Hey man take a compliment! I guess I'm ideologically not all…

Hey man take a compliment! I guess I'm ideologically not all that fond of the word genius either, but it is also simply the case that some people seem more gifted than others, almost supernaturally so in some cases. Marvin Minsky is my model for genius, having spent significant time around him. He just could do things with his mind that nobody else could. Actually I wrote about that in Introduction to Inventive Minds.

• We have some preconceived ideas about genius—that it is a mystery, a divine gift given to just a few select people, one that the rest of us can only be awed by. Marvin Minsky was a recognized genius, but it was the nature of his particular form of genius to question the very idea of innate talent and aptitude and the mystifications that surround it. To Marvin, the idea that the mind (or anything else) was beyond explanation was an affront and a challenge.

Minsky would probably agree more with you The Society of Mind: 7.10 Genius that it's a thought stopper. I say you need thought stoppers, consider them a search heuristic, a way to trim the tree of thought (and Minsky might agree with that too, I think – he was big on the need for mental censors or other suppressive mechanisms).

Re: Nobility – I have my own issues with Chapman's nobility schtick (see Against Nobility for more detail than anybody could want). Not the underlying concept maybe, but the metaphor has unfortunate aristocratic-class connotations that I find distasteful and possibly misleading. I prefer the yiddish term mensch for what I think he's talking about (that one has unfortunate gender connotations, but what can you do). But at least in word he is entirely against great-man thinking. You said:

Nobility is an attribute of actions at best, not people. Some people sometimes do noble things.

I think Chapman would agree with that 100%:

• Nobility is not special. It is possible for everyone, whereas it would not be possible for everyone to be special. Claims of specialness are based on uncommon qualities, not shared by everyone. In fact, it would only be possible for anyone to be special if most people were ordinary—which no one is.

• Because nobility is an intention, it is possible for everyone. Everyone could be noble—and at times all of us are noble. It is not an accomplishment; it is a stance.

  • Nobility | Meaningness

His later writings stray from this egalitarian perspective, IMO, and maybe you are reacting to those.

Another genius of my acquaintance, David Chapman, has written on this. One of the lessons of his flavor of Vajrayana Buddhism is that nobody is special, but nobody is ordinary either (see specialness). These are both evasions or false self-stories (my terms, not his); the resolution of these two false stories is nobility, which in Venkat's terms might mean putting your mediocre abilities to work for the benefit of all beings.

The word “genius” is basically a thought stopper. It rarely points coherently at anything other than non-neurotypical savant tendencies like in music or chess. Anytime it’s used for more culturally constructed perceptions of value (think: RLHF social proof genius vs RLVR verifiable geniuses) it dissolves into nonsense.

@Mike Travers the problem with your model is that while we can all agree that Magnus Carlsen is a chess genius, your argument that I’m being unnecessarily self-effacing in denying my writing “genius” could be countered easily by any of the hundreds of people who believe I’m just bloviating and producing word salad/verbal diarrhea. There’s no objective measure there. My own belief is it’s just a kind of fit. My style of thinking finds easy expression through writing in the current environment and many people enjoy it. It’s not nothing, but it’s too weak to serve as proof of an expansive notion of genius. It’s closer to path dependent compounding luck. Carlsen would be a genius chess player across a robust swathe of many timelines. I’d be a popular writer on a much more fragile set.

I’ve read David’s stuff on nobility. I don’t buy it tbh. It’s wishful Buddhist ethics. Nobility is just another way to smuggle in great man theory. David is fundamentally a great-man-theory Straussian. Just in very disguised Buddhist guise. I think it’s a fundamentally mistaken understanding of the human condition. Nobility is an attribute of actions at best, not people. Some people sometimes do noble things. The bodhisattva ideal is that some people are noble all the time because they perhaps experienced some spiritual transformations. I don’t think this follows. It’s like saying anyone who climbs Mount Everest has a purified soul. People may well believe they’ve achieved a certain nobility and grace and even convince their subculture of it. I simply don’t take such claims seriously. “Nobility” is not a useful notion for me.