Madness Vs Genius
Where is the much vaunted line between genius and madness? At a glance, it seems like they could be two sides of the same coin. Is the opposite of genius simply sheer stupidity? Is there a difference between the two or are they outputs of the same phenomenon? And where might there be some overlap?
In this week’s episode we discuss genius and madness. We discuss mental health conditions, historical figures and concepts that were considered quackery or fraudulent during their time, neurodiversity, Copernican heliocentrism, the germ theory of disease, AlphaGo and correlations between personality traits and levels of intelligence. Finally, we share examples of where we felt we were in the presence of genius.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph and this week we're discussing the line between genius and
Speaker B:madness. Nick, kick us off. Have you heard tell of Cathy Mitchell? Nope. She's a lady who appears on telly. She's American. Okay. She usually pushing some kind of weird kitchen gadget which you know slices courgettes or chops eggs or something. Okay. She wrote a book called Eat This Book, right? Okay. And how it works is each recipe is printed on greaseproof paper and what you do is you take that slice of greaseproof paper and you literally put the ingredients on it. So it doesn't like, okay, this one, everything is effectively cooked on papillote, right? So you basically, oh, here's one with fish. You put the piece of fish on the little bit of that paper where the fish goes. And then if you need some new potatoes, you put those in the bit where the new potatoes are. You wrap it all up and you put it in the oven. I would imagine I'd go gas mark six, probably half an hour. Got one word for you. Yeah. Genius. Right. Now I was watching her talking about this book, there's a trailer for this book where she explains it all. And it helps that she has the, she's got this very endearing demeanour of kind of a slightly dotty aunt who is kind of telling you about ceramic frogs or something. She's impossible not to like. She's got this real infectious enthusiasm. But that also, you know, that doesn't, I mean, that does slightly play into the madness side of it. But I really felt torn looking at this. I was like, this is the kind of thing I can imagine with a different sort of personality who is presenting this. If it was someone serious, I might be much more persuaded that this was genuine genius. As it is, I'm genuinely torn. I don't know whether it's genius or madness, or I can encourage people to look at the video themselves and see what I mean. But anyway, it occurred to me that we've never really talked about this much vaunted alleged sort of line between genius and madness, which I think it's not even clear what it means. And I'm sure we'll discuss what that means. But the idea being that in some sense, it's a bit like the, you know, people often say that the extreme ends of the political spectrum, it curves back around on itself and they converge again. And I think there's some sense in which, you know, what it's trying to do is subvert your mental model, that genius is at one end and madness is at the other, and sort of say, aha, but actually, at the ends there, there is an overlap. Now, I don't know, what does that mean? Is it true? All kinds of questions we probably want to tackle.
Speaker C:Is the opposite of genius not just stupidity, or just like, a fine line between stupidity and genius? Asininity, it's not madness. Madness is like randomness.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, yeah, is it? So look, I feel that I need to introduce some intellectual and analytical rigour to this. Ah, interesting. Rigorous. Rigorous up. Yeah, yeah. So we need to define some stuff, right? So we need to define what we mean by genius and madness. But also, we also need to talk about, is that peculiar to this? Or as Nick sort of saying, is it happening in other areas as well? And indeed, is it this, you know, is a line the right way to see it, as Nick's saying, this sort of continuum, or does it go round? And what I will say at this point, there do seem to be some common, I can see, it feels intuitively why you might get it mixed up, right? Or could be the blur between genius and madness, yeah? And just, because both of them, I think, are to do with unusual thinking, with, what's the word I'm looking for? Unconventional. Unconventional, there we go. And there's so, so yeah.
Speaker C:You can imagine, you can imagine the ignorant, the ignorati not being able to spot the difference.
Speaker B:Right, right. I think, so I think we, is it, right, so I mean, is there a difference? Right? Could we say that there is a difference? Or are they in some sense aspects of the same phenomenon? There's that. Is the output of a genius, or a madman, distinguishable, or hard to distinguish? Is that the idea, like the things that they produce? And then we've got this question of, is there an overlap in behaviour? That means that they are hard to distinguish by their, by their sort of epiphenomena, like the crazy, Einstein's crazy hair. Yeah, yeah. And the unconventional dress sense, and not wearing any shoes, and all those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. So there's several questions there. Yeah, yeah. So how are we going to navigate our way through this? Well, why don't we start by trying to take a stab at what we mean? Because I mean, I don't think, Peter, you might know more about this than me, but I don't think mad is an accepted mental health diagnosis these days. Is that correct? It's been unpacked a bit. Right. So, so genius is a bit more straightforward, because I think we do have a good handle on that, because IQ does a very good job of measuring, you know, fluid intelligence. So let's just assume that bit is solved, right? What we're talking about is people with very high IQ, 140 plus, or whatever. Let's say that that's, that's our genius. But Peter, where would you go with, like, what's, what is a mad person?
Speaker C:So think of this kind of like the romantic era concept of line between the mad genius. The Beethoven. Yeah, the Beethovens. And yeah, I think what they're getting at is the sort of mental health conditions, probably like schizophrenia, where your, your, your mental behaviours and your outward physical behaviours as a result of it is are fairly unpredictable, or can be, can be unpredictable, and are different, but very different in many ways to middle of bell curve people. So it's not, and possibly anxiety, but possibly, you know, possibly not the depressive, like, conditions. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an expert. But that's what that's what it brings to my mind is the, the schizophrenic. Or bipolar feels like the kind of thing you would.
Speaker A:But also, does it help? You know, do you have to be both mad and a genius?
Speaker B:Well, first of all, I want to, I just want to say that I thought there might be some evidence that mental health, mental illness is more common among high intelligence people. Apparently, this is best disputed. So I think we should assume that in terms of like, is the incidence of mental illness correlated with IQ? I think the answer is no.
Speaker A:Yeah. I don't think you're pushing this enough, because I think you just might be talking about just very clever people, right? I mean, maybe we're sort of overusing this word genius, right? I don't know how else you would. Well, but, but what about if you just chose a people? Is there anyone we could universe?
Speaker B:Do you mean like, like, someone who is a great artist, but not very good at maths or something?
Speaker A:No, no, what I mean is you could define, how do we define genius? It could be well, let's say, for example, if you won a Nobel Prize, you're a genius.
Speaker B:But those people are gonna all have high IQ, I guarantee you. No, that's what I'm saying. I don't think that's a good enough definition.
Speaker A:I think you need a game changer person like Einstein or Isaac Newton. Famously low IQ individuals like Einstein. Yeah, people, but is there any, could we name one person from history we could say definitively is a genius? A genius, but also a dumbo. Stop messing this up.
Speaker B:Yes, I can. Go on. Okay, well, and actually, I've got some examples of, well, of theories that could have been mad. And in fact, were vindicated, right? So obviously, they're associated with individuals. So you'll get what you asked for plus more. So how's that? I mean, I want the genius stuff. Let me run these ideas by you. It turns out that contrary to all the experience of every human, the earth actually goes around the sun. Mad. Look outside. Look outside, Copernicus. There's the sun going around the earth. Okay, what about the idea that diseases are caused by tiny animals that are so small, you can't see them? Tishtosh. Right. And that washing your hands might be useful if you're operating on people. Here's another mad theory. Did you know that the landmasses, famously, which are in the same places every time you go? They don't move. They're moving around. They're moving around like lilies on a pond. I don't know whether we should lock you up or give you a prize. Did you know that everything is made of tiny particles, some of which aren't even in a particular place? You would have struggle getting people to believe that. Stomach ulcers, famously.
Speaker C:Although they do start behaving themselves when you observe them.
Speaker B:Right, apparently, yeah. Apparently they really care about whether we're watching them. Yes, yeah. Then you've got the, did you know that time goes faster if you're going, time goes slower if you're going faster? I mean, these are all totally bonkers theories, right? But so, and I think at the time were controversial, most of them. And it took some time for people to discover that they weren't just, you know. Mad ramblings. Yeah, mad ramblings. So does that answer your question? Like, what do we mean? Can we come up with some examples of these things? I think those would be, those are squarely in that space of like, you know, yeah.
Speaker A:So I would say in each of those cases, the discoverer or the site or whatever of that is, yes, let's call them a genius for a moment. And you could say, well, what makes them mad is, or they might be called mad, is people hearing that information would just go, well, that's just bonkers. But what I think is more interesting is if we were to look into each of those people, right? And to see if, for them to think originally like that, to not think that this stuff is bonkers, is what is it about them that makes them different, right? That they're thinking differently. And a lot of it is, you know, the study that they've gone, done behind it. But they have got themselves to a point of originality in the way they think. So would we think hanging out with Copernicus, we'd think he's, right, he's quite good at sort of telescopes and stuff, but he's a bit of an odd fellow. Have you seen the way he walks down, have you seen what he wears, you know? That's why I personally think that's more interesting. Do they also seem odd, mad people in themselves? Or am I taking us down the wrong direction?
Speaker C:I think you're touching on something. So although there's not, it's disputed if there's a correlation between mental health problems and intelligence, what there is better ground for is other not necessarily pathological mental features of people, such as divergent thinking. Basically, you know, someone who's intelligent is able to think up more novel solutions to problems, aren't so dogmatic in their approach to things. And perhaps like the, I think there is a link between intelligence and creativity. So, you know, similar to the divergent thinking, but, you know, being able to proffer novel explanations for a given observation.
Speaker A:And sorry to butt in, but this also makes me think, first of all, two things. One, in your examples, they were all in the field of scientific discovery. And we haven't even talked about the musicians, the artists who were famously a bunch of nutcases.
Speaker B:Well, yeah, but I mean, just okay, but let's just throw out a few examples of those then. I mean, and I think you would, sorry, yeah, I mean, I think Beethoven is a good example. You know, I think some of his late music wouldn't have been out of place 100 years later. You have the kind of revolutionaries of the, you know, the 21st century, you know, the kind of, I guess, things like Stockhausen and Schoenberg, you know, producing things that have never been seen or heard before. Famously, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, you know, caused a riot on its debut night. So, you know, because it was so shocking and so different. And those things, obviously, now we listen to the Rite of Spring and we can't see what all the fuss was all about. So, you know, I'm just giving you some examples of that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly the first people to hear the Rite of Spring might have thought that Stravinsky had just rolled a dice and written some random notes on a page. Now, I think we have the ability to understand where they're coming from. But I don't think that's terribly different to these scientific examples.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think you're right, you're right, you're right. Look, actually, this makes me think of something. I think I've got a little bit of information on this. I've got a little bit of a perspective on this.
Speaker B:Is that because the people in the village where you live keep coming around and saying kill the madmen while you're doing those experiments on those corpses? Yeah, quite, yeah.
Speaker A:No, look, so something that gets talked about a lot at the moment, and I'm not a huge fan of this sort of context and the vocabulary around it, but is this thing about neurodiversity, right? So bear with me a second. Because what I don't like about the tone of it is I'm, you know, if you have ADHD, let's say, is, oh, I'm this beautiful mad weirdo, but I'm, you know, super creative and stuff. And I don't really like that that much. And as you do know, I got diagnosed with ADHD, so I feel I'm okay to say that. You know where you're coming from. But if we think, so at the moment, I'm exposed as an educator to lots of neurodiversity. And what I can see is that those people really genuinely do think in a different way. And I'm seeing it for the first time, not thinking about myself, but others. And I see a lot of it. And they are genuinely coming up with lots of super interesting stuff that, you know, they don't think. It's not typical as, you know, the vocabulary here is correct, right? The designations are correct. However, I can also see in them that others might find them a little odd, let's say. Okay. So I think there is something here. And so it does seem, it does help. And the very thing that makes you, you know, be able to see things in a different way, makes you look odd to others, and also, by the way, can also make you a happy person in yourself sometimes. It's so, there definitely does seem to be a connection.
Speaker B:I think that it sounds extremely plausible to me. So please touch on the fact that I think there is, there are some personality differences which are correlated with IQ. Things like openness to experience, for example, you know, which is, you know, I think quite a good, quite a big predictor. But it seems also completely plausible that the sort of more tactical level, if you break down, if you break down what we think intelligence is probably made of, what makes someone intelligent, it's probably a number of things. And if you dial all of those up, or one of them up to, you know, 11, that is going to have, because of the fact that we know these things are correlated, that's going to have some impact on other stuff. So I was just thinking while you were talking, you know, of, well, looking for patterns, for example, is something which is associated with intelligence. So being able to spot patterns in information that other people can't see. That obviously related to the ability to discover new things and create new theories and so on. Also probably correlated with spotting lots of things that aren't there, you know. And so you dial that up hard enough, you're going to be seeing a world of patterns that don't actually correlate with anything. Just, sorry, I don't want to be disagreeable. But also you could, I mean, I know some people, their analysis of schizophrenia, for example, is just that. It's that patterns are kind of intrusive, you know, that you're seeing patterns everywhere where they don't exist. I'm just using that as an example. It seems plausible to me that that would. And, you know, and let's take something like, well, conscientiousness is plausibly or being, let's say, hyper motivated to produce things, you know, which is, if you like, the opposite of ADHD. ADHD is like being hyper motivated, it's not when you're on medication. But if you imagine like being hyper motivated to go and explore, which I think we've discussed is a kind of way of thinking about. Whereas, you know, someone like Mozart would, you know, if he was just doing that all the time, would not have been bashing out millions of sonatas, right? Where I'm going with this is the same deal, right? Someone who's extremely conscious, anxious and highly motivated, they're going to just be able to produce more. Like, so you take two equally intelligent people, one of whom is super productive, that person is going to end up having a bigger impact.
Speaker A:I think there's misunderstandings, Dan, I'm sorry, misunderstandings that are around motivation and how things like.
Speaker B:No, I'm just trying to put some flesh on the skeleton that you presented us with. Are you agreeing with me? Yeah, I'm just saying, look, actually, it makes sense when you turn any of these personality, you turn the intelligence and, you know, some aspects of genius, be it, you know, something cognitive or whether it's something to do more with motivation and productivity and so on. Turn any of them up, you're going to get someone who's interestingly different.
Speaker C:There's no doubt about it. Yeah, especially if they're sort of dialed up artificially in isolation, they're going to be in some way unbalanced.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. But also, I think we should, you know, draw a distinction because you're talking about intelligence a lot. And I think that we need to be careful. I don't think it is a continuum. And when you get to 96 points or even beyond, even if we used IQ, for example, I think there's a difference between super intelligent and a genius. I don't think it's the, I think they're different things. I'm not sure. Because I think the difference. Yeah, OK. Right, Nick, move us along a bit.
Speaker B:OK, so we talked about like why there might be correlations in behaviour and genius and et cetera, like personality correlations. I think we, you know, I mentioned earlier that the idea that the outputs might be hard to distinguish. So let's look at the works, the works, if you like. We need some data, some examples. The things that you've done. And I mentioned things like the Copernican model and germ theory of disease, et cetera. But there are a bunch of things which, you know, were thought mad and were, or at least were turned out to be wrong. And so things like, I think Roentgen, having discovered X-rays, then decided that there were these N-rays. And he went very into the discovery of N-rays, they don't exist. They were supposed to be a type of, I mean, Newton, of course, famously was very into alchemy, spent a lot of time looking at alchemy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he wasn't to know it wasn't true, I suppose. I mean, from his point of view, both look plausible. Then you have things like you've got the Martian canals, of course, which turned out not to be there. Cold fusion, which has been, keeps being rediscovered and turns out not to be true. So, you know, where I'm going with this is we should expect, in fact, things that are sufficiently advanced in terms of their novelty and the, you know, the kind of the degree to which they demand a new kind of paradigm of the way that we're thinking about things. We should expect it to be difficult to tell if they're true. Right. Almost by definition. And I mean, by an analogy, I know we've mentioned this before, but AlphaGo, the Go playing software that I think, DeepMind, I think, yeah, made AlphaGo. And I think one of the points that people, you know, why is it doing that? We don't know. Why is it making that move? You know, it invented these new kind of moves, as I understand it, which were totally off the kind of path that most players use. And they turn out to be really, really good moves. Crazy like a fox. We just have no idea how to evaluate them. Because if we could tell whether they were good moves, we would be clever enough to make them in the first place. I mean, that's the OIP versus MP. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. But in fact, in this case, we can't. We cannot just look at them and go, yeah, that's a good move. We just have to see if it wins. Yeah. And I think to some extent, you know, it feels to me like by definition, sufficiently advanced new ideas or new technologies or anything are going to be hard for us to appraise to begin with. So, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah. Look, we need to finish things off. But I want to, Peter, I mean, we'll probably have a question. But if we do, Peter, are you able to round us off or finish us off with something? I don't know.
Speaker C:Yeah. And I think in summary for me, I think this concept of madness and genius and the proximity of the two is really just a romantic era kind of story that has perpetuated because it's quite a fun meme. And actually it's and it's playing into its own. It was hugely simple, as we've been discussing, we've hugely simplified what is madness and what is genius. So it's a kind of nice little soundbite, really, to me. I think you get hugely intelligent, very, very on a sort of on a sort of two by two of neural divergence and genius. You get people all over that all over that space, don't you?
Speaker B:Yeah. So you're saying it's a kind of selection bias thing that we forget we like to focus on the few people who, I mean, I mean, take Einstein, you know, famously quite sort of unconventional in his appearance. But you see him at Los Alamos and he's with all these other fairly indistinguishable people in suits with side partings wearing ties. Yeah. They're all up there in the Einstein League. But we don't sort of go, oh, look at these crazy geniuses.
Speaker C:Like you could say Niels Bohr and Einstein. They're quite on a level. Niels Bohr was. Niels Bohring more like. Yeah, he was kind of normal, dressed normal. Yeah. So you say for every Einstein, there's 100 like non like Joe Bohrings.
Speaker B:Yeah, but I wonder if there's an element I think I actually got definitely got a foot in the Peter camp here, the kind of skepticism about whether this is true. I think there are reasons to think it might be, which we've discussed. But I also think there's a self-serving element as to why we like the myth. And it's that we probably want to believe that you must pay a price to be a genius, that that in some sense, it's sort of a sour grapes effect, really, that, you know, it's comforting to go, you know, on one hand, I wish I'd been born with an IQ of 150. But then, of course, no, because you don't realise that this would come with the price of great mental torment and so on. But so I think there's an element of that behind it as well, sort of telling us this story of, well, you wouldn't really want that anyway. You know, it's not as good as it looks to be a genius because you'd, you know, come with the price of insanity. But as Peter says, I think the vast majority of cases that just simply isn't true.
Speaker A:We can examine this and we can examine this with my question. Right. So let's round it off with this. So this is my question. Is this us getting the science out of the cupboard now? Yeah, yeah. It's time to do some science on this. So if you think it's rubbish, tell me. I'm sitting here thinking, you know, have I ever met a genius, right? But that's difficult to answer. Every time you look in the mirror. So I'm thinking, well, look, can I think of times in my life when either in a one off or repeated, I felt that I'm with someone, wow, this person is the most intelligent. I feel I'm with someone special here. Something a little bit different level. And I can think of maybe one or two situations where I really felt like that. And then what I'm doing is going, so what was that person like? What were they a bit odd? You know, were they a bit different? And so I want to ask each of us that. And do you think it's a good question?
Speaker B:Yeah, but I mean, but of course, we have to assume in order for you to tell that you're with someone who's on the next level up, there must have been some visible indicator, which might mean that it's correlated with unusual behavior. That's all I'm saying. So in other words, you might well have had a conversation with someone who was, you know, massive genius. But they just behaved normally.
Speaker A:They were just talking down to you. No, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, and that's why I don't want to use the word genius. And although earlier I said, let's not necessarily confuse intelligence with. Cognitively impressive. Yeah, right. That's what I mean. And so I can think of probably someone who I worked with when I was an analyst, going back about 16 years or so ago now. And they were just phenomenally intelligent, it seemed to me. And how did that demonstrate, how did that manifest? Well, they wrote really well. They spoke in a really articulate way. But most of all, probably the way that their thoughts, their processes were just blew my mind. I couldn't. How did you get from here to there like that? And just really original. Maybe these are things I value and think of as intelligence, right? But they just blew me away. Right. And around them, I felt sort of, oh, I felt very, very ordinary. Yeah. And actually, I'm going to put it in another way. I was going to say, but they seemed totally mad. And they did. But as someone else there, when I worked there, put it like this. They said, the thing about X is that he's so intelligent, he doesn't know how to be with himself. And there was a lot of truth in. Sounded great. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But I think he'd put it on. He'd sort of defined it quite well, actually. Right. So that kind of means. So for me, that sort of seems, yeah, genius equals mad, mad equals genius. Anyway. So what do you guys think?
Speaker C:Well, I don't know. I'm thinking of the really, I think, yeah, sort of impressive people. And one particular is, you know, all those people are probably fairly far between. Um, but they've all been pretty normal in my experience, actually. So, um, we met, uh, Ander Sandberg, who's a philosopher, um, incredibly, incredibly well read. You couldn't not notice that he was a brain box. He was a brain box. Um, but he's incredibly sort of normal. Nice and normal. And very, just very interesting and very engaging. You know, doesn't, there's no sort of sense of superiority about him. He just, he loves to talk and explore new ideas and do it with anybody. Um, likewise, um, Nick Bostrom. Hmm. He's a bit of a brain box, too. He's can't be classed as witless. He comes across as pretty normal.
Speaker B:Um, I think there is, uh, what perhaps is difficult to tell with someone. So I'm thinking of, well, again, I'm not, I'm not going to name names, but people that I've met where, uh, I think there is an abruptness to the, and you were alluding to this, a kind of abruptness to the jumps that they make really, just to go from one thing to another. They, they traversing on a path that you can't quite keep up with, or if you're lucky, you can follow it, but there's no way you would have got there yourself kind of thing. And I wonder if that, that, that could just very well look like a random walk, you know, like if you, if you imagine just letting them be a little bit faster to make a jump that's a little bit further, you know, from your perspective, they're just, there is no connection between this thing we're talking about now and the thing we're just talking about a minute ago. So, you know, and I, so I've just, it occurs to me that that is a plausible reason why you might think this person's off their rocket because you simply can't follow the trail. Um, but the other thing I think I would say is, is, uh, some, a commonality is a kind of, um, a disregard for the things that other people care about. Like they're really, really motivated to know stuff about things and they don't really care what clothes you're wearing or what they're wearing or, you know, what your hair looks like. And it's not because they're being kind of, you know, it's not affectation. No, it is like, they just don't, I would, the way I put it is they realise that doesn't matter.
Speaker C:Also sort of conceptually, they're not bogged down by any particular dogma or, yeah. Everything is questionable. Everything's questionable. It's all up for debate. Yeah. It's, yeah. So they're not, they're not pre-programmed with particular bias. Like they're, if you've got a different opinion, no matter how weird, like normal, like to the average Joe, that weirdness is, they're willing, they're keen to explore it and understand why you have that opinion, because that helps them update their model.
Speaker B:I think it was Nature, wasn't it, who said that the dancers were thought mad by those who could not hear the music.
Speaker A:Nice. Nice, nice, nice. Okay. I think we'll stop there. Yeah, I very much enjoyed that. All right. Well, thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.
