Our Cult of Achievement Is Crushing the Genius Out of People

Humans worship at the altar of excellence, but is our complete obsession with this "quality controlled"
mode of intellect holding us back?

(//bigthink.com/community/eric-weinstein)
ERIC WEINSTEIN (//BIGTHINK.COM/COMMUNITY/ERIC-WEINSTEIN)
Eric Weinstein is an American mathematician and economist. He earned his Ph.D in mathematical physics
from Harvard University in 1992, is a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, and is
a managing director of Thiel Capital in San Francisco. He has published works and is an expert speaker on a
range of topics including economics, immigration, elite labor, mitigating nancial risk and incentivizing of
creative risks in the hard sciences. 

03 May, 2017

 Transcript 

Eric Weinstein: I think that very few people see the words 'excellence' or 'consensus' as
anything other than the most positive of words. These are the habits that most people
seek to cultivate. They wish to be part of the consensus. They wish to be excellent in both
their behavior and hope for excellent outcomes. I think the problem is that, we didn’t
realize that excellence so far as it goes is ne but it’s involved in a trade-off. And that trade-
off has to do with the fact that excellence is really about quality control. It’s about the fact
that if I’m going to go for, let’s say, a classical music concert, I want to assume that the
piece will be played awlessly and I will concentrate only on the interpretive aspects of the
piece above that. But, in fact, quality control can be deadly. For example, if in a jazz date
where an improviser takes few risks the music may be pleasant enough as background
music but it’s scarcely the sort of thing that would have animated the bebop generation
who played live dates under open-mic conditions never knowing what would happen
next. Perhaps the most famous jazz album of all time was Miles Davis’ 'Kind of Blue', and if
you look at the sheet music for that date almost nothing was written down. It was just a
question of bringing the most amazing minds together. And you can even hear a few
aws on that album which make it so exciting.

So I think that the problem is that, we have to realize that excellence is about hill climbing.
It’s about the fabled 10,000 hours. It’s about practice making perfect. And this is
something that, to the credit of excellence, it’s something we do know how to teach.
Perhaps we don’t know how to teach everyone how to achieve it but there’s always a class
of people who through dedicated repetition will be able to bring their variance under
extraordinary pressure so that they are reliable members of our society. We want this in
our surgeons, often. We want this in our classical music performers. But the question is: do
we want it everywhere? And because we do know how to teach excellence we’ve blinded
ourselves to the role that a different thought process is involved in, which I would associate
with genius. The key question is: who are these high-variance individuals? Why are our
schools lled with dyslexics? Why are there so many kids diagnosed with ADHD? My claim
is these are giant underserved populations who are not meant for the excellence model.
They are meant to be the innovators, the people who bring us new forms of music that
others will seek to perfect and hone in their performance.

But these are the sorts of people who bring us new scienti c vistas, who explore new
terrain, and what we’ve done is we’ve created a system which effectively demonizes these
different patterns. We even call these things learning disabilities when, in fact, if you look
at the learning disabled population they very often are the most intellectual,
accomplished members of society. But we put them through a torture chamber of K
through 12 education where we attempt to convince the teachers, who have no idea how
to serve this population—we try to make sure that there’s no indication that there are
teaching disabilities by pushing the responsibility onto the students.

These are the learning disabled but in no real terms is this population learning disabled.
It’s a different and a somewhat alien population that we have tried to machine to a point
where they look as close to the excellent population as possible. So it’s not really that I’m
against excellence. What I’m really against is the idea that we’ve absorbed the concept of
excellence into the very fabric of our society so that all those who don’t function within
that idiom feel that they are somehow abhorrent and less than, when, in fact, these are
the people who are going to cure our cancers. These are the people who are going to
create new multi-billion dollar industries.

And, in fact, the problem is, is that we don’t realize that genius is really about adaptive
valley crossing. It’s about taking on risk, taking on cost, doing things that make almost no
sense to anyone else and can only be shown to have been sensible after the fact because,
in fact, and I think, you know, Jim Watson said this beautifully, he said if you’re really going
to do anything big you are by de nition unquali ed to do it. So the entire culture of
credentialism, of professionalism, is really a culture of excellence. But, in fact, society is run
by power laws. The very thick tails of these distributions suggest that life isn’t normally
distributed but distributed by power laws. And we need a special class of people to play
those tails, to get us the returns, to power us forward and advance society. And so what I’m
really interested in is not being blinded by excellence to the prospects for other modalities,
in particular genius.

We want our surgeons to be excellent. We wants our classical music performers to be

excellent. But do we really want excellence everywhere? This is the provocative line of
thought economist and mathematician Eric Weinstein is currently chasing. We've gured
out how to reliably teach excellence, which is useful — but there is a trade-off. Individuals
and education institutions become hyper-focused on cutting variant individuals to a
certain shape, pushing them into a mold so they can passably imitate the "excellent"
population, but not really perform. "The key question is: who are these high-variance
individuals? Why are our schools lled with dyslexics? Why are there so many kids
diagnosed with ADHD? My claim is these are giant underserved populations who are not
meant for the excellence model." To that end, Weinstein suggests that the label of
'learning disabled' is severely misguided. Perhaps we should call this phenomenon what it
more accurately is: a teaching disability. How much genius is squandered by muting the
strengths of these populations?

excellence (https://bigthink.com/tag/excellence)

learning disability (https://bigthink.com/tag/learning-disability)

dyslexia (https://bigthink.com/tag/dyslexia) ADHD (https://bigthink.com/tag/ADHD)

education (https://bigthink.com/tag/education)

schools (https://bigthink.com/tag/schools) genius (https://bigthink.com/tag/genius)

Eric Weinstein (https://bigthink.com/tag/Eric-Weinstein)

teaching (https://bigthink.com/tag/teaching)