Il Genio Non Esiste

Barbascura is always entertaining, recommended on Too Big To Fail podcast. Italian-only book.

There is also a clear explanation of gravity with four dimensions, and many amusing anecdotes. Barbascura’s style is a bit too coarse in places; he always has to add a joke and it comes off as less serious, but the book is worth it. Very interesting and entertaining. I do not understand the point about Einstein, who for example did not have the luck of Marconi or Democritus. They are very different figures.

So it loses a bit of the book’s point: yes, geniuses are ordinary and eccentric, but some truly had a lot of talent. I am not entirely convinced by the message; it gets lost among the jokes. Still, a good read.

Notes

• So,
  • there is Democritus going on a study‑abroad journey, coming up with bizarre and untestable ideas in a period when everyone said bizarre and untestable things, yet for some reason people believed him for more than two thousand years. Remarkable.
  • Then there is the austere Newton, eccentric, dabbling in alchemy and at times exposing himself to heavy metals.
  • Darwin lacked motivation, but he encountered a series of extraordinary strokes of luck that fueled his wandering curiosity and his appetite for odd animals. Perfect.
  • Marconi was not particularly brilliant; we do not know how much of what he achieved was copied or not, he was not well educated, but he had family funding to back him. So even after getting many things wrong he could spend money to try, and it even worked. Not bad.
  • Tesla, on the other hand, was deeply solitary and often gave his ideas away. In the end, he achieved the near impossible: he died poor.
  • Einstein was a misfit with many good ideas who made his life harder by fighting a battle with time and tying himself in knots. He was wrong about many things, but in some curious ways he turned out to be right on a few. On many others he remained entirely wrong.
• So, do you want to become “geniuses”? Go out there and have fun. And preferably do it legally.
• And if I had not lived up to expectations? It is fine; we will all die one day. The universe will continue its existence and will not even notice I was here. Let’s go, rock ’n’ roll.
• It was never a matter of talent, because that would imply that someone is advantaged over someone else. The truth is quite different. The truth is that if each of us invested the same amount of time as those “geniuses” in honing our craft, making the same number of mistakes, discovering that we even liked some of those mistakes, trying, failing, mixing, experimenting, finding our very own style, perhaps today we could compete with them on equal terms.
• Democritus is a hacker of life. He made a perfect investment. He invested a hundred talents for an extraordinary voyage, during which he also studied around the world and met the greatest celebrities of his time, and in the end they even gave him the money back.
• As you can see, this is in the end a motivational book. Knowledge and learning are the only resources you can always use and always sell, and that no one can ever take away from you.
• Am I a Pangloss? I have run multiple tests on myself. Yes, I am. I am a Pangloss. I am optimism. I am optimism, and you may hate me.
• Fortunately there are not that many in the world, but why are there so few? Because many individuals die (predation, diseases, access to food), keeping the number of elephants more or less constant. But on what basis did some die and others survive? Because some were stronger (or rather more suited) than others. In short, there was a kind of selection between who lives and who dies. Here is the missing piece. Here is how species evolve. It was natural selection. Under given environmental conditions only the most suited survive; the others die. Those who survive have offspring and pass their traits to their children. Generation after generation, the most suitable traits are selected. But note: Darwin reached these conclusions many years after his return. This shows an important point, namely that Darwin did not say anything new. He only connected the dots that good fortune had already aligned along his path, ready for someone to notice.
• Marconi had three strokes of luck at once. Stroke of luck number 1: no one knew the ionosphere existed. Stroke of luck number 2: as it happens, the ionosphere reflects electromagnetic radiation. Stroke of luck number 3: it has been calculated that the signal did not bounce just once, but twice. The signal leaves, pong, pong, and arrives right above the detector.
• Marconi, proceeding by trial and error without really knowing what he was doing; Marconi, who made major mistakes but succeeded anyway; on one side meritocracy, on the other a privileged battering ram with a lot of luck. On one side someone who was truly self‑made, on the other the mother’s favorite with a full wallet. I put these arguments forward here to show that science does not care about any of this. The world got radio, and what remains is human frailty.
• The deformation happens in the third dimension, the one the flatbread‑people can neither see nor imagine. Because of that deformation, any other 2D flatbread passing nearby would end up falling in, and thus being attracted toward the object that produced it (the bowling ball). The flatbread‑person would only perceive acceleration toward that object, as if pulled. Not realizing they are falling onto it, they would call this “gravity.”
• I am in awe, but it is also true that, with a bit of boldness, I feel that in a sense this story is about me. About us. I am sure it will be the same for everyone who has struggled through university. That anxiety of not being able to finish the program in time for the exam, seeing the days pass and not feeling ready, grinding through books and pages in a storm of growing delirium. Up to the last days, sleepless, inhuman. If you are serial procrastinators as I am, the days right before the exam are the very definition of anxiety.