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satt comments on Einstein's Superpowers - Less Wrong
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We could quibble a bit about exact rarities -- Einstein was clearly exceptionally bright, but whether he represents 1 in 10^4 or 1 in 10^6 g depends on all sorts of trivia that I don't have good estimates for. (I think I'd start by trying to figure out the number of scientists active in math, physics, and chemistry in [say] 1935 and estimating the intelligence of the average 1935-era hard scientist relative to the population average, then assuming that Einstein was at the top of that community. That's just a ballpark estimate, though.)
That's all pretty orthogonal to what I read the grandparent as suggesting, though. By my reading of b_f2's post, someone claiming Einstein-level intelligence is probably saying that their estimate of their own intelligence exceeds all their convenient reference points below "famously smart scientist", suggesting a very smart person, but probably not 1 in 10^5 smart.
Which is actually a lot more charitable than my probable interpretation of such a claim: without impressive supporting evidence, I'd be more likely to assume that anyone claiming to have Einstein's brain is full of shit and probably a crackpot.
Not only do I agree, but I can't even envision what such “impressive supporting evidence” could be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone who had more than a vague idea of what Einstein did claimed to be as smart as him with a straight face; even if someone I thought was actually in the same league as him said that, I'd assume they are in jest or out of their mind -- indeed because such a statement would pattern-match a crackpot. (IME, people who are both extremely intelligent and very arrogant may say stuff like “99.99% of the people are idiots”, but they hardly ever say “I am as smart as $famously_smart_person”.
And BTW, I don't think many laymen by “Einstein” mean “someone as smart as the 60th smartest person in my home town of 60,000” -- they usually mean “one of the friggin' smartest people ever”.
Supporting your point of view is Lev Landau's list. Even as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, Landau ranked himself far below not only Einstein but also Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, & Schrödinger.