ZOMBIE FORUMS

Looking at the past (and maybe a few people that might apply in the future)isn't it strange that some geniuses suffer from some kind of mental illness if they aren't already clinically insane.

Now look at history's most infamous insane killers: Hitler, Ted Bundy, Ted Kaszinski(the Unabomer), etc. were certified geniuses. What causes that? Is it simply because they are so highly intelligent they are driven to insanity?

Hitler had congenital Syphillus and Nitzche(sp?) contracted it.

Otherwise, most geniuses can't cope with people because they are too damned different. Fitting in is important for humans, every sociological and psychological study has proven it. I fit in . . . to a group of about 5 people.

I have been called a genius, but I'm not. I am a reasonably intelligent person with a good memory and a love for reading. Tell you the truth I don't want to be a genius all that much anyway, I've known geniuses, alot of them are screwed in the head, skipped 6 grades so they don't know anyone their age and no one likes them, hard shit to lay on a kid. I only know one well-adjusted genius and he's crazy.

Furthermore, Hitler's genius is WAY THE FUCK overrated. He singlehandedly lost the war by insisting that the Germans attack Russia, and not only attack them but waste 2.3 million soldiers on the siege of Stalingrad, a place that ALL of his generals told him they shouldn't go. He and Napoleon were the two stupidest fucking geniuses in world history. What Hitler was was one of the best orators in history, he gained the total fanatical support of a country and managed to fuck it up with his arrogance.

I think that the biggest determinant of genius would be not how powerful your mind is, but how well you use it. Hitler may have had a brain, but he certainly didn't use it well. I don't put much stock in genius tests anyways.

Rather, Gold, he didn't use it well after his insistence on an attack on Russia.

Napoleon was successful due to the fact he had either memorized, or could just quickly tell you the sin, cos, and tangent of any angle. He could easily figure the velocity and angle he would have to fire his cannons to be successful. But he and Hitler did something that should never be done, attack Russia in winter.

Clay: Genius/ intelligence comes in many forms. The kind of people that skip grades get a lot of intelligence that helps them in school (mostly mathematical/ scientific type intellect).

But there's other types of intelligence, such as artistic.

Beethoven was a genius even though he didn't skip grades....

Point: Remember, school intelligence isn't the only kind of intelligence.

Napoleon left one army to die in Egypt, shattered one against the siberian winter, lost his Fleet to Nelson and was captured by the first Duke of Wellington at Waterloo because he thought he could win even though the English had position on him.

The only people he ever beat were the Italians, and since the roman empire fell, Italy has always had one of the weakest armies on earth. Every WWII vet I've talked to (many) has said they were cowards by and large. Especially by comparison to the Germans and Japanese.

Napoleon I rnak very low among generals. He did very little with a lot. Comparing him to Alexander is heresy or even to Cyrus, General Montgomery, the British General during WWII was a better general I tink, and he wasn't even that good. Erwin Rommel was a genius. George S. Patton was a genius. Hell almost any of the German Generals since Wilhelm I of Prussia were better. I'd stake the 1890s Prussians and Wilhelm te first against the French again and give them Napoleon, and they'd still lose the Franco-Prussian war.

Well, he was French, after all. When have the French ever really done anything in a war.
Oh, and a tidbit of info that I just remembered, one form of genius plural is geni. Geniuses is another plural form.

Well, there was Joan of Ark.

I actually feel kind of sorry for her. I mean, in the entire country, there was not one man with the balls to stand up to the British invasion. Not one. Must have been pretty depressing for her to know that...

I actually don't think geniuses are mental or insane or whatever. They simply think on a different level. They think of the world around them in such a different way that no one understands them and therefore they are viewed as crazy. In fact I don't even think fitting in matters to geniuses at all. It just seems to me that it doesn't really occur to most geniuses to think about little things like "fitting in" very often. After all, if it did, no genius would ever create anything new and original and brilliant because doing somthing like that absolutely requires that you break with tradition. So I wouldn't say that geniuses are crazy, just different.

Generals....brilliant generals......um, wasn't Winston Churchill supposed to have been one of the greatest military minds ever?

If I wasn't working on 3 hours of sleep, dead tired and starving, I would kill you.

Kill whom?

Do I look like I'm in any condition to specify? One of the vaugly bipedal blurs that are around here...

hey, it's a daily struggle to stay in society here, does that make me a genius or just a very antisocial misanthrope?

either way i'm happy about it

(look, no mention of Hitler in this post.. oops..)

Society is what one makes of it. The society here has nothing I would like to make anything of, so I stay away from a good deal of it. Theres only so many ignorant frat boys a person can deal with before a baseball bat to a skull is required.

WINSTON CHURCHILL!?! A Fucking Military genius!?! Like Hell. He was the author of one of the worst military catastrophies in british history and they've had quite a few!

Ever heard of the Gallipoli invasion? That sonovabitch slaughtered thousands of his troops because he though he knew something about the military. Of course the British never had a single leader in WWI that knew what to do, but they could send thousands of men to their deaths and refuse to change strategy because they were too goddamn arrogant and stubborn!!!

Gallipoli wasn't Churchill's fault. The landing at gallipoli was a mistake, and once they were there, they were pinned down and stuck there. The rest of the disaster was because of the people in command at Gallipoli.

then we invented the tank...

it doesn't take much to be a military genius, well, other than a good staff, good intel services, good supply lines etc etc

back on topic: some people are just better than others, an IQ test is as good as a world record at sprinting to measure this

then we invented the tank...

Yeah...it only measures one very specific thing.

(I realize this thread is all but dead [hey, rhyming!] but you know me, I just can't resist putting my 2 cents in. [And I wasn't here when the thread first started, since I've only started coming by the debate club recently] Just be glad I replaced the rambling monstrosity of a post that I *originally* put up with this one...)

The way I see it, there are two separate but related components to what we mean when we call someone "intelligent": Knowledge, and Intelligence proper. Knowledge consists of previously memorized facts and procedures, while Intelligence is the ability to think intuitively and creatively, and to make connections between things you already know. Intelligence comes from genetics and early childhood brain development (and can probably be modified, to a lesser extent, all throughout life), while Knowledge comes only through learning (or from observation of the world itself, although the lifespan of the average human keeps this from getting very far alone). Certainly, they are both important, since Knowledge is of little use without the Intelligence to apply it, and while Intelligence may enable one to learn more quickly from observations of the world, it's unlikely to take you very far without a previously-acquired store of Knowledge on which to build (Had Einstein grown up in a small village in the middle ages, I doubt he would have come up with the theory of Relativity). And while obviously, the two are related (math, for example, involves both knowledge of basic principles and using intelligence to apply them), I believe there is enough of a difference to draw a distinction between the two for the purpose of intelligence tests and so forth. An Intelligence Quotient test should measure only intelligence, meaning it should rely on things like pattern-finding and matching, spatial relations, etc. and not require any specific Knowledge, save for basic things like what a "square" is. It's been some time since I last took an IQ test, so I honestly don't know to what extent they rely on knowing certain things ahead of time . I know for a fact that the SATs do, and if they can really be mapped to IQ scores as I've heard, that implies that perhaps IQ tests do rely too much on explicit Knowledge.

As a final note, although in some ways I prefer Intelligence, since with enough of it you can create knowledge simply by observing the world (and because people with more Intelligence than Knowledge tend to be more interesting than the reverse- to me, anyway), it's not the be-all and end-all. A reasonably Intelligent person with a large store of Knowledge on which to draw can accomplish more than a genius who knows nothing, in most cases.

As for why geniuses are so frequently so close to being insane, I think it's obvious. Like I said before, one of the salient features of intelligence is the ability to think in creative and unusual ways. At a very high level of that, you get either a genius or an insane person, with very little dividing the two in many cases.