But I won’t talk about me. I’ll talk about a friend of mine. He stepped away from his role with the US Gov’t and spent the last year wandering through Africa and Eastern Europe. I don’t concern myself with him having a roof over his head, because he always will. He just doesn’t define himself by living in SF and putting a roof over his head; nor does he bemoan what could have been. He just is.
There are things that don't matter (someone a bit clueless working earnestly) and things that do (scammers, violence, etc). The goal is to differentiate and respond appropriately.
IMHO, it's neither. If others want something from you then they pamper you to get what they seek, and the more indispensable you are the more they tolerate. Over time you feel no pressure to adapt your behaviour because those who deal with you feel compelled to adapt to you.
Is your comment supposed to be satire? No one has ever said "When did they become a genius?" about someone who is considered a genius. I think, at least colloquially, genius is considered to be innate.
By understanding how a thing works, the more power one has to change it. Therefor, the better one understands their own intelligence, the more power they have to change their intelligence. However, being able to tease apart intelligence requires a high prerequisite intelligence, muddying the water between innate and not. In whole, I do not think intelligence is exclusively nature or nurture.
Asking someone, "When about do you think you became a genius?" is a great question. I might have to steal that one next time I bump into a genius offline.
Consider the interaction between John Carmack and Steve Jobs that was posted the other day:
> One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.
Do you really want to be remembered for anecdotes like that?
But if you question everything, try to work things out from first principles, and wonder what happens if things are done differently... well, you're "eccentric", at best.
It seems logically possible for a person to be a perfect conformist socially, and a wild free-thinker intellectually, but it wouldn't usually happen that way.
My comment, in the context of yours, comes across as childishly excusing/justifying antisocial behaviour. I'm not sure what to thinkn= of that. But I just meant that tendencies tend to transfer.
By its nature, it's hard to notice this in yourself. I like to think of myself as capable of independent thought. But when I've been solo camping for a few days, some of my perspective evaporates on contact with others, like a dream on waking. It's hard to even notice it leaving. I imagine they leave imperceptibly in daily life.
I think I know myself pretty well, better than most, and this allows me to make a pretty good guess about the way I would react. I think that if I were to answer wrongly to the Ash experiments, I would do so because of what is described in the Wikipedia entry as "distortion of judgment". This stems mostly from my view of the world and my belief that human observation, without aiding tools and methods of quantification, can be very unreliable. That applies for me as well, leading to poor confidence in my direct observation.
Thankfully, creating new ideas or solutions has several steps, observation being just one of them, another being the processing of the stimuli into the final idea. This, I consider, is where I am far better than the observation stage. Given a set of observations I arrive at a pretty complex solution and/or idea, and this is where most of my deviation from the norm usually stems. But I am aware of the possibility of mistaken input data of vicing this process, and forming the wrong conclusion because of it.
Anyways, sorry if I came of a bit arrogant, this was more of an introspection exercise and me musing and a little bit over-generalizing about the way people think.
These two sometimes works together, against each other or are absolutely ambivalent to each other.
So the question of eccentricity becomes a question of how do you need to project yourself upon others.
"All the world's a stage" as they say.