Cultivating Genius

Extracted 23MAR2012 from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/st_essay_genius/

Several years ago, statistician David Banks wrote a short paper on what he called the problem of excess genius: It turns out that human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight clusters...

We can begin to make sense of the “clotting” of creative talent. The secret, it turns out, is the presence of particular meta-ideas, which support the spread of other ideas. First proposed by economist Paul Romer, meta-ideas include concepts like the patent system, public libraries, and universal education...

The first pattern that becomes clear is the benefit of human mixing. It’s no accident that past talent clusters were all commercial trading centers, which allowed a wide diversity of people to share ideas...

Another recurring theme is the importance of education. All of these flourishing cultures pioneered new forms of teaching and learning... As T. S. Eliot once remarked, the great ages did not contain more talent. They wasted less.

The last meta-idea involves the development of institutions that encourage risk-taking... modern America is already very good at generating geniuses. The problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes.

We’ve never needed geniuses more than we do now. The good news is that we can learn from the creative secrets of the past, from those outlier societies that produced Shakespeare and Plato and Michelangelo. And then we should look in the mirror. The excess is not an accident.