The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent or Practice

http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/the_complexity_of_greatness_beyond_talent_or_practice

by tokenadult • 13 years ago

23 6 13 years ago

wslh• 13 years ago

If you liked this article, you might like "How Life Imitates Chess" by Kasparov himself: http://www.amazon.com/How-Life-Imitates-Chess-ebook/dp/B0049...

The name of the book is not the more imaginative title but the content of the book is very interesting. He separates the romantic era of chess to the professional one and speaks about many different chess players with different skills. The concepts from the book can be also applied to science in general: there was a romantic science era where one person alone could learn and produce a lot of stuff. Now we are in a professional era where we need teams to discover something, just look at the number of people involved in writing new papers in science.

Personally, I have not lost the romantic view but in a specialized world it is difficult to produce a lot of impact alone.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

Chess and music are very narrow domains. If you think that abilities in music or chess make one great, then your worldview is extremely deficient. In fact, computers have already surpassed humans in terms of chess or musical ability.

A word like "greatness" should be reserved for more ambitious and helpful pursuits, such as creating inventions or new social structures that improve the human condition.

kvb• 13 years ago

I'd argue that music and other forms of entertainment clearly improve the human condition. And if computers have surpassed humans in the production of music, can you point me to some of the great computer-generated compositions? I'm not aware of any, but I confess that it may just be ignorance on my part.

DanBC• 13 years ago

> If you think that abilities in music [...] make one great, then your worldview is extremely deficient.

Do you mean playing music? Or composing? Because it's hard to argue that Mozart was not great.

xerula• 13 years ago

I would say that your worldview is extremely spiritually deficient, if you do not consider that musicians and composers can achieve greatness. Music at its best is extraordinarily enriching, as beautiful and intellectually thrilling as the deepest mathematics, while also speaking to us of all the lightness and darkness of our human condition. At the lowest and most challenging times of my life, it has been music that provided solace and inspiration to find a way forward. I cannot express how impoverished my human condition would be without music.

Computers have not surpassed humans in terms of musical ability. Only someone tone-deaf, unable to let music into their heart, would say so.

(I have read articles saying that computers can now produce compositions indistinguishable from Mozart's, but the context of comparison is always on the level of silly, childlike little themes from very early Mozart pieces, more like extracts from nursery rhymes. And in terms of performance, there is nothing to rival our leading humans.)

beat• 13 years ago

You're kidding, right?

The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent or Practice

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