How to Think Like a Genius 18-Myths
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A more obscure topic. What are myths about genius? What busts that open?
Rick Rosner: First one that comes to mind is that geniuses lack common sense. To the — genius is sometimes accompanied by what is now called Asperger’s, when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. It was a term, maybe, but not a widely known diagnosis, and it goes along with some other characteristics like absentmindedness.
There’s probably a kernel of truth statistically, if you take it to mean geniuses are socially awkward or Aspergery, but it is often deployed, or when it was deployed against me in junior high school and other times. It was just a way of putting me down. It was a way of say that I can operate in the world and you can’t. It prompts the questions, “Do non-geniuses have common sense?”
A lot of people don’t. Common sense is something that you gain via experience with the world, and during the era when I grew up, which was jocks vs. nerds era, cool guys and jocks actually kind of grew up a little faster socially than nerds because they got have girlfriends. They were lucky enough to be popular. Being popular, they learned how to interact with people, and probably participating in team sports helped with that. It made me less nerdy. In relationships, one of the guys I went to was one of the guys I was bouncing a bar with. A cool guy and an athlete all his life. He did all of the things in the right order. He was a jock in high school, and then an engineer in college.
I didn’t do sports successfully. In college, I was a weightlifter guy, which is self-defeating. I turned to him for relationship advice because he’d been doing it for years longer like having a girlfriend. There can be some basis for nerds being socially awkward, but that’s probably less true now because everybody can build communities online and can learn to interact in many ways besides in person, and it’s not jocks vs. nerds with things being super oppressive for nerds. That whole geniuses lacking common sense has an element of truth, but is often used in bullshittey oppressive ways.
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