Ask A Genius 1017: The Steven Stutts Session
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/17
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Steven Stutts asks, “What do you think of the relationship between intelligence and awareness?”
Rick Rosner: In fiction, I’m thinking of Sherlock Holmes, the genius who notices patterns in the world and details that people of regular intelligence don’t. When we look at famous real-world geniuses, they’re famous because they found patterns in the world that nobody else had found before. Newton discovered universal gravitation. Darwin found evolution. Crick, Watson, and Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. Einstein figured out the two theories of relativity.
They got to these things before other people did. Though, Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus simultaneously. Darwin developed the theory of evolution independently of another guy. Was it Wallace or Huxley? One of those guys was Darwin’s cheerleader, and the other independently discovered evolution but isn’t as famous because his arguments weren’t as well developed. Darwin spent about 15 years developing his theories of evolution.
People like to say that if Einstein had been hit by a bus, someone else would have developed special relativity within a few years. Some argue for Henri Poincare, a French mathematician. Stereotypically, smart people are aware of more details and patterns in the world, but that also depends on individual personalities.
Bill Gates, for example, exhibits behavior that might put him on the spectrum. Being on the spectrum can make someone hyperaware of some things in their environment, like the feel of fabrics, which often bothers autistic people more than non-autistic people. On the other hand, autistic people are often oblivious to social cues. This leads to the idea that, maybe, among super-smart people, the intelligence is at the expense of something else. You only have so much overall brainpower, and if some of it is diverted for extreme mathematical ability, you might have a deficit somewhere else. This suggests that you can’t generalize across all smart people.
Jacobsen: Can you give examples of smart people who are famous for being hyperaware?
Rosner: Look at Elon Musk, who has a reputation for being brilliant and also kind of a gullible idiot. He’s spearheaded many tech companies, yet he can go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and buy into a lot of nonsense. Generally, there is a correlation between higher intelligence and awareness, but it depends on how you define awareness.
Jacobsen: Being aware of your surroundings can be helpful but can also be a characteristic of those on the autism spectrum who can’t filter. I don’t think you can make a one-to-one mapping between higher intelligence and those on the autism spectrum. In fact, it might be a myth. People on the spectrum generally have lower than average intelligence, and the higher ones are noteworthy.
Rosner: There are also plenty of people on the spectrum with regular intelligence who are neurodivergent and fine with it. You don’t have to be a basket case or a savant. You can be a regular person with some characteristics of autism. There might be more of those people than those at the extremes. For sure, there are more people severely affected by autism than there are savants, but I suspect that people with mild manifestations of autism might outnumber those who are severely affected.
There’s also fake smartness—people trying to fool others or themselves into thinking they’re smart by exhibiting stereotypical genius behavior. For example, someone might act like a granola head, always marveling at the natural world, and feel that they have more depth due to their appreciation of nature. There is a certain amount of that dynamic where people want to be smart and show their smartness in ways society characterizes as being associated with intelligence. We know that smart people can be more observant and get obsessed with aspects of the world, diligently exploring until they yield new truths. But I’m not sure that is a universal factor for smart people. There are plenty of smart people who are happy that being smart has made certain things easy for them but are content to live non-genius lives. What do you think?
Jacobsen: Is living a genius life, as it is typically envisioned, worth living?
Rosner: Most people wouldn’t find it worth living. Geniuses are often presented in the media as being tortured and miserable because of their gifts, living on the verge of madness. Genius is often sold with schadenfreude, where we look at the genius and see them as miserable. Aren’t you happy? You’re not this smart. So, is that an argument against being a genius, if you can be a genius? Kind of, but it’s also an argument often made by bullshitters at the National Enquirer, who did a story in one of those supermarket tabloids. I saw an article on Christopher Harding, a super high IQ guy from Australia. The article was like, “Look how weird and miserable this guy is.”
And I’ve had some contact with him, and I don’t think he’s particularly miserable, but that was the sensationalist angle. What else did I want to say? I guess what I’m saying about intelligence is that you can be super handsome or beautiful and use that to come to LA and try to become a TV or movie star. Somebody might notice that, yes, beautiful people become stars. But for every beautiful person who wants to come to LA, there’s a ton of people who want to stay home, settle down, and do some regular job, hoping to have a happy relationship and live a life where being super hot may make certain parts of their life easier and allow them to walk around feeling good about themselves. But beyond that, they want a normal life. So, I would think that being super smart would have kind of the same effect. You could go for super genius-level achievements or you could have a nice advantage in an otherwise normal life. Do you think?
Jacobsen: What distinction are you making between awareness and consciousness?
Rosner: What linkage am I making?
Jacobsen: What distinction are you making between those two, awareness and consciousness?
Rosner: The distinction could be that awareness is your sensory input on a moment-to-moment basis, while consciousness is your sensory input plus your mind’s analysis, memories, and associations on a moment-to-moment basis. You could argue that awareness should be considered another name for consciousness because are you truly aware of things without all the associations, memories, and analytics that pop up in your brain in response to sensory input? But I’m okay with making the distinction that awareness is what you perceive about your surroundings and how you prepare to address issues in your surroundings, which is consciousness minus the introspection. But it’s a matter of how you define each thing.
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