How We Kill Geniuses

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-how-we-kill.html

by antiform • 17 years ago

45 58 17 years ago

blog.wired.com

joubert2• 17 years ago

Talk about superstition.

dasil0034• 17 years ago

Why must hackers be so literal with everything? Just talking about inspiration as coming from an external entity doesn't imply superstition, it doesn't mean somebody has strong faith-based beliefs about the exact nature of spirits and little green people.

If you're willing to loosen your grip on the necessity for all ideas to be fact-based, and let some of the fuzzy in, the idea of a muse can serve as a useful perspective on the creative process. It's a hell of lot more useful than sticking electrodes on people and trying to quantify creativity with statistical analysis.

Even hackers have muses.

joubert2• 17 years ago

"...we should view the brilliance as a gift from an unknowable outside source..."

I'm OK with fuzziness, but mysticism appals me.

DaniFong4• 17 years ago

'sticking electrodes on people and trying to quantify creativity with statistical analysis.'

Or taking excessively precise measurements of the shape of people's heads. ;-)

omouse• 17 years ago

The only muse necessary is sitting your ass down and actually beginning the process of creation.

The muse is some mystical bullshit that we feed one another to make things look like magic. No one wants to hear the dirty details of creating something because, for some reason, it ruins the image of the final result.

Hexstream• 17 years ago

I think what the article is saying is that it might be better for your creativity to believe (or act as if you believed) that your creativity doesn't really come from you (regardless of whether or not it does or not).

It's a Jedi-mind-trick thing.

cmars232• 17 years ago

That reminds me of Pascal's Wager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager).

jobeirne• 17 years ago

What exactly the hell is a "quantum equation"?

ramchip• 17 years ago

Discrete mathematics ;)

jwesley• 17 years ago

Everyone here on HN is genius, so even if a few get knocked off there are plenty to step up and replace them.

stuntgoat• 17 years ago

I'll take two 16 ounce Mystical Fairy Juices and a two cookies, please.

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

From the amazon reviews of her book: "I could not finish this book. When the author burst into sobs yet again in the middle of prayer, or a conversation, or walking down the street, or (more likely) on the floor of yet another bathroom, I gave up. This is the type of person you meet at a cocktail party and RUN in the other direction after a few minutes when she starts spewing out all her problems at you with no end in sight."

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

That book features something I don't think I've ever seen on amazon: All three top (front page) reviews are one-starred. Not that amazon reviewers are perfect, but that's pretty rare for a book by a "genius".

DaniFong4• 17 years ago

I've seen that before twice: in both cases, it meant that it steps on someone's or some group's ego or politics, and then there's no small brigade of internet trolls sent out to deliver Amazon justice.

I've never seen that in fiction, though.

wallflower• 17 years ago

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the best treatise on writing (and by extension, creative expression) I think I've ever read. Here are some excerpts - I believe its worthwile reading the entire essay many times:

"I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest."

"There are heaps of books out there on How To Get Published. Often people find the information in these books contradictory. My feeling is -- of COURSE the information is contradictory. Because, frankly, nobody knows anything. Nobody can tell you how to succeed at writing (even if they write a book called “How To Succeed At Writing”) because there is no WAY; there are, instead, many ways. Everyone I know who managed to become a writer did it differently – sometimes radically differently. "

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm Submitting essay link for what it's worth..

unalone6• 17 years ago

I really wanted to dislike that essay - I was annoyed at how she treated writing like a sacred task - but it was good and definitely worth the few minutes it took to read. Thanks for the link!

hhm• 17 years ago

Maybe the book is too long for the point she tries to make. I think we are starting to need a shorter format for this kind of books; some of these ideas can be really useful, but they couldn't ever fill an entire book (another example: Gladwell's books, which can have an interesting point -even if it's a conjecture-, but they are too long for the ideas they try to tell).

jballanc4• 17 years ago

I'll go out on a limb (especially since this is HN! run by YC!!): entrepreneurship is killing genius. In my lifetime I've witnessed the slow slide from blue sky research being rampant in corporate America around the time I was born (early '80s), to being found only in academia ('90s), to even academia being expected to turn a profit ('00s). My university even has a vice-Provost in charge of turning research into new businesses.

Not every good idea can make a profit. When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out...

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

Genius created the apple computer. Entrepreneurship brought it to the rest of us. There's probably about the same amount of genius as ever, there's just a lot more people hawking it these days.

maxwell2• 17 years ago

Depends on how you're defining it, but attributing products to "genius" sounds awfully like a creationist fallacy. It's interesting that you should cite Apple; Woz's work on the Apple I and their current design process both seem exceptionally darwinian.

maxwell2• 17 years ago

It doesn't seem to be entrepreneurship, but investing in projects instead of people.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448722

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Agreed. I wonder if there's a correlation between the rise of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" and the shift from Sonatra to Britney Spears. If the geniuses are entrepreneurs, who's left for the arts?

And the line between graduate school and consulting is getting way too thin. One of my GRAs required that I spend time on-site with the customer -- sorry, "corporate partner on the research grant."

bayareaguy• 17 years ago

entrepreneurship is killing genius

I upmodded you because I think your post is worthwhile but I think you're conflating entreprenurship with short-sighted greed.

Entrepreneurship and genius are just different aspects of the same thing: solving problems in new ways, more often than not by challenging the percieved rules of the game.

jballanc4• 17 years ago

I realized only later that my statement needed an extra qualification: entrepreneurship is killing (non-entrepreneurship related) genius

Certainly Ron Popeil is some kind of genius...George Foreman too. But I'd challenge anyone to hand me a business model that could be formed around General Relativity! If we had demanded a business plan from Einstein before we let him continue working on his ideas, he'd probably have died a patent clerk.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Don't be too fooled by marketing. Just because pure research doesn't come with all the glitter and flash of applied research doesn't mean it's not there. Remember: Every Macbook sold is an advertisement for the transistor, but there's no product that advertises Andrew Wiles, apart from a few math books. But that doesn't mean the genius isn't out there. He may be sitting at the table right next to you!

The secret to doing pure research in the modern era is to hype up the applied aspects for grant-hunting purposes. Developmental biologists and geneticists don't do "pure research": They do "cancer research" or "stem cell research aimed at curing Alzheimers". Even when someone who hasn't read certain paragraphs of the grant proposal would have a lot of trouble telling the difference. ("Are you sure you're not just having fun trying to make the fruit fly grow new eyes in embarrassing places?" "No, I'm studying the regulation of this very important oncogene, implicated in 36% of human cancers, that also happens to make fruit files see out of their feet." The beauty of it is: None of this is untrue. [1])

And a lot of that vice-Provost stuff is for show. Most professors couldn't actually make money in the market if it fell on their head. They're filing patents, collecting letters of collaboration from captains of industry, and talking big about "entrepreneurship" because it's cheap talk that impresses funding agencies. (A lot of funding applications have a section for listing such things.)

Finally, it's important to remember why there used to be a lot of industry money for "pure" research [2]: Monopolies. The public paid for that research via what amounted to a set of not-particularly-progressive sales taxes on phones (Bell Labs), photocopiers (Xerox PARC), and computer equipment (IBM labs). I don't have a study or anything, but it seems to me that soon after each of these big companies started seeing significant market competition, their pure research started to dry up, despite its world-class quality. It may be that pure research can't survive in a competitive market: The only way to sustain it is via tax-supported public funding. Hopefully with more intelligently-designed taxes than, say, a tax on all our phones.

---

[1] Except that I made this oncogene up. ;) What I'm trying to say is: It's true that understanding cancer requires us to understand apparently unconnected facts about eye development in fruit flies. There's little about growth and development that doesn't have implications for cancer.

[2] It's also possible to argue that the industrially-funded "pure" research of old wasn't particularly pure. It was all intended to be applied or sold... just on a time scale more suited for a monopoly than a startup. Of course, it turned out that, even given a long-enough time, such a plan often doesn't work: For example, Xerox turned out to be well equipped to prototype the Alto, but was very ill equipped to manufacture and market it. It took a much younger and less mature company to do that.

jballanc4• 17 years ago

On the topic of blue-sky research, I couldn't agree with you more. Both your assessment of the the how and the why is spot on. I think it's a shame, though, that the public was very gung-ho about doing away with the "tax" on telephones and computers, etc., but never considered the ramifications of reducing the ability of AT&T, IBM, etc., to do that basic research.

I also think it's worth noting that the longer the time-scale over which the research will become profitable, the greater the number unforeseen applications. A good example of this was Shannon's work at Bell Labs. Not only did it justify the eventual move toward digital transmission, but it also made possible a wide swath of genetics research. Now who could have foreseen that? and how much did those geneticists actually pay for the research?

As for the ability of researchers to game the system, and your assertion that the University entrepreneurship push is all for show, I'm less sure than you that "everything will be okay". I recently, as a graduate student, approached the office of sponsored research (OSR) for assistance in applying for NIH funding. The people in OSR didn't have a director and didn't know who was overseeing my department. When I finally did locate the correct person there, he was rather helpful, but I posed the question to him: There are many opportunities for both students and professors, but I had to find this one on my own. Why doesn't OSR promote more federal funding?

His response was that the school is actively pursuing funding through patent licensing and commercial partnerships, so the OSR has received less attention and has fewer resources at its disposal.

In other words, I don't doubt the ability of researchers to sell their basic science programs to federal funding agencies and the public as having practical applications, but I do worry about them loosing institutional support as institutions look more and more toward industry partnerships. After all, a congressperson might be fooled into believing that E. coli genetics research can help cure heart disease (a spin that I personally put on an application for AHA funding ;-), but Merck or Pfizer will be much less enthusiastic about the same spin if they don't have a lead molecule in 3-4 years time.

yters4• 17 years ago

Whew, that makes me feel better. I really like thinking about things, but I also really dislike the pressure that comes from thinking my ideas are only valid if there is a clear way to turn them into something practical.

MaysonL2• 17 years ago

Then again, entrepreneurship can fund great basic (or applied) research. Three examples spring to mind.

  1. Jeff Hawkins, with Numenta, and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.

  2. David Shaw, with D.E. Shaw Research.

  3. Elon Musk, with SpaceX.

canoebuilder• 17 years ago

"Not every good idea can make a profit." - - - - -

One might argue, that by definition a 'good idea' is one that is profitable for its pursuer.

Don't confuse the exchange of federal reserve notes for profit.

By your saying "When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out..." I take it you are not confused in this regard.

10ren• 17 years ago

Much of achievement is circumstantial: a product takes off because people need it (which is something outside the product). You notice a connection between two things, because you knew about them both and happened to be thinking about them. You can't arrange to discover things that are unknown - by definition. All you can do is be out there looking, doing things, trying things. Inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter

motoko• 17 years ago

Briefly: based on anecdotes, some may be more creative if they psychologically attribute their creativity outside their ego

l0stman• 17 years ago

Frankly, I don't know. It seems the most creative people are also self-confident. They're both arrogant and humble. Plus, we should rate someone's achievement by his best output, not his thousands failures.

drinian• 17 years ago

Interesting starting point to a real problem with "genius," but not a great strategy. If she's arguing that internalizing blame for not being constantly brilliant or being able to maximize your brilliance puts undue stress on amazing people, then maybe learning to live with that fact rather externalizing the blame to something imaginary would be a better idea. That way, you will at least be comfortable enough with your own mind to maybe begin exploring real ways to improve your genius productivity (see also: http://nomediakings.org/time_management_for_anarchists/free_...).

nostrademons• 17 years ago

I dunno. I think it's wrong to view genius as being an inherent quality of a person. I think it's equally wrong to view it as an external force that just happens to visit people at certain times.

In my experience, genius is the result of turning over a problem in your head over and over, learning all the angles, and then relaxing and forgetting about it for a while. While you're forgetting about it, your brain can make subconscious connections between everything you've learned that seem to come from nowhere. But you have to have the background knowledge.

I find that I have tons of creative ideas when I'm just starting out a project. They almost all turn out to be bad ones. Then once I explore a bit, learn everything there is to know about the area, I'll occasionally get a decent idea. If I don't think too hard about it.

DaniFong4• 17 years ago

This article reminded me of the story of Robert Oppenheimer. In that case, at least, I think the story of how we destroy our heroes rings true.

If any of you enjoy biographies, stories of scientific and engineering heroism, and haven't read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," please do. It is an extraordinary story.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

Oppenheimer himself at his 1954 security clearance hearings denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer destroyed himself, allying himself with the only orthodoxy [but somehow being not orthodox] that was more murderous than fascism.

DaniFong4• 17 years ago

How is agreeing with some of the goals of an othodoxy the same as allying with it?

How We Kill Geniuses

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