I have been thinking about people who are 3+ standard deviations out in their respective fields, the people quintessentially associated with the word genius. This includes people like Christopher Nolan (direction), Leo Dicaprio / Marlon Brando / Daniel Day-Lewis (acting), Elon Musk / Issac Newton / Albert Einstein (science), Steve Jobs / Jeff Bezos (visionary), Shakespeare and JRR Tolkien (writers) and Conan O Brien (improv comedy).
These thoughts popped into my head after watching Tenet, Christopher Nolan's latest movie, which is set in a world where a device that allows you to co-exist in a backward time loop. Objects with their time backward can exist in the forward flowing time universe; this gives them the unique property of having their entropy reversed. Imagine a bullet being un-shot into the gun. The world he sets up makes that possible. After watching the movie, I got a glimpse into Nolan's mind and his capacity to be a "world builder."
Somehow my mind kept coming back to world-building, and I started wondering whether that is a good measure of a person's multi-disciplinary genius. We all build worlds every day, unconsciously. It is easy to understand if you think about a robot, which is a combination of hardware and software. If it wants to move to achieve its goal of picking up an object at a distance, the sub-steps that happen are:
- Take a snapshot of your world the robot inhabits right now - this means taking in your physical surroundings, the objects in it, how they interact with each other and with you. You also need to keep track of the forces acting on you and how they affect your center of mass.
- Translate the goal to a final world state - what does the snapshot of the final state look like, hold it in memory and optimize decisions that get you closer to the goal world state
- Update your current world state with every step you take until you reach your goal world-state
- A further complication is moving an object to take advantage of it in attaining your goal. These steps change your current world state even if it means you haven't moved (e.g.: moving an obstacle out of the way vs. jumping it)
We do that every second we act, and humans maintaining balance when we play a sport or walk a tightrope is an advanced application of this. I believe we approach genius with our ability to use a similar muscle to create abstract worlds without a clear goal and interact with them. A director like Nolan imagines the world and creates it on the screen; an actor imagines it and inhabits it; a scientist creates many different versions and sees which obey reality most closely; a visionary sees it and builds towards it; a novelist imagines it and writes it; a comedian invents absurd ones and jokes about their absurdity.
What I believe differentiates genius is the complexity of the world they create or, in simpler terms, the number of real-world variables they account for in this world. JRR Tolkien's world-building in LOTR is legendary for how varied and detailed it was; Mahatma Gandhi's took into account 600MM citizens of India, a British colonialist empire that relied on "dividing and conquering" and violence to come up with a non-violent movement to achieve independence. Albert Einstein's world accounted for so many variables that he saw through the fabric of the universe itself.
This is not exhaustive, nor a revolutionary idea but I thought useful for recognizing genius - the multivariate nature of their world, and the subtle complexity in it.
(e.g. Genius musicians like Beethoven may not fit, though a possible reach explanation is that they experience a world where their music exists and the emotional impact it has is so visceral that the music flows out through them).