General > General Technical Chat
The gurus never took an EE course.
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Jester on August 23, 2022, 09:52:54 pm ---One really quirky thing about my wife is that she really has no sense of direction (right vs. left ), even though she does have a good sense of direction in the sense of not getting lost or finding a place. I know that sounds contradictory. If we’re driving and I say turn right I need to point or there is a 50% chance we’re going to turn left.
--- End quote ---
Funny that you mention that. It is a problem I have too. I have to point to the direction I intent to say because lots of times it would be the opposite. Have the same thing when talking about north and south in respect to up and down. For me north is often down. My wife finds me weird in this respect :o
In nowadays educational system I probably would have been set apart. My results on elementary or primary school (In the Netherlands "lagere school" for ages 6-12) where never to write home about, because I had no interest in what was being taught. I rather played. Only when I got more aware I got better but still only with subjects like math and science. At that point I was send to technical schools where it all improved. Wasted lots of years that way, and missed out on high level education. Taught myself a lot of what I know along the way while working.
hans:
--- Quote from: Kjelt on August 23, 2022, 09:38:45 pm ---For me genius is a born gift to excel in some domain.
Where others need 10000 hours of study and work to accomplish a certain level the genius will do this in less than 1000 hours and could do it at a younger age.
In the current society having such a born gift can even work against you since the people around you where you have to interact with every day are unable to follow your train of thought, your interests etc. which results in isolation from the group. Luckily there now special schools but still my guess is that 80+ percent of born geniusses never will pop up, be it from a lack of exposure to the field where they could excel in (say a family where no-one ever played a musical instrument so a genius musical gifted child will not be exposed to this possibility) or where they will act normal to fit in.
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Yes it's a really unfortunate thing. The "gifted" children are set up for a wonderful career in whatever domain they pursue. But IQ is only half predictor of success, the other is hard work. And if they are never challenged at a young age, then they are likely to struggle and drop out at end of secondary school or college.
And then there is the issue that life can generally get much harder with high IQ. People can't follow your train of thought, while those people may pick up far above average on details and have trouble with regulating that stimuli. Not to mention that a plenty chunk of the very gifted ones also struggle with neurodivergence like Autism, ADD, etc. which also often means trouble regulating emotions.
To be honest, and this is almost an anti-scientific take on it, but I can't be fussed what a proper definition of a genius. You'll now when you spot one. For me personally though, as running around in academia with plenty of very clever people, I think staying humble is one of the pristine properties after you have jumped over all the bars of master/Phd degrees, tenure tracks, etc. Some people may brag about IQ, mental arithmetic capability, recalling events, working memory, etc.etc. but for me a lot of it becomes void if you can't be a humble human that can also recognize his/her bias, domain of expertise and limits thereof, projections or expectations on/of others, etc.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the popular genius' would be disqualified by these criteria.
SoundTech-LG:
‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.’
https://medium.com/skilluped/what-made-albert-einstein-a-genius-806ce9e783f5
MikeK:
I don't understand the point of this thread. The assertion is that they were good at what they did and didn't take an EE class? If that is true...Who cares? Self-education in a field as a means to achieve something is getting rarer and rarer, since low hanging fruit gets picked first. The underlying assertion, I think, is what is known as the Galileo defense used by crackpot pseudoscientists: "Galileo was persecuted and I'm also being persecuted...therefore I'm just like Galileo (and, hence, I have something of value)." Get an EE degree if you want to do something in EE.
TimFox:
I met Paul Horowitz when I was in graduate school at Chicago, when he was on the Harvard faculty working on similar experimental physics topics to those our group was working on.
At that time, he was doing practical engineering work on medical devices for a company.
According to his wiki biography: "Horowitz holds professorial appointments at Harvard in both physics and electrical engineering."
He is now emiritus at Harvard. https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/horowitz
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