The Care and Feeding of Genius, II

This week's New Yorker has two articles that are relevant: One is on Ivan Lendl's golf-playing daughters. Just teenagers they're doing well and Lendl seems to follow the pattern of Earl Woods. He says that kid athletes need a parental push early, but the parent needs to step back at some point. (What's different in sports these days is the early specialization. When I grew up, the 3 or 4 letter athlete was common (football, basketball, baseball, and maybe track). These days teens specialize early. )

The other article is on an ex-Harvard undergrad who developed Facebook, sort of a MySpace site tweaked for college. The point here is the familiar story of the computer whiz who spends lots of time and effort developing an application (similar to Napster and innumerable other applications). It's a combination of talent, effort, and the environment.

Mr. Kennicott, Meet Mr. Cohen's E-Mailers

I posted the other day on Mr. Kennicott's article in the Post on hatred and bigotry. Today Richard Cohen follows up on his past columns (criticizing Stephen Colbert's humor and supporting Al Gore's speech on global warming), specifically on the nature of the e-mails he received in Digital Lynch Mob:

"The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations."

I think the two should compare notes.

[I'll take this opportunity to update my post on Kennicott. I must admit I blogged on the article in the heat of the moment, a sure way to lead to distortion and misreading. Upon rereading the piece, Kennicott uses most of his piece talking about how art handles hatred, claiming that modern narrative art in whatever form doesn't present hatred as living emotion, but rather as something to be examined in the laboratory. I think that's mostly true--I guess it's another way of saying it's mostly "politically correct" or post modern. At the end he asks: "Could our political life benefit from allowing hatred to speak openly once again?" My point was that there's plenty of hatred spoken in our political life already. However, to give Mr. Kennicott the benefit of the doubt, he may have been asking: "if modern art put hatred front and center, as a reality, would it help political life?"

I think Cohen and I would say "no". Certainly there was enough anti-LBJ and anti-Nixon art in the late 60's and early 70's to go along with the hatred in the streets to undermine the thesis. I'd guess the problem is that neither narrative art (novels, plays, films) nor anyone else is self-reflective enough to handle hate in art in a modern setting. Miller may have said "attention must be paid" to a salesman, but no one writes with equivalent understanding of those who commit genocide. (There may be an exception for Palestinian terrorists; but even a movie like "Munich" doesn't portray a hater.)]

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.)

My Favorite Conservative Commentator?

Ben Stein is in danger of becoming my favorite conservative commentator. I recommend his column from yesterday's Times--You're Rich? Terrific. Now Pay Up.

"Here we all are under the gorgeous crystal dome of prosperity, drinking, making money, eating swordfish, changing money at the temple, showing off ourselves to others, bragging — and all of it, every bit of it, is made possible by the men and women who wear the uniform.

Every bit of it is done under the protection of the Marines, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard, serving and offering up their lives for pennies. And we're also under the protection of the police and the firefighters and the F.B.I., who offer up their lives for nothing compared with what others make trading money on computer screens.

Something flashed into my mind — something that my late father used to say, quoting loosely from the economist Henry C. Simons, a founder of the Chicago School of economics: that it is 'unlovely' to see the extremes of wealth and nonwealth that are evident in contemporary America."

Acronyms--Key to Bureaucracy

Today's LA Times has an article on The Fine Art of Legislation Appellation on how Congressional aides manipulate titles of bills to come up with a fitting acronym, as in:

"What do you call a bill to sanitize Congress of the current lobbying scandal?

The CLEAN UP Act — the memorable shorthand by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for his Curtailing Lobbyist Effectiveness through Advance Notification, Updates and Posting Act.

'You'd be surprised at how much taxpayer time is spent in offices coming up with clever names for bills,' said Michael Franc, a former congressional staff member."

Bureaucrats have to do the same thing. I remember in 1981 dodging the logical acronym of "CRA" for the "conservation reserve acreage" in the new farm bill for fear of some wise guy in the press adding the "p" for "program" to it. Instead we went with the forced and awkward, "ACR" for acreage--conservation reserve". But easy as it is to laugh, names make a difference. Just ask innumerable Hollywood stars.

The Capacity to Love

Having just posted on hate, I should give equal time to love. Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution
notes a piece in the NYTimes Magazine (Levitt and Dubner) dealing with research into talent and genius.

The argument goes that rather than genius being a matter of chance and heredity, it's really practice makes perfect, as shown in laboratory experiments, so genius is the ability to practice, and practice, and practice. So that means that genius is the ability to love what you're doing so much that you can endure the work that makes you great.

It makes sense to make, speaking as someone who always is jumping from one thing to another.

The Location of Hate

Philip Kennicott in today's Post uses an anti-Semitic diatribe from Chaucer (currently being performed in DC) to talk about hate in Chaucer's Slurring Words:

"It's rare, today, to hear this kind of hatred speaking on its own terms, at least in public spaces such as the theater. Hatred thrives, no doubt. In this country, it is still permissible, in varying degrees, to exercise it in public against marginal groups: homosexuals, immigrants, Muslims. And even bigotries that have been discredited in public, such as racism and anti-Semitism, still flourish underground, on the Internet and in public, if carefully coded. But most of the entertainment industry, and especially the arts world, is particularly sensitive to anything that smacks of bigotry. In narrative today -- in fiction, television, theater and movies -- characters who deal in discredited forms of hate are either caricatures, or so clearly marked as mentally ill or morally bankrupt that they wear their hatred with all the subtlety of a black cloak on a silent-film villain."

[He goes on to argue that exposure to hatred as expressed in past artistic works, like O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" broadens our understanding and leads us to consider hatred "old-fashioned".]

I find this self-satisfied, smug, and rather young. While many forms of hate may have been discredited, new forms spring up like weeds in springtime. I forget whether it was the Post or Times that recently ran an article on liberal bloggers, featuring a woman who exulted in her hatred of Bush. On the conservative side the hatred used to be for Bill, now it's Hillary and the vast left wing conspiracy. And us middle-roaders hate those who dare to believe passionately.

Administrative Capability--Enabling Weird Ideas

The Times today has an article on the history of the $100 rebate--$100 Rebate: Rise and Fall of G.O.P. Idea. It includes an interesting quote:

"Mr. Prater [staffer] reminded Mr. Ueland [Frist aide] that the Bush administration in 2001 sent rebate checks to taxpayers . Mr. Ueland ran the idea past his boss.

'It seemed reasonable to him,' Mr. Ueland said, describing Mr. Frist's reaction."

What is my point?

That sometimes, not all the time, governmental decisions depend on considerations of implementation--is the idea doable? If a faceless bureaucrat says it is, either by pointing to past history or by coming up with a new mechanism, as was done in 2001, then Congress or the bigshot administrators can go ahead and make up their minds.

Condescensional Wisdom, on Both Sides

George Will has a column, Condescensional Wisdom,
on John Kenneth Galbraith and liberalism in the 50's. He charges liberals like Galbraith, Reismann, et.al. with being condescending eggheads, who thought Americans were the helpless prey of advertising. There's a bit of truth in the charge. America is basically democratic and capitalistic, meaning we're all responsible for what the country is. Certainly anyone who writes on what America ought to be, as opposed to what it is, runs the risk of falling into snobbery and self-righteousness. George Will ought to know, from personal experience.

The "Decider", For Real?

Apparently President Bush is getting some attention (i.e., parodies, songs, etc.) for his claim that he's the "decider". But few seem to challenge the idea that he is decisive. I don't know. What I do know is that Mr. Bremer, in his book on Iraq, says that Bush doesn't announce decisions during or at the end of meetings of top officials. (Can't give a cite; I've returned the book to the library already.) It's not clear to me whether Bush does have a decision-making process.
If I remember the Woodward book on Iraq the decision to go to war evolved, it wasn't "decided" in the sense I'm familiar with. (As a bureaucrat you prepare a decision memo on an issue, giving options and pros and cons on each and the decider signs off, or holds a meeting to come up with an alternative. That's the way the Nixon White House worked, which may not be an endorsement.)

Then today I read in the Senate committee's report on Katrina this:

"In addition, the need to resolve command issues between National Guard and active duty forces – an issue taken up (but not resolved) in a face-to-face meeting between President Bush and the Governor on Air Force One on the Friday after landfall, may have played a role in the timing of active duty troop deployments."

There can be problems when political leaders get together to resolve problems--they may not know what they're doing. But staff (read Andrew Card) need to follow up on missing decisions.

It's possible that Bush fakes being a "decider", relying on his staff to read his mind and fill the gaps. (That seems to me to have been part of Reagan's process, but Baker and Regan were more assertive aides than Card seems to have been.)