The Care and Feeding of Genius

The post on genius being the result of practice (and comment) the other day caused me to ponder the care and feeding of genius.

• First, of course, you need reasonable capabilities (although "idiot savants", also known as autistic geniuses seem to have a screw missing). But no nurture is going to make a sprinter out of a white guy (joking) or a center out of someone of average height.
  
• Second you need early stimulation and positive feedback. (See Tiger Woods at 2 or Mozart whenever.)
  
• Third, you need a network that will keep feeding the feedback. Yes, Earl Woods gave Tiger feedback, but he also got him publicity. The publicity probably kept Earl going.
  
• Fourth, the third requirement means you need a welcoming environment. I vaguely remember Stephen Jay Gould talking about the ecology of genius. Without researching it, the argument is that classical music, or baseball, or whatever field of endeavor is like an environment. In the early days there's lots of opportunity, but as time goes on some of the early movers take up niches that effectively exclude others. In classical music, there are very few composers writing works in the style of Bach or Mozart. There's no market for fugues and there's no room for originality.
  
• Fifth, I'd suggest that Isiah Berlin's distinction between fox and hedgehog comes into play. It's much easier for a hedgehog to be a genius. You find yourself a field with plenty of opportunity and get lost in a continuous feedback loop of work and reward and before you know you're Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. (Interesting piece in the current NY review of Books by Andrew Hacker on class in America--the Rockefellers and du Ponts on the Forbes 400 list in 1982 were replaced on the current list by technology and marketing tycoons.)
  
• Sixth--the bottom line is that you need luck, amazing amounts of luck for all the pieces to come together.
  

Personally, I'm a fox, curious about many things and not carrying through on anything (though the latter may be an effect of old age.)