<p>I have no clue how often the term “genius” has been affixed to my name, and how erroneous the term is. However, I do believe that people who use such a term are fundamentally misguided. They are not accurate judges of “genius”, unless they learn a good deal of rigorous psychology.</p>
<p>It is an act of intellectual arrogance to presume that one can accurately distinguish between “genius” and “non-genius” based on a limited amount of information. Most people are moreover unaware of the significance of particular awards, respective to a particular context. </p>
<p>Moreover, they have a mental representation of a genius. Perhaps they have several mental representations of what a genius is (they may trust a bit of behavioral unpredictability in such mental representations, unpredictability that is larger in magnitude than the unpredictability in the behavior of more familiar people). Whatever such mental representations are, they’re highly unlikely to be accurate (especially considering that they know very little about me). Aren’t definitions of unspecific nouns all mental representations, anyhow? And then to argue that such mental representations (or connotations) are misguided is to argue that they are not accurate in characterizing me as a genius, much less conforming to the actual definition of a genius. Of course, most connotations are somewhat malleable and if someone redefines their connotation of a genius, then I could fit along with that connotation (or I may be excluded from the connotation). So then one has to think about the stability of a connotation. Connotation stability is contingent upon environmental circumstances. That people far more intelligent than me exist is an environmental stimuli that will trigger connotation instability (in a person), that may modify the person’s definition of “genius” as such. Most observations of human behavior are, after all, inferences based on limited information. Since people can change their labels of others, it is not too significant for them to label someone as “genius”. </p>
<p>Perhaps there is some merit in such labels, in that those who are affixed with such labels are more likely to conform to indicators of genius than the average person. It is moreover understandable that most people use such labels casually. Perhaps a sociologist who studied every single school in the nation may find behavioral characteristics among those who are labeled by their peers as “genius” and those who are not labeled as such, relative to the context of the other people in the school (and find statistically significant differences in particular behavioral characteristics). In this, the label “genius” contains some information of psychological significance, should the school be studied (even if such labels do not perfectly conform to the denotation of genius). This is often why people trust such labels - because most people labeled as “genius” do behave differently than the average student (in ways relevant to the denotation of genius - i.e. they behave differently in tasks requiring intelligence). This is also why people trust their own mental representations - because they usually aren’t especially surprised by most behavior (if they were - then mental representations would be useless).</p>
<p>In this, if people who casually use the term genius towards particular individuals are fairly accurate in identifying the most intelligent people in their own school, then the labels are not completely useless.</p>
<p>The majority of people who have done some exceptional academic accomplishment, after all, may have been labeled as “genius”. The majority of people who have not may never have been labeled as such. This is enough to establish that the label is of some merit, even if it is not of pedantic merit. But as with all informal definitions, nothing is of pedantic merit.</p>
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