[SEQ RERUN] Einstein’s Superpowers
Today’s post, Einstein’s Superpowers was originally published on 30 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
There’s an unfortunate tendency to talk as if Einstein had superpowers—as if, even before Einstein was famous, he had an inherent disposition to be Einstein—a potential as rare as his fame and as magical as his deeds. Yet the way you acquire superpowers is not by being born with them, but by seeing, with a sudden shock, that they are perfectly normal.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Timeless Causality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I think that there is a tendency in American (by which I mean USican) popular culture to go too far the other way.
The American Dream has always been about humble origins + hard work == success, and this is why Edison was seen as being such an exemplar of “American know-how”: he was an autodidact who used persistence to cheaply engineer an incandescent light bulb, making him successful technically and financially. So, the party line that the American Dream is selling is that hard work, persistence, and dedication are what lead to success, and not ‘genius’, or native intellect. No one wants to admit that even though it wouldn’t be fair, even though it wouldn’t be ‘democratic’, this is simply not true!
Hard work is fine and well, but beneath a certain threshold of intelligence, Einstein-level work is near-impossible, and while removing the reverence of Einstein is correct from a rational perspective, it will bring me no closer to achieving Einstein-level productivity. I’m not a genius, not in the same way that Einstein or Feynman were (I don’t care what Feynman’s official IQ was) or Hawking is. And that’s okay, or at least that’s what I tell myself each morning so I can get out of bed.
Wow, this got more depressing than I thought it would. Well-written article; I agree with it, and I think that many could do more if they shut up and did the impossible.