Skip to main content

The Genius Checklist - Dean Keith Simonton ***

There's something uncomfortable about the cover of this book. It's hard to read something that says 'Nine paradoxical tips on how YOU! can become a creative genius,' and not expect a self-help book, however scientifically based. However, this is not such a book, and you'd think a psychologist like Dean Keith Simonton would realise that promising something and then not delivering it is not a great way to win over your audience.

 Instead what we have here is an interesting exploration of what we mean by 'genius' - a fuzzy enough concept that it covers many different abilities - and a set of nine contradictions (that's the 'paradoxical' bit) in listing possible causes for being a genius. So, for example, we are told it's good to score 140 or more on IQ test, but IQ doesn't really matter, or that it's all down to the genes, but home and school are what make it happen. The very nature of these paradoxical statements makes it clear that this book cannot tell you how YOU! can become a creative genius. The chances are that Simonton was being ironic in his use of that self-help language - but that doesn't really help the purchaser.

 I did find the book interesting, partly for that exploration of what gets labelled genius, but mostly because it reveals so much about how poor the scientific credentials of much psychological research seem to be. It doesn't help that Simonton refers to the work of Freud as 'science'. But more worrying is the way that he seems to find it worth discussing an old study that claimed to work out IQs of long dead people from biographical details - doubly strange as this used childhood performance to deduce adult IQ, which Simonton's 'Turn yourself into a child prodigy/wait until you can become a late bloomer' section seems to suggest is pointless. Also Simonton tells out that the study's data was cherry picked, which should totally invalidate it. Not to mention that he doesn’t mention that the concept of IQ has been pretty much dismissed except as measure of the ability to pass IQ tests.

 Over and over again, what we seem to get is correlation being confused with causality, yet the book makes little effort to explain this, nor does it bring in the relatively recent revelation of just how many of such soft science results have proved unreproducible. And some of the conclusions are themselves confusing. For example, in the nature/nurture section, Simonton concludes that roughly half of who you become depends on genes and half on 'choosing your home and school environments.' As it happens, the next book I started reading after this one was Robert Plomin's Blueprint, which makes it clear (in a lot more convincing fashion) that the 50:50 split is distinctly misleading.

 All it really seems possible to come away from this book with, apart from a distinct concern about the scientific nature of this part of psychology, is that we really don't know a lot about genius. And that probably would have made a better article than a book.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more