阅览何为天才

阅览何为天才
The MacArthur Foundation late last month announced its latest crop of “genius grants”, and once again you thought maybe, just maybe, this was your year.
上个月晚些时候，麦克阿瑟基金会宣告了最新一批“天才奖”获得者。而再一次，你暗想说不定，真的说不定，本年就该轮到我了。

 
And why not? These days, we’re all geniuses. We might be “marketing geniuses” or “*culinary geniuses” or “TV geniuses”. We have so *diluted “genius” that it’s fast joining the company of “natural” and “mindful”, words rendered inert through overuse and misuse.
为什么不可能呢？在当今，咱们人人都是天才。咱们可能是“营销天才”、“烹饪天才”或许“电视天才”。由于过度运用和误用，“天才”这个词很快和“纯天然”、“正念”这样的词相同，被“稀释”词义，失去了原有的深度。

Admittedly, the word is tough to nail down. Sometimes we equate genius with raw intelligence. But many of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs were achieved by those with only modest IQs.
不可否认，这个词的意义很难清晰。有时，咱们将天才等同于天然生成智力出众的人。但许多人类最巨大的打破都是由智力十分一般的人完成的。

Sometimes we think of the genius as someone extremely knowledgeable, but that definition also falls short. During Albert Einstein’s time, other scientists knew more physics than Einstein did, but history doesn’t remember them. That’s because they didn’t *deploy that knowledge the way Einstein did. They weren’t able to, as he put it, “regard old questions from a new angle”.
有时，咱们以为天才是那些博大精深的人，但这种界说也有缺点。在爱因斯坦日子的时代，其他科学家要比爱因斯坦懂得更多的物理学常识，但前史并没有记住他们。这是由于他们没有像爱因斯坦相同分配那些常识。正如爱因斯坦所说，他们不能”用新的视角来看待旧问题”。

The genius is not a know-it-all but a see-it-all, someone who, working with the material available to all of us, is able to make surprising and useful connections. True genius involves not merely an *incremental advance, but a conceptual leap. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.
智者非知之者而悟之者也，是用人人触手可及的材料立异且树立有用联络的人。真实的智者不只进行量的堆集，更能完成质的腾跃。正如哲学家亚瑟.叔本华所言：能者达人所不能，智者达人所未见。

We’ve lost sight of this truth, and too often *bestow the title of genius on talented people hitting visible targets. A good example is the much-*ballyhooed announcement earlier this year that scientists had, for the first time, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding, a billion light-years away. It was a remarkable discovery, no doubt, but it did not represent a *seismic shift in how we understand the universe. It merely confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
咱们已丢掉了“天才”这个词所包含的真理，过分频频地将“天才”这一头衔颁发那些完成了看得见方针的有才之人。一个恰当的比如便是，本年早些时候人们大肆宣扬科学家初次记载到了10亿光年外两黑洞磕碰的声响。毫无疑问，这是一个特殊的发现，但它不会对咱们了解国际发生任何颠覆性的改动，它仅仅证明了爱因斯坦的广义相对论。

As Plato observed, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What do we honor? Digital technology, and the convenience it represents, so naturally we get a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg as our “geniuses”, which, in point of fact, they aren’t.
正如柏拉图所说，“一个国家会培育他们引以为傲的东西”。咱们以何为傲？数字技能以及它所带来的便当让咱们很自然地赋予乔布斯或马克•扎克伯格“天才”的称谓，但实际上，他们不是。

The iPhone and Facebook are *wondrous inventions. In many ways, they make our lives a bit easier, a bit more convenient. If anything, though, a true genius makes our lives more difficult, more unsettled. William Shakespeare’s words provide more *disquiet than *succor, and the world felt a bit more secure before Charles Darwin came along. Zuckerberg and Jobs may have changed our world, but they haven’t yet changed our worldview.
苹果手机和脸书都是美妙的创造。在许多方面，他们都让咱们的日子愈加轻松，愈加快捷。但是，假如现在存在真实的天才，那么他会让咱们的日子愈加困难，愈加不安。莎士比亚的著作带给咱们更多的是担忧而非救助。而在达尔文呈现曾经，人们感觉国际是更安全的。扎克伯格和乔布斯或许现已改动了咱们的国际，但他们还没有改动咱们的国际观。

We need to reclaim genius, and a good place to start is by putting the brakes on Genius Creep.
咱们需求回收“天才”这个词，而一个不错的初步便是约束对这个词的乱用。