[gunderson]

Bah... Academia heaps prestige upon the person who hits it big early, and from then on they don't get the same kind of feedback.

Imagine at Google: "Of course, Sergey, that's an awesome idea". But if it's not then everyone is wasting a lot of time. Chances are it isn't. Sergey had a lot of bad/mediocre ideas before he came up with PageRank, and has had a lot of bad/mediocre ones since.

The point is that ideas are more a function of being at the right place at the right time and acting on it than they are about some particular genius.

A good analogy is Scrabble. When you hit an awesome word early on it can still result in a loss, b/c you keep trying too hard and over thinking things. Also, in life, like Scrabble, some of it has to do with the letters that happen to be in your tray.

This is part of the myth that genius is a phenomenon of the young. That is luck. True genius involves sweat and perseverance.

[tidra14]

"This is part of the myth that genius is a phenomenon of the young. That is luck"

So then, luck is a phenomena of the young?

We were told of the "genius graph" in psychology in the lectures about evolutionary psychology. The explanation goes something like, we need to reproduce hence our ambition is more to do with getting a partner, hence why we do great works in early age, because once we have a partner we don't bother about it?

It clearly is a theory, but one can hardly argue with the statistics, except that there are " lies, lies and damn statistics"

[gunderson]

I think that's an example an evolutionary "just so story".

There may be some truth to it, but "genius" impacts such a small percentage of the population, that I think calling it genetic is quite a stretch.

Ambition, yes. Few people are ambitious enough to want anything more out of life than a 30+ inch TV.

But to take the leap into the territory of tremendous accomplishment, and to claim that it is a function of sex drive, cheapens it a bit in my opinion.

I think more likely there are just some people whose natural skills are called "genius" by society when they are young, and so they are society's "young geniuses". Who do we have today, Zuckerberg? Some kid who got into MIT?

Most of this is just hype. I think the true genius is someone who adapts over time and creates something tremendous that can't be credited to a social fad or a bubble.

[xiaoma]

Didn't Larry Page come up with Page Rank?