Intelligence killed genius

Inspired by conversations with B, S, H, D.

Mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS5_xqNPxjg & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q604eed4ad0

Where did all geniuses go?

They were killed by the the concept of intelligence.

it’s the EMH-level mindvirus except even worse

The first requirement to do genius-level work is to not be afraid to do things only geniuses can do, i.e. to have the internal feeling of being better than everyone else in the world.

The concept of intelligence kills this feeling. However smart you are, there is someone who is smarter than you. And if there’s someone smarter than you are, it doesn’t make sense to work on the hardest possible problems and to try to change the world - it’s the smartest person’s job.

You don’t need need to be the smartest person in the world.

I know a few people who I believe to be geniuses. What happens when I tell them that I believe they’re a genius? They all tell me that there are people smarter than them and that they’re “only pretty good at one or two things”

bitch this is exactly what genius is.

The people we traditionally consider to be smartest are those best at some sort of a general math / reasoning ability.

This is not what genius is.

Genius is being extremely good at a couple of things that really matter.

genius is having a vision

Genius is not the highest g.

Plenty of people with better mechanical ability than Ramanujan.

Genius is not 5 sd to the right of g.

Genius is like synesthesia. It’s the stray connections between parts of the brain that were not supposed to be connected that make your picture completely different, but might leave you just 2-4 sd to the right in g, orthogonal to intelligence

genius is not being perfect, it’s being unbalanced

The concept of intelligence, those ridiculous single dimensional rankings it’s so easy to put yourself onto means that genius thinks “i’m not 5 sd and my ability is just this random thing with me just being normal smart in all the other aspects nothing to see here”

fuck you.

don’t compare yourself to people smarter than you are. there’s always someone smarter. they’re no geniuses. they don’t have intellectual synesthesia. they don’t have a vision. follow those two even though there’s “plenty of smarter people”. they have no idea what they’re doing