"Brafarality" and "Major Legend", thanks very much for your feedback.
"Brafarality", in Ellen Winner's book,
Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, she has a chapter (Chapter 4, pg. 55) entitled, "Artistic and Musical Children". In this chapter, she observes that artistic giftedness and musical giftedness tend to be independent of IQ. She says that this isn't quite as true for musical prodigies. With them, she distinguishes between performers and composers. Musical composition appears to be intensely interesting to several of the smartest people I've known. A friend of mine, with an M. D. and a Ph. D. (who passed through the Prometheus Society during his residency), had Merrill Kenneth Wolf as his anatomy-of-the-brain instructor in medical school. The two struck up a personal friendship based upon their common (but unfulfilled) dream of becoming musical composers, and their love of classical music. (My friend didn't know the story behind Ken Wolf's precocity although my friend was also
very precocious in his own right.) Of course, one of the problems with becoming a classical composer these days is that people aren't buying much in the way of minuets and scherzos. If you want to capture their musical ears, I guess you have to write something like Frozen's "
Let It Go!', or Mary Poppins', "
A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down (In a Most Delightful Way)".
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Personally, I consider Shakespeare to be one of the smartest men in English history... in a class by himself. His IQ is estimated at 200, and look at his vocabulary! Your can almost tell you're reading Shakespeare without being told. He had such an ability to use common words in uncommon ways! He's also cited for his insights into human nature and human psychology.
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Another poet that for me has that kind of Shakespearean ability to handle common words uncommonly is Emily Dickenson. Emily Dickenson's poetry would be lost to us were it not for her sister's gathering up her giftings and publishing them.
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I suspect that there are a number of outstanding poets and authors that don't make it into the mainstream... a lot of blossoms in the dust. My sister and I were taken with the
poetry of a woman from Vinegar Bend, Alabama:
Vivian Smallwood. Vivien and her twin sister lived their lives and died their deaths in their little frame house in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama. She was well under five foot tall, with vivid blue eyes. I got to spend a couple of hours with her when my wife was on a birding trip to Dauphin Island, near Mobile.
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My interest in tracking down grown-up prodigies after I retired stemmed from my own life experiences, and from my desire make a contribution. My take on creativity is that, between our jobs and our families, most of us don't have a chance. During my working years, I was busy out the gazoo from breakfast to bedtime. I had a high-profile job that demanded well over 40 hours a week, and I had the duties that all us Daddy's, husbands, and home-owners have. I was always working on the lawn or filling out paperwork or doing my part for Christmases, birthdays, and children's activities to the point that I could never quite catch up At the end of each year, I'd generally have some vacation I had to use or lose, and during that week off, I'd come up with creative ideas. I'd tell myself that I'd shoehorn in some time for that after I went back to work, but come the Monday after New Year's Day, I'd be back in the same old rat race. With a wife, two children, and a mortgage, I didn't feel that I dared jump over the fence and try to start my own business, or seek a career in academia. Not only would I be gambling current income: I'd also be risking my future retirement income. Meanwhile, as my salary rose, my time for creative work regarding my immediate assignments fell.
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If this were true for me, it would also be true for everyone else. And it makes sense. people and organizations don't hire people to be geniuses or to be creative. They hire people to do the grunt work so that
they can do the higher-level work themselves. Universities might be an exception, but some pretty bad doyens and doyennes find academic tenure at universities and the political infighting can be fierce. Also, universities have come to expect their engineering and scientific faculty to support themselves by chasing down grants and contracts. Their university affiliation basically gives them a hunting license to pursue outside funding. Then, too, during the post-Apollo drawdown, as President Johnson and then President Nixon diverted funds for the war in Viet Nam and other projects, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 technical personnel joined the ranks of the unemployed, and the U. S. went through an aerospace/engineering Depression from the late 60's through the mid-70's.
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These are all reasons why neither you nor I could afford to "do our things" and, during our working years, boldly go where no one has gone before.
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That all changes after retirement. By retirement age, that all changes. By retirement age, if we're lucky, our children will have grown and flown, and we'll only be supporting ourselves, and if we're lucky, our spouses. But by that time, historically, people have been so old and decrepit that they don't have that much time left. And that's where Longecity and the alleviation of aging comes in. Retirement basically means laying up enough treasure that investment income from it can make us independently... if not wealthy, at least very comfortably fixed. If we have decades to centuries of retirement, then we have world enough and time to explore our creative ideas.
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This brings up the concern that if we start to live much longer, our retirement systems will no longer be able to support us and we'll have to go back to work. Surprisingly, the answer to that is no. We may have work a few more years but given a few more years in the work force, we can build a large enough nest-egg that we can draw on it (with cost-of-living raises to cover inflation) in perpetuity. How can that be possible? The basic formula for estimating the growth of a retirement fund to which we contribute a percentage
s (for "saving") of our salary each year is given by:
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Total Retirement Savings (in $, €, ¥, or what have you) =
s /r (2
rt/0.72 - 1).
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Suppose that we contribute 15% of our salary to our retirement fund each year. In that case,
s becomes 0.15.
r is the our expected after tax, after-inflation rate of return on our investments. The typical after-inflation, after-tax rate of return used in retirement calculations in a tax-free account is 4% a year, so this is the number we'll use for r. In that case, the above formula becomes
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Total Retirement Savings = 0.15/0.04(2
t/18 - 1) = 3.75(2
t/18 - 1).
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After we retire, we'll want start drawing an annual income stream from our laid-up treasure. If we assume that we can continue to collect the same 4% that we've been making during our working years, our formula becomes:
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Annual Retirement Income = 15% of our average annual salary(2
t/18 - 1).
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If we set t at 36 years, our Annual Inflation-Adjusted Retirement income will be 15% (2
2 - 1) = 45% of our average annual income during our working years. That probably isn't enough to cover exigencies. Suppose we work 54 years. In that case, our Annual Inflation-Adjusted Retirement income will be 15% (2
3 - 1) = 105% of our average annual income during our working years.
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After correcting for inflation, the U. S. Stock market has returned about 6% per year for the past 200 years. If we planned on investing our retirement funds in, say, an S&P 500 index fund and used that 6% rate of return to estimate our retirement income, we would get:
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Total Retirement Savings = 0.15/0.06(2
t/12 - 1) = 2.5(2
t/12 - 1).
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Now the picture looks even better. If we assume that we can continue to draw after-tax, after-inflation income at the rate of 6% a year, then
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Annual Retirement Income = 15% of our average annual salary(2
t/12 - 1).
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Now we can draw our 105% of our average annual salary after working 36 years. And remember, during our working years, not only do we have to support our children, we have to set aside part of our income for retirement savings, not to mention commuting, life insurance and disability insurance.
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But what about the fact that we can't all be rich... can we?
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Maybe we can. Suppose that 50 years from now, 100,000,000 Americans were retired, drawing $50,000 (in today's dollars) apiece a year. That would total up to $5 trillion a year. But the U. S. GDP in 2064 should be around $50 trillion. 100,000,000 Americans would constitute about ¼th of the American population. 10% of the U. S. annual income shouldn't be all that large a fraction of the American pie.
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But not everybody can be retired... can they?
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Clearly, not
everyone can be retired, but...
(1) Retirement should be a time for creative contributions to society rather than a time to play golf and immerse one's self in virtual reality games, and (2) there should be a lot of advances in robotics in the time it would take for a ponderable fraction of the population to amass retirement capital
if aging could be reversed tomorrow.
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My personal suspicion is that if we could seemingly convert 80-year-olds into 20-year-olds tomorrow, it would take a decade or two before mainstream medicine would want to endorse such a rejuvenation technique in terms of long-term safety and efficacy guarantees. (I hope we get a chance to put that to the test.)
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I know. This should be in a separate thread, but I'm thinking maybe this should be in several threads.
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Getting back to the plot, I think quite a few people pass through these ultra-high IQ societies for a year or two on their way to the rest of their lives.
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Most of the super-intelligent men and women I met were a delight to be around, but of course, not quite all of them. I hope you didn't have an unhappy experience with them. It's bad enough when someone ordinary gets sarcastic or unfriendly. I should think that it would be much worse if they were extra-smart. A great mind, when it's accompanied by a great heart, is a splendid thing, but when it's not, I should think that it could be traumatic. As von Goethe put it:
"Love's heralds both, the powers proclaiming,
Which, aye creative, us enfold,
May then within my bosom flaming,
Inspire the mind, confused and cold,
Which frets itself through blunted senses
As though by sharpest fetter-smart,
O God, soothe Thou my thoughts bewildered,
Enlighten Thou my needy heart."
(Faust, from The Song of Pater Profundus)
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"Major Legend", in making a perfect score on the pre-1995 SAT, Paul Allen would have been one of 5 kids out of the million who took the SAT that years who got a perfect score... about 1 in 200,000. Dr. Ron Hoeflin has estimated that at that time about one in three college-age students took the SAT, making the eligible pool 3,000,000, and the odds of getting a perfect score 1 in 600,000. Bill Gates made a 1,590 on the SAT, so he's also in the stratosphere. Apparently, a lot of corporate CEO's had high childhood IQs.
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On the other hand, psychologist
Anna Rowe studied a group of
U. S. scientists who were one rung on the ladder below Nobel Prize winners. Most of them didn't have histories of childhood precocity, nor did they plan to become scientists when they grew up. Her research included the psychology of people of superior intellect, alcoholism and its effect on creative artists and creativity. I thought of this in the light of your discussion of the connection between creativity and "slight weirdness".
Two people whom I should think are performing in the domain of the genius are Aubrey de Gray and Robert Kane Pappas.
One little tidbit: on the Hoeflin tests that used to be the "Open Sesame" to the Prometheus and Mega societies, several of the questions require creative, outside-the-box thinking to arrive at the answers.
