[Off-Topic] Talent Is Highly Overrated: Humanizing Einstein and Killing Gods
One thing I keep repeating is: don’t have idols, don’t blindly believe in gurus, and most of all, don’t follow false-Gods.
I’m a longtime proponent of killing gods — it’s practically a hobby. They make excellent fiction characters in bedtime stories, but obviously they don’t exist. Like the boogeyman, Santa Claus, or the Easter bunny. And no, this isn’t another anti-religion-focused article — relax.
For the same reasons, I want to dismantle the myth of “Talent” and bring the demigods back to humanity.
Talent Is Highly Overrated
I really hate the use of the word “Talent.” It should be used as a compliment, a quality, but it’s very often used as an excuse. The Latin root of the word simply means a large amount of money. Today’s mistaken and common use devalues the real efforts of truly “talented” people.
Every time it’s used to denote something like “I’ll never be an Einstein, so I won’t even bother trying.” It’s the favorite excuse of lazy people.
Although environmental and circumstantial factors play a crucial role, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in our biological material — like a gene — that, given the same circumstances, would prevent someone from reaching similar levels of success.
Yes, some people end up, randomly, in the right place at the right time. It’s like winning the lottery. And unfortunately, it’s impossible to recreate the same network of circumstances for everyone and replicate levels of success (more on this at the end of the article).
At the same time, it doesn’t help at all to believe in the mysticism that “talent” can be defined physically, “genetically.” That’s the thinking that creates Josef Mengeles and much of racism and other forms of segregation. There is no predestination.
These days you’ve probably heard of the concept of 10,000 hours of deliberate training to become a master at something, first presented in the book “Outliers” by the prolix Malcolm Gladwell.
From Bill Gates to Oppenheimer to the Beatles, the book tries to describe how the continuous and focused effort — 10,000 hours (roughly 5 years full-time) — of these people helps explain their levels of success.
Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” tries to go further than Gladwell in explaining that — obviously — only 10,000 hours of training isn’t enough, if it isn’t “deliberate practice” training, that is, not just repeating the same training, but obsessive training focused on continuous improvement.
In summary: do you want (the chance) to become a master at something? Have the obsession to do training excessively focused on improving by millimeters, milliseconds, over 10,000 hours, and not simply training the same routine during that period. Repeating the same thing, without focusing on improving results, doesn’t take anyone anywhere — it’s just a pastime.
This kind of deliberate training that Gladwell and Colvin detail in their books is one possible factor of success.
10% of the Brain: the Myth
This one is easy to debunk, so I’ll start here.
One of the “mystical” aspects of talent is linked to the belief in people who can activate more than 10% of the brain. The myth that we don’t use all of our “potential.”
Recent fiction films like “Lucy” by Luc Besson don’t help at all because they perpetuate this popular belief. Let’s describe it this way:
“The human brain constitutes 1/40 of the total mass of the human body, on average, but consumes 1/5 of all the calories we absorb. From an evolutionary point of view, where every organ in our body was created and naturally selected over ages for efficiency, having a brain that sucks up 20% of all our daily energy reserve for a mere 10% of efficiency simply makes no sense.”
Think about yourself right now. Are you using your muscles to sit there now? Using your hands to scroll your computer mouse (or finger on your phone screen)? Maybe eating or drinking something? Listening to some music? Breathing? Rest assured, you’re using more than 10% of your brain right now - Nature
With that factor out of the way, let’s continue.
Humanizing Einstein
In general, I don’t respect biographies. I rarely waste my time reading any. I’m not against them, but to me a biography is a story told by a writer, who took into account every technique to keep me hooked on the story he wants to tell. Every biography is limited to the writer’s interests, not the character whose name is on the book’s cover.
In fact, I consider biographies as any other kind of entertainment story. In exactly the same category as watching Captain America or Superman. Because that’s exactly how writers and directors produce “based on true facts” films.
By the way, hats off to the Coen brothers for the film “Fargo” which opens with the line “this is a true story.” And many people, even today, believe it’s real. A trolling of every film that begins with the infamous “based on a true story” while everyone thinks they’re watching facts, not entertainment.
Put in a name that existed, a situation that existed, and everyone associates the entire fiction as if it were real. I hope nobody thinks Lincoln was a vampire hunter because of the film “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”.
But if I were to ask anyone in the world who the greatest super-genius scientist of all time was, with the theories that most revolutionized humanity, no one would hesitate to say: Albert Einstein!
But why?
Physicist Roger Schlafly, in his book “How Einstein Ruined Physics: Motion, Symmetry, and Revolution in Science” brings a ton of evidence to the contrary.
In summary, yes, Einstein really did publish many very interesting things, but the super-inflated myth created around his figure is much more harmful than beneficial for the future of physics and his successors. And it keeps fueling the myth-making market.
Einstein was a person — and full of flaws, like all of us — not a demigod.
Mark Green, in his article “New Book Says Einstein Highly-Overrated and Ruined Physics” describes:
“What makes Einstein so great? The official story goes like this: Albert Einstein, a young clerk at a Swiss patent office, single-handedly transformed physics from a static, three-dimensional science into a head-exploding four-dimensional space-time universe with solitary ’thought experiments’ involving gravity, motion, space and time. Einstein also made unprecedented progress in understanding the nature of light and energy and was the first to grasp the equivalence of energy and mass. Einstein’s discoveries not only transformed modern physics but the way we see the universe.”
It’s what we all know. And I strongly recommend you read Mark Green’s full article, but let’s get to the points that matter.
E=MC² — was not invented by Einstein!
The equation was published 2 years earlier by Olinto de Pretto. As Schlafly says in his book, “Einstein’s understanding of special relativity … was inferior to (Henri) Poincaré’s.” By the way, if you’ve never heard of the French physicist Poincaré, I recommend reading the book “Chaos: Making a New Science” by James Gleick.
The notion of motion and time as a 4th dimension separate from three-dimensional space.
H.G. Wells speculated about the concept in the famous fiction piece “The Time Machine” in 1894. That same year Lorentz wrote the scientific paper where he “proposes the concept of local time in a moving object.” Poincaré wrote one in 1898 and another in 1900 exploring the relationship between motion and time.
And the relationship of E=MC² to the atomic bomb?
As Schlafly describes, E=MC² isn’t even necessary for the atomic bomb. The equation gives no clue about how to split the atom, or how to create a nuclear chain reaction, or any of the other steps necessary in making the atomic bomb. Relativity isn’t even necessary to understand the energy release of a uranium or plutonium bomb, since the release can be explained by electromagnetism considerations … predictions about relativistic mass were being tested (by German physicist Walter Kaufmann) in 1901, before Einstein wrote anything about it.
And, to top it off, it was also H.G. Wells who first published about the concept of “atomic bombs”.
There were many exceptional scientists, who worked hard, before and during Einstein’s era. Nobel laureate Henri Poincaré (whom British philosopher Bertrand Russell — remember Russell’s teapot? — called the greatest man France had ever produced), the other Nobel laureate and Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz; another Nobel laureate and Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell.
According to Schlafly, Maxwell was the first to coin the term “relativity” and created the first true theory of relativity of mass and energy. Electromagnetism generated the most important equations in the history of science.
Poincaré’s subsequent work on relativity provided the theorems that were “mathematically identical to Einstein’s,” and most of his work came before Einstein. Lorentz and Poincaré had all the main aspects of the theory of relativity, and published before Einstein.
Remember another detail of the “official story.” Einstein worked at a patent office. He understood the importance of “intellectual property” and had access to a lot of work before it had been patented!
And so a talent is born, irreplaceable and of inestimable value … for the mass entertainment market.
Hold onto another detail: what if Einstein hadn’t existed? Would we have been deprived of the Theory of Relativity? No, that work was practically complete before him. Others would have served the role and the media and folklore would just have a different name to call God.
Talent, is relative …
Geniuses Are Not Individuals, They Are Groups!
An important fact is that the Theory of Relativity wasn’t the invention of one person. A lone wolf who had a “Eureka” moment. Eureka moments are very different from what you imagine.
Understand that today, the Theory of Relativity is basic material for any physics student. Nothing remarkable.
Everything we have today is the result of hundreds of individuals and groups, who throughout history have used what was known before, thrown away what no longer works, refined what works, and added new pieces for the following generations.
Nothing we do today is truly done “from scratch.” Everything we have at our disposal today makes us orders of magnitude superior, more efficient, faster, than the generation that lived 200 years ago, millennia ago.
We don’t create anything based on absolute truths written in stone millennia ago. Evolution exists because everything is volatile. Everything that has been proving itself correct given years, centuries of scrutiny, becomes the strongest tools to create new things. Engineering, Medicine, etc.
Thanks to that we went from the era of subsistence to agriculture. To the Industrial Revolution. To the Information Age. And to where we’re heading toward the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and so on.
“Talent” is a way of pointing out moments in this continuous and uninterrupted history where society as a whole has been climbing on the shoulders of giants to take longer strides into the future. But no “one” individual was necessarily pivotal. The achievements would be made by someone, but from time to time, we elect a few individuals.
It’s easier to tell the story that way. That’s all — but innovation is a group effort, not an individual one.
Serendipity, Randomness, and Complex Systems
Unfortunately we, human beings, are terrible at understanding randomness. The world is highly random.
More than Einstein, the scientist who published the most significant work for humanity was Charles Darwin and his magnum opus “On the Origin of Species” where he explains how complexity emerges in a world of random events through natural selection.
I wrote in part about this in the post “Processes, Methodologies, and the Human Brain” from 2013 and in the post “We Are Mathematically Ignorant” from 2008. I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.
The very story of how we survived and evolved in this world, until reaching the humanoid form we have today, is the result of what we had to face in the natural environment, or we wouldn’t be here.
And a crucial factor in our primitive brain is finding patterns, things that repeat — very fast. If, in the dead of night, in the middle of a forest, we see a small pair of shining circles moving around us, if we don’t immediately associate them with the eyes of a lurking wolf and run away as soon as possible, we wouldn’t be here.
That same mechanism is what makes us see “faces in the clouds,” “images in coffee grounds,” “the face of Christ on a dirty cloth,” and so on. Identifying patterns amid randomness guaranteed our survival, but in the modern world this capability of our brain leads us to totally wrong conclusions of cause and effect.
That’s why I’ve written so much about “correlation isn’t the same as causation.”
The real world is “complex,” in the mathematical sense, which describes the exponentiality of results given a network of factors. There is no linear, step-by-step path in anyone’s biography. Not even in twins who were born and lived together, under — theoretically — the same set of factors.
“Complexity” isn’t what we’re used to imagining it is, and it’s what prevents us from predicting the weather more than the short term. It’s what leads to Lorenz’s famous butterfly, Mandelbrot’s fractals, and Chaos Theory. And more recently to Modern Network Theory (including Social Networks) published by authors like Barabási, Strogatz, or Duncan.
Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been fascinated by this subject for a decade and have already recommended all these authors’ books — it was even the topic of my first public talk in 2008, “Killing the Average”.
Beyond those 10,000 hours of obsessive deliberate training toward continuous improvement, you also need to be exposed to as many situations and people as possible to increase your chances of “serendipity” which is the combination of “being in the right place, at the right time, and with the capability to seize the opportunity.”
This is what can lead to such “success.” There’s no simple recipe — only hard work and a good dose of randomness. And, when all these factors are aligned, the results can really seem “miraculous” or “superhuman” and — given a long amount of time and humans’ capacity to inflate stories every time they’re retold — in a few years we create new Demigods.
Killing Gods
In every mythology there are many gods. Both popular manifestations of beliefs around the “inexplicable” facts of nature (at the time) like storms, volcanoes, the seasons, the weather.
And there are also the demigods, human beings who demonstrated some kind of superiority or so-called “miraculous” feats (at the time) that no other human could ever achieve — and a good dose of creativity in telling the story.
Both cases are explainable. Unfortunately the logical explanation is much less dramatic and doesn’t make as good a story, most of the time. Curing diseases and advancing humanity isn’t as “sexy” as a so-called “miraculous” feat.
But our style of mass communication in society — newspapers, magazines, television, films, social media — loves “sexy stories.” Negative news sells. Sexy sells. Logical facts don’t generate audiences. And, worse, they elevate false myths to the status of “truth.”
“Tell a lie enough times and it becomes truth.” - Joseph Goebbels
Just because you — yourself — don’t know the explanation for something, the argument “therefore there is the possibility of something mystical” doesn’t exist. If I can’t explain that your God doesn’t exist, neither can you prove that he does. So it’s a fallacious argument and has no place in a serious discussion. And that’s being nice, because whoever tells the story is the one who has the burden of proof, not me — the one listening — who is required to disprove you.
The last 200 years have been fantastic, because we’ve been killing gods at rates never before recorded in the history of humanity. It’s the reflection of how much we’ve advanced in our knowledge about nature and how it works. There aren’t many left — we don’t need to keep creating more.
Conclusion
The circumstances of why certain individuals are elevated to the status of demigods isn’t an easy answer. Much less a linear sequence of events. Much less an entertainment film, with high doses of fiction and drama, that claims to be “based on real facts.”
We all live in a complex world — I mean, where everything is intertwined in an infinite network of possibilities. Each individual has very different circumstances.
Many have no conditions at all and even so they exceed expectations, with superior determination, with superior dedication, with superior patience, and some really reach success.
“Natural” talent?
Many have the conditions, but don’t have dedication, don’t have patience, don’t have determination. And they fail. How many stories of heirs of great fortunes destroying the legacy of their ancestors?
Lack of Talent?
Everyone has chances. But there’s no point in waiting — the best thing to do is to build the capabilities as soon as possible so that, if randomness arrives and you’re in the right place at the right time, you have the conditions to seize the opportunity and surf on it.
But there are no simple answers, no recipes, no miracles, and no talents naturally born with genius ready and, therefore, unreachable ideals.
Now, if you have the conditions and don’t get success handed to you on a plate, it isn’t the “bad luck” of having been born without the talent gene. It’s pure laziness. Simple as that.
Don’t have idols. Have references.