How a Genius Is Different from a Really Smart Person(nautil.us)
nautil.us
How a Genius Is Different from a Really Smart Person
http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-genius-is-different-from-a-really-smart-person
4 comments
tl;dr an interview with five mensa members about how they perceive genius and their hi IQ peers. They mostly associate genius with accomplishment or creativity that expands a frontier.
I would also like to add that they saw their intelligence as a very specific one well tuned to doing IQ tests/logic puzzles.
Genius is a dynamic thing rendered via the lens of social value.
If scientific progress is our goal, then I would argue that forming cliques around a clique-governed definition of "most likely to elicit genius" is not only wrong, but dangerous. Heuristics can be ugly things.
Also, MENSA reminds me of church. Church is boring.
If scientific progress is our goal, then I would argue that forming cliques around a clique-governed definition of "most likely to elicit genius" is not only wrong, but dangerous. Heuristics can be ugly things.
Also, MENSA reminds me of church. Church is boring.
I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is. Genius is the extreme form of insight. It's really not a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps.
Getting to a rare perspective is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen.
A high IQ gives you more ability to build the mental framework needed to see these associations, and a genius has actually applied it.