[MichaelZuo]

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough.

In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

[neilk]

In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality.

There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.

Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.

I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.

[ioblomov]

I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

[neilk]

The original claim was not that geniuses and savants exist. They clearly do!

The original claim was that a genius should be able to easily and quickly attain mastery of any topic, given a grounding in the basics. Like, you give Mr. Super Genius IQ a book on quantum chemistry and the next day they’re putting things together so cleverly they are on the precipice of new discoveries.

Feynman actually did this a couple of times! But I think that just shows the “unreasonable usefulness” of mathematics, as well as his own spirit of curiosity. (And at least one time that we know of, he faked it by reading a colleague’s research before he presented it. Not to take credit, but just as a prank, so he could interrupt and predict every conclusion before the presenter finished.)

[Der_Einzige]

Ramanujan is particularly interesting because he repeatedly claimed that divinity gave him his results.

I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.

[MichaelZuo]

How would you confirm either way?

Assuming you don’t have a direct line to divinity yourself, you would need to have that profound genius in the first place to evaluate…

[rnewme]

What does being competent enough mean?

Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?

[aerophilic]

Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science.

He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.

It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.

This was his MO.

Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…

My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.

There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.

[rnewme]

I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.

[caminante]

Great at writing programs, but doesn't know how to debug?

You're pulling our leg or in denial.

[aerophilic]

This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.

FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.

Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.

[caminante]

> this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.

Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.)

They are fun to tell!

[aerophilic]

lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories.

Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:

First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.

The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.

While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...

[samatman]

Even introductory materials cover the difference between "your" and "you're" rather thoroughly.

[MichaelZuo]

So?

[doesnt_know]

What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".