As we humans looked around at the remarkable complexity of nature, we asked how such order and harmony could have come into being. With the human lifespan merely a single frame in a video of 10,000,000 frames, we were incapable of knowing how all this change came about. It was natural for us to anthropomorphize …
Companies in the high-tech fields compete aggressively for employees who are highly intelligent. To gain an insight into the skills sought by those who are recruiting employees, we look at a sample of interviews of the captains of the giant corporations. In 1993, Forbes journalist Richard Karlgaard, in a conversation with Bill Gates asked, “What …
Are Corporate executives seeking employees with high IQ? Read More »
As you might expect, different people attribute different values to intelligence and success. The American Dream, originally conceptualized as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” evolved after World War II into the pursuit of financial success. In Arthur Miller’s celebrated play Death of a Salesman (1949), the main character, Willy Loman is a salesman …
What do people respect more: Intelligence or success? Read More »
Between July 6 and July 16, 2022 the brightest and the best students from more than 100 countries attended the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in Oslo, Norway. On July 11, these intellectual gladiators were given 3 difficult problems to solve in a period of 4.5 hours, and then another 3 problems the following day. Each …
Do we all have the potential to become the next Albert Einstein, or are some people born with greater brain power than the rest of us? The debate rages on, fueled by strong emotions and fomented by cherished ideologies. Many who subscribe to an egalitarian ideology argue that, except for the mentally challenged, we all …
Sometimes, highly intelligent people fall into what psychologists call the intelligence trap–a tendency of experts to overreach the limits of their expertise. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in 1998 with the failure of the investment firm Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) generally attributed to the prevailing hubris among its senior partners …
Does intelligence increase your ability to fool yourself? Read More »
This post is a response to a question posed by a visitor to this site. A significant part of Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries drew from his gedanken (thought) experiments. When most people believed that time is absolute, i.e., it unfolds at a uniform rate and is measured to be the same by all observers, Einstein realized that concepts …
The qualities of social isolation and absent-mindedness have been evident in the great geniuses throughout history. Isaac Newton was so intelligent that he had difficulty relating to his peers, and became increasingly solitary through his adolescent years. This isolation enabled him to pursue his experiments with intensity as he sublimated his need for human interaction …
The World Shirt Event My mother was like Pluto–the planet, not the dog. The orbit of Pluto, our solar system’s most remote planet, has an eccentricity of 0.249; more than all other planets and over 14 times the eccentricity of earth. While this extreme departure from normalcy once caused Pluto to be denied its status …
During the past two centuries, this question has become the focus of an ongoing emotionally-charged discussion between the political Left and Right. The Left denies the existence of natural talent, while the Right asserts that it resides in our DNA. By denying the existence of talent, those on the Left argue that the distribution of …
Can a person without natural talent become a genius through effort? Read More »
