The Genius and the rest of us

About a month after I moved to the US, I was sitting in my dorm's dining hall at a table with a bunch of other students from different countries and upbringings. I didn't know much about the world back then and tried to be very careful in asking. Across from me was sitting a guy from Iran, who was quite successful academically, but had a reputation for lots of drinking, doing drugs, and sleeping around. He was eating the same dining hall dish as me. He was eating pork. This character in front of me clearly didn't match the image of an Iranian in my head (and I hadn't met many Iranians by that time), so I asked him how he reconciles his upbringing with his current lifestyle. His answer stuck with me, "You see, I believe that the last prophet who came to this Earth and told people what to do was Steve Jobs. But he died already."

Today, I still encounter people who believe in prophets. It bothers me when those prophets are found in science, it bothers me when my contemporaries cite certain sacred texts. I find the memoirs of senior scientists to be sometimes of historical value, giving insights into how things worked out for them and back then. However, they are less useful in practical sense, for me to make choices now and in the future. Still, these texts communicate a certain aura or an attitude about how to be a scientist. Many of my friends were enamored with such attitudes and chose them as their aspirations, goals, or even standards of performance.

In this venue I am interested in how people think about science and who they take for an authority in science. I pose that there are two ways to success. One is to be a genius with an enormous brain; the other is to cobble together pieces of skills and lessons from mistakes until something sticks together. There may be more, but these two surely exist, and are surely distinct. The geniuses exist for I have met a bunch, yet this is no place to drop names. Those people are so remarkable, so productive, so idiosyncratic, that it is only fair to recognize that I am not a genius by that measure.

In my adolescent years, I read a lot of Robert Heinlein, a mid-20th century American scifi writer. In college I came across a sale of the original prints of his books in paperback, $0.50 apiece. I was reading "Time Enough for Love" for several months in between of classes and travel, as the book was falling apart at the seams (that glue didn't last 40+ years). This book is about a man named Lazarus Long who lived for 2000 years, while the rest of the humans had normal lifespans. You and me, as Homo sapiens (the vanilla kind, opposed to the protagonist), have finite time to learn and hone our skills before we hit the biological limitations of aging. Some of us spend the whole life perfecting one craft, some switch several but never become complete pros at either. But Lazarus Long skips through that. He became an absolute pro at every conceivable profession, from art to commerce, from engineering to governance, from science to medicine, from agriculture to space travel, from cutting wood to making love. The book has two "intermissions", which contain sets of aphorisms distilled from Long's long life that accumulated much more wisdom than you, dear reader, will ever get. Learning from Long's teachings is like listening to an oracle, or a prophet, or some other form of authority with absolute wisdom. I was so impressed that for a while a printout of the aphorisms hung on my dorm room wall for regular consultations. I marked a few that I thought most helpful for my situation.

But something didn't sit right. The story of Lazarus Long is a work of fiction, and a piece of wisdom, written by a man who lived much less than 2000 years. More importantly, it's a product of its time, the 1970s. The ability of a human to master the skills and the crafts and the laws of nature through study and dedication is a profoundly modern idea. The problem is, we live in a postmodern world.

I lost passion for Heinlein only after I read over half of his bibliography.

The top standard of recognition in science, especially for the general public, is the Nobel Prize. There are other awards from scientific societies, there are awards that have to be translated for press releases as "the Nobel in mathematics" or "the Nobel in computer science", but the actual Nobel prize is the one recognized by most people. Not long ago, I had a chance to go to a meeting where the senior attendees were selected squarely on the basis of having received the Nobel prize (that year, mostly in physics). The younger attendees (students and postdocs) had a chance to listen to and interact with more than 40 "top" physicists in the world. The idea is in the transfer of insight from the older generation to the younger.

Yet the thoughts that pursued me during the week-long meeting were not what to ask from these accomplished people (even as they told anecdotes ranging from hilarious to depressing to pedantic). My thoughts were about the dynamics of power: the power that gives Nobel prizes, and the power that Nobel prizes give. The Nobel laureates have achieved their success through both modalities: some are sheer geniuses, and others just contributed a key component to a discovery after many trials and errors in a broader science ecosystem. Yet who exactly of the scientists is honored depends crucially on the self-selection mechanisms in the Nobel community.

Once you get a Nobel prize, you are effectively handed a megaphone. For at least a year, before the next class of winners is announced, all journalists are hanging to your every word - so what do you do with that kind of platform? Are you going to advance yourself? Your scientific topic? Your social cause? Or just say "that kind of work could have never been done today"?

Nobel prizes, just like scientists' memoirs, lag behind the state of the art, often by forty-some years. Do you want to willingly subscribe to the outdated myth of the lonely genius who transcends human limitations and/or is propped up by prize selections? Do you want to justify the genius by an argument from authority, made out to yourself? If you, dear reader, are a genius, you are reading the wrong column. But if you are not, should you learn from the genius? That's not it.

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