Another interesting article that you can be interested in reading is this one: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm (The Bipolar Lisp Programmer). I talks about the same kind of psychological problem that we are talking about here, and it’s an interesting read, even for non-programmers.

Best regards,

Hernán

The word “genius” has a kind of ugliness to it: as a concept, it bears a more than passing resemblance to racism or sexism, in that certain categories of people are held to be inherently superior to others. And while such ideas have become outmoded, genius survives; it’s the unaccountable “x factor” of success, the post facto pronouncement of a community to explain achievement. Scientists should be more skeptical of such shabby notions.

In any case, I suspect that the days of great advances by a brilliant physicist may be in the past. It’s been two decades of intense work on superstring theory and definitive experimental or observational predictions still seem beyond reach.

In the mean time, the great progress has come from observational astronomy with COBE, WMAP, and the discovery of dark energy. I doubt that many of the scientists involved with these discoveries would consider themselves as smart as Ed Witten, but they certainly seem to be the ones advancing the field.

I also left with a lot of pictures of my brain.

But my point is that when someone sees the burden and expectations associated with being a genius, she might think it better to ‘lie low’ and not even show any exceptional skill she might have to escape performing at a higher level. This is true especially if she had the skills but did not have very high competitiveness.

The case of William Sidis might be apropos.