Then, as a general rule, I start drinking if I have no obligations for the evening. Thankfully this evening I started drinking before I read this, so I can skip all the other stuff and just enjoy this awful feeling as I contemplate several of my friends who have accomplished things, and one of whom is actually a genius, unlike me.
Edit: Thank goodness for whisky. (Did I mention that I predicted Trump's victory back in August 2015? I'm pretty good at political predictions.) (No, I don't vote, and my predictions don't imply endorsement. All politicians suck, even those who aren't (or weren't) politicians.)
Also, if I ever accomplish anything noteworthy, I will let you poor HN comment readers know immediately.
I started to work on improving my life one step at a time. Wanting things to happen overnight but knowing that takes time. Sometimes losing faith but never losing focus on the end goal. I want to to not waste my life. Forget being smart or doing something big. I don't want to regret wasting it.
Ive recently realized that things worth doing are worth doing well. That means its going to take time before anything good happens. Having patience is paying off.
I do stumble. Sometimes choosing to not work and relax. Whatever. My way to deal with this is to not see this as a loss but as an inconvenience. I can still (and often do) work for 10 minutes after wasting an hour or two. Its better than nothing.
Lastly, if you want to accomplish something noteworthy, go and jump off the empire state building. If you want to do something worth doing, look inside and figure out what makes you tick. Then go do it. Its not wether you can or cant. Its wether you want or not. Good luck.
It took me a few years to figure out what was meant by the conversation. You see I have two kids. I came to realize that it was about more than my kids. So now I work at a University after working at a credit card company and I volunteer for programs that help youth. Mostly STEM related activities like FIRST Robotics.
>If you want to do something worth doing, look inside and figure out what makes you tick.
This is so true. I used to think I needed to volunteer in ways that were public or the opportunities provided by my employer or friends. Once I got over that I searched for opportunities that were aligned with my skills and talents. So I work with STEM and more.
P.S. I am very sorry to hear that you lost your brother. That must be painful.
I'm not proud of my intelligence, why would I be? (much of it) is determined by genetics and the environment you grew up in and I had little control over either of those.
I also point out she is the one who speaks 3 languages fluently, has a degree in finance and qualified as a shipbroker, I just explain things really slowly and simply to a very fast idiot for a living.
Given that I have the same job as you do, this took me an embarrassing number of seconds to understand.
Well said.
Funny, that's the same for me. People confuse memory for thought.
In a similar vein, my mom and dad forked into different paths but are both intelligent in very different ways. The intelligence that allows him to speak five languages fluently, though, is something that's really far from my mom's aptitude with Fortran and laser physics, or my own with the "very fast idiots" (as you say) that I work with.
Noteworthiness is also very dependent on context. If you're too late, you're not a genius, even though you came up with it independently... how can what other people do affect your brain tissue? It can't; genius isn't about your brain, but the context.
Geniuses are like prospectors who get intrinsic credit for striking it rich... but they didn't put the gold there. However, it is right to celebrate them, to encourage prospecting...
Thankfully, I have a good counterbalance of extensive readings in philosophy and theology.
Now, for a real sense of loss, two days ago the grandmother of my best childhood friend died. She raised him since his mother was about 15 or 16 when he was born, and she was one of those influential adults from my childhood. She was 93.
I happened to be taking a driving trip from Iowa (where I was raised -- yes, by Swedish parents) to the east coast, so on the way I drove through the tiny town where I grew up. (I grew up with the people who made Templeton Rye when it was still bootleg. I recognize the people on the label, even though I haven't seen most of them for 40 years.)
When I drove out to my childhood best friend's farm (a mile outside of town), only two of the outbuildings were still standing. The barn is gone. The house is gone and the basement has been filled in and grass is growing there. Some of the old trees have been cut down. Even the old hand pump that was in front of the house is gone. (It worked when I was a kid.)
It's ridiculous, I suppose, but I cried, and I'm not at all what you might call "a crier." The memories were so thick and so . . . not painful, but acute. I am cursed with an extremely good memory. The sense of loss, or really I suppose the sense of the contrast of difference between reality and the ideal in my memory, made me cry.
I think that is what accounts for that sense that perhaps one is a genius: 1) the desire to be a genius, in order to impress your dead parents or perhaps your peers who have inordinate reverence for genius; 2) a better than average memory that creates a deep sense of time; 3) sensitivity to change; 4) as the article points out, noticing things others ignore.
Now that I'm mildly buzzed, I'm going to work on creating a triple boot of LinuxMint, Manjaro, and OpenSUSE on this shitty little ThinkPad T60 made in 2006 since the wifi has quit working with OpenBSD. I'm too tired to figure out why, and I've never tried any of these Linux distros, and who says doing stupid stuff like this is only for teenagers?
Please forgive me for drunken rambling on a Saturday night. I promise I won't do it again for at least a year.
I propose to blog anonymously about those “interesting ideas” then. That way you can achieve something, but get none of the personal recognition you seem to want to avoid.
> Then, as a general rule, I start drinking if I have no obligations for the evening.
Please stop drinking alcohol regularly, especially when you feel depressed. It may make you feel good for a short while, but drinking alcohol regularly can result in liver failure, mental illness, and an increase in the risk of cancer, among other diseases.
I only drink alcohol very occasionally, and not compulsively. It is quite different than it was when I was compulsive decades ago. I have been to literally thousands of AA meetings, but have abandoned that philosophy as incomplete and disingenuous. (See the Orange Papers if you understand the previous sentence and are curious.) I sincerely appreciate your concern.
P.S. I really don't think I am a genius, just to be clear.
You're good at lying to yourself, too. Bush and Gore weren't the same. Clinton and Trump weren't the same, either. Had Gore won, we'd literally live in a different world. The Middle East might not be as stable as the US, but it would be vastly more stable than it is now.
And, looking back in 4 years, I'm pretty sure the world will be very different than it would be had Clinton gotten elected.
Between you types (the apathetic) and the Trump voters, we are so fucked.
All of that experience taught me that there is, in fact, no difference between Bush and Gore. There is a difference between Clinton and Trump, but there is no difference between Clinton and Jeb Bush.
By the way, Trump is different because he comes from outside of that system that has been built up since the late 60s. He doesn't fit any of the existing paradigms the Baby Boomer generation created, which is why establishment Republicans were busy attacking him during the election and obstructing his agenda right now.
Now, tell me again I'm lying to myself. Tell me how many politicians you have personally eaten with, or even spoken to in private, in the last 30 years. Tell me why your experience is superior to mine when it comes to making such a judgment.
I'd recommend starting writing a journal with ideas you want to execute and instead of drinking / watching tv crack your habit and design something cool.
Hear! Hear! Total agreement. been married almost 32 years. There were many difficult years in the first ten or so. Now it is love, support and understanding.
There's truth in the genius of mainstream and average too.
If you accomplish some great work of genius, but no one can understand it, what then?
One is a genius of memory. He memorized the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry when he was a child. (I'm not even kidding.) In college we all played a game where we would give him the first line of a poem. He would then supply the title of the poem, the author, the year it was published, and generally the rest of the poem, or at least the rest of the first verse. He's a college professor. You've never heard of him, but his students invariably love him. He changes people one at a time.
There are others in this group who are very accomplished in publishing, acting, comedy. I also know a guy whose name is associated with the creation ("discovery") of several elements. (I suspect he glows in the dark from all the radiation he has absorbed, but I haven't actually confirmed that.) Tough crowd if you're in a mood to compare yourself.
The article is uses the word "psychopathology" which is a general term for the study of mental disorders. However I want to talk specifically about Psychopathy as a disorder, because I recently came to understand that I am a psychopath. My guess is that there are probably a bunch of psychopaths reading this too that don't even realize what they are.
I also scored in the "Genius" level on IQ tests in middle school (whatever the hell those are worth), and have made a non-trivial creative dent in the world.
The challenge is that, for the average person, if you hear "psychopath" or "sociopath" all you think is murderers and rapists. While most institutionalized (ie. caught) murderers and rapists do fit that profile, 90% of sociopaths are out there in the world and struggling to fit in. In fact almost half of CEOs would fit the diagnosis: Lack of empathy, remorse or guilt. Because that's all it is, it's not based on behavior (even though that is usually part of a formal diagnosis).
I have gone through my whole life with what in retrospect feels like a handicap that I have to make up for in every way. Not being able to feel empathy, remorse, guilt etc... means that every movie that the whole crowd is in tears at, every funeral of a family member, you are basically saying to yourself "What is with all these emotional people?" When relationships deteriorate because the best way you know how to deal with people is to act like you care, to manipulate them to thinking you care and then when the "mask of sanity" slips temporarily it blows your whole life apart.
Therein lies the rub, cause there is no sympathy there, and you know if you reveal who you are you won't get any breaks, because you are seen as a predator. So you spend your whole life studying people to see how they respond in certain situations so that, like a robot, you can try and emulate them - and because you're so smart you can actually pull it off. Genius level sociopaths/psychopaths look like the best of us because it takes that level of intellect to play a character 24 hours a day without taking a break.
And you don't reveal yourself - because what would the benefit be? You don't get a chance to be yourself because who you are is broken and ugly. So you continue to play the game and get into higher and higher stakes. You start to run a company, maybe even a big one with thousands of employees, you get married, have children etc...and your ability to manipulate and control just get wider and wider. And you see that your contemporaries are also psychopaths, so you think, well I guess that's what it takes to make a big impact. So your goals and ambitions, those "delusions" get bigger as you accomplish the "delusions" you previously had and see that you can accomplish a lot that others can't.
This is something that needs to be discussed because from where I stand, it's pretty clear that psychopaths like me "rule the world." It's not from a place of malice or hate though, but adaptation and if we can have that conversation and we can start to recognize and cope with psychopathy then I think everyone would be better off. It's tiring as hell to live this life.
It's also interesting to see some people to think that I'm judging them or remotely care about their existence, when in reality I simply don't care about them at all; I think I told my parents that once, which was met by a strange reactions (guess I won't say it again).
To me it seems all perfectly rational and normal; Why would you care about other people? Why not live for yourself? Why not take advantage of other to further your interests? Life has to meaning, so any meaning you assign is just as equally valid. As I continue to interact with people that have no ambition, that are afraid to do something because it might hurt other people the more I fall into the idea that most people are cattle to be taken advantage of by the likes of GP, Trump, Bankers, and others;
And yeah in the end you do realize that you are broken and ugly, that you will never be like the others. If I had any regrets I'd say its not being able to enjoy love as others do, especially when I was younger. But I simply can't see the reason why I would want to do that, there is very little utility, and I feel like it would only slow me down (although having a partner that shares my world view would be nice -- a la Mr Robot's Evil Corp CTO -- but finding that person is difficult since that would require us both disclosing our true personalities).
Given that short context, your post is interesting to me partly because, from my perspective, it sounds like you're searching for some empathy from me so that the channels of communication will open.
So either you aren't wanting us to empathize with your way of life being exhausting, in which case the purpose of the post eludes me, or you do wish for us to empathize. And finally, you certainly don't wish that you had the ability of empathy to minimize your (potential; real or theoretical) damage to other people's life experiences or feel other people's joy.
In other words, this logically deduces to being entirely self serving. You wish for us to empathize with you so that you can make a personal gain, not because you wish to do better by other people.
Isn't everyone self interested? To an extent, yes. I "selflessly" help someone, which increases my fitness as an organism because I experience their positive experience. If this goes both ways, it's a 4x net gain vs. 1 self interested individual. Two self interested individuals with aligned goals still only get 2x net gain, which is half as much as two selfless individuals.
Maybe I completely missed the mark but that's my evaluation. I'd be interested in hearing more on your perspective.
I have one question: can sociopaths express altruism?
Thanks for your valuable time!
I have argued for a long time that everything everyone does is self-serving, it's just wrapped in all of this social/behavioral expectation. Maybe that's because I am unfamiliar with actual selflessness.
Can sociopaths express altruism - I argue yes insofar that the outcomes are mutually beneficial. I spent the first half of my professional life in public service, taking much less pay than I could have doing something else. I make special effort to volunteer and spend time during the holidays with the indigent - going so far as not to post or boast publicly because that is transparently self serving - letting others do that on my behalf.
All that is done though so I am "beyond reproach." So you can't say that I'm not great, that I haven't done everything possible to be a "good person." So when it comes time to implement what I want to implement, nobody can find any dirt on me or say I'm a selfish bastard - cause just look at all the good works people can prove that I've done and I never even boasted about them!!
I think this is on the higher end of the functional sociopath spectrum though.
I was often wondering whether it is possible to communicate with a psychopath. Communication requires trust, i.e. that the person you are speaking with isn't lying. With non-psychopaths this is achieved by the complex play of empathy, guilt etc. However, given that psychopaths lack these feeling the mechanism just doesn't work. It's an epistemic and, actually, quite terrifying problem: You have this human being and no chance to ever know what they think of feel.
And if there's no chance to communicate, there's no way to truly solve problems.
And now I hear the problem is experienced even from the other side. And note that I believe you because the comment was posted from a throwaway account and thus you have very little to gain from it.
So maybe, in the end, there's a chance to communicate over the chasm, possibly using some techniques from game theory?
If your goals are misaligned, you'll likely come away thinking that you communicated but you might be being manipulated - which depending on how good they are at it, you might not realize.
It is a challenge though when the situations are forced. If I'm forced to be in a situation that doesn't align with my goals (and also stroke my ego in a certain way that might not be obvious) I will subtly sabotage whatever is going on or horse trade with someone else so that I can get out of the work.
I wouldn't try and play the game theory approach (I assume you mean the prisoners dilemma style cooperate/non-cooperate primarily) with most sociopaths because while a lot of high functioning ones are really logical - we'll change the rules to make the advantage ours.
I come from a different starting point, with similar results though.
I'm very emotion driven most of the time, getting out of my way to understand how people feel or think, empathizing with their angst. However I soon learned that many of these characteristics are seen by many as 'weak', and this was impairing my ability to get social advantages.
At the same time, the process of hearing and trying to understand leverages your advantage, as you may grasp the hidden desires of people. If the other person is not engaged in the same profound way, of understanding the dialogue, you end up in a position of power.
I identified very much with the expressions 'robot' and 'playing a character 24 hours a day' because that's how I learned to be more comfortable.
It's really hard to break this chain, that keeps reinforced by the narratives you create yourself, of how you should be seen or perceived, and used as a rationalization (just or not) of happenings on your environment (e.g. as a self-fulfilling prophecy).
Not having empathy with others can be a variety of illnesses, one of which I'm suggesting to look into is schizoid personality disorder. Schizoid personality disorder is an illness in which a person doesn't feel empathy or emotions, has restricted affect. Schizoids can often function as you described above (merely responding based on how they understand other humans to be emotionally like a robot) and often don't feel the need to seek treatment due to their capability to function in this way.
Note: I have schizotypal, a related illness to schizoid (has more delusions etc) and many of your descriptions that you ascribe to psychopathy also describe how I function in reality. Would you be interested in having a conversation about yourself and the limits of your self?
Yes, when I have spoken with therapists they typically use one of two terms: Antisocial Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. However it's pretty clear to me that neither of those fit because they seem to present without the manipulative behavior.
You are correct though that the term psychopath isn't medical but rather criminal focused.
It was my understanding that schizoid was more along the line of schizophrenia and schizotypal was along the lines of borderline but I am not as familiar with those. I'll look into that, thanks.
Why?
> It's tiring as hell to live this life.
So don't live it. In your opening sentence you say you must hide your identity and in your last sentence you say it is tiring to live like that. So don't hide behind the "mask of sanity" and then you don't need to be tired.
It won't be easy, but nothing worthwhile is.
I know this because it happened about two weeks ago. I was with a group of friends and we were discussing things and I brought the topic up to see what their response was. It was generally met with "no way you aren't," "only serial killers are like that" etc... but in the end the whole thing just became morose. I heard later that the other couples had gone to breakfast the next morning without me, and that the bulk of the conversation was about how everyone really got freaked out about it and didn't really know how to deal with me now.
When I talked with my wife about it a long time ago she basically said "Well, I had my suspicions but now that I know it's real I can't ignore it." It basically made her question every interaction we had. She said it turned into living with some kind of robot, where she didn't know what was real and what wasn't.
It taints literally everything once people know about it. So it's not in my long term interest to be open about that fact.
Your perspective resonates as very plausible.
I do know that it seems like there is an impending "break" coming where it all falls apart, but I'm not really sure what that looks like practically.
I think I've learned the right emotional responses to situations and people, but the way people describe emotion to me is something I don't think I'll ever be able to learn.
"Crazy" is a bad word. There's "crazy" and crazy. Hemingway was touched with unique ways of thinking, but he wasn't John Nash (with all due respect to Mr. Nash).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/hospital-guns-mental-h...
I guess that may or may not have been particularly abnormal in Britain at the time, though.
That would be nice, if it were true. But it isn't.
Those are the stories that everybody likes though, a bit like the kid with a 25c fishing rod out-fishing adults with 100's of $ worth of gear.
But in practice, most progress in most fields is made by insiders, one tedious bit at a time.
I'm not discounting the work of insiders, but their role is typically to tame the wilds first explored by the outsiders.
If we use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, most progress is in periods of "normal science" and most breakthroughs involve a "paradigm shift".
One of the hardest things to learn, for example, is a foreign language. If the language is drastically different from one's mother tongue, then it generally takes adults about 10 years of casual study, or three years of intense study. I think this qualifies learning a second language as an outstanding achievement. Many adults try and give up, and the vast majority never progress past fluency to native-level (partly for lack of trying). By many objective measures too, it's a difficult task; I have probably stored many dozens of thousands of unique pieces of information in my brain related to my chosen language of study. Languages are complex in ways we don't even know we understand; Clifford is a big red dog, not a red big dog.
And yet, for the most part, every single person ever born learns language. Even people born with severe cognitive disabilities generally succeed at learning language.
So while I accept there is a strong correlation between genetics and measures such as IQ, I really do find it hard to believe that there is anyone who is truly incapable of learning basic calculus, or Python, or how to play the guitar. In practice, it doesn't seem this way, but every time I think about this issue I can't help but consider that out of a sample size of 1 billion people randomly born in China, pretty much 1 billion of them successfully learned Chinese.
Well, I've read many very convincing arguments that it is (including statistics pertaining to how children perform in school, with which I have my own problems, but which nonetheless need to be accounted for), how have you found that it is not?
We all have a fairly similar brains, some people's are organized slightly more efficiently for certain tasks, but that doesn't mean they're more efficient for everything, in fact it is quite like likely the opposite. Additionally, the brain is incredibly plastic, so you're not completely stuck with the architecture you have.
So madmen might be usefull- but not all the time, and not in all situations. The true art in project managment is to keep the madmen around against all resistence ("That guy is constantly reinventing the wheel"), prevent the usual specialization silos from walling off against this and get a stuck project to "shift gears" as in, temporarily withdraw the usual project-management ("We need fast, easy solutions- not something custom made") - and get the recombined stuff at least discussed.
That's just off the top of my head, though searching for intergenerational or family genius turns up surprisingly few useful results.
Of course, disambiguating nurture vs. nature effects is a challenge, and I'd be interested in examples where neither prior fame nor economic advantage were particularly beneficial. Cases of twins or siblings raised independently would also be of interest.
I disagree with this statement but is difficult to debunk unless 'genius' is nailed down. Nominally if a large part of socially communicable (and thereby recorded) analytical or creative capacity ("genius") is experiential rather than genetic, then it is heritable in the sense that it can be taught. If it is taught to many, however, then by some definitions it becomes non-genius.
Are the large number of documented ascetic/hermit traditions teaching genius? Preserving an alternative worldview? Simply crazy?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
I think genius can be nurtured and as a society we can make better use of all our geniuses but I don't think it can be taught. It really has to do with brain wiring and although much of it is plastic some of the defaults can't be changed and those default settings are usually the ones that make or break a genius.
Taking the title at face value, Your not a genius if you think you are. I will say that dealing with people who don't have basic math, science, logic, physics, chemistry and philosophy understanding it's pretty easy to convince yourself that your both genius and crazy.
Most of the smart people I know struggle with some form of depression or existential issues. The really smart ones are invariably a bit odd.
I've been poking around the Skills and Creativity pages on Wikipedia for the past few days, as well as their references, looking at the state of art and understanding of these topics.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's five-phase model of creativity seems pretty accurate: preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration. (Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention).
I'm also quite captivated by Liane Gabora's "honing theory", which ... gets into a whole mess of areas: world models, systems theory, epistemology, evolution, communications theory, and more. I've only just run across it but it's quite exciting, as is much the rest of her work (bio page with links below).
Another element I'm finding useful is to have a useful concepts and interests capture system, for which I've gone retro: 4x6 index cards and a series of file boxes. The immediacy, free-form nature, adaptability, and physicality of the system make it hugely useful (my HN user submissions history includes a link to a POIC, "pile of index cards", data management system). And the list of people who've relied on index cards, starting with Carl Linneaus who invented the damned idea, is pretty impressive. (I particularly recommend John McPhee's essay, "Structure".)
I've known researchers myself who've used the method and am coming to understand its merits. And yes, search and grep are challenges, but the review such attempts trigger seems to be a more-than-ofsetting advantage.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/creativity-the-psychology-of-...
https://people.ok.ubc.ca/lgabora/
I wonder if this is true is that why some think that using psychedelics have helped them see the world from different perspectives and be creative in their work world?
Maybe geniuses are kooky because of how outnumbered they are by irrational people? Or something else like that.
Pretty sure people that know me would place me in at least one of those categories as well.
That's not how I read it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16178679
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23551975
http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi/Hannibal%20Lecter%20...
In other words, psychopathic people aren't necessarily smarter. In fact, contrary to the Hollywood idea of the "super-intelligent serial killer", most actual serial killers were basically kind of idiots who got caught in stupid ways, with a few notable exceptions.
It's also hard to read anything Einstein (an actual genius) wrote and conclude the man was bereft of warmth and empathy.
All of the studies to date have used the criminal population as the sole source of research for psychopathy - as your reference does.
The point I was making with my lengthy post is that, in fact, genius level psychopaths don't become murderers; they become Presidents, Dictators and Hedge Fund managers.
Also, many actual confirmed geniuses like Einstein, Alan Turing, etc. clearly were simply obsessed (which is really just a more negative way of saying "very enthusiastic") about their work - they didn't necessarily care to become powerful men (Einstein famously turned down the Presidency of Israel because it was boring to him). These people were just really, really interested in the problems they were working on. This seems to intersect better with something like OCD rather than psychopathy - and indeed, there are of course many anecdotes around Princeton University of Einstein exhibiting OCD tendencies.
