>>12583316Ron Maimon is by far the highest functioning individual I have ever encountered, and he insists that such people do not exist, that the idea that there are special people who can do magic relative to others is a myth imposed unconsciously on you by authority structures, from the bias you picked up from society. Quoting maimon:
>"Genius is not a property of a person, it's a property of the things that they do. It means a great deal of originality plus an impact due to fitting in with the greater story they are a part of. Aside from doing the genius thing, there is nothing otherwise special about that person.>People generally think that there is some sort of "capacity" for doing something new, which is absolutely demented. If you have a normal brain and some time on your hands, you're about as qualified to discover General Relativity as Einstein, or to do whatever else. You just have to sit down and force yourself to do it, especially when it becomes hard. And that takes thousands of hours of single-minded effort, and it requires a sense of what exactly needs to be done, and it requires tolerance of a great deal of failure along the way, without taking this as an indication that you are somehow defective.>Everyone around you is roughly as competent as the best people at about any intellectual task, at least if they avoid hard drugs, aren't handicapped in some obvious way, and weren't raised by wolves."Feynman had similar feelings about magic people. Quoting feynman:
>"I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they're just people."I would bet that the sentiment of these two "geniuses" is echoed by countless other "geniuses" like them.
