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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

My view of genius has changed quite a bit as I've gotten a bit older.

I think the word "genius" best describes a body of work, or an accomplishment that changes the world in a surprising way, that is, genius is not just intelligence, it is being in the right place at the right time, with the right people around you (Einstein's wife was reportedly brilliant as well), and then being driven to understand and describe the world back to people through new science or art. It means that a person has enough resources and few distractions that occupy their minds.

In other words, 'genius' to me describes a situation, not just the person.

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> genius is not just intelligence, it is being in the right place at the right time, with the right people around you

Intelligence + circumstance is key, I agree, but I don't think you should devalue the intelligence part. Plenty of people face similar circumstances but don't move the world.

I liken intelligence to a catalyst in chemistry: nothing happens if the ingredients aren't there, but if they are, it's remarkable. Without the catalyst, the progress of a reaction that has all of the right ingredients might not even be perceptible.

If we're going to talk seriously about intelligence, I think we need to have a multi-factor understanding of intelligence. Too many people think that intelligence means doing well on tests (this was my view as I grew up).

In the SciFi book "Children of Memory", Tchaikovsky at least splits intelligence into reasoning and recall. People also talk about system size and working set.

Persistence is another thing I've come to view differently. The mind is willing to entertain a problem as long as progress feels possible. I wonder if that feeling of possible progress is trainable. Another view of 'possible progress' is rational faith (lower case f, sorry I don't have a less loaded term, after all, many consider faith to be irrational).

But mainly, I think we are still in the dark ages of psychology, brain function, and theory of the mind. Thus it is important to me to be humble about how I talk about what intelligence might mean.

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By the way, I love the Children of Time series, but I had to really defocus my mind and suspend my disbelief and scientific critique to try to imagine other intelligences.

> Tchaikovsky at least splits intelligence into reasoning and recall.

I'm not sure these are cleanly separable or observable. Reasoning is assisted by recall, and if there is some distinct reasoning ability then one can use it to make up for poorer recall by deriving knowledge.

In computational terms: you can gain speed up computation via memoization (trade off memory for more computation), but you can also trade off computation speed for memory with suitable compression. If you only had a black box, how would you distinguish these different internal mechanisms? I don't think you can, increasing either recall or reasoning ability will both improve performance on any conceivable intelligence metrics.

> In computational terms: ...

Agreed. I do not mean that these facets are completely separable, but that they can be evaluated as their own "thing"/schema/clade/subgens. After all, even though a von Neumann computer needs both memory and computation to function, you can benchmark them separately.

I really wish I had better ontology words. Ontolographs.

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Also, I'm doing the book a great disservice by simplifying it so much.

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