How to find someone to be an intellectual mentor for them?

"For the life of the mind, I have a rare level of understanding of many things." If I were looking for an intellectual mentor, the statement above is the kind of thing I would want to hear about you *from someone else*, not from you yourself. Gently I will say, someone who makes public statements like that about himself raises red flags with me about self-importance and pompousness. I would be inclined to smile and nod and back slowly away.

And I will add this: after a lifetime spent in pursuit of knowledge (and I, sir, am no "rising star" in my field, having long since arrived with tenure at an Ivy League school) I have never met a true "genius" who was anything less than humble about her/his intellect and what s/he had to offer others. I've met plenty of arrogant, narcissistic young hotshots who think they are brilliant before they actually accomplish anything. I can spot the type a mile away, and I spot him now. Your very prose style tells me you are not the genius you profess to be, and I read papers all the time from truly brilliant students, so I know whereof I speak. You can spot brilliance in the first paragraph, and even in the sentence structure. You have given us every excuse in the book for why you either a) haven't actually accomplished anything significant in any intellectual field other than impressing (you say) your professors and (woohoo) your TAs at some second-rate school; or b) why your accomplishments are either so super secret or so impossible for us laypersons to understand that it would be pointless to explain them to us. You also have plenty of time to post to AskMe and write rambling questions and answers (and to go out partying, to judge from your other AskMe questions), but "the time factor" somehow prevents you from wasting your precious research time on an internet forum. Ah yes, your work is far too important for mankind to waste time on the internets . . . .huh? You are BSing someone, either yourself or us, or both. Now you want some young acolyte to look up longingly into your eyes while you dispense your pearls of insight that are simply too grand to be encompassed by the existing structure of disciplines and have utterly humiliated a "rising star" in your field with the inadequacy of his/her PhD training. You want to BS that prospective mentee as well, it sounds like. It definitely also sounds like you want to be a "mentor" to achieve further ego-stroking goodness, not because you actually want to help anyone do anything good. That's not really being a mentor. That's being a pig. So I will not believe you until you can point us to some confirmable accomplishments, sir. No 20-something college student is doing "super secret" research that no one else can know about unless he's/she's a physicist or biochemist working for the CDC or DOD. I don't detect even a whiff of scientific or philosophical literacy in this post or your previous posts. All I hear is you saying how smart you are -- how much smarter than other people, to be exact -- over and over again, and enjoining us to believe it for the sake of argument. You need a shrink who specializes in pathological narcissism, not an advisee. Or you need to grow up and learn that humility is the proper attitude before the vastness of human knowledge, and the even greater vastness of the unknown.

Note well:If I am to describe what an event my first glance at Schopenhauer's writings was for me, I must dwell for a moment on an idea which used to come to me in my youth more pressingly, and more frequently, than perhaps any other. When in those days I roved as I pleased through wishes of all kinds, I always believed that sometime fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself: I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. But should he who has a decided inclination to be a goldsmith for that reason be forcibly compelled to study music? Is one to agree that Benvenuto Cellini's was right continually to force him to play the "dear little horn"—"that accursed piping," as his son called it? In the case of such strong and definite talents one would not agree: so could it perhaps be that the maxim advocating a harmonious development should be applied only to more mediocre natures in which, though there may reside a categories of needs and inclinations, none of them amounts to very much taken individually? But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voices in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living center? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other that he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mold the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion. - Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator"Are you quite ready to accept this responsibility?

Frankly, "I'd like to help people become geniuses" sounds weird and slightly creepy. I'm not saying you are creepy, just providing a data point as to possible reactions. You might want to dial back on the Pygmalion complex and just enjoy whatever opportunities come along for opening people's minds. Your intentions are admirable, but you can't force that sort of thing.

Can one not imagine there's a humble person who has something to offer intellectually but cannot point to websites to prove it? Not if one uses the question to claim that one is so brilliant that there is no broaching the question of what you actually have to offer. I am not a "troll." I've been here a good deal longer than you, and have an extensive posting history. But I find people like you very annoying and deserving of being taken down a notch. One of my major hot buttons is people like you who trash the accomplishments of people like me and my students (who put in a good 5-7 years of serious hard work at starvation pay to accomplish something in their careers, unlike you) because academia is supposedly such a waste of time and energy that no one who is seriously good at anything would go into it. The "those who can't do, teach" and "bordello" comments that anti-intellectuals like you typically toss off as a way to dismiss academia (while simultaneously revealing a huge desire to participate in it that makes me wonder if you weren't simply turned down for funded graduate study at some earlier point) are so full of shit. I can do many, many things well, and have done many different things professionally. One of them is teach and "mentor," and it took me years of work and study to get the credentials and experience to claim that expertise. You just toss it aside as meaningless because you somehow are such a meta-disciplinary auto-didact that you can clearly see that all of us who labor in actual science, which tends to happen in academia among other places, are wasting our time and our lives chasing trivial truths. F**k you, too. I don't really believe most of your puffery about how you helped redesign courses and the like, but it's true I have no idea if you went to a second rate school other than by judging your thought processes and prose style (which I do for a living). As a professor, I can say with assurance that there's no way I'd let any undergraduate, not even Baby Einstein, "redesign" my course syllabus. That's either lazy or second rate. There are a lot of second rate people whose names are known. No one is asking for "websites," either. Tell us what you've published in print. Tell us what kind of experimental research you've done. Tell us a problem you've solved. The fact that you simply avoid answering, even in the most general terms, the question "what have you actually accomplished that entitles you to be a 'mentor' to someone else?" speaks for itself. You can't separate the question of "finding mentees" from the question of what on earth you have to "mentor" anyone in. Posting an ad on Craigslist sounds about right for you. You're really bound to find someone at about your level of ignorance that way, so bravo.

I still don't understand what genetics has to do with a Cartesian sense of self. So much for your "off the charts" level of "understanding, then. "Unitary Cartesian notion of the philosophical subject" is hardly "technical language," (vs. "substance dualism" and "property dualism," what did you do, google the question quickly?) either. Its a bit over-condensed, but anyone educated in Philosophy should know the approximate tradition being invoked. The questions of agency and the integrity of the "self" are among the major questions in modern social and philosophical thought. You just basically proved you have almost no acquaintance with these areas of inquiry. Give up, kid. If you did this in real life, you'd be outed as a phony immediately. You asked how to be a mentor. Nasreddin and I and others here have shown you, maybe in my case with a little more tough love than was necessary. Mentoring someone means, often, telling them truths about themselves they are reluctant to hear. You come across as a pompous, totally arrogant, lightly educated fake who is completely convinced of his own brilliance and is bound to make a major fool out of himself in the real world someday as a result. You also seem intelligent, you write decently (though not very well, just decently), and passionate. Those are good qualities that you could combine with a touch of humility and a little respect for people who actually have done the work you dismiss as irrelevant and trivial and who have earned the right and privilege of "mentoring" others in intellectual pursuits. Introspect, know thyself, and all that. You haven't fooled any of the professors on this thread, so your sense of your own intellectual power to slay PhDs with your insight is certainly inflated, given that the standards of evidence on an AskMe post don't even begin to approach those that apply in the classroom or in science more generally. I'm sorry I've been so hard on you. You still don't seem to really get it. You'll only dig yourself in deeper by pretending you can engage and impress highly educated people with your grasp of serious philosophical questions as an amateur with little but a college degree and some self-directed study. You need a mentor; you aren't ready to mentor anyone in these areas. I was serious, by the way, in suggesting you learn some important things by mentoring a child in trouble. There is somewhere your experience, age, and education would appropriately make you a potential mentor, someone who could change someone else's life by showing the value of cultivating the mind. But don't pretend you're a professor. Go out and become one. Just leave the attitude at the door of whatever grad school program you eventually choose if you do. Good luck to you. You want one more piece of advice? Don't listen to fakers like Tony Robbins. You can't will yourself to be successful if there is development of a core of competence, skill, or creativity in your work. Attitude does not trump substance in the real world; only in the fantasy world of motivational speakers who take your money to tell you the most obvious things as if they were profound. You've picked up the habit yourself, and its unbecoming a real intellectual.

Ah, on reviewing your posting history I see where it comes from. You are an acolyte of the Tony Robbins school of self-actualization narcissistic self-regard. There will be no arguing with you, as you will have (as you have had) a snappy rationalizing comeback for every possible criticism anyone could offer. What you want to be is a *motivational speaker,* not a mentor. That way you can have all the benefits of mentorship while imparting only empty truisms masquerading as "the truth" (as you keep calling it. It's a good business because a sucker is born every minute, and you yourself are exhibit A for that. So, from the perspective of someone who actually does mentor many people (I've trained about 20 PhD students so far), let me just conclude by saying this. Great intellectual achievements are almost never made by generalists. They are made by solving specific problems, framed (always) in disciplinary contexts in which questions can be reduced to answerable queries subject to hypothetic-deductive reasoning. Generalists often compliment themselves, as you do, on their meta-grasp of a range of disciplines. Unfortunately, they are rarely masters of any one discipline. You've got it backwards. You must accomplish something determinate within a disciplinary context (and I don't mean just academic "disciplines," since fixing engines -- diesel, gasoline, nuclear? -- is a field with disciplines quite as much as academic inquiry) -- before you can claim the generalist overview you say you already possess. No one who actually has mastered a particular discipline will take you seriously otherwise, and anyone who does will find themselves seriously disappointed when they take what they have learned from your "mentorship" into the real world in which practical forms of mastery are the coin of the reputational realm. Done. Deletions expected, but this had to be said.

Based on personal experience, I'd suggest you've got this reversed; you don't find someone, they find you. For example, at the bank I'm employed by I write financial market commentary. It's not part of my mainstream job duties, but I do it anyway. And it's not the usual type of invest here / disinvest there type of research, rather I have the latitude to write about things I find interesting (e.g., a recent paper looked at "The January Effect", a well known positive correlation of the equity markets annual performance with January's performance); this paper was a follow up to an earlier article I wrote in January 2007. I've been doing this for years, at multiple institutions and my point is over time folks have approached me with ideas, questions or for advise. These activities have even led to me being quoted in mainstream media such as Business Week (upcoming US housing collapse, 'Toxic Mortgages', September 2006). So it seems if you get your ideas out there somehow, let people know what you're thinking about and generally engage them you'd find the opportunity to mentor. Another idea: I also teach finance part time at a University in London and this forum, naturally, puts me into a position where students approach me for career (and at times personal!) advise. I'm not sure if this is an option for you, but it would naturally lead to the type of role you seek.

I am interested in how genetics affects the idea of the unitary Cartesian self? Biologically, it seems neuroscience would be a be better way to look at it, and it would show it's not viable. And I don't know what you mean by that being good or bad either. Drivel. Total tautological mess. What is the "it" anyway, here? The unitary Cartesian self? Sure, if you "look at it" biologically, one would want to approach consciousness as a neuroscientific problem, among other kinds of biological perspectives (evolutionary, for example -- ring any bells?). But what would it mean to show the "self" is "not viable" by "looking at it with neuroscience," and what does either have to do with the question of how *genetics* (presumably meaning what we know about the genetic constitution of the organism, phenotypically and genotypicaly) affects the "Cartesian self?" Nasreddin's question was pitched at the level of discourse, not biology. He asked how our new knowledge of the genetics of consciousness might disrupt our philosophical privileging of reason and consciousness. You respond with "neuroscience would be a better way to look at it." WTF are you talking about? This is not the writing of someone who "knows the truth." It's the writing of someone trying to sound smart and failing to do so. Because I could answer your questions, but if I did, I would want to answer a dozen others in different fields, to make clear I want to attract generalists. Then at that point it's hard to be anonymous and it becomes more of a project than I want to take on/ My dog ate my homework once too. I was about 12. It's beyond funny at this point, dude.