Any other decision, in fact, would call their genius into doubt. I’ve met a number of geniuses, and what many of them have in common is a highly pragmatic determination to make life as pleasant for themselves as possible. This is a vast generalization, of course, but it seems to square with experience. In other words, the real geniuses are reluctant to take on the voluntary stupidity that science demands, and they’re more likely to find sources of satisfaction that don’t require them to constantly confront their own ignorance. They choose not to take the hard roads to the frontier, over which the rest of us, the lesser intellectual toilers, must travel. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data-gathering and analysis. They don’t have to sweat the science courses they take in college. Why should the rule of optimum medium brightness hold? (And I admit this perception of mine is only speculative.) One reason could be that IQ geniuses have it too easy in their early training. What, then, of certified geniuses whose IQs exceed 140, and are as high as 180 or more? Aren’t they the ones who produce the new groundbreaking ideas? I’m sure some do very well in science, but let me suggest that perhaps, instead, many of the IQ-brightest join societies like Mensa and work as auditors and tax consultants. And while Wilson isn’t talking about relative stupidity here, exactly, he’s certainly discussing relative intelligence, or the idea that the best scientists might be just a little bit less bright than their smartest peers in school. Schwartz is talking about “absolute stupidity,” or our collective ignorance in the face of the unknown, and he takes pains to distinguish it from the “relative stupidity” that differentiates students in the same college classes. In fact, they’re two separate observations-although they turn out to be related in one important respect. Schwartz’s thoughts on the importance of stupidity, which I quoted here last week. It has occurred to me, after meeting so many successful researchers in so many disciplines, that the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it.Īt first glance, this may not seem all that different from Martin A. This is so much the case that in most fields most of the time, extreme brightness may be a detriment. In fact, both accomplishments along the frontier and the final eureka moment are achieved more by entrepreneurship and hard work than by native intelligence. Work accomplished on the frontier defines genius, not just getting there. But then Wilson makes a striking observation:īut, you may well ask, isn’t the cutting edge a place only for geniuses? No, fortunately.
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“The frontier of scientific knowledge, often referred to as the cutting edge, is reached with maps drawn by earlier scientists…Somewhere in these vast unexplored regions you should settle.” This seems like pretty good career advice for scientists and artists alike.
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Wilson writes in Letters to a Young Scientist. “Original discoveries cannot be made casually, not by anyone at any time or anywhere,” the great biologist Edward O.