I think enjoying thinking is a necessity of genius. Has there ever been a genius who didn’t like to think about their topic?
Generally to be the best in the world at something you have to enjoy it. Maybe some musicians dislike playing music, but got good because their parents forced them. I would guess only those who eventually learn to enjoy music becomes a great.
I chose music because that’s what I think most of those types of parents force their kid to become good at. If I were to look for a counterexample I would look for musicians.
This topic began in the General Chat. I’ve recreated the conversation so far below (edit: some of the quotes within quotes indicating what was being replied to are separated for some reason):
Jarrod: I haven’t read it so idk if it’s any good but I saw a book called “The Man from the Future” about von Neumann
Jarrod: Thank you for sharing. I found the information about Hungarian society at the time and the bevy of geniuses it fostered super interesting. I also thought it was sad that such an environment doesn’t exist anymore (AFAIK). I also found it interesting that young JvN received ~non-stop tutoring (which lines up with Bloom’s 2 sigma problem).
I liked this quote from Teller:
“I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed almost nothing else.”
Also this other Teller quote:
“When he was dying of cancer, his brain was affected. I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstance.”
Reminded me of this from The Fountainhead:
“But don’t they know that if suffering could be measured, there’s more suffering in Steven Mallory when he can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mowed down by a tank?”
Btw (if you don’t mind me asking), is there a particular reason you’re curious about the early history of computing?
Jarrod: And yeah, after reading that, if def seems like JvN is a bit overhyped (even if one didn’t believe some of the more incredible myths).
Jarrod: Oh from the Scott Alexander article
Elliot:
Probably
Jarrod: I don’t really have much to add to the Teller quote other than that I like the idea of loving/enjoying thinking.
Jarrod: Reddit post title: TIL Tennis Legend Andre Agassi Admitted in His Autobiography That He Hated Tennis but Continued to Play Due to Family Pressure and Talent
Jarrod: Oh cool I saw you created the topic
Jarrod: Oh yeah nice find. From the comment: “It wasn’t until he was an adult that he started to actually like what he was doing and become serious about it.”
Jarrod: Have you seen the movie Whiplash? (I’m not saying you should watch it, I was just wondering).
Jarrod: Yeah I wasn’t so sure. I watched it ages ago so my memory might be fuzzy, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of having to like… torture oneself into being great.
Jarrod: I feel like some (a lot?) of the people who are regarded as great are probably conflicted and maybe have a mix or good and bad motivations. Like I think some high achievers might be motivated by having a chip on their shoulder, feeling the need to beat others, etc.
Jarrod: Also Michael Jordan. I think he genuinely loved the game but he also seemed motivated by like proving others wrong and stuff like that.
Jarrod: Are you going to put the Teller quotes in your post? Or should I post them? If you do, I reckon the Claude Shannon quote your shared is also a good one.
Jarrod: Oh. It’d be a shame if they’re apocryphal lol since I like the spirit of them
Jarrod:
Yeah at first glance that seems plausible but I’d have to think about it some more. Maybe I’ll reply to your topic if I think of anything.
One thing that comes to mind:
I think ET thinks that there a lot in common between physical skills (like learning to walk) and intellectual skills (like text analysis). So brute force exercise/practice could apply to both.
But overall I still feel that I agree with you that curiosity and intrinsic motivation are really important.
Jarrod: both the quotes are misquotes tho in the sense that they don’t match exactly verbatim what Teller said. I can transcribe them if you want?
Jarrod: Done.
“I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed practically nothing else. This explains a lot because what you like, you do well. And he liked thinking not just in mathematics, he liked thinking—in the clear and complete manner of mathematicians—in every field. In mathematics, in physics, in the business world (his father was a banker), in many other fields.” [“practically” rather than “almost”; plus i added some more of the quote]
“When he was dying of cancer, his brain was affected. … I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstance.” [ellipsis]
I imagine it’d be extremely helpful, though I agree with Elliot that there’s “Probably” at least one exception.
I think that genius is a little bit of a subjective term in the sense that some people might argue whether a given person is a genius or not. Also, even within the ranks of geniuses, people might argue whether someone is a greater or a lesser genius.
The people that I personally regard as geniuses (Rand, Temple, Socrates, Goldratt) all seemed to really enjoy thinking.
Ayn Rand and World She Made by Anne Heller:
“Thinking is all I do,” she [Rand] said.
In Atlas Shrugged, Rand says that “the man of the mind” knows “that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power” (my bold).
Goldratt’s daughter describing her father in The Choice:
You’re always the scientist. You are constantly figuring out how the world is ticking, trying to verbalize the cause-and-effect connections—on any subject, in any situation.…For you, everything is like a prototype. No wonder situations that trigger disappointment and frustration for others are, for you, a source of energy.
In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates arrives very late because, while walking to the party, he stops and stands still for ~hours in order to think deeply… before finally resuming his journey to the party. IOW, Socrates got lost in thought.
[Adam] Smith was described by several of his contemporaries and biographers as comically absent-minded… He was known to talk to himself… According to one story, Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, Smith walked into a huge tanning pit from which he needed help to escape.[58] He is also said to have put bread and butter into a teapot, drunk the concoction, and declared it to be the worst cup of tea he had ever had. According to another account, Smith distractedly went out walking in his nightgown and ended up 15 miles (24 km) outside town, before nearby church bells brought him back to reality.[57][58]
Maybe Adam Smith liked thinking so much that he was reluctant to pay attention to more mundane matters.
The process of thinking is man’s basic means of survival. The pleasure of performing this process successfully—of experiencing the efficacy of one’s own mind—is the most profound pleasure possible to men, and it is their deepest need, on any level of intelligence, great or small.
Is it possible to be obsessed with something and not particularly like it? I think a lot of genius comes from obsession and not necessarily enjoyment. Maybe it can turn into enjoyment later? I’m not sure. But it is possible to do a lot of something without liking it
Does daydreaming count as thinking? A lot of kids get lost in it but are punished for it by school or parents, but I think it can be a positive habit that can develop into active thinking, and can lead to more creativity.
Also one book that made me like thinking more is Henry Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science
He mentioned various methods of thinking, such as writing on paper, typing with a typewriter, or even talking to oneself out loud. He wrote about the pros and cons for each method. It was the first time I saw someone go into such detail and actually recommend talking to oneself
This also got me thinking: Are there geniuses who don’t think for their aspect of genius? For example an artistic genius who paints really well. What if painting is their way to get into a mode of being where they aren’t thinking, and more so in a flow state?
Like there could be obsession about greatness in general, and the thing they picked was just something they had talent for, but don’t necessarily like.
This does a lot of motivation for greatness. It’s more difficult to do the practice necessary every day if you don’t like it. Someone else who has similar motivation but actually likes would have an easier time being consistent and would have a competitive advantage.
Now I’m talking about genius as if it’s a competition. I think the term “genius” is used in a competitive way. The word to describe the most skilled or intelligent in a field. The obsessed guy could still get really smart without being top 5.
For intellectual genius I was thinking it would be hard to compete with someone who spends all their time and energy on their interest. For example a mathematician who when they wake up immediately starts thinking about math, someone who on their lunch break is still thinking about the problem, someone who struggles to fall asleep because they’re so fascinated by an idea.
Maybe it’s wrong to think about the time spent. If we can only focus deeply for like 4 hours a day (or some other fixed amount), then the obsessive type can easily keep pace. Or maybe it still matters because the habitual thinking takes less energy or uses energy differently.
If the time isn’t the issue it could still be that the quality of thinking can only be genius level if the person enjoys thinking about it. That the thinking could only be highly creative if the person is interested. That you could only find solutions if you were genuinely curious and not if you were just forcefully trying to find solutions. It may not be theoretically impossible to be really creative in a forceful way, just really difficult compared to genuine interest, and thus realistically impossible.
Some relevant quotes I just read from The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner:
On Robert Millikan:
As a younger man, the professor had almost missed his own wedding because he was so busy reviewing a scientific manuscript in his office.
I think he was enjoying his work.
Maybe Edison is a counterpoint to my hypothesis?
Edison usually worked eighteen hours a day or longer, pushing for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers. He disliked bathing and usually smelled powerfully of sweat and chemical solvents.[1] When fatigue overcame him he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available space ([…]).
He maintained a vast library in his laboratory and pored over chemistry texts as he pursued his inventions. At the same time, however, he scorned talk about scientific theory, and even admitted that he knew little about electricity. He boasted that he had never made it past algebra in school.
So he could seem like just a hard working type who didn’t like thinking that much because he didn’t like scientific theory and mathematics. But poring over chemistry texts seems to suggest he just liked a specific kind of thinking.
Errors matter more than effort. Spending more energy on induction won’t get you great results.
Spending more effort on physics won’t fix being merely competent at arithmetic. Subtle errors can make the difference between being really talented at a prerequisite or just being good at it. It can be hard to go back and improve that stuff later and automatize new knowledge, and people often don’t try to.
Error correction is crucial too. Even if you’re irrational with others, you better at least be able to think critically and correct some of your own errors.
I don’t do painting, but I’d think about it this way:
There are lots of activities that don’t involve consciously thinking while doing the activity itself. E.g., if you’re playing basketball or doing mixed martial arts, I don’t think the athletes are doing much conscious thinking in-game. To the contrary, I’ve heard some athletes advocate shutting off the mind and getting into the zone.
But this doesn’t mean they don’t think. It’s more that all of their conscious thinking is done beforehand like when practicing technique, when strategizing for the game, etc. And then they master their techniques etc to such a point that they can do it without thinking during the game. It’s like ET’s practice and mastery ideas. You want to master stuff to the point that you can do it without conscious attention or thinking. (Unconscious competence.)
But that said, maybe it depends on the individual. Like perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was a genius who did a lot of thinking about anatomy, lighting, layered painting techniques, etc. in order to paint so well. But for some athletes, perhaps it’s more the coach or trainers who do more of the thinking for them. (E.g., John Danaher pursued a PhD in epistemology. (Wikipedia: “He is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA) instructor and coach. Danaher is widely regarded as one of the best instructors and coaches in these sports.”))
That’s a great point. It reminds me of business: if you work hard at creating a product that nobody wants, you’re not going to get rich. That’s why some people advocate creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and getting customer feedback early.
Likewise, if you’re working hard to increase the output of a non-bottleneck, you’re not going to be productive. (In fact, it could be counterproductive.)
Likewise, having small versus large capital can make a big difference. (E.g., harvesting with a hand-held sickle versus a modern combine harvester. Or having billions to invest versus $100 to invest.)
Hard work is at best secondary (or even tertiary or even lower down in terms of importance). One needs to make sure that these other things are correct/optimized first before applying hard work, else one might be rowing in the wrong direction (so to speak).
Or, as you said, “Errors matter more than effort.” I like that formulation.
After listening to a biography on Robert J. Oppenheimer I started thinking that either you place too much importance on prerequisites or that Oppenheimer really wasn’t such a great scientist. Quotes from American Prometheus (which I listened to ~2.5 years ago):
Oppenheimer’s approach to learning physics was eclectic, even haphazard. He focused on the most interesting, abstract problems in the field, bypassing the dreary basics. Years later, he confessed to feeling insecure about the gaps in his knowledge. “To this day,” he told an interviewer in 1963, “I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there—just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive. . . . I took a course from [J. E.] Littlewood on number theory—well, that was nice, but that wasn’t really how to go about learning mathematics for the professional pursuit of physics.”
Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics. “I never did learn very much. I probably learned a good deal by a method that is never given enough credit, that is, by being with people. . . . I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was a part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”
Other things that made me skeptical of Oppenheimer’s greatness was his mysticism, irrationality, neuroticism and liking Marxism and Freud. He seemed more like a pretentious academic, rather than a great physicist, in some ways. I may be misremembering what I heard, I mostly listened while driving.
And maybe I shouldn’t hold all those things against him. Maybe there are other great physicists of that time who believed in those types of ideas. There’s Kurt Godel, a mathematician, whom I don’t know much about except his reputation as a mystic. I remember the Los Alamos physicist Ayn Rand talked about who held a four-leaf clover for good luck. I checked and that was Oppenheimer, PWNI:
There was a story in the press that during the first test of an atom bomb in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos group who had produced the bomb, carried a four-leaf clover in his pocket.
Continuing:
More recently, there was the story of Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut who conducted ESP experiments on his way to the moon. There was the story of a space scientist who is a believer in occultism and black magic.
I didn’t research Oppenheimer’s physics achievement. Ayn Rand believed he was a great intellect despite the mysticism. From The Journals of Ayn Rand:
“Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It’s the type that Oppenheimer projected-that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly.
Are your claims compatible with Oppenheimer not being so great at the math and physics basics? I may be over reading into Oppenheimer’s lack of skill here. It seems he could follow along with difficult math (same book):
When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on campus, only Robert and one other undergraduate had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. They painstakingly worked their way through the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, coauthored by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.” Despite this experience, Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics.
(The text in the end here is the same as the math quote above.)
Although that could be compatible with:
I’ve been mostly on the side that mastering the prerequisites is what you want if you want mastery at the higher levels, or to be a genius. But I’ve had little doubt about the issue that I never addressed. It feels like I’ve had a justificationist or probabilistic attitude to the issue. If I had brought up this issue earlier I might have been more convinced about prerequisites and been more excited to learn them.
AFAIK, smoke rings and elastic vibrations aren’t prerequisites for a lot of physics (maybe @alanforr or @lmf knows more about this). They are things which are taught in schools, so you’re socially expected to know them.
And then he mentions a number theory course. And I think what he means is he had gaps in his knowledge of advanced math, not that he had errors in his understanding of arithmetic or algebra.
And then in the next quote, he’s talking about how much (advanced) math he learned, not how well he learned the basics.
And there are different things you can be great at besides math in order to contribute to physics. But being really good at math is one of the paths that can work. But you can’t tell from what Oppenheimer says here how good he was at math.
lol @ reading Principia Mathematica. i now suspect he was quite good at math.
I have no opinion about whether Oppenheimer was a great physicist. But I don’t see any contradiction to it in these quotes.
Elastic vibrations are useful to know about for understanding properties of materials, e.g. - the relation between the speed of sound in a material and other material properties such as density. The maths underlying EVs are useful in many other branches of physics. Smoke rings aren’t anywhere near as useful as EVs.
Later in the same chapter Oppenheimer is said to have mentioned Hamilton’s principle, which is about formulating physics in terms of the calculus of variations, so I think he was good enough at maths.
I think my memory had drifted on this. My impression was more like that he was shaky on fundamental calculus, but reading the quotes and reading the chapter again it reads more like the gaps were in advanced math like you say.
I don’t think I knew about Whitehead and Principia at the time, so that wouldn’t make the correct counterweight on my impression.
Without knowing Whitehead’s personality, I wouldn’t think he would have the patience to read PM with a student who wasn’t good at math. It also said Whitehead hadn’t read it in a long time so he was relearning stuff, which would require his students to be able to figure stuff out for themselves as well.
Here’s another one with better evidence. On Claude Shannon from The Idea Factory:
Some things about him actually suggested little in the way of conventional brilliance. When confronted with ordinary number problems—18 × 27, for instance—Shannon would work them out not in his head but on a blackboard.[5] He wasn’t much for details; sometimes he would solve problems in a way that showed surprising intuition but a mathematical approach that some colleagues found unsatisfactory or lacking in rigor.
I would assume that being able to do 2 by 2 multiplication in your head is required for the arithmetic mastery Elliot advocates (for a mathematician at least).
When I read this I was thinking that I didn’t say Shannon couldn’t do it, but then I read what I wrote, and I saw that I did say that. That was a writing error, unless I’m misremembering what I thought. I thought he probably could do it in his head, but that it wasn’t automatized enough to where it would be more convenient to do it in his head. That doing it in his head would be too mentally taxing or unreliable. And I thought that would be analogous to this:
Like why I assume 2 by 2 multiplication in your head is required for arithmetic mastery by your standards? I think that would come from mastery being emotion resistant, which for multiplication would translate into it being more convenient to do in your head.
When I first wrote about the Shannon quote I didn’t think through it that clearly, although I think I can remember thinking about emotions and mastery, that just seemed like fitting your standard.
I wasn’t looking for examples of great mathematicians not having mastered arithmetic, I just stumbled upon this text. But it could be that I’m biased toward finding such examples and thus I would think that this Shannon quote would contradict your standards of arithmetic mastery without clear ideas of what your standards would be.
Anyways I was interested to find out if you don’t consider habitual 2x2 multiplication in your head necessary mastery for mathematicians. Do you?
Mental calculation skill and conceptual understanding are different things. They typically go together a fair amount but it’s conceptual understanding that’s really important.
How is conceptual understanding of math practiced? Do you practice writing a bunch of explanatory essays or tutorials like you wanted lmf to do (when testing his conceptual understanding)? Is it mostly just necessary to practice calculation, while understanding is more about having the epiphany? Or you just have to write one explanatory essay and then practice calculations?