I love stories about Shannon, Feynman, Weiner, Grothendeick, Turing, and others, but I've become suspicious of the idea of genius. While these and others are undoubtedly examples, and telling their stories inspires us to follow their paths at least for a while, the underlying idea is that these people, whose minds necessarily took liberty first to make their discoveries, are somehow unreachable Others.
This is where I diverge, as I think if we were to cultivate the core values of benevolence, humility, with iconoclasm in kids we could produce more minds like these. What makes genius so exceptional is less a magical quality of the person, but that they manage to achieve in spite of the rest of us in as we occupy our classrooms and offices. I suspect it's these values that are the necessary condition.
Such a pleasant article about such an amazing mind.
To summarize other comments on genetic component, I think survivor bias has more to do with it, as even if hypoethetically there is a genetic component, how many of those genetically "gifted" people come out the other side of our institutions and systems to be remembered as "geniuses?"
One doesn't need to subscribe to tabula rasa to bet that the real incidence of a Ramanujan intelligence is orders of magnitude higher than its appearance in european universities. The more plausible explanation is that our societies are exceptionally good at suppressing these intelligences because the problems they index on and the only ways to solve them are specifically orthogonal to the skills you need to rise in a bureaucracy.
Genetics might be a thing, but I'm saying any genetic component of intelligence is effectively cancelled out in all but a few celebrated instances by the leviathan mean-reversion machines we call societies.
Edit to add: I think the argument should be about the best way to discover how fat tailed the distribution of human intelligence really is instead of producing explanations for why we should think it's long and thin.
> even if hypoethetically there is a genetic component
> Genetics might be a thing
Wouldn't it be a huge surprise if genetics weren't a thing when it comes to intelligence (or imperfect attempts to quantify it)? Maybe my lay understanding is out of date or something, but research like [1] concludes that metrics of intelligence are "moderately to substantially heritable," along with "virtually all individual psychological differences."
Of course; the parent likely meant something more like "even if hypothetically there is a strong or very strong genetic component". It's undeniable there is one, but the responsibility is still hotly debated. I've seen claims between 20 - 90%.
I think their point was that no matter how strong it might be, it often may not visibly materialize due to various environmental factors, including passive or active suppression and the way our societies and economies are organized. So assuming for the sake of argument it's 50% or even 90%, there are still a lot of reasons why such gifted people may not get recognized and/or reach their full potential.
Ramanujan very easily could've died with almost no one remembering him if none of the letters he wrote were taken seriously. The first two mathematicians he contacted ignored him. If not for the third, G. H. Hardy, giving him a chance, we might not be talking about him. And even he initially suspected he was a fraud of some kind, until he scrutinized the work more carefully and shared it with others.
The main thing about homo sapiens is that we are a cultural species, capable of evolving and select for culture much faster than genetic evolution, passing know-how and tools down to the next generation to improve.
The culture, tools and values we grow around with has so much power to shape our thinking and values (not even talking about opportunities) that I would be surprised if it didn't dwarf most genetic influence. (Hard to prove: how do you know success was passed down via culture vs genes?)
This is why we are so interested to learn about geniuses: by adapting their values and thinking, we might be able to copy some of their success. This is the process of cultural learning, for better or worse.
> Hard to prove: how do you know success was passed down via culture vs genes?
By studying twins separated at birth (reared-apart twins), which establishes that genetics accounts for more variation in intelligence than environment, culture, etc. One starting point for further reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/well/family/what-twins-ca...
'Success' in life is something completely different from 'success' in academia.
The later probably requires one to be quite intelligent, the former, not necessarily, it'd be just one of many advantages.
Throw in the creativity and propensity to think or daydream, frankly I don't know how many professors could do anything else with their lives. We all know profs who literally would put ties on backwards.
It can be the case that the raw intelligence necessary to be a genius is moderately to substantially heritable, and yet that most people that inherit such raw intelligence don't become geniuses. In fact, this seems quite likely.
I think it’s probably a little of both. On one side, I am reminded of the quote “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. Many of the big discoveries happened by very intelligent people being in the right place, at the right time where a certain idea was ripe, meeting the right people, and having just enough gusto, so to speak, to push in a new direction. I think that is probably applicable to people like Einstein and Shannon. I’m not taking away from them at all because they did it with work and intelligence. It’s just they had the right preparation at the right time and place.
But then there are other people that do seem to be on a totally different plane, usually in some specific field. One that comes to mind is someone like Grigori Perelman. I think that’s where the comment on genetics applies, because someone like that truly has biological horsepower that the rest of us don’t have.
Then there are others who are more generalist thinkers, at a system level, that seem to see things the rest of us don’t and have the capability to sort through it all. I’m reminded of people like Stafford Beer. Someone like Noam Chomsky is probably in this category as well but also in the former, like Perelman. If you’ve ever watched Chomsky debate or speak, he seems to have a basically infinite memory and instant recall of what he has read.
I like the sentiment, but I have to disagree. I believe there is something genetically different about Grothendieck that makes him possess superior intelligence. I don’t think you can cultivate a bunch of Grothendiecks in mass by teaching a bunch of children advanced mathematics at a younger age.
Off subject but on Wikipedia Grothendieck says Riemann was his only main or most admired mathematician. Do their fields match up for this to make sense?
Grothendieck did a lot of work in areas that were built off of Riemann's work.
So, for example, Riemann came up with Riemann surfaces, which were the inspiration for Riemann manifolds. Finding ways to generalize that was a major starting point for algebraic geometry. Which Grothendieck did a lot of work in.
As an example, Grothendieck's first famous theorem in algebraic geometry was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grothendieck%E2%80%93Riemann%E.... Which finds an appropriate generalization of a result originally due to Riemann in a much more limited context.
Side note. When the name Riemann appears on HN, it almost always is in reference to the Riemann hypothesis. Which is a conjecture in number theory. This might mislead you into thinking that Riemann was a number theorist. He was not. His total contribution to number theory was a single paper where he used his complex analysis techniques to prove the prime number theorem, and made his famous conjecture.
The only other context that most on HN will know the name from was the Riemann integral. Which is the main integral that most who take Calculus will know.
I think it is partially genetic, but also the type of environment that Grothendieck was raised in. He was raised in utmost uncertainty during WW2 (he was half-jewish), and i think he gravitated towards the certainty in mathematics. He was also mostly self taught early on, so he definitely had a different way of looking at things than those who came from regular academic backgrounds like serre. I like to think of natural brain power as hardware (genetics) and the set of beliefs, interests, fundamental ways of thinking about the world as software acquired through experience. Even the best hardware can't run shitty algorithms. In any creative fields, there are an extraordinary amount of brute force paths, it takes a special type of touch to find the correct path, and this seems to be very much a function of the life experiences a person had and this is really what differentiates special creative people like einstein or grothendieck from people who are just as intelligent but haven't done nearly as much.
I used to view things this way as well. It has a lot in common with blank slate psychology. I have come to not believe things like this anymore.
As I get older, I am returning more to it's more about nature than nurture: genetics matter much more than environment. I've realized just how hard it is to do some of these things, even with all the resources and tools at your disposal. I spent much time thinking of how environmental cultivation can help, and I do think it matters to a degree, but genetics matter much more, in as much that the only reason environment matters at all is that it helps bring forth expressions of your genes. Having children made me realize this even more. While they pick up on some things and mannerisms of their parents, I have no idea where their unique little personalities came from, and their tendencies towards certain subjects, hobbies, or activities. It amazes me every day I see them change and grow into their own person.
Additionally, it belittles the consistent effort and energy spent by these individuals to train their minds. Genius to an extent has a lot in common with madness, in that you have to be almost mad to take ideas they did to their conclusion. We see the result of their works, but not the countless hours and sleepless nights put in to get to that point, driven by the idea of novelty and discovery.
>Additionally, it belittles the consistent effort and energy spent by these individuals to train their minds
Not following this logic and this seems to be at odds with the rest of your comment. You seem to be saying that the idea of 'nurture/environment' being more or as important than 'nature/genetics' belittles the effort made by individuals to train their minds? Isn't the complete opposite actually true, ie acknowledging the importance of 'nurture/environment' or epigenetic enabled knowledge/skill acquisition, would actually be to recognise rather than belittle the 'consistent effort and energy spent by these individuals to train their minds'?
I didn't finish the train of thought because I felt like it was getting too wordy, but, yes training can bring you to a certain level, but you need to have the right genes as well to be even above everyone else. I am a big sports buff so my mind instantly thinks of all the thousands upon thousands of players across the world, people who train night and day, sleep 8+ hours, have perfect diets, and still come up short. Then you have a Michael Jordan, or my favorite example of pure genetic specimen: Bo Jackson. You need it all: the right genes, the skill acquisition, the grit, the determination, the right mindset, and finally, a little bit of luck.
Shaquille O'Neal is the perfect example of this. He hit the genetic jackpot. Being 7' feet tall is a one in 1 million shot. Being 7'2 with that type of frame is like a 1 in a billion shot.
So glad you brought up Shaq. He is the perfect example of if he had say half the madness of a Michael Jordan, he probably would have went down as the greatest of all time, surpassing Kareem. He made grown men look like children in the same way Wilt did in his generation.
I am realizing this is difficult to express concisely.
Let's for the sake of this conversation narrow down our definition of intelligence as "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills" which also presupposes some form of ability to maintain intense lengths of focus and concentration required to learn these skills and acquire said knowledge.
I will preface by saying surely there have been people whom society would have viewed as "not having the right genes" accomplished many great feats and tasks. And surely there have been geniuses, or what we view in a certain lens as "genius" without having had a reputation for being particularly intelligent.
But the point I am making has three parts:
Point one: If you take the purely metaphysical approach, there is a maximum capacity for intelligence that any one individual has. Evolutionary biology has told us, thus far to our understanding, that this is brain size. Going down this same road, that means certain people have evolved, or fitted more advantageously for intelligence, and some for other things like strength, others for other traits that are important, so on and so forth (by the way to go ahead and nip in the bud, this isn't saying one is better or more important, so don't take this as any kind of statement of supremacy). Genetics plays in part your maximum capacity, for some function of intelligence: whether its the sheer number of skills and knowledge you can acquire, I haven't done enough research personally to make an accurate statement there, but I do know that we have limitations and those limitations are determined by genetics.
Point two: You can certainly overcome some limitations. But your effort to overcome efforts and become "genius" at a given field is still hampered versus someone who puts in the same effort and has the genetic platform. That is why you still have the "scrappy" players in the NFL that are clearly inferior genetically but have carved out a niche for themselves, or you have business people that have a "stroke of brilliance" But in order to obtain maximum human potential for intelligence, the genetic platform first needs to be there, and then you need to put in the consistent effort to acquire the skills, to put them to use.
Said another way someone genetically inclined to gather knowledge is going to accomplish more knowledge gathering than someone not genetically inclined to do so. Just as my lanky and bony arms are never going to lift as much weight as someone who has tree trunks for arms if we hit the gym the same amount of times.
Point three: Yes there are scrawny and scrappy, the "brainless" that have strokes of genius, the people who overcome improbable disadvantages to achieve greatness. But we are talking about the most likely scenario. I have 3 brothers and my oldest was always considered the most intelligent. We had the exact same upbringing and exposure to resources and tools. Our genetic expressions determine our propensities to engage in certain behaviors, which lead to certain interests, which lead us down different roads. Our environments help carry us along those paths.
The ones that are truly great, or "genius" or "best of all time" in a sport, have gone down a road they have the genetic propensity for, and utilized their capacity to its fullest, through consistent effort and energy.
This is at least my current model of the world through my life experiences. Do you think it is grossly incorrect? Happy to be corrected, or incorporate more factors.
Don't worry, we're talking at cross purposes and don't seem to be understanding the others point. Let's leave it here.
Oh and btw...
>If you take the purely metaphysical approach, there is a maximum capacity for intelligence that any one individual has. Evolutionary biology has told us, thus far to our understanding, that this is brain size.
I don't think these days that it's accepted that 'brain size' necessarily determines 'maximum capacity for intelligence' for the record. My understanding is that this is a rather outdated way of thinking about the brain and intelligence.
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
> As I get older, I am returning more to it's more about nature than nurture: genetics matter much more than environment.
It is my understanding that modern science supports this. I’ve seen either a book or article (none of which I can recall at the moment) that echoes this sentiment.
Off-topic, but a book or article though could be something totally different than "modern science".
Even if it mentions dozens of studies.
You can find a book on every position in science. In some you can find tens, or thousands supporting a position. And they all references studies and statistics, and such.
But they can still not reflect any real consensus in "modern science".
Either because they cherry pick from a side far away from the consensus (e.g. there are hundreds of such books from climate change denier scientists, but the consensus is elsewhere).
Or because the consensus itself is broken to 2 or more equally strong directions.
I now tend to only consider "settled" science (and that's mostly "settled for now") what has been studied and distilled so long, it's in 101 university books and such.
> There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.
- Hans Bethe
I believe Feynman's "magic" was in how well he could explain things to others, and there isn't a "explain things well" gene...
Do you mean a workplace like Bell Labs where the monopoly only had to come up with a significant game changer now and then instead of on a quarterly basis?
The below podcast, a TWIML AI interview of Charles Isbell is an interesting listen overall and the above question’s assumptions about Bell Labs come from the podcast’s depiction of Bell Labs.
I personally think it goes beyond simply access to resources. Isn't having the financial freedom to pursue your interests for large portions of your life a common trait of many intelligent/polymath/achieved types?
I don't think anyone is genius in any field by birth. Yes, one can have some biological traits but those are mostly related to having a properly functioning brain. Then, with long, sincere effort and right environment starting early in life, one eventually attains the mastery in the given field.
I read this book 'The Children of Tomorrow' [0] in which the author has mentioned about a couple Laszlo Polgar (a psychologist) and Klara who intentionally and carefully planned making their children genius chess players. The result:
> Their first daughter Susan Polgar won her first Under-11 chess tournament at age four. At twelve, she won the World (Girls) Under-16 championship. At fifteen, she became the top-rated female chess player in the world. Going through the conventional Grandmaster (GM) norms applicable to men, she became a chess grandmaster at the age of twenty-two. In 1996, twenty-seven-year-old Susan Polgar was crowned the women’s chess champion.
> their second daughter Sofia who, at the age of eleven, became a world Under-14 girls chess champion.
> their youngest daughter, Judit, who
At age twelve, had thirty-five more points in FIDE rating (world chess rating) than the erstwhile world women chess champion. At age fifteen, she became the youngest chess grandmaster, far ahead of any male chess grandmaster throughout the history of the game. Judit is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time. At age ten, she not only took on chess grandmaster Lev Gutman, but also won against him.
> All three daughters were home-schooled by Klara with a specialization in chess. They figured a long time ago – as an increasing number of parents are discovering today – that there was little sense in sending their children to a traditional school where regard for individual growth and understanding the temperament of each child was negligible. By the time most children come back home from school in the afternoon, they are tired and a whole day seems gone. To expect that they would then pursue intensive training in anything else at all is neither practical nor reasonable.
> but that they manage to achieve in spite of the rest of us
This is a very important factor.
Whatever things these geniuses brought to the world, were not self-evident to other people. The geniuses not only had to come up with their ideas, but (maybe even more importantly) "sell" those ideas to others.
It is very hard to convince others to even pay attention to new ideas, it's even harder to get them to adopt them.
>Reflecting on the arc of his career, Shannon confessed, “I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.”
This is one insight about actual geniuses that shun the "classic" trappings of life that has always intrigued me. They are essentially coerced by their own neurology to aim for academic pursuits, because anything else cannot scratch that itch. Money and power are nice (and Johnny von Neumann loved his parties and loud music) but in the end it's just not that stimulating in comparison to hard abstract problems. Social relationships still have their draw as well, but you have to hit the knowledge-pipe regularly or face withdrawal.
For people of that caliber, living in pre-modern societies must have been equivalent to torture. For the rest of us, it would have been like watching paint dry for our entire lives. Sounds like sour grapes, but in a way I am grateful not to have to deal with all of this. Looking at von Neumann's example again, the fear of death still caused him to lash out irrationally and in the end even he could not escape the human condition.
I'm not a genius by any stretch, but I felt that way until I was given access to the internet and enough job stability to have a few hours of free time every day. The internet became a way to easily just read about whatever interested me, which is usually a few hours a day on various subjects. Before that, life was miserable.
As an adult I've realized that I need significant and varied diet of books, internet, social time, rigorous physical activity, problem solving, musical practice, and art making every day otherwise I quickly fall into a deep depression. I can see how in other times or other circumstances I'd be turning to substance abuse just to make it through the day. It feels like my mind requires constant effort or I'll be unhealthy and unhappy.
Several family members of mine who are quite a bit more intelligent struggle with this even more. Some have even fallen into substance abuse as a shortcut, but one that never achieves stability, only ruin.
Of course the freedom to scratch that itch means you need to have the option to not work a job you don't enjoy to meet the physical needs of living.
Today it's easier to overcome, but not everyone has the privilege of clawing their way out. By the time they do, then who they are is already defined as someone who is not interested in that itch. Name one scientific genius born into poverty.
If you want to split hairs about what "poverty" means, you might want to put down a line. There are plenty of other types of geniuses (literary, musical, etc) that were born in poverty, so I see no reason to think it's an exclusive club of the financially stable.
George Washington “ Carver was born into slavery, in Diamond Grove (now Diamond), Newton County, Missouri, near Crystal Place, sometime in the early or mid 1860s.”
Interesting you say that because I was just reading[0] about his life:
> Ramanujan (literally, "younger brother of Rama", a Hindu deity[14]:12) was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu, India), at the residence of his maternal grandparents.[14]:11 His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop.[14]:17–18[15] His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and sang at a local temple.[16] They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.
He wasn't born in a rich family but it wasn't poverty either. He did become very poor at certain point in his life due to his inability to focus on anything other than mathematics but then recovered financially as his genius started to be known by more.
Probably the more important point is that he was born into a brahmin family. Brahmin culture is heavily focused on learning and knowledge (a bit similar to jewish culture).
Maybe learn about how times have changed. It was completely possible to be a clerk and have a middle class lifestyle in his era. His parents' home is a museum nowadays.
I should know by now that certain audiences will see it as a challenge rather than discuss the point. A pedant would blame me for not stating a more waterproof literal argument.
Don't know if he was bragging or not, but if you have achieved something, I think it's hard to talk about yourself without someone thinking you're bragging.
I once got a top grade after passing an exam where I had read one page beyond what was required (can't remember if it was by accident, or because I was curious about something - but we're talking one page). After my presentation, the examiner asked a final question. This was covered in that page, so I just had to connect two dots and could give him a little proof immediately. Very little brain activity needed. Pretty sure I couldn't have come up with a proof on the spot otherwise.
I sometimes bring up that story as an example of why grading is stupid, but even though the point is how arbitrary the situation was, I can't shake off the feeling that people might think I'm bragging.
I think we should cut people some slack, if we don't know their intentions.
That is an excellent point. In this case, I still can't help but think of all those whose circumstances did not allow them to produce anything that would be remembered by history.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
— S. J. Gould
“His name may not ring a bell. Don’t worry, we didn’t know who he was either when we started.“
This really sounds like a weird quote that doesn’t help promote their book at all. Why would I want to read a biography written by people who didn’t know the person until five years ago?
I guess that sentence tells all about who the target audience is for the book.
> Why would I want to read a biography written by people who didn’t know the person until five years ago?
Professional biographers are generalists who turn existing primary and secondary sources into a narrative of someone's life, perhaps with input from the subject, friends and family, etc. They need a fair bit of background knowledge, but they don't need to be experts in the field. It's a biography, not a technical survey or intellectual history, although it probably includes some elements of that.
If you're interested in Shannon's life and want to understand something about his work in that context, this could be a useful to you. If you're primarily interested in his work, read a textbook or his publications.
> Professional biographers are generalists who turn existing primary and secondary sources into a narrative of someone's life
And that's why most "professional" biographies suck. I am not saying the biographer should dedicate their life to their subject , although it certainly does not hurt, but a certain level of competence beyond "just" reading the primary and secondaries sources is expected for a great biography. Sometimes you get that because of long experience, sometimes you get that because you knew the subject or because you have worked in the same field. If you want vapid books like this one or ,a little less charitably, Walter Isaacson's Einstein go for it. But if you want fantastic tour de forces like Westfall's "Never at Rest", Joseph Frank's series on Dostoevsky, Pais' "Subtle is the lord",Stach's books on Kafka you need an experienced world-class expert in the subject in a multi-year (sometimes, multi-decade) effort.
Realistically, how would you know these biographies are actually that good? Suppose we took the most well-researched biography imaginable: a person who pores over a single life over decades and manages to find all or most of the material still available. In this hypothetical case, you are still sold a narrative that is based on the author's own impressions and reading of the material, and the material itself lacks important details about the person that could not be recorded due to their very nature.
We can with some reasonable degree of certainty conclude that some bios are better than others and some bios are not worth reading at all, but in all cases you are left with an illusory understanding of the person.
You are looking for a perfect biography, that does not exist, not even auto-biographies, those tend to be the worst.
But let's compare the Einstein biography written by Pais: He had a PhD in physics, also a degree in mathematics, personally knew Einstein, personally knew most of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Worked at the IAS in Princeton, published a lot in Quantum Physics,had several contributions to the theory, was a tenured professor, wrote several excellent books in the history of physics. Now imagine a book on Einstein which starts "Dont worry if you dont know who Albert Einstein was, I didnt know either five years ago"
Personally I thoroughly enjoyed both of Walter Isaacson's biographies on Jobs and Benjamin Franklin. I got a lot from both. What specifically makes the other biographies better? More details, wider points of view etc?
All of Ray Monk's biographies are supposedly excellent. I have only read the Wittgenstein one, but he also wrote some books on Bertrand Russell (philosopher/mathematician) and Oppenheimer (scientist.)
It's true that this biography was not a great vehicle for understanding Shannon's technical contributions as they are in many cases glossed over, is much more focused on his professional arc, hobbies, family, kind of more about getting to know him outside of his papers.
But Shannon was a very interesting character, lot's of oddball moments and projects. It's a fun read.
When I join a new software project I usually know nothing about the problem domain either. And sometimes not even about the tools or languages used. But that is not a problem because the skills actually required are the ability to become familiar with unknown problem domains and the ability to use your general knowledge about software development to make use of whatever language, framework, or tool the project asks for.
“But that is not a problem because the skills actually required are the ability to become familiar with unknown problem domains and the ability to use your general knowledge about software development to make use of whatever language, framework, or tool the project asks for.”
I think a lot of projects suffer from the fact that the people working on it don’t have deep domain knowledge. A lot of attempts to “disrupt” an industry fail because they don’t understand the status quo.
I mean I am developing custom business applications, the customer and also the in-house developers have the knowledge. But sure, if you are trying to build a product you want to sell, then you or at least your team or company should certainly have deep domain knowledge. But this seems also really self-evident, how would you even build a product for something you do not understand? And whoever had ever to become familiar with a new domain will probably know this - from the outside and with no or limited knowledge things look often not very complicated, but once you dig into it, even the simplest looking domain has very deep rabbit holes everywhere.
> Why would I want to read a biography written by people who didn’t know the person until five years ago?
Because you're the kind of thoughtful person who would evaluate the question of whether you should read a book based on more than the most superficial criteria. (or because you want to read about Claude Shannon and there aren't a lot of options)
Yes, this article has less to do with Claude Shannon and more to do with garden variety motto's like "Chaos is okay", and "Big picture first, details later". This is a theme I've found in shallow marketing copy that's optimized to raise to the top of a social feed instead of actually inform the reader of something substantial. It's quite sad, as Claude Shannon is a truly fascinating individual, but I will not read three-hundred pages of a book by this post's authors to hear more about him.
Well, I guess our inclinations differ. I wouldn't want to read a biography of Hitchcock written by a blind man, or a biography of Shakespeare by someone who can't speak a word of English, has read none of Shakespeare's works and knows nothing about Elizabethean society -- no matter what experts they speak to.
I'm wondering though: have you read a biography you really loved by someone who completely lacked any personal insight into the work of his subject?
One problem I see is that a lot of biographies are pretty good at describing the person's life as far as social relations go but they usually don’t have only very shallow information about the actual topics that made the person famous. When I read the Steve Jobs biography I would have like to hear more about how he thought about technology and how product decisions were made vs his relationship to his daughter and so on. Same for scientists.
Not sure how to do better but I think there is a risk that professional biographers describe only certain easily accessible facets of the person and not go into the depth of their work.
I read the book last year and found it really interesting. That being said, it is still a biography about a person by people not in his field of expertise. It's a narrative about the person not the technology. In concert with 'the idea factory' it is an interesting T shaped perspective on innovation and creativity. That being said I've noticed two big concerns with how the book has been presented and advertised...
1) I find the implicit connection in the post title to Malcolm Gladwells 10k hours theory of expertise to be incredibly antithetical to everything in the book itself about how Shannon worked and thought and created. If they wanted to be pithy and make a connection to Shannon and expertise, mentioning Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world seems much more appropriate.
2) All of it seems to be a little to 'we discovered this interesting person' which frankly is a weird way to position a biography. It is a PATH to people learning about someone, but usually the greatest interest in a biography is going to come from people who know abotu a person but want to know more. It is part of a broader, fairly egocentric approach to advertising the work that seems to really make it about the authors not Shannon, which just strikes me as odd for a biography of someone else.
This is where I diverge, as I think if we were to cultivate the core values of benevolence, humility, with iconoclasm in kids we could produce more minds like these. What makes genius so exceptional is less a magical quality of the person, but that they manage to achieve in spite of the rest of us in as we occupy our classrooms and offices. I suspect it's these values that are the necessary condition.
Such a pleasant article about such an amazing mind.