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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more