It's interesting to think about the genius through generalization. I think there is a real benefit to having this kind of varied background and then the skill or disposition to draw on that variety of experience in ways that make sense. I've spent most of my working life among people who were self-evidently smarter or more talented than me, but I was more willing to draw the various threads of my experience together in ways that felt different or fresh. This is really the story of my writing about teaching writing. I don't have any special training or knowledge. I just got busy thinking about the work in ways most people don't either because of lack of time or not having that kind of disposition. For me, it was a matter of trying to stay interested and engaged with what I was spending my time doing. I think I have a strong desire for some degree of novelty in what I spend my time doing.
On AI in education, I have no doubt it will be useful in some ways, but I think the whole notion of "personalized education" as it is framed by people like Sal Kahn, as being some kind of goal is flawed conceptually to begin with, so when we set this as a goal, I get very concerned about the lack of consideration around the underlying values that animate that goal. When it comes specifically to something like feedback on writing, AI will never be as good as humans because (unless we have a breakthrough to true, sentient artificial general intelligence), the AI cannot read, think, feel, or even communicate with intention. That we may view this feedback as good says more about our lack of care about what kind of feedback is meaningful than it does about the quality of the AI.
But as you say, time will reveal these things. I sort of wonder if I'll be around long enough to see it.
Hi John, this made me laugh as I was the bass player in an indie band at 6th form college (junior & senior in the US?) but could not really play the bass. Most bands had a similar arrangement, with only one or two competent musicians, although I'm not sure competence was ever really the point, though.
My band was weird because I was the second best guitarist and I played drums while our best drummer was the front man and played rhythm guitar. He wrote the songs so of course he was going to be out front. Our lead guitarist could rip pretty good and our bass players were solid, but I felt like I was holding on for dear life most of the time.
Love this discussion. It reminds me of Willa Cather's obsession with genius in her novels and stories, where characters like Thea Kronborg are drawn from real-life prototypes, such as Olive Fremstad. These tropes have lent themselves to a kind of Cather mythology -- the genius sprung fully formed from the plains -- and some outright canards, such as the notion of Cather's lifelong companion, Edith Lewis, as a kind of admiring drudge. Benjamin Taylor even repeats one of these canards in his new biography (which has won some praise, but which Cather scholars find maddeningly careless with facts), claiming that Lewis is buried at Cather's feet in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (in fact, they are buried side by side). Melissa Homestead has shown in her book "The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis" that Lewis was an active editor of Cather's manuscripts, not merely the domestic partner who washed the dishes while Cather was off dreaming up her next masterpiece. I like this example as a companion to your notion of genius as relative (lots of different kinds) but also as collaborative (teaching requires a willing learner).
The ability to work perfectly in sync with others for the greater good is very to similar to what Atul Gawande describes as the new model for modern medicine vs the old days, what he calls “cowboys versus pit crews.” In an era of mass information overload and hyperspecialization, the lone swashbuckling (often rule breaking) “genius” no longer serves patients or society
Love that analogy. One of the things that transformed how I taught writing was to make it more explicitly oriented around the goal of learning together. In my syllabus I would say that the course was a "shared inquiry into the subject at hand" meaning collectively we'd interrogate the experience of the class and share our different perspectives in a way that allowed for additional reflection. I wanted students to see they had a role beyond just doing their assignments and getting a grade. We had a collective responsibility to that inquiry.
The essay is also about writing, and near the end of the essay, Wood writes this sentence, which makes the point clear:
"For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."
I once knew, but forgot that James Wood was a drummer. I wish I'd recalled it as I was working on this piece, so I appreciate the addendum. From what I think I've heard Wood is quite good as a drummer. I would say that I've reached the level of advanced intermediate myself.
I define genius as someone whose brain wiring (we all are very good with a few things) meets passion and an immense amount of deliberate/deep practice and all the above meeting the luck (having a parent and/or teacher helping the person to pursue the activity and encourage when the person is struggling as so-called genius struggle too and also getting opportunities to showcase your skill/talent) for the world to see the result/performance we see from a “genius” and my above definition is mostly influenced by my experience dealing with a few at my work and the below two books:
The world owes Leopold Mozart a great debt for having “dreamed a dream” for his now immortal progeny at the cost of having his own considerable accomplishments eclipsed, but in this, the tercentenary of the birth of this talented musician, protean scholar, and dedicated educator, everything’s coming up Leopold.
The question I cannot answer is: can a lack of brain wiring be entirely overcome by just an immense amount of practice? I think it can be to a large extent, but how a person handles unexpected/unknown situations will tell you whether the genius has a brain wiring, to begin with or it was the sheer practice scenario.
I've been thinking a lot about how much work goes into removing people's personal agency and autonomy and I think genius worship plays into that. There is a movement of people (mainly in tech, but elsewhere as well) who consider themselves Rationalists and what I have gathered so far is that they believe there is one right answer to every question and only through their very narrow form of rational inquiry can we get to it. AI evangelists believe that they can simplify the human brain enough for a computer to emulate it completely. They don't need to understand teaching, learning, or anything else as long as their programs meet their limited expectations. The Rationalist approach seeks the one best way to transfer knowledge and wishes to standardize that across education (even if the best approach is effective for 80% of students and 20% are left out).
I agree 100% with the insight about hobbies, and as an amateur guitar player, it is incredibly motivating to see the improvement I've made in just the past year. My final, more cynical point is, you can't maintain low-wage jobs if you recognize that people develop skills and expertise in what they're doing. You must raise up certain people as geniuses to justify their deservingness and therefore push others down as unworthy.
Very interesting insights. I hadn't pulled these threads together between the rationalist movement and how it manifests itself in a sort of technological solutionism to education, but what you say really resonates with me. It's like that guy who is trying to lower his epigenetic age as a way to be healthy (and presumably live forever), but his life seems like a total misery. He spends an hour a day on skin care for the love of all that's holy. Maybe these obsessions are meaningful to him, and bless him for it, but the idea that he's unlocking something for all humanity seems nutso to me.
And in education, the metrics against which what they propose "work" may not be related to anything meaningful when it comes to living a good life. The fact that we can't agree on what makes a good life strikes me as important here.
Very true, many people will have different ideas about a good life. And something like critical thinking may be incredibly important for a good life, but it's also much harder to measure through multiple choice.
There's a whole lot more to be said about it, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot when it comes to technocratic policymaking. On the surface, it seems like the right answer, but once you know more about a specific field (education, economics, healthcare) you realize that what we're able to measure is only a tiny part of the information needed to make good decisions. And relying entirely on measurable results tends to override any values based practices, or community needs more broadly.
Yes, genius is brain wiring, as referred to in another comment, and passion, but it does not manifest itself in a vacuum. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, someone in their life saw them, their passion and skill and acknowledged it, and believed in them. Mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or a kindly neighbor down the street, all of them, or only one of them, it does not matter. Every genius began their journey with one person believing in them unconditionally.
That's an excellent point that at some point, genius needs recognizing. It's nice to think that it's obvious, but this isn't necessarily the case. There's lots of geniuses we never come to know.
I grew up believing I was supposed to be a genius and that I failed due to a lack of diligence, which seems somehow to negate both the distinctions you make.
I'm unclear on how I acquired the idea that I was supposed to be a genius, or make myself into one, except perhaps that my father, a professor of Classics and humanities who died in 1981, is described to this day as "the best teacher I ever had" by students at every institution where he taught, even those whose sole education from him consisted of conversations over bridge in the student union. My mother got a PhD in English and then went on to medical school, while raising me as a single mother. She got through on sheer persistence, I think, though by all accounts I have heard she is also an excellent doctor.
Perhaps I didn't quite believe my parents were geniuses or experts, but I did gather that I was supposed to be both, leaning toward the former. As it is I believe I know more about writing, copyright and fair use, and perhaps another subject or other than the average person, but that counts as only a marginal level of expertise and none of genius. Then again, we still need people to plow along, doing the work that needs to be done, including loading the dishwasher and putting away laundry, both of which I ought to be doing right now instead of writing.
John, I liked it very much, and you provoke good questions. I will lamely fall back on an old saw from my childhood, maybe one of those witty sayings that were printed over gorgeous nature scenes and hung on office walls. "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% persperation."
Thinking about revision from your past last week, I'm curious how much revision you do of these Substack posts, or if they're largely published as first written. (I'm not trying to imply that they read as unedited, just curious.)
(It's hard not to think of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule from Outliers while reading this post, haha.)
Hyperbole and a Half made me laugh so hard I cried, several times. Highly recommended.
The chapter in Hyperbole and a Half about her two dogs made me almost sick from laughing. Mrs. Biblioracle too. There's something about the combination between the drawings and descriptions in that chapter that just kill me.
These posts tend to go through something I think of as "revision lite" where I draft one day, read through with an attempt to make sure each section makes sense internally, and then try to find the connective tissue between sections. But this is different than something like a book where I'm actually trying to resolve my thinking as much as possible rather than leaving it so open and in progress as it clearly is here. Parts of the current book started as newsletter or (Inside Higher Ed) blog posts where my thinking was more exploratory and provisional and then the passage of time mixed with the focused activity of the book made what I meant to say clearer in my own mind.
I guess that's the easiest way for me to think about my own revision process, the attempt to bring the text in to line with the ideas that exist in my head. This is a feeling as much as it as rational process. One of the things I like about this medium is that it's okay to publish something that's not fully formed. That said, I also have an internal threshold for how formed it has to be. If I publish 50 Sunday newsletters this year there will be another 10-12 that I've drafted that I end up ditching because they couldn't reach that bar.
I often throw around the G word to describe a Simpsons’ bit or a particularly biting or relevant or insightful turn of phrase in a group chat. We are all capable of it, to varying degrees.
I think this is similar to the perspiration vs inspiration dichotomy - never completely separate from each other.
But a person who truly makes the cut to meet this standard - as a general statement about their work or art or talent - has something that others don’t really have, or certainly at a much higher dose that can (kind of) be articulated or identified.
Maybe try-hards can compete with those of greater genius, but I like to think that we (someone?) can see the difference.
I totally get what you mean by practicing the drums helps with writing or other creative endeavors. I, too, decided on lessons about three years ago and it was one of the best decisions I made in my adult life. For me, practicing and playing the drums is a very clear and concrete example of how tiny changes add up to big progress. That fill you couldn't nail last week soon becomes a little easier after some diligence and practice.
I've tried to apply that to my writing practice, as well.
Cheers. Let me know if you want to start a band with only two drummers and maybe a trumpet.
It's interesting to think about the genius through generalization. I think there is a real benefit to having this kind of varied background and then the skill or disposition to draw on that variety of experience in ways that make sense. I've spent most of my working life among people who were self-evidently smarter or more talented than me, but I was more willing to draw the various threads of my experience together in ways that felt different or fresh. This is really the story of my writing about teaching writing. I don't have any special training or knowledge. I just got busy thinking about the work in ways most people don't either because of lack of time or not having that kind of disposition. For me, it was a matter of trying to stay interested and engaged with what I was spending my time doing. I think I have a strong desire for some degree of novelty in what I spend my time doing.
On AI in education, I have no doubt it will be useful in some ways, but I think the whole notion of "personalized education" as it is framed by people like Sal Kahn, as being some kind of goal is flawed conceptually to begin with, so when we set this as a goal, I get very concerned about the lack of consideration around the underlying values that animate that goal. When it comes specifically to something like feedback on writing, AI will never be as good as humans because (unless we have a breakthrough to true, sentient artificial general intelligence), the AI cannot read, think, feel, or even communicate with intention. That we may view this feedback as good says more about our lack of care about what kind of feedback is meaningful than it does about the quality of the AI.
But as you say, time will reveal these things. I sort of wonder if I'll be around long enough to see it.
Hi John, this made me laugh as I was the bass player in an indie band at 6th form college (junior & senior in the US?) but could not really play the bass. Most bands had a similar arrangement, with only one or two competent musicians, although I'm not sure competence was ever really the point, though.
Huw
My band was weird because I was the second best guitarist and I played drums while our best drummer was the front man and played rhythm guitar. He wrote the songs so of course he was going to be out front. Our lead guitarist could rip pretty good and our bass players were solid, but I felt like I was holding on for dear life most of the time.
Love this discussion. It reminds me of Willa Cather's obsession with genius in her novels and stories, where characters like Thea Kronborg are drawn from real-life prototypes, such as Olive Fremstad. These tropes have lent themselves to a kind of Cather mythology -- the genius sprung fully formed from the plains -- and some outright canards, such as the notion of Cather's lifelong companion, Edith Lewis, as a kind of admiring drudge. Benjamin Taylor even repeats one of these canards in his new biography (which has won some praise, but which Cather scholars find maddeningly careless with facts), claiming that Lewis is buried at Cather's feet in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (in fact, they are buried side by side). Melissa Homestead has shown in her book "The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis" that Lewis was an active editor of Cather's manuscripts, not merely the domestic partner who washed the dishes while Cather was off dreaming up her next masterpiece. I like this example as a companion to your notion of genius as relative (lots of different kinds) but also as collaborative (teaching requires a willing learner).
Homestead's book is worth a read: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-only-wonderful-things-9780190652876?q=melissa%20homestead&lang=en&cc=us#
The ability to work perfectly in sync with others for the greater good is very to similar to what Atul Gawande describes as the new model for modern medicine vs the old days, what he calls “cowboys versus pit crews.” In an era of mass information overload and hyperspecialization, the lone swashbuckling (often rule breaking) “genius” no longer serves patients or society
Love that analogy. One of the things that transformed how I taught writing was to make it more explicitly oriented around the goal of learning together. In my syllabus I would say that the course was a "shared inquiry into the subject at hand" meaning collectively we'd interrogate the experience of the class and share our different perspectives in a way that allowed for additional reflection. I wanted students to see they had a role beyond just doing their assignments and getting a grade. We had a collective responsibility to that inquiry.
Great piece, John. I especially like and appreciate your emphasis on Joe Slaby here.
I was reminded of an essay by James Wood, "The Fun Stuff," which is all about drumming, with a focus on the work of Keith Moon:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/29/the-fun-stuff
The essay is also about writing, and near the end of the essay, Wood writes this sentence, which makes the point clear:
"For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."
I once knew, but forgot that James Wood was a drummer. I wish I'd recalled it as I was working on this piece, so I appreciate the addendum. From what I think I've heard Wood is quite good as a drummer. I would say that I've reached the level of advanced intermediate myself.
I define genius as someone whose brain wiring (we all are very good with a few things) meets passion and an immense amount of deliberate/deep practice and all the above meeting the luck (having a parent and/or teacher helping the person to pursue the activity and encourage when the person is struggling as so-called genius struggle too and also getting opportunities to showcase your skill/talent) for the world to see the result/performance we see from a “genius” and my above definition is mostly influenced by my experience dealing with a few at my work and the below two books:
https://www.amazon.com/The-Talent-Code-Daniel-Coyle-audiobook/dp/B07VH2KNT2/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?crid=7XPHJIT9SEQE&keywords=the+genius+code&qid=1707055059&sprefix=the+genious+codd%2Caps%2C66&sr=8-11
And
https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Robert-Greene-audiobook/dp/B00A6G9CGG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3Q37Y06IAZ9IL&keywords=mastery+by+robert+greene&qid=1707055262&sprefix=mastery+by+robert+greene%2Caps%2C63&sr=8-1
And then here is a post that sums up Mozart’s father's effort and sacrifices to make Mozart a “genius.”
https://blogs.loc.gov/music/2019/11/leopolds-turn-leopold-mozart-turns-300/
The world owes Leopold Mozart a great debt for having “dreamed a dream” for his now immortal progeny at the cost of having his own considerable accomplishments eclipsed, but in this, the tercentenary of the birth of this talented musician, protean scholar, and dedicated educator, everything’s coming up Leopold.
The question I cannot answer is: can a lack of brain wiring be entirely overcome by just an immense amount of practice? I think it can be to a large extent, but how a person handles unexpected/unknown situations will tell you whether the genius has a brain wiring, to begin with or it was the sheer practice scenario.
I've been thinking a lot about how much work goes into removing people's personal agency and autonomy and I think genius worship plays into that. There is a movement of people (mainly in tech, but elsewhere as well) who consider themselves Rationalists and what I have gathered so far is that they believe there is one right answer to every question and only through their very narrow form of rational inquiry can we get to it. AI evangelists believe that they can simplify the human brain enough for a computer to emulate it completely. They don't need to understand teaching, learning, or anything else as long as their programs meet their limited expectations. The Rationalist approach seeks the one best way to transfer knowledge and wishes to standardize that across education (even if the best approach is effective for 80% of students and 20% are left out).
I agree 100% with the insight about hobbies, and as an amateur guitar player, it is incredibly motivating to see the improvement I've made in just the past year. My final, more cynical point is, you can't maintain low-wage jobs if you recognize that people develop skills and expertise in what they're doing. You must raise up certain people as geniuses to justify their deservingness and therefore push others down as unworthy.
Very interesting insights. I hadn't pulled these threads together between the rationalist movement and how it manifests itself in a sort of technological solutionism to education, but what you say really resonates with me. It's like that guy who is trying to lower his epigenetic age as a way to be healthy (and presumably live forever), but his life seems like a total misery. He spends an hour a day on skin care for the love of all that's holy. Maybe these obsessions are meaningful to him, and bless him for it, but the idea that he's unlocking something for all humanity seems nutso to me.
And in education, the metrics against which what they propose "work" may not be related to anything meaningful when it comes to living a good life. The fact that we can't agree on what makes a good life strikes me as important here.
Very true, many people will have different ideas about a good life. And something like critical thinking may be incredibly important for a good life, but it's also much harder to measure through multiple choice.
There's a whole lot more to be said about it, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot when it comes to technocratic policymaking. On the surface, it seems like the right answer, but once you know more about a specific field (education, economics, healthcare) you realize that what we're able to measure is only a tiny part of the information needed to make good decisions. And relying entirely on measurable results tends to override any values based practices, or community needs more broadly.
There's also a disturbing overlap between rationalism, tech-bros in general, and eugenics which Emile Torres recently wrote a book about that I've been meaning to read (I think it just came out). Some of his thoughts are here - https://www.truthdig.com/articles/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics-2/ My impression again is that many rationalists are fooled by surface level data (IQ scores, racial disparities in education), and are unable or unwilling to look deeper at the historical context. I don't think this has to be a feature of techno-optimists, but it seems many get so lost looking to the future that they completely discount the lessons we can learn from the past. (book link here - https://www.routledge.com/Human-Extinction-A-History-of-the-Science-and-Ethics-of-Annihilation/Torres/p/book/9781032159065)
Yes, genius is brain wiring, as referred to in another comment, and passion, but it does not manifest itself in a vacuum. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, someone in their life saw them, their passion and skill and acknowledged it, and believed in them. Mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or a kindly neighbor down the street, all of them, or only one of them, it does not matter. Every genius began their journey with one person believing in them unconditionally.
That's an excellent point that at some point, genius needs recognizing. It's nice to think that it's obvious, but this isn't necessarily the case. There's lots of geniuses we never come to know.
I grew up believing I was supposed to be a genius and that I failed due to a lack of diligence, which seems somehow to negate both the distinctions you make.
I'm unclear on how I acquired the idea that I was supposed to be a genius, or make myself into one, except perhaps that my father, a professor of Classics and humanities who died in 1981, is described to this day as "the best teacher I ever had" by students at every institution where he taught, even those whose sole education from him consisted of conversations over bridge in the student union. My mother got a PhD in English and then went on to medical school, while raising me as a single mother. She got through on sheer persistence, I think, though by all accounts I have heard she is also an excellent doctor.
Perhaps I didn't quite believe my parents were geniuses or experts, but I did gather that I was supposed to be both, leaning toward the former. As it is I believe I know more about writing, copyright and fair use, and perhaps another subject or other than the average person, but that counts as only a marginal level of expertise and none of genius. Then again, we still need people to plow along, doing the work that needs to be done, including loading the dishwasher and putting away laundry, both of which I ought to be doing right now instead of writing.
John, I liked it very much, and you provoke good questions. I will lamely fall back on an old saw from my childhood, maybe one of those witty sayings that were printed over gorgeous nature scenes and hung on office walls. "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% persperation."
PS Supposedly said by Thomas Edison??? You would think he might know.
Thinking about revision from your past last week, I'm curious how much revision you do of these Substack posts, or if they're largely published as first written. (I'm not trying to imply that they read as unedited, just curious.)
(It's hard not to think of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule from Outliers while reading this post, haha.)
Hyperbole and a Half made me laugh so hard I cried, several times. Highly recommended.
The chapter in Hyperbole and a Half about her two dogs made me almost sick from laughing. Mrs. Biblioracle too. There's something about the combination between the drawings and descriptions in that chapter that just kill me.
These posts tend to go through something I think of as "revision lite" where I draft one day, read through with an attempt to make sure each section makes sense internally, and then try to find the connective tissue between sections. But this is different than something like a book where I'm actually trying to resolve my thinking as much as possible rather than leaving it so open and in progress as it clearly is here. Parts of the current book started as newsletter or (Inside Higher Ed) blog posts where my thinking was more exploratory and provisional and then the passage of time mixed with the focused activity of the book made what I meant to say clearer in my own mind.
I guess that's the easiest way for me to think about my own revision process, the attempt to bring the text in to line with the ideas that exist in my head. This is a feeling as much as it as rational process. One of the things I like about this medium is that it's okay to publish something that's not fully formed. That said, I also have an internal threshold for how formed it has to be. If I publish 50 Sunday newsletters this year there will be another 10-12 that I've drafted that I end up ditching because they couldn't reach that bar.
This is the best thing I’ve read all week. Thank you.
Thank you!
This is a great post and some great comments here too! Thanks John
🙏
I often throw around the G word to describe a Simpsons’ bit or a particularly biting or relevant or insightful turn of phrase in a group chat. We are all capable of it, to varying degrees.
I think this is similar to the perspiration vs inspiration dichotomy - never completely separate from each other.
But a person who truly makes the cut to meet this standard - as a general statement about their work or art or talent - has something that others don’t really have, or certainly at a much higher dose that can (kind of) be articulated or identified.
Maybe try-hards can compete with those of greater genius, but I like to think that we (someone?) can see the difference.
Hey John,
I totally get what you mean by practicing the drums helps with writing or other creative endeavors. I, too, decided on lessons about three years ago and it was one of the best decisions I made in my adult life. For me, practicing and playing the drums is a very clear and concrete example of how tiny changes add up to big progress. That fill you couldn't nail last week soon becomes a little easier after some diligence and practice.
I've tried to apply that to my writing practice, as well.
Cheers. Let me know if you want to start a band with only two drummers and maybe a trumpet.