Shakespeare and Myths About Genius

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6. And a case in point: Good Will Hunting

I have lost count of the number of arguments I've had over the movie Good Will Hunting for this very reason. Being, as we are told with multiple sledgehammers, a genius, Will Hunting simply can't be wrong about anything. Despite the movie's grab for the heartstrings all I could ever see was the patent unrealism of this not very smart person's fantasy of what it must be like to be smart. A character who not only does Nobel-level maths on the blackboards after class is let out, but who in a fit of pique invades the library and spends a weekend studying the history section (a topic he's never shown the slightest interest in) just so he can humiliate his romantic rival by showing extraordinary knowledge of the field his rival has spent years studying. And let us not forget how Will whines aggressively to Robin Williams that nobody can understand how easy this all is for him, as if he spends his time pining for a problem that's actually difficult enough for him to need to think about it to solve.

I brought this up once on a tech discussion site with a lot of pretty smart people who proceeded to pile on and insist I was jealous because I couldn't understand what it was like to be such an extraordinary person myself. To which I replied, jealous of what? That's like being jealous of Superman, a fictional character who doesn't and can't possibly exist in the real world. Smart people are mortal too, and knowing a lot isn't the same at all as knowing everything. It's actually worse, because it is true that "the more you know, the more you know you don't know." Smart people are much more likely to understand their own limitations than, shall we say, less-smart people. That's part of the Dunning-Krueger effect.