Is Genius a Performance Art?

I have recently been doing some reading on the history of mathematics. I enjoy doing this mostly for the rich little anecdotes about individual mathematicians. Many of these stories may be apocryphal, but they're compelling all the same. 

Carl Friedrich Gauss, as you may know, is one of the towering figures from the annals of mathematics. In reading about him, I was struck by the suggestion that he would often try to hide the process by which he arrived at many of his discoveries. In writing his proofs he preferred for them to appear as though they had emerged "out of thin air." Also fitting with this description are the accounts that he disliked teaching. Together they paint a picture of a man preferred for his methods to remain mysterious.

A question this raises in my mind is whether this obscurity of methods is a necessary component of our idea of genius. Is a mathematician who produces many novel results by working much harder and longer than this her peers a genius? It would seem more accurate to me to say she's a hard-worker. If on the other hand her results come to her almost effortlessly, as though from some magic source of inspiration, then it seems appropriate to call her a genius. This holds for individual thought processes too. In general, the more I understand about how someone came to a result less likely I am to see it as a work of genius. 

Let's consider the parallels to a magic trick.  If a magician performs some challenging slight hand that his audience fails to notice, we say it seemed like magic. Suppose now he explains how it was done. If he performs this trick again and this time we don't fall for the misdirection, it will probably seem a lot less magical even if he performs it equally skillfully. This leads some people to see magicians as charlatans. It bothers them that someone would pretend to have magic abilities when in fact there is no such thing.

Personally this opinion strikes me as uncharitable to magicians.  Pretending that the tricks are magic is part of the presentation of the performance, and a little suspension of disbelief is what makes it entertaining. I must confess, however, that I have less sympathy for people aspire to be seen as geniuses. Since there is less public recognition of the element of performance in being a genius, people who obscures their methods to give themselves the aura of genius often are viewed as having a magic gift. Trying to be transparent about your methods may make your findings seems a little less inspired, but it gives other people a better chance to collaborate with you on your work. An unfortunate truth about knowledge work is that this collaborative spirit often receives less respect than the auspices of genius.

Olympia Academy

Have you heard of Olympia Academy?  In 1902 Einstein and two other friends would meet regularly to discussion their shared interests in philosophy and physics.  Only three years later Einstein published four papers that revolutionized physics. I love the existence of this group.  It tells me that friendship is fertile grounds for genius.

Degrees of Freedom

Is free will an illusion?  This is a question endlessly debated by philosophers.  I think, however, it's also a question that most people quickly lose interest in. I myself have long been fascinated by philosophy of action. I'm not sure that I can do justice to the attitude of someone who is bored by discussions of freedom, but if I had to guess I'd say they think something like this:  "Those philosophers who claim that determinism is incompatible with free will, they're probably right.  But maybe the universe isn't deterministic.  And besides what difference does it really make if I don't have free will.  I guess that would be kind of depressing, but I'm not going to just stop acting."

I hope to convince some of the people who hold a perspective like the one I've imagined above that understanding the nature of freedom really can make a difference to how they live.  The reason why an understanding freedom matters is that freedom isn't binary.  There are varying degrees of freedom and the decisions we make about how to live can make us more or less free.  To me this seems like a very good reason to spend time thinking about the nature of freedom.

To give some flavor to this allow me to use a personal example.  In the past, I've gotten into the bad habit of snoozing my alarm clock repeatedly and not getting out of bed until long after the original time that I set the alarm for. When I decided it was time to end this habit I thought at first that I could end through pure force of will.  Each night before I went to bed I promised myself that tomorrow morning I would wake up and get out bed right when the first alarm went off.  However, as with many habits, my snoozing habit proved stronger than my will to overcome it.  Part of the problem was that person I was when I woke up each morning was motivated differently than the person who made the promises each night on going to bed.  For the morning me, the desire for sleep seemed a lot more relevant than the desire to be in control of when I would wake up.

For a while I found this predicament rather depressing.  If I didn't even have enough self-control to decide when to wake up and then do it, how could I possibly expect to control my behavior in important and difficult situations where making the right choice really does require a lot of willpower?  Then I noticed something about my snoozing habit that gave me reason for hope. The habit wasn't unbreakable.  In fact, in certain situations I broke it quite easily.  For example, if I knew that I had to wake up when the alarm when off in order to make an important meeting I would wake up when the alarm went off.  Thus, one way to get myself to stop snoozing was to schedule a social commitment which wouldn't give me time to snooze. For example, if I wanted to get up every morning before seven I ask an early rising friend of mine to meet me every morning for breakfast at seven.  While I didn't have the freedom to choose to end my snoozing habit by simple force of will, I did have the freedom to end my snoozing habit.  

In this story I think there are two very deep insights about freedom.  The first is that there are times when you have the ability to make decisions that increase your degree of freedom. Choosing to make morning appointments gave me the freedom to choose when I would wake up. The second is that your degree of freedom is not just a measure of how much willpower you have. Things that seem somewhat external to your identity as an agent, like a social commitment, can make the difference between being free to do what you want and lacking self-control.

I hope you will spend some time thinking about your freedom. Examine you behavioral patterns. No doubt there are some that you approve of and some that you would rather end.  If you have no trouble continuing the ones that you like and discarding the that you don't then great-- you probably have a lot of freedom.  But if there are good habits you can't seem to start and bad one you can't seem to end, don't despair and don't assume that you are crippled by lack of willpower. Look for opportunities to create structures in the world and in your psychology that enable you to do what you want. Strive to be more free.

About

Welcome dear reader.

As this blog is in its infancy I can't say much of what it is about yet. One might even say that its existence precedes its essence. I will say this: right now the plan is to write about ideas that I find interesting, ones that I'd like to remember, and ones that I'd like to discuss. Knowing me (as I do somewhat but not completely) these will often be ideas from cognitive science or philosophy.