Geniuses of Limited IQ
This article is boring but I have no audience so it doesn’t matter
I’ve always known that I wasn’t a genius. I was an A-minus student, always trying but rarely earning the top score in any class. I’m guessing my IQ is about 115 or 120, though it remains unmeasured. The kind of kid a typical mom could be proud of, apart from the temper tantrums, of course.
Yet it has not escaped my notice that I often have unique potentially-world-changing ideas that no one else seems to have. For one thing, I built these projects where no one else made something filling quite the same niche:
Loyc Universal Syntax Tree & Expression Syntax
Lexical Macro Processor for Loyc languages such as Enhanced C#
Except I don’t think of them as a “niche”; they’re the foundation for grand things that would have far-reaching implications on the software world if they had been built up further and used widely.
All those projects failed due to a lack of interest from the outside world. To become truly useful, they needed a lot more manpower than one volunteer could provide in his free time. (I also fucked up by caring too much about fast code, but that’s another story).
(I have one more unique project almost ready for release; time will tell if people like it.)
And I published these unique proposals that interest almost no one:
Ungglish: the easy English
Enjoy True Democracy with Simple Direct Representation
Let’s Make the Truth Easier to Find: The Evidence Depository
I also have political causes no one else seems to have, like a deep yearning for government funding of Open Engineering. Perhaps more importantly, we should pay companies to publish more open-source libraries. Time and time again I have employers that refuse to open-source small, general-purpose parts of my work, not because there is any conceivable drawback of doing so, and not because it wouldn’t make the world a better place, but because businessmen just see no profit in it. It took me awhile to think of the idea of just paying companies part of their R&D costs for general-purpose tools, but it seems obvious in hindsight. I’ve heard no one else propose it. Finding the “best” way to allocate funding is tricky (quadratic funding is probably suboptimal due to existing human biases, but maybe it’s the best we can do)… but I digress.
Most people tend gardens, or build Rube Goldberg devices they can show off on YouTube, or collect objects in a certain category, or care only about their immediate friends and family. Most people act like “altruism” is just a trick for looking good in front of your friends and feeling good about yourself.
Meanwhile, I see what’s wrong in the foundations of the world in a way no one else does, and I have an extremely rare drive to improve those foundations.
I am not a genius in the traditional sense, and the way I am doesn’t sound like it should be unusual. Everything I build and everything I propose comes from recognizing real and serious problems in the world. Other people could see these problems and seek solutions, but very few of them do. I am a genius only in the sense of finding and adoring important ideas, not in the sense that millions of others couldn’t do the same, theoretically, if they wanted.
I’ve never met someone who truly seems like me. I suspect there are a few over in Effective Altruism―but most of them live in cities so expensive that the thought of moving there is painful. How can a donation to EA organizations be “cost effective” when salaries are huge just because they live in the world’s most expensive cities? So I signed the pledge and officially joined the club, but out here in my “normal” city there are no EAs in sight.
I know of various people who seem vaguely similar to me, though.
I don’t work with them. We’re not even friends.
Typically, such people are working on important but very different problems than I am, so we don’t have anything to collaborate on. But in the rare cases when we are working on comparable projects, those other people tend to come up with very different solutions than I do, and then we disagree about what the Best Solution is and fail to collaborate. And since the things we propose are so inexplicably unpopular in the first place, there is no one to adjudicate our disagreements. I make my arguments, they make theirs (which I usually don’t understand very well), and it ends there. The conversation is public but no one else is watching. No one else comments; no one else cares.
I don’t know why.
I am too stupid to ever win a major award singlehandedly; too smart and too specialized to find friends on this part of the mountain range of life; too introverted and poor to have any connections to important people; too ambitious to be interested in ordinary stuff like sports or travel or celebrities. Even when I do have an ordinary interest (e.g. video games) it’s just not important enough to try to build friendships around that.
It’s a lonely place, but at least a few tall buildings popped up not too far from me in recent years, like ACX and LessWrong. And then there’s Slow Boring and Future Perfect, places where I can feel like politics doesn’t have to be terrible and brain-dead. And Future of Coding―I have no time to visit anymore, and I’ll probably never be able to create anything like what I wanted, but at least I can see that I’m not entirely alone. I mean, I am alone, but at least I can glance over at places like that and see that maybe the world will muddle through without me. The world doesn’t want what I have to offer, my chance of having an impact is slim, but at least I’m not the only one trying. So maybe things will get better? Maybe we won’t cause our own extinction?
It’s just… more than half my life is gone, and I still haven’t found any good friends in the region. So… I’ve been trying a questionable new tactic of growing new friends from scratch. Here’s my first:
It’s an extremely inefficient approach, and I’m not particularly confident that it will be successful. But at least it’s a rich and interesting experience filled with love and cuteness.
Geniuses of Limited IQ are uncommon, but no one can be sure whether they are more or less common than high-IQ geniuses. Unlike IQ, which can be measured with a simple test, Geniuses of Limited IQ (GLIQs) are in the eye of the beholder. We often hear tales of people that were “ahead of their time”, but if you look for a list of such people, you’re likely to find lists like this―of people who invented something early, but were basically successful at what they set out to do.
More interesting to me are the ones who had the potential for greatness―the drive, the insight and the skill―but largely failed. Nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg is a good example: his team designed a safer form of nuclear energy at ORNL, the Molten Salt Reactor. They came tantalizingly close to success, but ORNL was in Tennessee and Nixon wanted the funding sent to California. Weinberg may yet succeed someday―but only decades after his death.
Was there a crusader for Proportional Representation in 1776 America? Could it be that someone designed and built a web microtransaction architecture that would’ve allowed anyone to buy articles for two cents or give five-cent donations with a single click―and everyone ignored him? Perhaps someone made it their life’s mission to figure out the key principles and techniques that would give us a fair, effective and efficient legal system, and published their breakthroughs in a mostly-clear, somewhat-well-argued book 200 years ago that everyone has ignored from then until now! Or did, perhaps, someone find Five Principles that would have revolutionized Macroeconomics, only to be ignored by all because he was not in academia and spent his life drifting from one staff economist job to another in Mississippi?
It’s impossible to tell. For every GLIQ there are probably ten cranks, twenty grifters and thirty wannabes, and very few people have enough training or interest to tell the difference.
One thing I can guarantee you is that numerous companies in obscure industries own nuggets of beautiful, multipurpose code―a thousand lines here, five thousand over there―locked away in software packages that don’t deserve them, made by GLIQs whose contracts guarantee that their work can never be widely known. Few would be willing to pay for these gems, nor would these companies sell you a copy, and yet, if they were open-sourced, they would provide billions or trillions of dollars of value to the software industry.
A typical capitalist will certainly leave a billion-dollar check laying on the ground if they can’t personally cash it. It’s not so much that they couldn’t benefit from it, it’s that they won’t notice it’s there in the first place and, even if they did notice, they wouldn’t benefit without a coordinated effort involving lots of other people. It’s not the easiest way to personally benefit, so they don’t bother. They, along with the politicians and the general public, just walk on by.
There may be any number of GLIQs in the world today, just as there may have been any number in times past. But their ideas are unconventional, their personal connections are few, and they will probably die without having achieved the impact and recognition they so desperately craved.
