How to Think Like a Genius 39-Pretending
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Should we be encouraging that form of behavior?
Rick Rosner: We’re facetiously talking about that form of behavior.
Jacobsen: There’s aspects of pretending to be a genius. There’s a lot of people like that. At the same time, there’s simply people that may think they are rather than simple wanting to take some behaviors of people that have greater ability — one might say weighted towards more innate ability — than these individuals that want to improve. They want to improve performance. That’s more noble, thought the bar is low there.
Rosner: I grew up in the 70s, which was a time of sexual desperation — where getting a girlfriend or making out with a girl was maybe probably the hardest problem we were confronting for many years and we looked at many angles of how to somehow become palatable to girls. And that idea has faded. That generalized male desperation has been knocked down a little bit by social media, where people have a more reasonable idea of who their communities might be and since everybody can have a sort of community that isn’t necessarily their miserable in-school community.
I think there’s a lot more stuff to do besides trying to make out with a girl now than there was in the 70s. So, there’s probably less desperation, but that idea has still moved forward to the extent that there is the pickup artist movement, which is there were crappy books on how to pickup girls in the 70s. And then there were more effective and better thought out ones in the 90s — though no less creepy.
Off the top of my head, one reason to want to appear to be a genius if you don’t have the serious intent to be a genius is to be socially successful. And I don’t know if it is worth it. It probably is. If you have an angle on it, there are plenty of ways to pretend to be someone else long enough to at least to talk to a girl.
With the pickup artist technique is to dress like a fool, and … [phone, end of conversation]
Some aspects of genius can be triggered with the right clay, the right genetic background, through exceptional circumstances with to parents as well.
If you’re either going to be a genius or fake being a genius, a good head start is having a crazy parent. A parent who wants to make a genius. John Stuart Mill’s dad wanted to turn out a prodigy and it worked out. John Stuart Mill was speaking like a dozen languages by the time he was 8 or some crazy young age. His dad pushed, and pushed, and pushed the way a crazy sports kid might push a kid now. Mill had the mental resources for this to work out.
It’s a crap shoot. Most of the time it won’t. There was William Sidis a hundred to a hundred and twenty years ago who had a dad who was very ambitious on Sidis’ behalf and got him educated and pushed him, and then the kid pushes himself and then becomes a Harvard Professor at like age 18 or 16, or something. And then kind of doesn’t — he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in is 40s, which is no way to become an immortal genius.
In the mean-time, he worked at the post office. He became obsessed with trolley transfers or bus transfers. Little slips of paper where you need to take more than one bus, and at the same time he came up with a system of physics and was writing a history of the world, but when the op-eds were written about him they emphasized that he was a misguided genius that didn’t live up to his early promise, which is a general theme of stories about genius is that there’s a lot of schadenfreude in stories.
People like to read about celebrities and their lives that are a mess. They like to read about geniuses who are very troubled because of I guess the psychology is or the thought behind it when people write stories like that is that people like to feel good about themselves by showing somebody who has greater gifts than them but has greater deficits too. People might feel good about that.
There are — we’ve been talking. You mentioned Adragon de Mello. Another kid with a dad that was crazily ambitious on his behalf and turned him into a prodigy and is he the one who ended up working at Home Depot or is that a different one.
Last information we have is that he worked Home Depot, yes.
So, there’s a case out in Colorado about 12 years ago. I’ll have to look up the name of the mom. Instead of pushing her kid to become a genius, she just committed flat out fraud. She got the answers to a well-respected IQ test. Either the WISQ or the Stanford-Binet, and coached her 3-year-old kid on what the answers were, and took the kid to be tested at age 3. The kid got the score of an average 12-year-old, and giving him an IQ of like 400 or about the highest IQ in history.
That’s a great strategy, except that it’s a terrible strategy because how do you back it up. If the kid has the highest or is the most brilliant kid in history, somebody is going to want ask that kid to multiply a couple two digit numbers together or write like a paragraph and that kid who has been coached in the answers to one specific IQ test is going to be found out pretty fast as the mom and kid were. I think the mom got prosecuted, for what exactly I don’t know. Fantastic, terrible strategy.
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