I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.
99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.
So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.
'genius' is just a particular configuration out of millions or billions in which a brain can form. Brain's real estate is malleable like a city's. So, no reason why one cannot configure it to one's liking. Now, the procedure to do so might not be as easy.
I also think that there is not much difference between an alcoholic (any addiction for that matter) and a workaholic genius. The reason is that both do not know what drives them.
All of these add a lot of noise, but there's still an underlying signal there. It's kind of like BMI; at an individual level, it may be highly misleading due to the variance, but at a population level, it's fairly insightful.
I think that's strong. It will generally reflect perceived value, which is often caused by skill level and worth-based factors.
What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.
But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.
Can you create an exaggerated perception of your skill in others? To what degree does your skill have latent demand vs effective demand? To what degree has your skill been monopsonized? To what degree does your skill apply to solving problems that are currently externalized?
Some simple examples: An amazing social worker could change the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people, however, since those people are broke & homeless, her target demographic is unable to compensate her for what she does (latent demand), and her salary is very meagre and state subsidized. An expert in environmental restoration could save a strip mining conglomerate millions of dollars while improving the health of hundreds of thousands of people in communities downriver, however because that conglomerate chooses to externalize those costs onto those communities, that environmental expert also ends up recieving a meagre state subsidized salary.
Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.
I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.
Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.
You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.
Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.
1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.
2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).
I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"
If people got paid their actual worth to the company there probably wouldn't be much profit to go around at the end.
No, it's not.
Under ideal market conditions, the price of any good (including labor) is exactly equal to its value to the marginal purchaser (and, also, to the marginal seller.)
Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value. When talking about labor groups/unions you can approach an ideal scenario. Even those will have variation that are manipulated by human to human interaction.
There are no "ideal market conditions". The real conditions are such that, statistically, you will be underpaid in comparison to your value within a company. Sometimes you get lucky and drop into an upside down position, which is overpaid, but that's the best wage slaves can hope for.
Sure.
But now we're talking about “in practice” not “by definition”.
I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).
They’re also excuses when you are one. “Genius here, don’t need to cook or clean.” They’re a point of failure whichever side of the fence is greener.
I have hit this wall and have sometimes wished I was less intelligent but more diligent. I would be healthier and wealthier for sure.
To any intelligent but lazy young man reading this, don’t delay improving your diligence. Seek counseling and coaching if you can. Don’t let your good grades, impressed teachers and peers, and fancy college acceptances convince you otherwise.
But avoid ADHD drugs. They will wreck your body, make you numb, and sap your enthusiasm for life.
My buddies kid actually took the advice to heart and has been getting A's and B's in college still which is good to see. I wish someone would have given me that advice and saved me an extra semester.
My late father had an incredible penchant for mechanical watches. Whether wristwatch, pocket watch, wall clock or alarm clock. Even large church clocks fascinated him immensely. It was the artistry of the mechanics that made his heart beat faster.
I could not understand this for a long time. Could not understand why one spends several thousand euros on watchmaking seminars to learn the craft as a hobby.
At some point I learned that as a child he wanted to become a watchmaker, but this did not work out and so he had to take another profession (which he nevertheless loved very much). Only late he has fulfilled his childhood dream.
And actually, it is only today, after he has passed away and I have occupied myself with the watches he had collected in the course of his life, that I can really begin to appreciate the little bits of knowledge he gave me every now and then.
Today, I wear few watches myself. They are the ones that were especially precious to him. And I appreciate them very much. Both in their external and mechanical aesthetics.
It is wishful thinking to believe that most people are average but this is not the case. There are more people on the right and left side of a bell curve than in the center.
When you account for all bins most people ARE not average though the "average" represents the biggest bin. (It also depends on how big you make your bins but in general if you make your bins a reasonable resolution more people live to the side of the average than in the center)
What this means is that there are people all over the spectrum, tons of people who are bad, and tons of people who excel and are better.
It is convenient to think otherwise but it does not mesh with reality. There are people who are better than you in all things just through sheer talent and there are people who are worse than you in all things also because of sheer talent.
Your uni anecdotal example also is biased. It also depends on the university you attend. Universities filter off of cognitive ability through grades and testing. Students within the same university are more or less roughly equivalent in ability due to going through the same filtering to attend the same university.
There is, however, a very evident difference in skill between students who go to different universities. If you ever transferred from a lower tier university to a higher one, you can feel this difference anecdotally. The difference in ability between students on average in say Stanford is markedly different then those in a community college.
That's almost tautology they way you worded it. Statistics has a term to describe "left and right", it is called standard deviation, and one standard deviation covers ~70% of the sample population.
What is true is that half of any population is below average by whatever metric you choose to apply. (EDIT: for normal/Gaussian distributions)
Not exactly, this is sort of true in practice but not true logically. Imagine a population of [1, 100, 100, 100] or a population of [1,1,1,1,999999]. Two examples where the population that is below average exceeds half the population and is below half the population.
But this is just semantics. If the population follows a bell curve and at high resolution standard deviations, what you said is generally true.
That's the old joke, "If Jeff Bezos walks into a dinner party, suddenly everyone is on average a billionaire!"
Which used to be "Bill Gates", and before that "Warren Buffet". I wonder who will be the next person to fill in this joke. :)
It doesn't 'beat' smarts, it's just different.
What most people call being 'smart' means you're a fast learner and/or are good at abstract thinking.
Of course someone with experience knows how to do something better than you if you have no experience, but if you're left to figure things out for yourself you might work out a more efficient way to do things faster than the experienced person did.
If you're doing a repetitive task, being smart isn't that important and so experience usually trumps being smart. If you're doing a dynamic task where you face new problems, then pure repetition doesn't help as much because each problem is different.
The very definition of being good at a thing means, being able to that specific thing well. You could learn something fast, but really getting at good that will demand tons of practice before it begins to appear as sleight of hand.
>>If you're doing a dynamic task where you face new problems, then pure repetition doesn't help as much because each problem is different.
Each heart surgery is different, yet in many ways similar. Practice matters a lot in these cases. Your initial enthusiasm might not even matter in these cases.
I never discounted practice, and yes to be "really good" (Whatever your definition of that is) at something takes a lot of practice regardless of how smart you are.
I also specifically said _pure_ repetition because I know that repetition is important for all skills, but for more complex skills you need to synthesize your past experience and extrapolate to future experiences (I.e abstract thinking). This is a lot more involved than pure repetition.
Did you know Grand Wizzard Theodore invented the disc scratch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Wizzard_Theodore
By your comment I learned from the Wrestler, but more importantly the Ku Klux Klan reference and meaning. Thanks for laying out a bread crumb to follow for new insights.
I only have one, but have interacted with many, but I think your dad's special there. Most dads don't spare you.
It's something I've been thinking a lot about since having kids, and who I will be to them when we're peers.
There is a value in "seeing the good in others". But we tend not to see it unless it benefits us.
I also think the effort to see it - mostly time and patience - is less forthcoming nowadays. Whether it is the rush of life. Or disposable society meaning craft/repair skills are less valued so it isn't worth the time to get to know "elderly appliance repair person". Or the polarisation of debate and views of people.
But yeah, I try to hold that every stranger has some cool/good/great thing that I can't compete with. There are a zillion things in the world.
The chances that MY one or two cool things overlap with theirs is minimal. But their cool thing - whatever it is - is still cool.
If you are careful there are a certain things you can chose be good at that will help you on the longer run. Stuff like personal finance, retirement planning, health etc.
Good news is you can be good at nearly anything by spending some time getting a little better every day. But you have to keep that going for a few years before you notice some thing phenomenal coming out of it. Unless you are very at the precipice of death, pretty much any body has a chance of being good at anything.
I vastly overestimated the impact of the former until university. Engineering classes kicked everyone's asses. Everyone was equally smart, but some people studied harder than others.
On the other hand, I know I am well above average at certain things because I've been doing them for many years. I have an above average interest in those things, and put an above average effort into learning them.
This is also true for other people. My dad is an average dad, until you ask him about cars or motorbikes. I knew he liked cars, but I didn't get to appreciate the breadth and depth of his knowledge until I started wrenching on vehicles. He spared me the details out of politeness, because I wasn't into cars. Now, he doesn't spare me, and it turns out he's a mechanical grandwizard. It was right under my nose this whole time.
I suspect most people are like that. They are average, except at one or two things. We tend to judge others based on the one or two things we value, and fail to appreciate them for what they're good at.