I doubt it’s Romantic myths since people that come to my mind mostly lived in the XX century
The Romantics invented the myth of insane geniuses touched by divinity, but that doesn’t mean people holding that belief suffer from amnesia and are unable to list any examples from after the Romantics… Given the lifetime prevalence of any mental illness in the general population, it would be surprising if one couldn’t list some anecdotes like Godel.
That’s the point of experimenting :-)
There’s a practically infinite number of genetic changes one could make. Understanding of genetic networks influencing cognition will have to be extraordinarily good before any researchers can write down a completely novel gene or variant which has no natural examples and experiment with it. For better or worse, for the next several decades, we’re stuck exploiting natural variants—all interventions are going to look something like ‘people with X seem to be smarter, let’s try adding X to others or select for it’ or ‘Y is a rare or de novo variant, maybe it’s harmful, let’s remove it or select against’.
That’s not my mental model at all. I haven’t thought deeply about it, but I probably imagine geniuses as an overclocked, supercharged, often highly specialized piece of wetware running on the same-reliability components, possibly crowding out some other capabilities, and frequently having social problems just due to the fact that 99.9%+ of people around you are quite different from yourself.
The Romantics invented the myth of insane geniuses touched by divinity, but that doesn’t mean people holding that belief suffer from amnesia and are unable to list any examples from after the Romantics… Given the lifetime prevalence of any mental illness in the general population, it would be surprising if one couldn’t list some anecdotes like Godel.
There’s a practically infinite number of genetic changes one could make. Understanding of genetic networks influencing cognition will have to be extraordinarily good before any researchers can write down a completely novel gene or variant which has no natural examples and experiment with it. For better or worse, for the next several decades, we’re stuck exploiting natural variants—all interventions are going to look something like ‘people with X seem to be smarter, let’s try adding X to others or select for it’ or ‘Y is a rare or de novo variant, maybe it’s harmful, let’s remove it or select against’.
That’s not my mental model at all. I haven’t thought deeply about it, but I probably imagine geniuses as an overclocked, supercharged, often highly specialized piece of wetware running on the same-reliability components, possibly crowding out some other capabilities, and frequently having social problems just due to the fact that 99.9%+ of people around you are quite different from yourself.