Comment on Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator
utopiah@lemmy.world 3 weeks agothere’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.
I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don’t know about Elsburg but wouldn’t you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.
How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is “normal” that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by “just” being.
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
I don’t think most people could have the capacity to store the knowledge in their brain (with immediate recall) no matter how hard they worked.
utopiah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I bet, but that’s just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to “most people” who have never written essays since high school and I but a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.
That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely “selected” him for the practice.