How to Think Like a Genius 15-Future Genius
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the role of genius as we move forward? In other words, what is the role of genius in the past, now, and how can we project into the future with that?
Rick Rosner: Alright, so — I think the idea of genius really kind of kicked off or started gaining the modern idea of genius probably got started with Francis Galton and his book Hereditary Genius, which I’ve got the Wikipedia in front of me right now, and he did this study of how giftedness — a series of linked biographical sketches that shows that giftedness runs in families, and he was an early eugenicist. Eugenic is the idea that you should only let the people with the right genes, good genes, reproduce because people with bad genes are a threat because they tend to reproduce more and will threaten society with the genetically inferior, and this is kind of a first reaction to Darwin’s idea of argument of survival of the fittest, but it is a scary and ultimately and bad and dumb idea.
Obviously, if you have a risk — I’m Jewish. Every Jewish person knows about Tay-Sachs disease, which is a horrible disease that runs in Jews and then kills the kid at age 3. Obviously, you want the kid to be born with that. You want to make sure that if you have the potential to be the carrier of a condition, or your spouse, you don’t want to bring some horribly and doomed to die before age 5 kid into the world. Nobody needs that kind of trouble, but some people will take that upon themselves, but most people would prefer not, but eugenics takes that way too far.
And it is historically being abused with the biggest abuser being Hitler.
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