Your theory is that, let's say, John Carmack can't self-identify as a genius after all he has accomplished, and given how far out in front of most others he has always been on the technology curve?
Bill Gates possesses a genius level intelligence, has the accomplishments and mental demonstrations to back it up, and is apparently fully aware of it. What's the problem exactly?
Let's define genius:
"exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability."
or
"a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect."
As though it should be difficult for a genius to recognize that their abilities far exceed those of other people.
I would argue that being oblivious to that level of blatant genius - having no idea you're so much better than most others - would be more of a negative mental trait vs being aware of it. You'd have to be incredibly ignorant, and almost entirely non-self-aware to miss such a thing across a lifetime.
If you can reasonably be defined as to be in possession of X trait, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing that. It is not an ego problem to do so. If my brain is capable of great feats of mathematics, and I can tell that I'm drastically better at math than my peers, there is nothing irrationally egotistical about recognizing it. With there being a critical distinction between recognizing your capabilities, vs. obnoxiously promoting them to others.
If John Carmack or Bill Gates thought of themselves as geniuses, they wouldn't have accomplished a fraction of what they did. Nothing is more destructive to someone's intelligence or creativity than believing the hype that people put on you, and that goes 10x if that hype comes from yourself.
Put another way, I consider both of those guys geniuses, but if either of them made that claim about themselves, I would have to reconsider the position.
Put another another way, no good can possibly ever come from acknowledging your own genius, even if that was something a person was capable of perceiving about themselves, which I don't think it is.
I completely agree with most of your comment. I wonder, though, if some good could come from (erroneously) acknowledging one's own genius privately and temporarily. If that person were above a certain threshold, wouldn't the acknowledgement of one's own genius evoke the conflict that there must be much more left to learn that the person isn't yet aware of? It might just provide enough motivation to search for the reasons why it was so ignorant to have considered oneself a genius.
Very interesting! I find that what geniuses are secretly proud of is seldom what others perceive as their top achievements, so it would be hard to parallel the external "you are a genius" with the internal "I'm a genius".
Or maybe I'm just talking about highly intelligent people != genius.
Those two definitions are far too vague to use a term like 'blatant' to describe genius.
For example, I'm not sure what you're seeing in Bill Gates. I don't want to have a discussion about him, just offering an example of how nebulous any definition 'intellectual power', 'creative power', 'natural ability', 'general or particular intelligence' and 'general or particular creativity' is, and to second the opinion that definitions of genius are primarily social rather than operational or falsifiable.
edit: apologies for distributing your definitions but still using quote marks.
I guess it depends what the threshold for "genius" is. Obviously Carmack and Gates are very bright people who've accomplished a lot, but let's be honest, they're not exactly at the level of DaVinci or Einstein, or even Feynman.
And I do think it's ego problem if somebody goes around defining themselves as a genius. One of the things I'm always struck by is the fact that many of the smartest people I know are incredibly humble. They're smart enough to realize all the things they don't know.
Feynman was perversely proud of the fact that when tested (as a child?), he _didn't_ have a "genius" IQ. Wikipedia claims it was 125, but I thought I'd heard him claim it was 134, one point too low to qualify for Mensa. That's just my memory of a brief anecdote he told a group of undergrads over 30 years ago, so I likely have the details wrong.
He claimed that any genius could win a Nobel prize, but that he'd done really well to have won one as a non-genius!
I've never believed Feynman's self-reported IQ. Reading his breezy autobiographical books, he had a habit of somehow bragging by underplaying his abilities, making his accomplishments miraculous/lucky/etc. I suspect the IQ legend is just a part of that.
I've never seen a claim than an IQ as low as 120 would classify as "genius". Lowest I've seen is around 140.
In any case, while I'm not foolish enough to believe IQ isn't a useful measurement of intelligence, I certainly don't think any given number indicates "genius", which is something else again.
If it was truly 120, that would make over 10% of the population (based on a standard bell curve) geniuses. I've never seen it that low. 160 seems to be the current acceptable number, but of course there will always be a range.
This is also wildly dependent on the test in question and what 1SD is equal to. 3+ SD is generally accepted as "genius" and not all tests have the same SD.
Egoism is also a form of madness, is it not? Narcissism is actually well-known to be one of the more creative personality types, and there's research to back that up.
