The myth of the "genius creator" requires that we ignore the people they build on, or insist they don't matter

I haven’t seen the full text, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that’s the creator genius myth they’re looking to debunk. The idea, as I take it, is not that people who are better than others at, say, physics or literature, don’t exist. As you point out, they clearly do.

I think what it’s taking aim at is more the idea that these people have a sort of divine inspiration. Or whatever the secular version of that is. We focus on the story of Archimedes having his “eureka” moment, or Newton having an apple fall on his head and suddenly understanding everything about gravity. Or a writer suddenly finding their “muse” and then producing something brilliant.

The reality is that these people are very smart, and not everyone can do what they do. By and large, however, brilliant ideas don’t just suddenly come to a gifted few. Einstein didn’t pull relativity out of his ass. They also worked very hard, and had the benefit of other people doing some of the work, or creating things that inspired or informed their work. I think we both agree that’s the case, I just don’t see anything in the text that implies this isn’t the original point as well.

Might have missed something though. I’m busy working very hard to still never be as good as Einstein or Newton.

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It doesn’t matter what kind of shockingly new genius you are. You still owe a debt to the people who developed math or language at the bare minimum. You owe a debt to the people who developed architecture so you can sit inside and think. Are you eating? You owe a debt to the people who identified what kinds of things are edible. It’s all a giant interdependent web.

You have to reject all that if you plan to claim taxation is theft.

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It’s like sports championships, how do we know there is not a kid two blocks over who if pushed into a sport like many were would destroy every record? Chance is a hell of a thing.

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All you are saying is that genius might remain undiscovered.

It’s manifestly true that 99.9% of kids two blocks over never surpass any records, no matter how well they select their field. (It’s kind of a mathematical inevitability, really.)

I think the point is more that the way in which some people present ‘genius’ has the effect of telling the 99.9%* that they might as well not bother because they are not geniuses.

That may not affect you but I can say from personal experience that the knowledge that you will never be more than mediocre at something can be a hell of a barrier to deciding to do something.

The reality of course is that 99.9% of all human activity is carried out by those who are at best mediocre. That there exist those who are capable of more should not mean that the achievements of those who are more pedestrian should be ignored.

Also the ‘genius creator’ thing can also obscure the work of those who actually did the inventive step - see for example Edison. Popular imagination= great inventor. Reality= perfectly decent inventor, great businessman and promoter.

Or take Columbus. Millions of people will still tell you Columbus ‘discovered America’. Ok, even if we were to accept that - who got him there?

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I get to hang out at the Fields Institute in Toronto from time to time, sometimes even meet Fields medal recipients. My experience of off-the-charts genius is that they are usually quick to acknowledge the bases for their discoveries and tell you with unabashed, geeky, enthusiasm the steps to their advances, often delighting in the little gems uncovered along the way.

Perhaps the endurance of the myth critiqued in the podcast and, with more vigour, dissected in Dr. Schlesinger’s CSI piece, has more to do with a lack of a broad social experience with doing science and developing knowledge. The “citizen scientist” movement is not without its flaws, indeed has been quite sharply criticized as outsourcing of scientific grunt work, but you do get a feel for the process, its joys and pitfalls.

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No genius lives in an intellectual vacuum:

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That’s a fair comment - and I am not really here to lionize the heroic, mythical independent individual. It’s just that I don’t think the antidote to the sole cultural presentation of one half of the story, to the exclusion of the whole, is to solely push the other half of the story, entirely denying the first.

The glorification of heroes finds its counterbalance in the ethos of petty hatred, envy and sabotage towards anyone extraordinarily competent. And neither sentiment should totally prevail.

Columbus was a scumbag extraordinaire - but it was specifically his personal (incorrect) vision and lobbying that propelled the expedition across the ocean.

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The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

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Well nuts, now I want to see the administration put on Equus. [Adjusts flow of NO2 to White House.] Soon. [Orders the screenplay on CD drop-shipped.]

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Nice timing! I might like ‘now’ a little better, at this.
Still, when the universe lends you idiots and hydrogen, making mellowed idiots and metallic hydrogen is nice to see. Columbus, man, I don’t think so; that’s like crediting air for being warm when there’s a hurricane.

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Once upon a time Noam Chomsky declared that the news media filtered out the left. It was a big part of that film about him in 1992.

I can’t remember if I realized it at the time, when the woman doing publicity for the film kept telling me she’d cancel the local paper, “nothing in it” or some years later when I got online, but old media has to filter, it lacks bandwidth. What it filters is secondary.

For maximum penetration, old media has to be broad, so the audience is there. Someone might want comics, others sports, but whatever, on the way they may stop and read something else. It’s that broadness which brings the viewers. Start narrowcasting, and it won’t go far. Some of the most useful stuff has been filler, raw material to interpret, not a talking head telling you what to think or do.

Most people don’t grasp this, so even after there could be a local, the internet congregates along narrow spaces.

I derived this from observing others, and probably somewhere some “expert” had already done a treatise on it, but it was my observation.

Yes, many people template. They move into a space by picking up buzzwords or reading the manual, but they don’t look at the situation. They can fit in, but they can’t challenge the status quo. If things don’t work out, it’s “but we followed the book”. If challenged with new ideas, they may say “we’re afraid of making mistakes”, which is valid, except they aren’t questioning the book, just accepting some perceived authority, which even at best might not fit the local situation. Or decision making is based on what others are doing “they did it there”, which isn’t making a decision, just following.

Or someone will read something and spout something back, as if they’re expert on the topic, you know because you read the same thing, or maybe said it yourself first.

There seems to be some common belief that “new thought” comes from some other, complete with some status to assure us he is knowing.

Yes, “geniuses” make leaps based on what others have done, but they are wide read, and synthesize from multiple sources. That beats repeating something you just read.

People can have “eureka moments”, because they are listening to the situation, and base response on that rather than apply some fixed solution. I did it when I was 16, I’ve done it because someone said something to me or in trying to explain something I have insight. You need stimulus to be “creative”.

I once made smoke come out of the ears of a psychologist, me saying a test was “too abstract”, so he proceeded to tell me about his degree etc. I had said something significant about myself, but he ignored it, wanting me to fit into a template.

For a long time, I thought the issue was situation, the school system or something making people follow templates rather than look at the situation. But maybe they lack “intelligence” or “creativity” to figure things by themselves.

There seems to be a dismissal of “creativity”, that it’s not valuable and thus anyone can take it. Yet if anyone can do it, why is it valued enough that others take it? If they have to spout what others have said, then it’s not something everyone can do.

Yes, some of it is quite easy, it comes to you while walking along the sidewalk, but it’s valuable because not everyone can do it.

In simple words, by the time someone writes a book or makes a movie that’s good, they don’t need to use characters that others have created. But first you have to understand what makes something good.

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Maybe even simpler words: You need to know the rules before you can do a good job of breaking them.

Yeah, but it’s not all mere chance that keeps lights under bushels. Imagine if Shakespeare had instead been his sister!

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I blame the Civilization games.

I want that on a T-shirt. (Maybe a HOPE con tee, 2018?)

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…and even the people who can do it can’t always do it, it seems like inspiration is a limited supply that decreases with age. there’s a reason most artists and scientists produce their best work early on. it might be something to do with decreasing neural plasticity with age (maybe making it harder to find links between disparate ideas hidden in random corners of the brain), or other more general age related cognitive impairments, or both.

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