- (Jared) What’s up, Wisecrack – Jared here. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed a
trend lately, but a lot of very smart people are acting incredibly dumb. Elon Musk made
some very bold and very wrong statements about Coronavirus, musical genius Kanye West has
announced a run for president without even filing the right paperwork, and I can’t
seem to go a day without finding out about some award-winning scientists hawking weird
psuedoscience.
- (Narrator) Professor Montagnier is first of all a medical doctor. A pragmatist. He's
convinced that water memory opens up a new area of research for medicine.
- (Jared) This is not to hate on Musk or Kanye: one is, in my humble opinion, a musical genius,
and the other changed the landscape of cars with Tesla. But what if some of the weirder
antics of people like Musk aren’t just regular human error: but speak to a bigger problem
about how we understand intelligence? In other words - why do geniuses act so dumb?
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Myth of Genius, and no spoilers ahead.
- (Jared) To really understand the strange paradox of genius,
I want to tell you the story of Linus Pauling. Born at the beginning of the 20th century,
Linus Pauling was a titan of science. In his 30s, he proposed a third way atoms could bind
together, called orbital hybridization. He then went on to identify several key features
of DNA structure, created a formula to measure electronegativity, and discovered the underlying
mechanism behind sickle cell anemia. For all his work, Pauling has the distinction of being
one of only four people in history to win two Nobel Prizes (though one was a Peace Prize).
So if anyone gets the genius title, it’s Pauling, right?
Well. Maybe not. Pauling made another “contribution” to science: orthomolecular medicine. Coined
by Pauling in the late 60s, the term refers to the practice of treating everything from
the common cold to psychosis to cancer to even AIDs with... vitamins, take at extremely-high,
megadoses. Now I don’t think it takes a genius to know vitamins won’t cure cancer,
but at the time, this idea gained some major traction. After all, one the smartest scientists
alive was not only advocating for it, but even publishing multiple books about it.
But the wider scientific and medical community wasn’t buying it. The American Psychiatric
Association, for example, wrote a blistering report in 1973 questioning why Pauling’s
vitamin of choice - niacin - seemed to never provide the results he claimed when experiments
were performed by independent investigators. The APA’s major concern was that his claims
were at best unprovable, and at worst dangerous. Despite them calling the practice and its
claims “deplorable”, and the American Academy of Pediatrics calling it a “cult”,
Linus Pauling only doubled down until he died in 1994. After his death, a 1996 study on
the effects of Vitamin A and beta carotene on heavy smokers had to be cut short, after
lung cancer rates soared 28% percent and the mortality rate rose a horrifying 17% among
the participants. All of which raises the very simple question: how did one of the world’s
smartest men end up being so dumb? And why do we continue to worship him in spite of
this, even catapulting his pseudo science to the New York Times best seller list?
As it turns out: the idea of genius is a relatively modern concept. The Latin word “genius”
originally referred to an individual spirit that inhabits and protects a person from their
birth, thereby determining their character. Which isn’t that surprising when you consider
the latin root of genius is gignere, or to birth or beget. So whether you grew up to
be a tough-as-nails general or a talented bard, ancient Romans would chalk your talents
up to your individual genius, and there’s a certain appeal to this. This Roman sense
of the word can explain why someone excels in a certain area, without committing us to
believe they’re great at everything. Using this sense of the word, we can immediately
see the problem with Linus Pauling: The guy was a brilliant chemist and a biologist looking
at the proteins of misshaped bloodcells – but not exactly a shoe-in for cancer-doctor of
the year… It wasn’t until the 1600s that our modern notion of genius started to emerge.
The word began to refer to a specific individual with a “natural intelligence or talent”
and “exalted natural mental ability”. And this is where the problem starts – where
genius begins to gain the revered, catch all status it has today. The word’s evolving
definition corresponded with the larger cultural shift of the European Enlightenment. This
was a time of unparalleled intellectual growth in Western Europe, manifesting everything
from the birth of modern science to the creation of calculus, astronomy, and economics. Central
to all this intellectual progress, though, was the idea that man could, through his intellect,
unlock the keys to the universe and change our world for the better.
This is around where we start to see glimmers of our modern-day genius worship. Eighteenth-century
French philosopher, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, for example, asserted that progress only occurs
when an individual genius makes advances in their field. According to Turgot, states have
a responsibility to foster these geniuses and allow them to flourish. In his eyes, there
probably wouldn’t be anything wrong with governments subsidizing Tesla or SolarCity
through lucrative tax credits, or giving Kanye’s fashion brand, Yeezy, a “small business
loan” in the wake of Covid-19. It’s all in the service of further developing their
genius. Nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher and mathematician, Thomas Carlyle, takes this
idea of worshipping geniuses one step further. In his book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
The Heroic in History, Carlyle famously stated that "the history of the world is but the
biography of great men". In Carlyle’s views, a select few geniuses were responsible for
all the major developments throughout history, while us lay people were just along for the
ride. After all, history won’t remember the original founders of Tesla – engineers
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning – much less credit the countless other designers
or technicians who have worked towards the company’s success. But we won’t forget
Elon Musk. American philosopher Sidney Hook perhaps best encapsulates this perspective,
arguing that, "Genius is not the result of compounding talent. How many battalions are
the equivalent of a Napoleon? How many minor poets will give us a Shakespeare? How many
run of the mill scientists will do the work of an Einstein?
But even though they lauded geniuses, they still distinguished between different KINDS
of geniuses. Thomas Carlyle, for example, divided his great men into six categories.
He wouldn’t, for example, compare the genius of a priest, like Martin Luther, to that of
a poet like John Milton. Similarly, Francis Galton, the father of the since extremely
debunked theory of eugenics, broke down the star-studded world of geniuses into categories
ranging from judges and statesmen to scientists, painters, poets – and even oarsman.
Now Galton and Carlyle aren’t exactly the standard for today’s scientific explorations
of genius. But if you want to look at the world of smart people saying dumb things,
a pretty good red flag is people venturing outside of their specialty. This isn’t to
say that multi-platinum artist Kanye West isn’t allowed to have political opinions,
or that scientists haven’t excelled in multiple fields. But in today’s world of hyper-specialized
knowledge, nothing about understanding how jet propulsion works makes one an expert on
epidemiology. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you venture into the world of psuedoscience.
There, you’ll see a crop of PhDs and MDs venturing outside of their speciality, claiming
to be some revolutionary thinker, despite their lack of training or peer-reviewed publications
on the topic.
Take for example someone like Ivar Giaever, who despite being awarded a Nobel Prize for
proving electron tunneling occurs in superconductors, also happens to be amongst the biggest climate-change
deniers in the scientific community. On the one hand, a genius, on the other, a dum-dum.
There’s also just people who go off the rails: Take Luc Montagier, who proved that
a retrovirus causes AIDs, only to turn around and publish two papers claiming that DNA
can produce electromagnetic signals when diluted, aka basically homeopathy. Montagier’s claims
were met with scorn from the scientific community.
But this is only half the story. There’s another reason modern society valorizes “geniuses”
like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk, presuming them to somehow have special brains capable
of tackling any problem regardless of the topic.
Which brings us to IQ. Cast your mind back to the French countryside in the early 20th
century. Universal education has just become a thing, and as your classroom is flooded
with children from all sorts of backgrounds, you need to identify which ones have special
educational needs so they can get extra attention. How do you do this? Well, if you’re psychologist
Alfred Binet and his assistant Theodore Simon, you decide to test each child to determine
what their mental age is. A child who could answer all the questions expected of a typical
8 year old would be said to have the mental age of 8. But if the next 8-year-old could
answer the questions for a typical 9-year-old, they’d have a mental age of 9. Now it’s
important to note that Binet didn’t think this number could fully quantify a child’s
intellectual capacity or potential, merely that it could predict how a child would perform
in school at that point in time. Just because a young Linus Pauling built a chemistry lab
from scratch and likely had a higher mental age than his peers, wouldn’t, in Binet’s
mind, mean that the other kids couldn’t catch up. Even though Binet wasn’t trying
to quantify genius, two psychologists independently took Binet’s model and tried to do just
that.
The first was Lewis Terman. If Binet was against the idea of ranking people by intelligence,
Terman was all for it. Inspired by Galton’s theory of hereditary genius and Binet’s
mental ages, Terman decided he was going to scientifically quantify intelligence. To do
so, he applied a simple formula: mental age divided by physical age multiplied by 100
equals intelligence quotient, or IQ.
So if you can answer questions that a 10-year-old can, and you’re only 5, 10 divided by 5
is 2, times 100 is 200. You’re a genius! With this simple calculus, Terman instituted
the modern regime of IQ testing as we know it today, ranking and sorting everyone from
school students to army recruits. But this massive wave of testing brought to light an
interesting fact: as English psychologist Charles Spearman first noted, scores across
different portions of different IQ tests were positively correlated.
In other words, kids who were good at pattern recognition, for example, were also good at
vocabulary and memorization. Intelligence, it would seem, wasn’t tied to specific subjects
or areas. Instead, this statistical correlation implied what Spearman called a “general
intelligence”, better known as g.
We now had our modern conception of genius. A genius was someone with a high IQ, which
made you smart about almost everything. In committing to this view, we as a society had
completed a U-turn on our pre-Enlightenment views. Genius was no longer something that
everyone possessed – a characteristic or quirk to explain their personality. Instead,
it’s the domain of the hyper intelligent, and we should revere them for it. So don’t
criticize Elon Musk for dipping his toes into predictive modeling and COVID-19 - even if
he’s catastrophically wrong. And don’t you dare think that hawking vitamins as a
cure for cancer is essentially a multi-level marketing scheme with less steps. We often
give these people the benefit of the doubt just because they’re seemingly much smarter
than us. Or at least, that’s what the cultural narrative wants us to do. It’s the reason
why Albert Einstein, with zero political experience, was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952
- because he’s just so smart. But Einstein, understanding that his genius was not universal,
declined it, citing his complete and utter lack of experience in the matter. And here’s
where we can understand how Terman and Spearman got a lot about intelligence wrong.
Despite its prominence in popular culture, the IQ test – and the concept of monolithic
g – has been under sustained attack from psychologists for decades. The problem is
that intelligence tests – whether they’re dealing with logical or spatial reasoning
– are only measuring intelligence in a certain sense. It’s hard to see how an IQ test will
spot the person who’s going to make the next big contribution to music, or how a kid
with impeccable spatial reasoning will do in The Floor is Lava.
According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, this is where most intelligence tests fail:
they refuse to look into the context of what they measure. In Sternberg’s view, we’re
suffering from “predictor-criterion confusion.” That’s a fancy way of saying we’re using
IQ tests to reflect intelligence more than real-world problem solving.
To Sternberg, intelligence has to take into account the “purposive adaptation to, shaping
of, and selection of real-world environments relevant to one's life.” In other words,
intelligence doesn’t occur in a vacuum; instead what’s considered intelligence changes
drastically between cultures, environments, and situations. While being able to spend
hundreds of hours studying for the SAT might make you smart by a college’s standard,
for a hunter gatherer, intelligence might be linked to the ability to orient yourself
in your surroundings while tracking prey. In both cases, our intelligent human is adapting
to real life scenarios to get what they want, even if these forms of intelligence are very
different. Going back to Kanye, the only way to measure his specific brilliance is
to hear his music.
So here’s the big question, Wisecrack: if our modern conception of genius rests on IQ
tests that are kind of bunk and a concept of g that might not really mean anything in
a broader sense of intelligence, is there really even such a thing as a genius at all?
Sure, Elon Musk has had moments of genius, as did Linus Pauling before him. But what
if they’re actually just smart people who happened to stumble upon some breakthrough
ideas? As it turns out, there's some evidence this might be the case. Terman – in his
quest for studying geniuses – actually embarked on one of the longest running longitudinal
studies in history. Partnering with the California public school system, he used IQ tests to
identify the most gifted children, and then followed up with them for the next 35 years.
While Terman had hoped to find the “great men” that Carlyle theorized moved history,
instead most of his approximately 1500 geniuses went on to live normal lives. In a devastating
analysis, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin demonstrated that Terman’s geniuses did just as well
in life as a random sampling of kids from a similar socio-economic status. In other
words, genius-level IQ didn’t produce any Linus Paulings or Elon Musks. In fact, as
journalist Malcolm Gladwell points out, Terman actually tested and ultimately rejected two
individuals who went on to win Nobel Prizes.
Maybe genius isn’t a number then, but rather the happy accident of a hardworking, lucky,
and ultimately normal person. And maybe they get a boost from specific kinds of reasoning
skills. Terrence Tao, winner of the Fields Medal in 2006 – kind of like the Nobel Prize
for Math except much more exclusive – takes just this view. He argues:
“The popular image of the lone (and possibly slightly mad) genius — who ignores the literature
and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration ... to come
up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts—is
a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one...”
To Tao, genius isn’t the result of the great men that Carlyle proposed. Instead, the genius
stands atop the shoulders of those that came before, whose small incremental advances led
to the genius’ breakthrough. It’s not brilliance, it’s simply progress “obtained
naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature,
and a bit of luck.”
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Did the simulation just short us the intelligence
needed to fully appreciate the legend that is Elon Musk? Let us know in the comments
how smart, or dumb, you think we are for writing this. Thanks to all our awesome patrons for
supporting the channel and our podcasts. Slam that subscribe button to prove how smart YOU
are, or don’t. and as always, thanks for watching. Peace!