{"id":591,"date":"2009-05-02T22:10:18","date_gmt":"2009-05-02T22:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=591"},"modified":"2009-05-02T22:10:18","modified_gmt":"2009-05-02T22:10:18","slug":"demystifying-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/demystifying-genius\/","title":{"rendered":"Demystifying genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the benefits of training in philosophy is an ability to demystify human ideas, and human language.\u00a0 A good example is given by Tony Grayling’s article<\/a> in The Guardian<\/em> today, which makes the case that human intelligence is more than whatever is measured by IQ tests.\u00a0 Although Grayling is sometimes prone to unbehooving belligerence (especially when he argues against religious belief<\/a>), his argument here is clear and calm.\u00a0 It is not, however, original.\u00a0 My first investigations into the literature on IQ tests were conducted almost 30 years ago, and even then empirical evidence existed that the test scores of US children were significantly impacted by the race of the persons handing out the test papers; black children do significantly better if the test invigilators are black rather than white.\u00a0 In the light of such evidence it requires a special kind of either stupidity or malfeasance to believe that only something innate is being tested in an IQ test.\u00a0 IQ tests test one’s ability to do IQ tests, under the circumstances in which the test is conducted, and nothing more.
\nHowever, despite his admirable efforts in demystifying IQ testing, Grayling continues to leave mystified part of the story.\u00a0 He says:<\/p>\n

Some mental aptitudes are hard-wired: gifts for maths and music (which often go together) require no knowledge, and manifest themselves early in life. So does artistic ability. “<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Professor Grayling appears to know\u00a0nothing about mathematics, music or art.\u00a0\u00a0 While certainly benefiting from natural abilities (and perhaps lucky wirings of the brain or other physical quirks), no one gets very far without acquiring a great deal of knowledge,\u00a0and undertaking many hours of training, in each of these fields.\u00a0 Even Srinivasa Ramanujan, every non-mathematician’s favourite example of a “natural-born genius\u00a0mathematician” was taught, first by himself (from text-books he found), and then by G. H. Hardy.\u00a0 Ramanujan was\u00a0famous for his ability to intuit mathematical relationships between numbers which were completely non-obvious, even\u00a0to other mathematicians\u00a0working in the same field.\u00a0 Some of these intuitions were sublime and very profound.\u00a0 But even at the height of his powers as a mathematician, these intuitions were just as likely to be wrong as correct.\u00a0\u00a0As John Forbes Nash once remarked of his own madness,\u00a0there was no difference inside his head between\u00a0his great mathematical ideas and his\u00a0paranoid lunacies; only the outside world treated these ideas\u00a0differently.
\nThe situation in music is the same as in mathematics,\u00a0 \u00a0Perhaps the greatest musical prodigy of all time in western culture was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, more advanced even than the young Mozart.\u00a0\u00a0 And some of Mendelssohn’s greatest music, and some of the greatest in the western canon,\u00a0was composed in his teens — for example, the string Octet, written when he was 16. But listen to his 12 string symphonies, composed between the ages of 12 and 14.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is a\u00a0discernible increase in sophistication and musicality\u00a0across the 12, with the last 3 being considerably more sophisticated musically than the preceding 9, and the 3 before that likewise clearly more sophisticated than the first 6.\u00a0\u00a0 These are not the works of someone relying on hard-wired gifts or natural ability, with the music arriving fully formed from some untrained, black-box genius-brain, as Grayling would have us believe.\u00a0 Rather they are the contingent and constructed works of someone struggling with the material – learning, improving, experimenting and visibly maturing as he practiced and trained himself to be a composer.\u00a0 One can’t compose music without having\u00a0lots of very specific knowledge — knowledge of the capabilities and constraints of different instruments; knowledge of the rules (as were then believed) of melody and harmony; knowledge of the patterns and styles used for organizing musical materials across long time durations (eg, Sonata form; key relationships across movements).\u00a0 None of this knowledge (which is both know-what and know-how) is hard-wired in anyone, and all of it has to be learnt, no matter how good one’s musical ear is.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of it is socially constructed (ie, it differs from one society to another, and from one time to another), and thus cannot possibly be innate.
\nNo doubt Mendelssohn had some natural abilities,\u00a0perhaps congenital (since\u00a0both his father’s and his mother’s families had musicians across\u00a0several previous generations), but he also had some very strong sociological advantages:\u00a0 a nurturing and loving home life, the best teachers in the Prussian empire, the best instruments, original manuscript copies of the works of the great composers, and weekly musical salons organized by his mother in the family living room, where Berlin’s best musicians would play the western canon (as it then was) and also play his new compositions.\u00a0\u00a0 Who could but prosper in such an environment. If I had to bet on the\u00a0ratio of nurture (including training and hard-work) to nature in the case of Mendelssohn, I would put it at 95% to 5%.
\nCoincidentally or otherwise, the demystified view of genius was presented (with references to the literature) by David Brooks in the NY Times yesterday<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the benefits of training in philosophy is an ability to demystify human ideas, and human language.\u00a0 A good example is given by Tony Grayling’s article in The Guardian today, which makes the case that human intelligence is more than whatever is measured by IQ tests.\u00a0 Although Grayling is sometimes prone to unbehooving belligerence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-human-intelligence","category-music","p1","y2009","m05","d02","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}