world opened up to me. Ironically enough, not feeling the need to compare myself to someone who was a "genius" freed me to truly develop myself to a point I'd never be capable of when I was younger.
Your comment makes sense if we replace “smart” with “crazy”. Note that most geniuses are not crazy and don’t act crazy. I doubt any parents pointed to young Einstein, Feynmann, or von Neumann and told their kids not to be like them.
Also, I don’t think there’s such thing as being too smart. Worrying about that is like worrying that you will have to pay lots of taxes if you get rich. A good problem to have.
Beyond some point, being smart really isn't a good thing. You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you. You live on top of a cold, windy, snowy mountain while everybody else lives in a warm and fertile valley. Yet you choose to live on the mountain anyways, because after you lose everything, you realize that's just who you are, and there's really nothing you can do about it beyond accepting it.
And so you are insane. You don't care about being comfortable, or about being paid well, or about people liking you, or having fewer problems in life, or anything else that makes sense. You just care about obsessing over that something.
People always talk about genius like it's some good thing. Maybe sometimes, if you obsess over something society values. But few people talk about the price of genius, probably because we're taught from an early age that being smart is a good thing and so few people go that far off the deep end anyways. I think it should be said, especially for HN types, that there can always be too much of a good thing. That it's healthy to relax, not take things so seriously, have a sense of humor, and relate to other people. That a good life is worth living. Because to forget that is a life lost.