> I think I've met one true genius in my life so far
I'm really curious what your criterion or threshold for genius is. I realize it's likely a fuzzy topic and we don't need to get into a tangent about the philosophy of intelligence (although I'm not opposed to it, just trying to avoid a larger discussion), but you must have some way of deciding that the person you are referencing is a genius. How did you determine that?
I'll try to pin it down, but it will be an approximation. The depth of insight gained from simple observations that turned out to be undeniably true over a long span of time is the thing that convinced me of this. It wasn't luck of the draw or something like that just piercing thought aiming at the heart of the problem and never at the symptoms. It's mostly about clarity rather than anything else. And I only realized the level of insight that went into this years after the fact, at the moment it did not even strike me as particularly special. So think of that as a label tagged on much later.
At my organization (large thinktank that works with IGO’s) we use mensa testing and have a bias towards pattern recognition. Its not perfect but it serves as metric for aptitude.
I'm really curious what your criterion or threshold for genius is. I realize it's likely a fuzzy topic and we don't need to get into a tangent about the philosophy of intelligence (although I'm not opposed to it, just trying to avoid a larger discussion), but you must have some way of deciding that the person you are referencing is a genius. How did you determine that?