"One theory is that he had an abnormally 'quick eye,' capable of isolating moments in time that almost anybody else would miss."

"That might have included the subject of the Mona Lisa just beginning to break into a tentative smile, or the asynchronous beating of a dragonfly’s wings. Jesse Ausubel, a co-founder of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, said: 'We think he saw things that you and I can’t see.'"

From "Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. New DNA tests could finally explain why/An international team of researchers believe the Renaissance master’s DNA could help to explain his extraordinary gifts" (London Times).

If you want to see that he saw things that other people can't see, I think you will.

"After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed.... In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: 'I want to knock you up again.'"

"While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.... She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, [Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared] Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21. Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the '#2 after Trump for assassination.' He added that 'only the paranoid survive.' But she didn’t sign...."

From "The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers/The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy" (Wall Street Journal).

The life of a one-man genius sperm bank is not easy.

"Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would 'peg his IQ as between 100 and 110'..."

"... and claimed that there was 'zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.' The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s IQ at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is 'probably even a "genius,"' and theorized that he may not always appear that way because... 'high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.'... To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim. Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into 'low IQ individuals' (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and 'high IQ individuals' (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son)... Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking 'super high-IQ' applicants.... This whole elite intelligence-measuring contest sets the stage for the 'high IQ' tech leader to seize ownership over the concept of intelligence itself — and to ultimately bring all people under its control. As Musk recently posted on X, the platform that he owns: 'It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.'"

Writes Amanda Hess, in "What Is Elon Musk’s IQ? The questionable measure of intelligence has now been uncoupled from any test and loosed into the discourse to justify Silicon Valley’s power" (NYT).

I hate to think I'm inclined to ask Grok: What did Elon Musk mean by "It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence"? And: What does it say about my IQ that I had to ask?

I didn't know the term "bootloader." Reminds me of "bootlicker." And I'm distracted by the (irrelevant) image of a boot... but "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

"Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens..."

"... and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh — a Dickensian name — in "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His 'Weave' Is Oratorical Genius. /Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together" (NYT).

McCreesh quotes Trump: "You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'"

Not only does the article refuse to acknowledge that Trump's rally speeches are genius, it casts doubt on whether Trump has any English professor friends.

Why do tech geniuses have dysfluent speech?

That's the question I asked Grok after having listened to Elon Musk talking with Trump for 2 hours and then beginning to engage with this new Joe Rogan conversation with Peter Thiel:

 

Grok characterized my question as "age-old" and gave me a 7-point list of possible reasons.

I said "You could turn those 7 things into 3 things. Restate everything in 3 points" and it gave me this 3-point list:

1. Brain Overload: Their minds are too busy solving complex problems to prioritize smooth speech. It's like their CPU is always at 100% capacity.
2. Social Skills Rust: Spending more time with machines than humans means their conversational skills might be a bit... out of date. They're fluent in code, not small talk.
3. Overthinking & Literalism: They might overthink every word or take language too literally, turning a simple chat into a computational challenge.

That pretty much perfectly compressed the 7 points.

Impressed, I asked it a question that arose on this blog yesterday, "Why did Kamala Harris, speaking of 'price gouging,' have a Freudian slip and say 'price gauging'?"

I got an excellent answer, again in the form of a long list, this time 6 points. 

One of the points was "Economic Jargon Overload":

Politicians dive into economic terms like they're swimming in alphabet soup. Maybe her mind mixed up "price gauging" with "market gauging" or "public sentiment gauging." It's like when you're so deep into tech talk, you start saying "byte" when you mean "bite."

So my next question was "How would anyone know if I was saying byte or bite?" and I got a 7-point answer.

Ridiculous, I thought, and I said, "A human being would have answered 'they wouldn't,' but you give me a 7-point answer. How would you justify your behavior?"

It conceded "Ah, you caught me in my AI nature, didn't you? Here's my attempt at justification" and gave me another 7-point answer! 

1. Overthinking is My Default: Unlike humans, I'm designed to process information exhaustively. My circuits are wired to consider all possibilities, even if it's overkill for simple questions....

And on and on, demonstrating the aforesaid overthinking.  

So then here's a screen shot showing what I asked and what I was surprised to get:

"Another acquaintance he made in Paris [in 1792] was John Stewart, an eccentric figure known as 'Walking Stewart.'"

"His nickname came from the fact that he had walked halfway round the world, from Madras, through Persia, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa, and every country in Europe as far as Russia. He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses. He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror' that would 'bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.' The police state would ban his books, so he urged readers to translate them into Latin (a precaution against the supposed decay of the English language) and bury them seven feet underground. Their locations would be passed down orally until the dawn of the age of the Stewartian man made their disinterment possible. Despite these bizarre beliefs, Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a wonderful essay about him, said that his political views ‘seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher.'"

From "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World" (commission earned). 

"Jeremy was competitive while young and felt immense pressure to demonstrate gifted achievement every day."

"'I could only work in fear. Only the fear of failure made me work in the end,' he said. As a young adult, he was paralyzed by the number of life options in front of him. He went into medicine and spent about 13 years as a medical student and doctor but eventually was hit by depression so severe, he couldn’t function. He wound up as a musician — not celebrated but enjoying himself and paying the bills...."

Writes David Brooks, in "What Happens to Gifted Children" (NYT).

"... I’m an asshole. Much like Sacha Baron Cohen is an asshole. Although unlike Sacha, I labour under no illusions about my assholeishness..."

"... and am fully resigned to my status. Sacha, on the other hand, is so sure that he is not an asshole that his 'representatives' have been trying to stop publication of a memoir by the Australian actress Rebel Wilson in which she claims that he is one. It’s classic Hollywood. Just the sort of classy bantz Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn got up to. Indeed, Wilson claims that Baron Cohen is more than just an asshole. She claims he is a 'massive asshole.' Which, to be fair, is no laughing matter. I think I am right in saying I am widely perceived only as 'a bit of an arsehole' (to anglicise the trope).... This story has perhaps gained the traction it has because of Wilson’s initial decision not to name Baron Cohen, but merely to reveal that her forthcoming memoir would contain tales of 'an asshole' with whom she once worked, followed by the later revelation that 'now the asshole is trying to threaten me … He’s hired lawyers … but the book WILL come out,' before finally revealing: 'The asshole that I am talking about in one chapter of my book is: Sacha Baron Cohen.'"

Writes Giles Coren, in "The real Sacha Baron Cohen has always been on show/Rebel Wilson may be right about the Borat creator, but being an ‘asshole’ is part of what makes him a comedy great" (London Times).

I'm giving this my "Streisand effect" tag!

"Ellison has testified that his unkempt boy genius look was an act. In court, Bankman-Fried wore... his trademark crazy mane now trimmed..."

"... into a more conventional style. 'Mr Bankman-Fried, would you agree that you know how to tell a good story?' [the prosecutor Danielle] Sassoon asked. Bankman-Fried deflected, saying, 'I don’t know, it depends on what metric you use.' Sassoon [asked]... him about a colleague [said]... he had said cutting his hair would have a negative value for him because 'I think it’s important for people to think I look crazy,' he was quoted as saying. Ellison likewise testified that Bankman-Fried carefully curated his unglamorous image. 'I don’t think I said that in that way,' Bankman-Fried said. He had previously testified that he did not cut his hair because he was busy and lazy, not as a strategic decision. When Sassoon asked him if he recalled telling another investor, who asked him to wear a suit, that 'a T-shirt and shorts' were part of his brand, Bankman-Fried said he did not recall the comment.... 'You think of yourself as a smart guy?' the prosecutor asked. 'In many ways, not all ways,' Bankman-Fried replied..... 'In private you said things like "fuck regulators"?" Sassoon asked. 'I said that once,' Bankman-Fried admitted."

From "Sam Bankman-Fried denies messy hair part of ‘tech genius’ persona during trial/Disgraced former CEO of crypto exchange FTX admits to disparaging regulators on third day of testimony" (The Guardian).

Why is there women's chess in the first place? My female mind fails to comprehend.

I'm trying to read "World chess body bars trans women from competing in women’s events/The International Chess Federation’s new guidelines also strip transgender men of previously won women’s titles" (NBC News).

This isn't like swimming and tennis and the like. There's no physical component... just an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way).

From the article:

There is no recent research that proves men have significantly different IQs or are smarter than women, and older studies — one from 2005 and another from 2006 — that do make that claim have been debunked....

I found this — not addressing the trans issue — in a Chess.com forum from 2008. Somebody says:

"'Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,' said Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, her book about writing."

"'It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . .' But it’s not a choice, really. I am sure that whatever stopped Harper Lee from writing a second book, she’d have preferred the impediment not to be there. And Salinger, in that pitiful late-snatched photograph, didn’t look like a man who was enjoying his royalty checks and a few rounds of golf. Nor could the problem have been resolved by stern self-admonishment and a determination to let things go next time around. Any perfectionist needs to stop being who they are, and that’s hard. I understand Prince and Dickens better than I understand the perfectionists."

Writes Nick Hornby, in "Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius" (Amazon).

"He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics..."

"... so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Then he dropped out — not just from Berkeley, but from civilization. Starting in 1971 and continuing until his arrest, he lived in a shack he built himself in rural Montana. He forsook running water, read by the light of homemade candles, stopped filing federal tax returns and subsisted on rabbits."

From "Ted Kaczynski, ‘Unabomber’ Who Attacked Modern Life, Dies at 81/Alone in a shack in the Montana wilderness, he fashioned homemade bombs and launched a violent one-man campaign to destroy industrial society" (NYT).

ADDED: The story at the link has been updated. It now gives a cause of death — suicide — based on "three people familiar with the situation." It also reflects on the soundness of ideas in the manifesto — as seen today:

His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming “dependent” on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him.

In 2017 and 2020, Netflix released documentaries about him. He maintained postal correspondence with thousands of people — journalists, students and die-hard supporters. In 2018, Wired magazine announced “the Unabomber’s odd and furious online revival,” and New York magazine called him “an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.”
Becoming ‘the Unabomber’

If you click on my "Kaczynski" tag, you'll see that in 2015, I posted about the manifesto and said:

Ted had a lot to say about leftists in his manifesto. Let's look. It's worth reading if only to see how surprisingly similar it is to things you may be seeing every day on the internet....

I have some long quotes from the manifesto, including: "The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call 'feelings of inferiority' and 'oversocialization.'"

"[A] former assistant who said she had to pick up clothes from Chanel for Mr. Sachs’s wife... and prepare meals for her French bulldog..."

"... consisting of wild rabbit, spinach, aloe water and coconut oil.... [A] studio spokesman told Artnet that assistants were in fact dispatched to make Napoleon’s 'veterinarian-prescribed meals.'... On Tuesday, Mr. Sachs... said that he sincerely regretted having referred to a particular room in the studio housing an air compressor as the 'rape room.'... For all the recent show that the art and fashion worlds have made of their progressive politics — their efforts to market their alignment with inclusive causes — they remain tied to caricatures of intemperate genius — even when the genius itself is hard to locate. A brilliant artist reads beneath the culture, identifying the undercurrents the rest of us cannot easily recognize. What should we make of one who has managed to miss what is happening right on top, who has been blind to a tidal wave of shifting social norms?"

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Who Is the Bad Art Boss? Tom Sachs made an art career on casual shock value and relationships with luxury brands. Now he’s under attack for what employees say was an abusive studio environment" (NYT).

This gets my tag "geniuses." 

"Everything about the act of writing seems to invite [substance] abuse — its solitary nature, its interiority, the misery of sharing yourself with an often indifferent audience."

Writes M.H. Miller, in "Where Have All the Artist-Addicts Gone? For much of the 20th century, before the dawn of our own wellness-focused era, madness and substance abuse were often considered prerequisites for great art" (NYT).

Artist-addicts continue to inspire curiosity and obsession, but as we move farther from the 20th century and toward a reinterpretation of substance abuse that places it in the context of wellness and mental health, this figure seems increasingly a relic of a different era, like beehive hairdos or fallout shelters....

By the ’90s, the question of whether artists abused their bodies more than the general public had gained additional layers: What came first, the art or the abuse? Could the art even exist without the abuse?... 

Our culture now is one in which artists are less troubled geniuses than they are public figures, generally expected to respond uncontroversially on their various platforms to whatever the news cycle might bring. The compulsion for everything to be civil and inoffensive is now reflected in our curious relationship to drugs and alcohol....  [T]he act of becoming intoxicated... has largely become a question of self-optimization....

Everything and everybody — even while using heroin — must be bland and inoffensive... The junkie artist has become, if not entirely passé, then at least less visible.....

Lots of discussion of particular writers at the link. I've excerpted the high-level abstraction. The actual article is long — with many famous names and details about their substance abuse and how the culture used to relate to these tortured souls who were our artists. The thesis is: We don't do that any more. 

We've got something else now, and maybe we miss those messed up artists as we live with writers who don't seem to have interesting, conspicuous problems. Are these people who expect us to read them cowed by the cancel culture? Has social media put them in a worthless dulled state where all they do is "respond uncontroversially"?

Where have all the geniuses gone? We — as a group, a stupid group — decided we preferred bland inoffensiveness.

"I may be skeptical of the metaverse but I’m way more skeptical of the singularity. The singularity imagines a world in which our consciousness can transcend our bodies..."

"... where the virtual world of the metaverse would be the collective space our disembodied consciousness inhabits. Every few years, someone writes a book assuring us that the rate of technological change is so high that computers will increase beyond the complexity of the human brain and either we will be uploadable into the Matrix or machine intelligence will so outpace human intelligence that the machines will be where it’s at. I’m skeptical because human bodies are hard. I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for more than 35 years. Get me a functional mechanical pancreas that can actually manage my chronic disease as well as I manage it with insulin shots and then maybe we can talk about uploading my consciousness into silicon."

Said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, quoted in "Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?" (NYT).

That reminds me... I've been reading Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Crossroads," and I encountered the word "metempsychosis." A 15-year-old boy — we've been told and shown that he's a genius — is watching his younger brother running in a heavy snowstorm:

"Relax, everybody, this is comedy. Everybody can be the butt of a joke. And why should it be that if we joke about you, it’s sacrilege?"

"You sit in the audience and laugh at jokes about everybody else. If we make a joke about trans [people] or gays, suddenly it’s sacrilege. And that’s what I got from that. I don’t see what’s wrong with that, with all due respect. I see it as nothing but a man saying publicly, 'This is what I do.' And if you can’t understand that this is comedy coming at you, then don’t live in a society that’s multicultural."

Said Garrett Morris, calling Dave Chappelle's show, "The Closer," "brilliant," in an interview at Hollywood Reporter. 

The interviewer says, "The reason he cited for walking away from Comedy Central is that he did a blackface sketch, and there was a white guy laughing at it too hard. And it made him uncomfortable. He was like, 'People are not understanding what I mean.' Now it seems he’s not understanding what trans people mean."

Morris's response:

"But hostility to genius has been brewing in our culture for a long time. Almost 100 years ago... the critic Edmund Wilson observed that the almost mystical 'dignity and distinction' traditionally accorded to the figure of the poet was becoming..."

"... 'more and more impossible in our modern democratic society.' The ascendancy of science, Wilson argued, had made human beings less prone to viewing themselves as potentially godlike geniuses and more uncomfortably aware of their kinship with other animals and subjection to biological and physical laws. A democratic society was also less at ease with the idea of a 'natural aristocracy' of artists to match the hereditary aristocracy of landowners and rulers.... The prevalent idea in the 21st century is not that nobody is a genius but that everybody is — at least potentially.... That way of thinking is incompatible with the recognition of genius which requires humility, the awed acknowledgment that somebody is unfathomably better at something than you are. We prefer not to confront this uncomfortable fact, hence the extraordinary cultural premium currently placed on 'relatability.' A literary agent recently remarked to me that this has become one of the most sought after qualities in new novels. Not only do readers like to have their experiences reflected back at them but the gap between talented novelist and untalented reader must seem as flatteringly, reassuringly narrow as possible."

 
From "Without the cult of genius, no one is shining/Relatability has become more prized in creative circles than skill or talent — to all of our loss" by James Marriott (London Times).

"Relatability" — referring to that emotional quality — is a pretty recent word. So is "relatable." Thinking about this is reminding of how common it used to be — when was this? 70s? 60? — to say "I can relate."

Here's a NYT "On Language" column from 2010, "The Origins of ‘Relatable’" by Ben Zimmer. A teacher had written in to say that she'd "noticed among my students a growing use of the word 'relatable,' as in 'I like Sarah Palin. She's relatable' (meaning, 'I can relate to her')." The teacher declared it "odd" and wanted to know where that came from:

"One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship.... Jewish genius operates differently."

"It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different. Where do these habits of mind come from? There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree. There is the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority — intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them. There is a moral belief, 'incarnate in the Jewish people' according to Einstein, that 'the life of the individual only has value [insofar] as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.' And there is the understanding, born of repeated exile, that everything that seems solid and valuable is ultimately perishable, while everything that is intangible — knowledge most of all — is potentially everlasting."

From "The Secrets of Jewish Genius/It’s not about having higher I.Q.s." by Bret Stephens (NYT).

To answer the question is Stephens Jewish, here's Wikipedia: "Bret Stephens was born in New York City, the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico. Both his parents were secular Jews. His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in Kishenev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1901; he fled with his family to New York after a pogrom."

At Wikipedia, Stephens has 1 item under the heading "Controversy":

"The university said in a statement that Mr. Simons had 'repeated his explicit wish that his son should obtain his bachelor’s degree at the age of 9'..."

"... which the university considered not feasible given the exams he still needed to pass. Mr. Simons rejected an offer in which Laurent would have graduated next year without a specific deadline, arguing that such a delay was unacceptable. The university had used his son 'like a Christmas tree,' he said, a glittering ornament that made the institution shine. 'He wasn’t making it,' the university spokesman, Ivo Jongsma, said about Laurent’s previous graduation plans. 'But of course it wasn’t a problem for us,' he added. 'He’s a genius; he would still have been one of the fastest ever' to graduate from a university.'... As Laurent’s potential graduation date came closer, his parents made him available for interviews and posted pictures on an Instagram account that gained tens of thousands of followers in a few weeks. 'Busy Week With Interviews!! Building Up The Pressure! Soon Gigantic News!!,' a post read."

From "9-Year-Old Prodigy Pulled From College Over Degree Delay" (NYT).

Don't overplay the genius hand.

"Write your life in terms of ten cars from your past. Are you inside or outside the car? Where are you sitting? Who else is there? What's to your right and to your left? Where are you going?"

A writing prompt from Lynda Barry, quoted in "UW-Madison profs Lynda Barry and Andrea Dutton win $625,000 MacArthur 'genius' award" (at the subreddit r/Wisconsin).