Prisoner of Dilemmas - The Poem

(Should have ideally written this poem with this post)

It is the start of a new term
Despite all the resolutions firm
I know how it is gonna go
It is the same ol’ story, same bore

The new term always dawns bright,
‘Cos first month doesn’t require fight.
Then the tests and submissions start
The enthu drops by a quite a lot.

Why the bother, why the care,
Why all this hoopla on being fair.
Just give me a random number please,
Hey, I just want to lead a life of peace.

Oh yes, they have done it cleverly,
Just so you don’t give up easily,
Just in case, you don’t give a damn for CG,
You are caught by the balls because of RG.

In the Background a voice whispers

He is a Prisoner of Dilemma, Stuck in the rat race
Could have opted out but chose to save face

I don’t mind working hard, thinking deep,
Just do not spoil my beauty sleep.
It is like getting hammered again and again,
After a point, must learn to enjoy the pain.

Welcome to the Machine, Step This Way,
You should have thought hard, now pay.
Look at that sedative, the old textbook,
Haha sucker - you are never off the hook.

He is a Prisoner of Dilemma, Stuck in the rat race
Could have opted out but chose to save face

I know, I know. I have been cribbing too much in the past few posts. But they were mostly "Staying in" posts. It is like I suddenly lost my enthusiasm to blog. So just made a few posts to stay in the game. But seriously, feeling stuck in a rut. The rut of being in highly competitive systems that measure intelligence through examinations. (Are there any other?) Please God, I have done that enough! I still like the adulation of "winning something" and I don't mind working in projects and actually enjoy those that I choose to do. But I think I would like a different kind of challenge. What is it? How will it come? No idea. Guess I need to create my own challenge. Until then, Boredom and Restlessness. Boring: "Having been there, done that. Played the game till now by the rules and it is so boring. Now What." Restlessness: I feel I can be doing better things, painting a broader canvas than going through this mindless monotony. Whatever... I feel strangely divorced from my environment. It is like... watching people act out a play. Interesting in spurts.

The Prisoner of Dilemma?

Fig.: Payoff Table for the Mugging Game

To anyone who has been through the Relative Grading system (referred to rather fondly, one would think, as RG), the resonance with Prisoner's Dilemma is unavoidable. Therefore, one becomes a Prisoner of Dilemma and starts mugging.

Of course, an important condition here is that the reward (which I have rather "nicely" depicted in that wad of notes picture) must be something that both the players treasure a lot. If the reward is not so compelling, then people would just give up. Let me refine that. If the players don't see a direct connection between the reward and effort, then they would give up easily.

Of course, the pundits are most probably going to tut-tut this and point out in a shocked whisper, the cavalier manner in which I am generalizing a two player game to multi player situations. I frankly have no idea about the results in the multi player case. But still, I think it touches a chord and I shall leave it!

And this blog was meant as a continuation of the crib about mugging in my previous blog. For all this high falutin stuff, the end result is that reality has not changed one bit. Understanding it, somehow, somehow, makes me feel good, though for what end, I know not.

(PS1: Credit to Anuj Pradhan who talked about this after the Economics Exam)
(PS2: "Prisoner of Dilemma" is such a nice title for a prospective song/poem. Cool! I now have a kickass title, about the poem...)

Untitled

Have been slightly overwhelmed recently. The feeling that things are going on in a totally unexpected manner… pleasantly unexpected though. Have been thinking a lot, just thinking. Some general thoughts in no particular order:

• The first time I got smashed, that is the uncontrollable blabbering smashed, was one of the greatest things to happen in my life. I strongly suspect half these prophets got their ‘revelations’ after a triple absinthe and coke. That time when you get that Fuck You attitude, that time when you start thinking so what, that time when you feel It doesn’t matter.
• This leads to my new found philosophy in life: (Please note, all these are not original more like a collection of my favourite lines from various movies, I guess mostly from Trainspotting or Fight Club)
• You are not the money you make, You are not the car you own, You are not the school/college you went to, You are not the chick you bang etc. You are simply the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world. It doesn’t matter, you were crap, organic matter, into which life was induced for some reason, some reason and that life shall be taken away again for some reason, if any. So we are propelled into an essence- less existence. But what makes this fundamentally pointless journey meaningful are the two great gifts we have: intellect and sexuality. So concentrate and satiate either one or both, things should fall into place.
• Middle class parents pile up too much pressure on their children nowadays. I feel this is an expression of insecurities induced by the widening inequalities in India. It is like if you miss out now, you are fucked son, so bust your ass out. I have this gnawing fear that increasing inequalities is going to be the biggest problem for the next generation in India.
• Pain at the correct times can be SO pleasurable. Nothing new in this, but I am starting to experience all these only now. I love that occasional drinking binge, a binge just to puke out everything you have ever eaten. The constant throbbing in the head the next morning, the pain in your stomach give a different dimension to life. That lingering feeling of nausea… then you eat and puke one last time… go to sleep, that helpless feeling… and get up. It is like starting life afresh.
• I also love to create that “Copy of a Copy of a Copy” feeling that Edward Norton talks about in Fight Club. Purposely go without sleep, induce insomnia, wreck your sleeping pattern, then when you walk around, you suddenly zone out, you are in a conversation, suddenly not, you are seeing equations on the board, then suddenly you see the sheep game… this seamless blending of reality and subconscious – one word… beautiful.
• A friend spoke about this… Get up early in the morning say 4 AM, even though you have slept late, waste time till 6-7, watch a movie, eat, then a slow numbness will begin to set in… curl into a couch with a book and you will feel sleep take over you… the sweet numbness spreading to all parts of the body… Bliss!

(Note to Friends: These are from conversations with friends. So you may find your ideas here. But you don't want to be linked to such a blog do you? :P )

A Passing Thought…

I feel that Human Thought has currently reached a level of stagnation. Before all the PhDs holler at me, let me elaborate. I am really embarking on a thankless task. It is difficult to articulate and prove a statement like ‘Human Thought is stagnating’. First of all, this statement is highly subjective. What I may find as boring and stagnating may be stimulating to someone else. Also, an expert may always find something interesting which skips the layman’s interest. (w.r.t a certain field) That is why I ask you to read the article completely, before forming your opinions.

I strongly feel there is no genuinely exciting thought going around. This may seem contradictory/misinformed considering that we are the children of an ‘Age of Innovation’. However, this age of innovation strives to structure and commercialize creativity. Most of the attempts at ‘innovation’ are formulaic and end up only in incremental (or delta) improvements.

I agree that there is a lot of fairly interesting stuff going around. And I am not berating the importance of these incremental contributions. We have mobile phones which can pretty much do everything. At a deeper level, Wikipedia is a genuinely revolutionary concept. What I miss is more the ‘The velocity of light is same in all frames of reference’ kind of thinking. Anyone who hears that the first time, is struck with a feeling of incredulity and wonder which challenges even the most indifferent to read up on it.

Therefore, two things which I expect/ strongly wish that happen in the next twenty years are:

1. An idea from somewhere which leads to another thirty years similar to the Thirty Years That Shook Physics.
   
2. A radical re-look at the PhD program as it works today. I feel that the paper-publishing culture has now come to a stage where it is doing more harm than good.

Obviously, there are some counter arguments. I make it seem as if nothing brilliant ever happened after 1930. Not at all. The Second World War and the period after that was again an extremely fruitful era for Human Thought. However, I strongly feel that a tendency has come to systematize creativity and this leads people to label a lot of stuff they do as “innovative”. I feel that something (and I have no idea of that something), will come and shatter this attempt to systematize creativity. Something that disrupts attempts at contrived disruptive thinking.

Let us take an example. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is an interesting and useful field. No two arguments about that. While whatever may go on the theory level, at the practical level, CFD simulations involve writing down a few PDEs (Partial Differential Equations), making some approximations and using computation intensive algorithms to solve these. All CFD approaches involve some sort of differencing schemes. While these are interesting and there are tricky issues, the point is, it is still boring and ugly. If we could have some sort of a nifty transform which made PDEs so trivial that even say, XII std. kids could solve it, THAT would represent a really interesting and fundamental advance which would generate more exciting ideas.

(One way people do that is to convert a PDE into a system of ODEs and apply Laplace transforms on those ODEs but that is still tedious and boring)

An obvious shortcoming of my analysis is this: maybe some fields are experiencing truly great work which will come out / have come out, that I am not aware of. I admit that, but only grudgingly.

To conclude, the saturation is more in the sense that the tools currently employed are tried and tested and we should see a whole new set of tools which redefines our thinking abilities.

Sleepless in Ganga Hostel

Senti Warning: Step in at your own risk!

(I am unable to sleep. It was that Expresso I had at Qwiky’s at the Ascendas Tech Park at Taramani. I had had a horrible headache. The Asecendas Tech Park represents the new India - BPO offices, high-disposable incomes, pretty BPO people. My sleep disappeared with the headache. I hate deviations from routine that affect my sleeping rhythm. This one time, in the second year, I went sleepless for two nights without a point, just after seeing Fight Club for the first time. I really wanted to see if insomnia was that powerful. The essence of the experiment is to keep oneself pointlessly awake. If there is some motivation, then it wouldn’t count as insomnia. Managed to do that. I saw numbers popping out of the blackboard the third day. Friends said I looked drunk. This was when I hadn’t started drinking even. It was scary. And trippy.

I hate building a sleep deficit. The rational part of my brain loses control and the emotional part takes over. In common language, I become cranky. The irony is: I can see it happen, I can see my emotional part dictating my chain of thoughts against the protests of the rational part and I feel helpless. My room is stuffy. Al of a sudden, I can hear the Fight Club sounds in my brains and then suddenly the Reservoir Dogs theme. Really love it when this happens. But I have an exam tomorrow and a long day after that. I need to sleep. I decide to go to the terrace. There is a pleasant breeze blowing, the soft glow of the sodium vapour lamps under the green canopy provides a calming effect. I lean back against the low wall in the terrace. The cold of the wall feels deliciously soothing and I am calm enough to observe my own train of thought)

I hate quiz weeks. I always become edgy and nervous. Thoughts of the impending CAT rat race (cat-rat?) and the spectre of the Darwinian placement process are enough to induce extra edginess. It is one of those times when the monotony of being and the constant throb of ambition threaten to hijack the fun from life, the joie de vivre, as the French so seductively put it. Suddenly I think of my schooldays. A time of innocence, a time of concentration. Have never reached those levels of concentration since. Did the TM (Transcendental Meditation) have anything to do with it? A feeling of yearning for that simplicity. Reminded of the teachers of the IIT classes at Satyamurthy School. Epitomes of the “Simple Living, High Thinking” philosophy characteristic of teachers of a bygone era. I am reminded of my own disillusionment with academics and big thinkers ever since leaving school. Doesn’t one commonly observe the very same experts who study their own fields with insight, being extremely pedantic? Don't they let their judgment be clouded by their egos when it comes to anything outside their domain? Vidya Dadaathi Vinayam, goes a Sanskrit saying (Education leads to Humility). Mostly it is the opposite, I think to myself, bitterly.

I realize that my philosophy after coming here has changed and today, I look down upon the very idealism that I once treasured. I feel a knot of fear in my stomach. The world seems so intimidating all of a sudden. It is all very fine to pontificate about the notion of God being only an idea, but involuntarily I recite a shloka I learnt as a kid.

Maybe it is the rising of the sun or the delicious wind blowing but I suddenly feel a revival of my spirits. Correspondingly, the rational part of the brain seems to gain hold again. It is all fine to mourn a lost idealism but a very important thing to keep in mind while following ideals is to constantly question the relevance of the ideality. That is, as societies change the values change. Agreed there are a few basic values which are eternal. Truth and Ahimsa are absolutely essential for a sane society. But beyond that most of the values are the dictates of the economic and social compulsions of the times we live in.In fact, most morals and values are often the reflection of the values of the powerful classes of that society.

Another key point which I think most of us know at an unconscious level is this: Any tradition/movement/idea will survive at a mass level, only if it will bring about economics returns at some level, maybe not immediately, but it should bring an economic incentive. If it fails to do that and is carried on by the force of emotion, then people will start questioning it and quietly breaking such traditions, before it eventually disappears. (I have based these arguments on some instances. Going into them here would be tedious. There maybe practices which do not have this feature. But they will be followed by small groups, or tightly knit communities. Even in those communities there should be an element of choice in the framework. If arrogantly imposed, even those will perish.)

Therefore, practices which were attractive or elegant once have to be jettisoned if they are not relevant for the times. There will always be old people saying that things were better during those days but they too are looking at the world through rose coloured glasses. That does not mean we should lose all sense of idealism. It just means that we review our value systems and goals periodically to see if they are consistent with reality. For example, I still think that “Simple Living, High Thinking” is the most elegant and satisfying way of living. However, simplicity thirty years ago may have meant having a cycle if you could afford a Bajaj. Today it means owning a Sumo if you could own a Land Cruiser :-)

Coming back to the changing nature of moral values: Herein lays the problem of the idealist. An idealist may take a prescriptive stance but the compulsions of change will lead that notion of idealism to be changed. However, she cannot change it as the act of changing would reflect on the idealism of her stance. Therefore, the idealist preacher is stuck in a situation where she has to impose her philosophy or be caught on the wrong foot. That is how many well meaning thinkers have ended up becoming hardliners and contributing more to the untruth of the World. In other words, idealists and crusaders are more likely to cause non-ideality than the Average Joe.

Therefore, what we are left with is an Absurdist view of life. Yes, there is no inherent meaning to life. But that is a liberating notion, not at all a sad one. Since my existence doesn’t have a pre-ordained meaning I can go about shaping it whatever way my intellect leads me to. Therefore, the only thing left to do, given that we have come into existence, is to plunge into the world with complete involvement and determination to experience all that it offers. The determination to experience the world should be so complete that if there is any obstacle then we must invent ways to go over it. Hedonism is my religion :-)

Feeling clearer, I walk down to Hot Chips for an early breakfast.

On Relationships

Ever since a boy crosses the Rubicon and realizes the hand may be used for, ahem… well, other purposes, girls and women come to play a large role in his life. As he matures and comes into the early twenties, the desire to be in a relationship with a woman is a strong one, perhaps the strongest. (Of course, due to the surfeit of sex in cinema and television, the thresholds are reducing, but I speak of the average.)

Tune into SUN Music and every second one sees SMSs flashed on the screen which indicates that some X loves some Y. If you see SUN Music long enough, you would think that Tamil Nadu must be teeming with young couples. Whether that is true or not, one simple fact is that one sees a lot of people openly proclaiming their “boyfriend”hoods and “girlfriend”ships like never before.

It is interesting to see how all this starts. From common observation, I think the “Girlfriend getting process” is best classified as Darwinian. Every young man worth his salt starts off (or rather should start off) lusting after Aishwarya Rai or Bipasha Basu or whoever is the flavour of the day. After much struggle he realizes that the Ms. A. Rai or the Ms.B. Basu is out of his reach and downgrades to the Asin or Samiksha or whoever is the local babe. (An aside: I think what would put off a full blooded man from pursuing Aishwarya is not the threat of Salman’s muscles but rather the possibility of Vivek Oberoi’s effeminate “threats” over phone) He soon realizes that even they are out of his reach and now looks for the babe in his circuits. Even that is not so easy due to the “Hot Girls Date Only Losers” Theorem. Therefore, our wise and more importantly, horny hero settles for the policy of “Carpe Babeum” (Seize the Babe) and proposes to the first girl who laughs at his jokes and listens admiringly when he speaks of his tooth picking strategies.

Please do not mistake me. I do not intend any disrespect but I couldn’t help the sarcasm. And that sarcasm is because, I consider the “Boyfriend – Girlfriend” relationship as a strange one. For one, it is a loosely defined and predominantly convenience based relationship. If it were purely so, I wouldn’t have any problems. But for such a relationship the emphasis on fidelity is quite senseless. Due to this stress on fidelity, the relationship essentially is like a marriage without its main perk, the sex.

While the earlier part was quite frivolous, in the following lines I will talk about my idea of an ideal relationship. Put simply, the basis of the man woman relationship should be sexuality. But the problem is that sexuality encompasses many aspects namely, the attraction based on looks, intelligence, personality, fetishes etc. Therefore, it is highly probable that an individual (man AND woman) finds one partner inadequate. (Of course, if you are in a relationship and perfectly satisfied by it then you could be one of those one-in-a-million guys lucky enough to have found your dream partner. Alternately and more probably, your standards are too low.) Therefore, at least in the years before commitment, people would want to experiment in various kinds of relationships.

Therefore, in my “model” of the ideal relationship, we have at the core of the relationships, the “companion”. This “companion” is that someone with whom you connect and see a future with. But the future is distant and as far as today goes, the field has to be played and it is quite unsatisfying to settle for one person. Therefore, around this core you can build multi-dimensional relationship polygons. (Why settle for the old triangle when there exist polygons I say?). The aim is to experiment with various kinds of relationships. However, you have to work out an agreement with your companion wherein you agree to tell each other everything (a la Sartre and de Beauvoir) or choose not to say anything. The companion will also have his/her love polygon. Then each one explores relationships on his/her terms and after a certain number of years the both of them sit together and review the relationship.

Obviously there are many loopholes to such a proposition. The greatest problem is that of jealousy. It is for this reason that such an approach to relationships may not be suitable for everyone. Heck, in fact it will cause problems even to the most broad-minded. The next problem is the other partners in the loop may feel cheated, if they come to know, and this could lead to ugly situations. Therefore, the essential ingredients to such an arrangement are maturity and honesty. Another angle is marriage. Is such an arrangement feasible for marriages? I think not. I guess the willingness of two people to enter into marriage implies fidelity.

Despite all these safeguards, common sense suggests that such experiments, from an expectation point of view, are doomed to fail. Even a simple analysis of the situation indicates many emotional complications. Yet I wanted to articulate an alternative to the current trend of relationships, after all what are jobless thinkers for? ;-)

God as the Final Variable!

I guess this kind of a post will be skipped by the experiences reader simply because of the millions of theories floating about. Almost all self respecting bloggers would have given their version of God/Religion/Mortality. I normally refrain from talking about religion and the “higher things in life”. The reason for that is two fold. Firstly, my own philosophy is that, there is no point worrying about the questions of higher powers, destiny, fate and related terms, at this age (meaning eighteen to thirty). My attitude can be summed up by Kahlil Gibran’s beautiful verse:

Yesterday is dead,
Tomorrow is unborn,
If Today be sweet,
Why fret?

The second reason is a basic question of how to think about abstract terms like “God” and those associated with it like soul, duty, heaven, hell and so on, without getting caught in a web of semantic confusion. In fact a simple cause of confusion could be the practice of capitalizing the “God” and “Him”. My view on such terms is this: If you cannot define a term properly, you MUST NOT use it.

(A digression: I am aware that this view follows from the so-called “Picture Theory” put forward by the great and equally enigmatic German philosopher Wittgenstein in his seminal work, Thr Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus . The problem is, after great effort, I did find a copy of the TLP, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make much sense of it. So I shall continue with the idea which captivated me though, I am not even sure if that is the “Picture Theory” that Wittgenstein intended.

Second Digression: Do Google about Wittgenstein. In my opinion, Wittgenstein, Von Neumann, “Che” Guevara, Camus are the most charismatic thinkers in recent times.)

The problem with much religious discourse is that the key terms used are value loaded i.e they immediately conjure up an impression/value associated with them even though the author may not imply it. Another problem is that in many cases, multiple meanings are attached to each word and therefore, there is just too much scope for interpretation and misinterpretation by followers.

It is for these reasons therefore, that writing about these topics is loaded with pitfalls. But I shall nevertheless put forward my interpretation.

One of the most striking features about Hindu Philosophy is the multitude of theories of God which exists in its framework. On the one hand, we have works like which seek to establish this “God / Ultimate Being”’s supremacy in terms of physical characteristics or some special powers. For example, the Purusha Suktham talks about the Purusha or the Ultimate Being having a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and his presence encompassing the Earth and so on. On the other extreme, we have philosophies like Advaita and Dvaita which are extremely sophisticated and abstract apparatuses to understand the “Supreme Power”. The beautiful thing is all these approaches to understanding God are equally relevant. It is this multitude of approaches which has led to me to come to my own view of God.

Essentially, as human beings, we strive to understand the world around us and our own existence. There are two reasons for this. One is utilitarian, in the sense that it is in our interests to understand how the world works from a mechanistic, “How and Why Things Work” point of view. This desire is to a great extent satisfied by Science. But at the deepest levels even Science finds itself entangled in often paradoxical philosophical questions.

The other reason is purely aesthetic. Understanding how the various aspects of life interact leads to a sense of confidence and fulfillment. Most of the philosophical nuances belong to this category. From a day to day point of view, nothing more than a rudimentary philosophical model is necessary. Indeed, a person can climb to the very top of the industrial world without any refined understanding of philosophy.

Often the quest for knowledge arises due to a combination of these compulsions. Having started on a line of thought due to various reasons, one cannot draw the line and say, we will address certain questions because they are of aesthetic value and avoid other questions.

Therefore, I think we have convincingly established that the two main motivations to understand the world are utilitarian and aesthetic.
Having established why we need to understand the world, the next question is How do we go about doing it? We have tools like Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy and Language is the “currency”, the means to express concepts. Let us call these the “Tools of Thought”. So in effect, we try to understand the world through our senses and some tools we have developed. However, these tools of thought keep on developing and at any point of time there are many phenomena which we cannot explain with our current level. In those cases, we have no recourse but to attribute those phenomena to something beyond our understanding, something “miraculous”. That Unknown Entity to which we attribute phenomena we cannot understand is called as “God”.

To give an analogy, consider Regression analysis. Say, there is a variable y which we think is to be modeled as a function of u,v,w. So typically we would write it as:

y = a1*u + b1*v + c1*w

What if unknown to us there is some other variable we have not taken into consideration? Also, the coefficients a1, b1, c1 obtained by fitting historical data cannot forecast future data perfectly. There will be a deviation. In Regression analysis, to account for this an error term is included in the expression.

So;
y = a1*u + b1*v + c1*w + ε

To come back to our initial point, the world is what we try to explain through the tools of thought and in that endeavour we need the concept of God to play the function of the ε variable; A variable to explain all that cannot be explained by the Tools of Thought at that given point of time.

Please do not take this analogy literally. The term “Error Variable” may seem to trivialize the concept. What I am essentially saying is this:

The conception of God we have at a given point of time, is a reflection of what cannot be explained by the prevailing “Tools of Thought” at that point of time.
A Corollary of this idea is that the functions or the powers attributed to God should reduce once the Tools of Thought become more sophisticated.

In this framework of God as the Unknown Variable, the question of creation has no been addressed. My argument is that God is a man made invention so creation is merely a set of one-in-a-million occurrences which happened to occur period. An important fallout of such a view is the realization that different views of God are acceptable as long as the user can navigate his/her life. As a human being goes through the journey of life, his/her priorities change. The knowledge sophistication also changes. Therefore, it is very natural, in fact, very necessary that one’s conception to God changes. More importantly ideas related to God like morality, duty among others will and should change.

The next useful conclusion is that any work of religion should be viewed as literature, even if exceedingly brilliant. The crucial difference between literature and divine books is that, in literature you can reject the author's viewpoints without any feelings of guilt, in fact, you are encouraged to do so. However, refuting divine works always brings an inescapable feeling of guilt. This should be removed.

Re-reading this article I feel I have done some of the common mistakes that I started to debunk. Aaah! Maybe we shouldn’t even attempt to talk of these questions. Maybe you just realize the truth but language is insufficient to express it. Maybe!

A Thought

I feel that:
We are powerless creatures toiling under subconscious influences formed when we were very young, say before twelve years of age. Whatever we do is under the compulsions of those influences and eduaction only helps achieve those notions.

Rather vague. Let me elaborate. All of us have ideas of achievement, happiness, fulfilment, personal satisfaction and so on. We labour all our lives to achieve these. However, the seeds of these notions are laid at a time when we cannot even understand them, let alone regulate them.

To give a bad analogy but one that will serve the purpose nevertheless, it is like we are on a journey to oprimize some objective function, say happiness, success and so on. Education helps one achieve that maximum but the answer to the question of why different individuals have different objective functions lie in the environmental infleunces when they were say, less than ten years old.

Let me give two cases. Say, an individual went through financial difficulties in the first ten-fifteen years of his life, he/she will most probably conclude that money is God and nothing else matters in this world and devote himself to that pursuit.
Another individual growing up in an environment where the Mathematican uncle is the most admired person in the family would most likely want to end up as a mathematician.
Perhaps, both may have equal intelligence and both may get what they want, but the reason for these two individuals to chose these diverse paths will most strongly be influenced by those factors.

These are examples, and they are for illustration purposes only. I am not using them as arguments.

The first objection will come in the question of genius. Aren't geniuses in a sense independent of their environment? The few cases I can think of, it seems to be the case. So leaving individuals who are later pronounced as geniuses, I believe for the rest of us it is a matter of influences only.

If anyone is sufficiently provoked by this statement and/or jobless enough to retort, comments will be highly appreciated!