How to Think Like a Genius 19-Busting
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s stereotypes about nerds only being in engineering, science, computer science, and mathematics, being tortured loners, and the line between genius and madness. Any busting for those potential myths?
Rick Rosner: I don’t know what percent of the American population is of some kind of drug designed to treat mental problems, but it’s got to be more than 10% of the population. People used to like to say, and dumb people still like to say, that people only use 10% of their brains, which is just a ridiculous, meaningless comment, but it is disproven by the high percentage of people who at some point during their lives have mental difficulties, have psychological difficulties that require counselling or medication or that go untreated, but still exist.
It’s a significant chunk of the population, probably over a third. Everybody at some time during their lives has psychological difficulties. I’d say somewhat more so among geniuses, though not necessarily wildly more so. I mean geniuses tend to at some point of their lives maybe across large swathes of their lives give themselves the freedom to do what they want to do or think they should do, or decide to determine their own rules.
And this means they may behave strangely, other people who don’t allow themselves to try to be geniuses may conform more. So, you have geniuses acting or have a tendency to do what they want to do and without the pressure to conform. Geniuses may act out, act more eccentrically other people. The demands of some geniuses, so-called geniuses, artists, what people who are pushing themselves mentally to as much as they can from time to time might show more psychological effects.
Plus, it’s been romantic at various points in the 20th century for certain kinds of geniuses, artistic geniuses, to be thought of and think of themselves as people who need to get drunk all of the time. Hemingway drunk and suicidal. Fitzgerald drank himself to death. A lot of, Polick was pretty drinky. It was of the myth, the romanticism, of being a creative person or the romance of being a creative person in the 20th century and if you’re drinking and drugging that’ll make you teeter on the edge of some psychological issues.
There’s some legitimacy of the fine line between genius and madness. Also, there area bunch of crazy people thinking they are geniuses, walking around thinking they are misunderstood, and so they mess up the Bayesian genius pool there, where they’re bad advertisement for genius. So, yea, geniuses can be a little crazier than regular people, but I don’t think that every genius is always dancing on the thin edge of craziness.
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