SarahC comments on Einstein's Superpowers - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 May 2008 06:40AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (92)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 April 2010 05:01:28AM 10 points [-]

I had a similar revelation -- not with Einstein, just with the brightest kid in my freshman physics class. I was in awe of him... until I went to a problem session with him and heard him think out loud. All he was doing was thinking.

It wasn't that he was dumber than I had assumed. He really was that bright. It was just that there was no magic to the steps of how he solved a problem. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like what he did was perfectly normal. The rest of us, with our stumbling, were making it all too complicated. Of course, that didn't mean that suddenly I could do physics the way he did; I just remember the clear sense that his mind was "normal."