[HN Gopher] Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored ___________________________________________________________________ Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored Author : nahuel0x Score : 279 points Date : 2022-03-16 13:36 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (erikhoel.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (erikhoel.substack.com) | jleyank wrote: | Perhaps the Genius-creation-rate is the same as it always was, | but their marketing value has plummeted? Now, with people like | the Kardashians, various populist politicians, ... and the | general anti-science, anti-expert that seems to wander about the | internet, who looks for or listens to them? | | Money, fame (err, notoriety), clicks - this is what matters now. | Not sage discussion of physics, math or cosmology. Granted, very | very very few people have a 1905 moment but people still publish | and try to communicate. There are a number of effective, | relatively popular science communicators but man, they're just | lost in the noise. | mcguire wrote: | " _Here's a chart from Cold Takes' "Where's Today's Beethoven?" | Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) | and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total | human population with the education and access to contribute to | these fields)._ " | | _Headdesk._ | | "total human population with the education and access to | contribute to these fields" | | _Headdesk._ | skrebbel wrote: | You're not even trying to make an argument. | Yaina wrote: | What's distinctly lacking in this piece is a definition of a | genius. This article seems to define it to be an individual that | is globally lauded for their scientific/artistic achievements. | | I'm sure there is a plethora of reasons why this doesn't happen | anymore, it seems to me that this is a good thing, but it's no | reason to conclude that we don't have intelligent people anymore. | tpoacher wrote: | Not necessarily the point the article is making, but it remind me | of a quote I once heard, which I liked and jotted down. | | "There is often a mentality in the workplace that with | sufficiently detailed protocols and procedures, the village idiot | can perform theoretical physics just as well as Einstein. | | In fact, no amount of procedure will make that happen; quite the | contrary, all that procedure ensures is that if you ever do hire | Einstein, their output will closely resemble that of the village | idiot." | | Paraphrased from a slashdot comment, originally in the context of | agile programming | (https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12210032&cid=5675766...) | mtkhaos wrote: | This one one of those granular issues where there is no single | right answer. Given the forum, the best answer would be why has | our given technology been shaped to act as aristocratic tutors to | us all? | | Further, is there enough room for any given Einstein in this | dogmatic landscape? | ceejayoz wrote: | It maybe less about dogma and more about the size of the | remaining problems. A single Einstein can't go find the Higgs | boson; you need a multi-national consortium willing to build a | city-sized machine for it. | | You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the | telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single | contributor is capable of. | PaulHoule wrote: | One reason Einstein seems like such a genius was that this | happened in his lifetime | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment | | We have a much bigger physics community today but the closest | thing to the above happening are these two events | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons#Discovery | | and | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson#Dis. | .. | | with | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation#Observati. | .. | | as a distant third that has played out very slowly which is | attributed to a very strange theorist character | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo | | There is public fascination with Steven Hawking, but | Hawking's work has been confined to questions where the | answers are unobservable (what's inside a black hole? what do | you see in 1064 years when stellar origin black holes start | to pop?) | Atlas667 wrote: | It's liberalism that promotes this idea of individual merit. By | liberalism i mean philosophical liberalism that most of the | modern world has, be it in a conservative fashion, neo-liberal | fashion or the modern sense of liberal and all their flavors. | | The idea that people are "equal before the law and have | individual rights" does not mean people are equal. But media | keeps espousing this narrative to convince us that even rich | people are equal, thereby saying that if you do not reach this | level it is by your individual merit. It is the "humble" | philosophy of a world run by the rich and powerful. And that has | extended to anyone with success. | | And i like that, while this article does not consciously critique | liberalism, it still puts down its notions. | | The idea that there are magical people who do things with their | magic abilities makes talking about the material conditions of | our development almost impossible and inconsequential. Not to | take away from these genius' contributions, but to add to their | condition. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | That's got it backward. Among the tutored, the geniuses could | thrive. There were likely uncounted geniuses that spent their | short lives tilling fields. | beowulfey wrote: | Thomas Kuhn has a model for characterizing the stages of science. | One of these stages is the paradigm shift -- a completely new | framework to represent theory replaces an old one. I would | suspect that the major contributions of geniuses correlates with | paradigm shifts. | | It may be possible (albeit difficult) to quantify when paradigm | shifts have occurred in different fields over time. Perhaps that | can be used to roughly determine whether genius output has | decreased. | | My interpretation of this idea presented in the article is that | these days most paradigm shifts are smaller, but they happen more | frequently. So an individual brilliant person ends up having less | of an impact themselves, relative to someone in the past. No one | is individually remembered for being an incredible genius. But a | huge number of very brilliant people makes smaller but faster | incremental changes to science. | | This may also be happening in the arts, but I don't know if it | applies the same way. | alde wrote: | The article assumes there is an infinite linear pool of ideas | that we can take from. This is not the case. All-encompassing | models like general relativity, the standard model and quantum | mechanics can only be discovered once, same goes for music and | other old fields. Not to comment on minor errors in the article | like quoting Olaf Spengler instead of Oswald Spengler. | hans1729 wrote: | This is ridiculous. We're seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and | looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the | species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it | like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only | nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of | scientists just script up things in python. We have how many | million people who are able to code? I don't even care how | minuscule the odds are that ONE coder changes the world. The | numbers make it impossible for us to lose on all the fronts. Tech | is basically matured to the point where all the questions of the | 90s are now solved. Ad tech? Check. Search? Check. Mobile hq | video and photo beyond the 90s imagination? Check. The list goes | on. Computers ALREADY BEAT HUMANS AT GO, let that sink in. | | I don't even care how pessimistic you are - if you fail to see | how we are a) blooming right now and b) will continue to bloom | for the foreseeable future, the wording is exactly right: YOU | fail to see it. | | It's there. It's everywhere. The fact that you can read this | message, that I'm typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in | our bed, should be mind blowing. If you lost that sense of | wonder, maybe it's time to reconsider your models. | andrewclunn wrote: | People who think there are no new great minds are looking for | society to hand them socially approved "great minds." The thing | about great minds is that your mind has to be at least not | entirely eclipsed by them to recognize their greatness. | bitlax wrote: | https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 | | Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as | opposed to atoms. | bruce343434 wrote: | I can't tell if this is a parody and/or copypasta | | > that I'm typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our | bed, should be mind blowing | entropi wrote: | Agreed with all your points, except for this one: | | > b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future | | I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden | age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable | machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get | a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this | golden age going on more than 50 or so more years. | hans1729 wrote: | The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have _tons_ | of spare intellectual resources. I can 't imagine a world | where millions of people live in rich countries, who can | code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops | progressing. Of course the _system_ we 've built is | constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. | E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not | everything just gets better and better. | | But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, | far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to | come will change the face of the earth to a completely | unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is | absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea | levels notwithstanding. | Beltalowda wrote: | Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, | but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, | migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of | circumstances that are conducive to progress. | | Then there are many political reasons; the internal | politics of many western countries are kind of in a | stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps | working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's | a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front | as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried | about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest- | beating about Taiwan. | | Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets | compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not | make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot | less confident things will work out as easily as you say. | engineer_22 wrote: | _- >economic upheaval, migration, things like that._ | | What better motivation for a scientist to innovate than | the threat of starvation and violence? | hans1729 wrote: | >Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets | compromised then things will become very hard. | | I think of it differently: it already did. The old world | is already dead. It will just take a couple of | generations until that realization kicks in, or until the | consequences of that realization are implemented in our | cultures and systems. The political incentives in western | democracies are not aligned with the interests of the | following generations. The opposite is the case, current | politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. | I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. | But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I | think _exactly_ that 's what is conductive for progress. | | Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction | is essentially the product of people who hold on to | concepts of the world that have already lost their | meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth | listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. | But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born | before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost | exclusively people born before 1990. The number is | arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point. | TigeriusKirk wrote: | I just want to say it's incredibly refreshing to read | comments from someone looking at the big picture and | providing thoughtful optimism about where things are | headed. | | Thank you for your comments. | jacobr1 wrote: | The geopolitical situation in the 1800s and even the | first half of the 1900s was much more volatile than | today. Yet, industrialization caused massive changes. In | fact that was a big part of the feedbackloop for the | political instability. Neverless it certainly wasn't an | impediment to innovation and sometime even spurred it | (via war funding). I just don't buy that peace and social | stability enables progress, I'd argue the very opposite. | mehphp wrote: | Yes, thank you. I'm tired of the constant negativity. | derbOac wrote: | So, I basically agree with you that there's lots of progress to | be amazed by. I also think that the "genius" model is | fundamentally flawed, at least in today's age -- there's | something to be said for the possibility that education and | support systems have improved to the point where maybe geniuses | are everywhere. If anything I think we have too much of a | genius mythology, and maybe this paper is sort of inadvertently | pointing out that the Einsteins of the past were more about the | social structures they found themselves than their "genius" per | se. | | There is another argument to be made, though, that goes | something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are | basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. | Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in | place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is | just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat | on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's | something that basically just took a ton of engineering | refinements to get to. | | That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a | _ton_ of money thrown into things at the same time, far more | than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your | smartphone today? It 's pretty remarkable, the miniturization | involved, but how much money has been thrown at that? | | I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board | with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number | of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at | some level. | | Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be | _no_ progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a | strawman. It 's not really what these pieces are arguing. What | they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 | or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable | scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just | engineering the hell out of those advancements since then. | | Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these | sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind | their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't | see it. | spupe wrote: | That's a good way to look at it, I think. It is fair to the | article's intent. But there are two counterpoints to this | line of thought: | | 1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than | science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into | consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon | landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather | than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed | our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than | writing essays or doing other abstract work. | | 2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot | of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the | AI research we are developing in order to perform face | recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is | simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a | single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not | underestimate how significant they were. | flavius29663 wrote: | People keep saying how fast flight evolved, such that a person | was alive both for Wright brothers and landing on the Moon. | | We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a | lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch | cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world | knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free! | brimble wrote: | > We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, | with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and | punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world | knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free! | | I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) | for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the | Web's history, and that what's available online is still | really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of | the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is | _horribly_ poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of | why I 'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as- | meaningful-progress thing. | | A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as | in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic | paper _piracy_ website. A half-decent academic library still | crushes the Web, and it 's not even a close contest, if you | only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. | This _should not_ be the case, but it is. | | We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise | squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic | incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely | secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and | computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as | far as I can tell, _badly_ under-explored, without much sign | of improving soon. | | We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means | edutainment-heavy _curricula_ (plural) by now, so engaging it | 's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. | Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since | back when I was its target audience. We have institutions | that could push these uses, open interoperability between | platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful | way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good | attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and | collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind | of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments-- | gee, wouldn't _any_ amount of serious work on that front have | been _hugely_ helpful in the last couple years?). The best we | have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing | but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and | multiple choice tests. There 's Youtube, but little of even | the best material there's good for actual learning versus the | _illusion_ of having learned, and some of the best of it 's | just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, | but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the | capability we have now? | | "VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, | I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use | that to anything resembling its real potential when we | haven't with _gestures about_ this? | throwawayozy wrote: | I disagree. | | The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is | shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had | in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and | unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. | I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part | of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": | because your perception of things is not rooted in anything | more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the | world at large. | | If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self- | deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for | themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for | grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even | out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, | once again the incentives for most science is not love of | truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) | it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than | organized religion has in the past. | | Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us? | | The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually | useful, and not simply a distraction from reality? | | Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to | magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly | ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I | don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they | done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify | certain things -- while neglecting the rest? | | Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that | can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies | -- to what end? | | We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not | be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his | innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and | we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask | ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For | Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 | years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things | you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we | have been so foolish). | | It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without | painting one's emotional state over it. | cushychicken wrote: | Yeah, I knew this article wasn't for me when I read the first | sentence. | | Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. | It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - | which makes its findings harder to disseminate. | jjulius wrote: | I don't wholly disagree with your overall point, but I'm not | entirely onboard, either. I feel like, as someone else | mentioned, you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" | (read: genius) a bit too much. I also think that you're too | narrowly focused on innovations within tech, while genius can | occur in countless other fields and the article itself doesn't | even keep it's focus on "genius" so narrow. | | >... all the questions of the 90s are now solved. | | This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually | think this is true. | | >Ad tech? Check. | | Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, | as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. | Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will | really propel us forward as a civilization. | hans1729 wrote: | >you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: | genius) a bit too much | | you're right to step over this, my point was directed at | broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's | because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. | And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...]. | | Point being: you can only find out about general and special | relativity once. After that, every following genius would | have to make a dent of the same proportions _relative to the | now-already-made discoveries_. We 're just too far down the | line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that | there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have | the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs | as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just | won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population | as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who | works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated. | | >This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you | actually think this is true. | | Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that | we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at | least made significant progress. Excuse the wording. | | >Ah, yes! Advertising technology! | | Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. | Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your | audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use | this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time- | local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made | along the way. | glhaynes wrote: | >>Ah, yes! Advertising technology! | | >Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. | Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your | audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use | this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time- | local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made | along the way. | | One of the most significant applications of Einstein's work | was to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese | civilians. | mschuster91 wrote: | The problem is, we could be doing _so much better_ as a | species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working | in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the | masses. | | Not to mention that the government and the military have all | but scrapped their research programs - a _lot_ of the progress | of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably | the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX | and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to | progress. | | This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of | everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money | to improve the lives of everyone. | AlgorithmicTime wrote: | tastyfreeze wrote: | Government research is for breaking ground that is too costly | for the private sector or doesn't have a financial pay off. | After the private sector steps in government should move on | to new frontiers. | | Taxing billionaires will not solve anything. It is just a | shoe in the door for more taxes for you. No matter what the | government gets in taxes it will never be enough to satiate | the desire to spend other people's money. Just remember, | anything that is applied to billionaires also will be applied | to you. After all, we are all equals. | rustybolt wrote: | > The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a | species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working | in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the | masses. | | So what _does_ create real progress to the masses? | mschuster91 wrote: | A clear vision of a target. That worked for the removal of | lead, for the combat of acid rain and for the ban of CFC | gases, and right now many European cities are piloting the | vision of a "car free city" with astonishing results. | candiddevmike wrote: | Crisis (recently lead to the general availability of mRNA | treatments) and war (starlink recently showed how easy it | is to reconnect a country during wartime) | beiller wrote: | Keep in mind some of the best and brightest minds in the | past, some cutting edge medical experts, were highly paid to | perform lobotomies. And that is just one example. I was | reading recently about cutting edge "medicine" back in the | day, that was literally just radioactive water made from | radium. Killed lots of rich people because of how expensive | it was as a treatment. | hans1729 wrote: | Let me offer a diverging perspective: | | >we could be doing so much better as a species | | ...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world | (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would | predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are | not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this | status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, | and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the | evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and | meaningless in the greater scheme. | | If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, | give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad | because in a theoretical instance of our world things could | be better, won't close the delta between our is and your | ought. | | >We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion | dollars | | this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core | problems are derived from an unfair distribution of | resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I | would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly | the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as | a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try | to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. | Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more | you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, | and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers! | bairrd wrote: | "I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats | truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back | that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems | that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of | scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in | potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, | not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging | with your heart and blinding your brain to | political/financial realities that are capital H Hard | problems? | hans1729 wrote: | >Can you back that claim up? | | Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally | change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of | resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal | systems design. People don't know how to have | conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to | dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to | have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education | systems), leading to an open and actually progressive | culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich | countries, we have more than enough resources to be able | to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. | Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's | billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you | truly convinced that the world would be a better place? | 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the | distribution? How? | | The resource-distribution problem is only the core | problem when the majority of people actually lack | resources. My impression is a different one - everyone | wants _more_ , regardless of if they have enough. _That_ | , according to my model of the world, is our core | problem. We're building a culture of material greed and | constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding | insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just | point at billionaires and claim that they are the _root_ | problem. | | Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is | disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But | I don't see how someone being able to fund a space | company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is | the problem when the vast majority of people have food on | their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be | happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, | maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely | are, either. | slibhb wrote: | The private sector taking the lead in space exploration is | healthy. The government should be involved when it needs to | be. That was the case in the past but isn't any longer. | humanistbot wrote: | You're absolutely right, although on a completely different | topic: I'd argue that most of the things you mentioned might | not be good for society, especially when combined with the view | that most technological development takes place in publicly | traded companies whose primary obligation is to maximize | quarterly profits. I guess it is innovation when a personalized | recommender system is able to pick exactly the right conspiracy | video to HD stream to someone's phone that will get them to | keep watching videos on an ad-supported platform. But not | exactly society "blooming" in my view. | | Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation | destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference | hans1729 wrote: | fwiw, that's a very time-local judgement of the progress we | made. Objectively, as a species, we solved inter- | connectivity, high quality media, etc. - the fact that we | _currently_ live in a culture where these means are | distributed in the name of wealth will simply be meaningless | a couple hundred years down the line. | engineer_22 wrote: | Maybe I'm lacking some nuance here. Are you saying humans | will become less greedy in the next couple hundred years? | | Edit:. Appreciate you for putting your opinions out in open | air. | hyperbovine wrote: | > Objectively, as a species, we solved inter-connectivity, | high quality media, etc. | | I do not think that is an objective statement at all. I | think one could just as readily make a highly data- | supported argument that never in history have we been more | factionalized or inundated with low-quality media than in | the current moment. | forum_ghost wrote: | why? status, hierarchy, etc, will be genetically edited out | to turn our species into a faceless mass of obedient | drones, ruled by the selected few? | | I see simply no other way out of very deeply the | status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our | species. | hans1729 wrote: | Because the feedback-loops that allow for notions as | isolated material wealth will lose traction (or at least | that's what I estimate will happen). Where do you think | automation will lead us over the course of ten | generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? | After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to | contribute to society anymore via jobs, how will this | change the perspective on work/wealth/etc as a whole? Now | add another five generations after we reached that point, | just to get rid of some friction of people holding on the | the past. | | The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a | partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect | _any_ continuous level of progress in our problem-domains | (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time | until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, | there is an active _demand_ for inequality. People want | to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be | poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will | continue to change in our favor - maybe forever. | | I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our | species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some | middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant | factor over the long run. | kenjackson wrote: | But the comparison point helped invent the atomic bomb. It's | done some arguably done some good, it also has some clear | downsides. | JackFr wrote: | > that will get them to keep watching videos on an ad- | supported platform | | Eventually the ads have to be for something. | Victerius wrote: | Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last | technological breakthrough was the smartphone. | | We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more | than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud | City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms | (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and | using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of | cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life | expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass | produced technology or consumer products using graphene. | | We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier | looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and | video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > We still don't have space stations that can accommodate | more than a half dozen people. We don't have Moon colonies. | We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on | spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still | don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No | anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No | $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer | products using graphene. | | All of these statements apply to Einstein's era as well. | | We do, however, as of the past ten years or so have reuseable | rockets (non trivial), inexpensive virtual reality goggles, | mRNA vaccines, bioreactor grown meat, on demand access to an | enormous quantity of humanity's artistic creations at any | time, nearly-out-of uncanny valley digital human replicas, | self driving cars with a low probability of killing you | getting from point A to point B, and, yes, some really cool | video games. | forum_ghost wrote: | some cancers are curable with 95% success rate, but then | again cancer is really more of an umbrella term, not a | specific disease. | | we do have physics of warp-drives somewhat figured out, but | engineering remains a challenge. there are some warp fields | experiments going on. if were to apply your metric, GPS was | invented in 1915, by Einstein. | michaelscott wrote: | > We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier | looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and | video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great. | | Damn.. I'm not sure what more you are wanting given the | amount of time that has passed? You wanted humanity to go | from its first flight and engine-powered vehicle to warp | drives, cured cancer and Moon colonies in less than 200 | years? | Victerius wrote: | Yes. | evocatus wrote: | The smartphone, fucking really? | | No mention of CRISPR-Cas9, the explosion of deep learning and | "AI," the James Webb Space Telescope, detection of | gravitational waves...? | | My god. Are people really that myopically spellbound by | computing these days? | xoserr wrote: | We aren't innovating like we use to and it isn't even close. | We are just such a histrionically ignorant society that has | lowered the bar on innovation so we can pretend that we are a | society innovating at lighting speed. | | The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was | yesterday. | | 1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, | motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity.. | | We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are | clueless. | exdsq wrote: | Is it possible that you don't appreciate the great | innovations of the last decade, but looking back there will | be just as many as the 1900-1910s? | betwixthewires wrote: | The ability for mitumba in a village outside of Nairobi to | whip out a little device in his pocket and learn anything | his mind can conjure up a desire to learn and speak with | any human being on the earth they'd like is not a small | development compared to air conditioning, airplanes and | plastics. And it's not an abstract academic example, a few | weeks ago I video chatted with a real Masai warrior who | I've never met, because my friend was casually catching up | with family overseas. | | And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 | years between first powered flight and men stepping on the | moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds | information are going to do things with their minds that | you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in | novel ways and nobody can stop them. | pharke wrote: | The smart phone doesn't even belong in the same category as | the others you listed. The digital computer certainly does | but it's been 80 years since that occurred. The smartphone | is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap. | Practically everything people are listing here falls in the | category of refinement of existing technology rather than a | completely novel form of technology. That is the scary and | correct assertion of the article, we've almost completely | stopped discovering or inventing novel technology or at | least the rate of discovery has slowed to the point where | 100 years of our present progress is equal to 10 years of | the previous. | jaegerpicker wrote: | That's ridiculous, the smartphone has changed society far | more than desktop's or really any form of computer that | exists. Vast numbers of people only access the internet | via a smart phone. Doctor's visits across the globe, | remote working from wherever you are, hand held GPS and | maps, access to countless hours of entertainment, etc.... | ceejayoz wrote: | > The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic | technological leap. | | There's very little that isn't. | | Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old | technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of | little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of | throwing things. | | Any definition of innovation that doesn't include | smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear | they were novel and massively impactful on society. | jaegerpicker wrote: | In the last 15 years we got reusable rockets, mRNA | vaccines, Crispr, workable quantum computers, AI capable of | beating us at Go, and many other numerous breakthroughs. | Sure 1900-1910 meaningfully changed the world but the bar | form the 1800's was dramatically lower than the 2000-2010 | bar from the 1900's. Ironic that such a ignorant comment | laments societies ignorance. | ceejayoz wrote: | > The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. | | That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How | often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to | occur? | | Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. | Is there a _need_ for cloned humans? What huge societal | improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product | with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, | powerful batteries not? | Victerius wrote: | > kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? | | Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving | women from the pain of childbirth. | | Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow | people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone | himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his | businesses after him. | | > What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? | | Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they? | | > Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but | the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not? | | Life is graphene. It's fantastic. | mardifoufs wrote: | We could almost certainly get to human cloning very fast; | the technology isn't really the botttleneck. It's just | that no one does it and for very good reasons. The only | way human cloning could be useful and help "solve" any | problem would also involve going back to chatel slavery. | Why would any research go towards that? | | It's not like star wars, human clones would still be | human. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > A. Clone. Army. | | So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the | army? | | > Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow | people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone | himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his | businesses after him. | | He could also do this with his children? | kenjackson wrote: | Also ignores things like electric vehicles at scale | (battery and charging tech), mRNA vaccines, blockchain, OCD | treatment, DNNs, cable television (I think some of the best | works of art are TV series now). | dtech wrote: | > The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. | | Indeed, already 15 years ago. Hurry up slackers, I want an | innovation that literally changes our whole lives every | decade please | ramesh31 wrote: | >This is ridiculous. We're seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and | looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the | species makes it far enough to look back, that is). | | Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally | occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius | operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make | that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and | they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look | what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you | get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" | until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes | sense". | [deleted] | fullshark wrote: | Not to get political but people don't care when they can't | afford a house, and their kids' future doesn't appear to be | brighter as their town is shrinking + all future jobs will be | low paying service/technician jobs unless you are working on | building these new technologies. | syshum wrote: | Where is my Flying Car, Where is my Space Tourism, Where is my | Space Colony, Where is my Underwater Colony, Where is my Cheap | Plentiful Environmentally friendly Energy Generation / Storage | | it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current | technology, but we have not created new technology in a long | time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is | just iteration of the same design.. | | We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations | / improvements on the same old, same old | tastyfreeze wrote: | Prior to the invention of telegraph and rail Thomas Jefferson | lamented the fact that transport and communication were so | slow. Modes of transportation and communication hadn't | changed in centuries. Technological progress had seemed to | slow to a crawl. Shortly after his death, telegraph and rail | were invented and technological progress boomed. Technology | is constantly refined slowly for long periods of time. Then | there is a new discovery and everything changes rapidly. I | believe we are on the precipice of such a boom. ReBCO high | temperature super conductors were invented in the 80s and | reached manufacturable maturity in 2010. Anything that uses | powerful electro magnets is just starting the process of | being made more powerful and cheaper. This invention is why | there is a sudden interest in commercial fusion. I have seen | recent papers calculating upgrades to MRI that will make them | more powerful, cheaper to build and run. I already feel the | future of my childhood has arrived. I am very excided for the | technology we will see in the next couple decades. | | PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read | Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations | of slow progress. | | PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great | technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient | and lighter machines that were not possible before. | JackFr wrote: | You got communicators and tricorders instead. You're welcome. | drewcoo wrote: | If we live in an age when we're all outlier Einsteins, then | none of us are outlier Einsteins. | snarf21 wrote: | Agreed, this article's premise is nonsense, while well written | with some interesting history. The geniuses are making things | that are now so common place that we've lost our wonder. | Nanometer computer chips? That sounds like genius to me. | Editing the human genome with CRISPR (et.al.)? That sounds like | genius to me. It is true that some of our smartest minds are | now focused on ads and exploiting complex derivatives but we | also rolled out a vaccine to a world of billions in 9 months. | There is plenty of genius, but the bar is higher and the easy | things are done. This author seems to miss the genius required | to let me watch live streamed video from the other side of the | world on a watch as I "drive" 70 mph down the highway while the | car keeps me in my lane if I stop paying attention. | shubb wrote: | One really major innovation is that we have developed the | capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and | are just - with the big data revolution - developing the | capability to understand these data volumes and translate them | into findings. | | Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of | labs, with little communication between countries - there are | now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every | developed country doing research. And that research uses | machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. | | And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data | together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is | greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding | are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a | new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting | from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered | bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between | fields that it rarely happens. Yet. | | What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in | AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to | give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be | another tidal wave of innovation. | JackFr wrote: | > Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small | number of labs, with little communication between countries - | there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs | in every developed country doing research. And that research | uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high | speed. | | And the median value of that reasearch is zero. | | There is literally too much research being done. Because of | perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are | a fair number of results that are not useful along with some | which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the | bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable | impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the | species. | ModernMech wrote: | You're mistaken, I think, because one of your assumptions | is not necessarily true - that wrong/useless results are a | bad thing and slowing us down. | | First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to | remember that literally the best results science have to | offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in | the past. What science produces are models of reality, and | while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality | they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. | So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because | then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead | of going down this path, we can instead be content that | some research is wrong, because the scientific process is | one of continually refining those results. Also, we note | that despite everything literally being wrong, society, | technology, and engineering still make progress. Being | wrong does not mean being useless. | | Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The | thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and | it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is | useful in one era is completely useless in another. For | example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of | big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could | make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no | one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was | brand new. Should that research not have been done until it | was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How | then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a | research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then | it wouldn't be research, would it? | | So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of | research with the intent that it would increase the sum | total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you: | | 1) identify the bottom half of research before it's | conducted | | 2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, | and how do you intended to squelch useless research while | allowing useful research to persist unimpeded | | 3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" | research | | 4) fund useful research while passing over useless research | | I think the answer to those questions would basically | involve re-inventing the scientific process. | | I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn | out to be useless at least has the positive value of | showing how something isn't to be done. This has the | positive result of allowing someone else to try a different | method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to | unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the | latter without the former. | JackFr wrote: | > Being wrong does not mean being useless. | | I understand what you're trying to say -- yes Newton was | wrong and now we have refined Newton with Einstein. But | Ptolemy was wrong, and we have not refined Ptolemy with | Gallileo, we threw Ptolemy out. | | As an example, the original power pose study has never | been replicated. The idea that posing in a specific way | led to a neuro-endocrine response was simply wrong. And | yet it got cited many times. One of the the original | authors disavowed it, the other continued promoting it, | but now with a much weaker claim. Is it science? Or is it | a waste of resources? | | I think much of the research I'm deriding is actually | pretty good thinking. Published as essays or thought | experiments I think a lot of it would have value. But | because of a perverse demand for publications, any good | idea has to have prior work, p-values and if you can get | a grant and fMRI slapped onto it. | shubb wrote: | There is def an element of this. Replicability, perverse | incentives, bad scientific cultures in specific fields, and | all sorts of problems mean a lot of bad or pointless | research is done. | | It is very hard to say with basic research, what is | pointless. For instance, there is little application for | bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the | other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked | kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about | subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers | or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So | hard to value. | | But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out | how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only | becomes valuable once we can do that. | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | Is the blooming you refer to helping humans and making them | healthier and happier though? Or smarter? For the average | person in the USA that I encounter it seems like the answer to | smarter is a resounding no. And this seems to correspond with | the rise of social media in the timeline in my head. Human | intelligence doesn't evolve lower in such a short time period, | but the knowledge in that head varies greatly with what you put | in it. | beardedetim wrote: | I think we're seeing _many_ people's health be raised in the | past ~30yrs. Maybe not Americans/Western Europeans but I | would venture to guess that _most_ people are now living | _healthier_ lives than they were 30 years ago _globally_. | | For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and | intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not | Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our | education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I | think so! | | Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now. | t_mann wrote: | fwiw, I happen to know that there are companies specializing in | finding these sort of tutors today (well rounded in the arts and | sciences, ideally multilingual, can regularly spend with kids for | longer time periods, be a sort of 'role model'...). I don't know | what it would cost to use them, but I can imagine... | makz wrote: | Works for fictional characters as well, like Goku who is a genius | martial artist. | jyounker wrote: | The author hasn't spent much time looking for counter-examples: | | * Paul Shannon * Paul Erdos * Donald Knuth * Richard Feynman * | Harper Lee * Iain Banks * Leonard Bernstein | | And I think you can go on-and-on. | r-zip wrote: | Claude Shannon* | huetius wrote: | I humbly submit Einstein's own words: "The perfection of means | and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem." | | The author rightly identifies the educational impotence of our | society as a major problem, but his inability to address it as | anything other than a question of technique leaves the problem | unperturbed. | defgeneric wrote: | The quality of this thread is really disappointing. | Conservatively, about 80% of the replies, criticisms, | suggestions, re-framings, here are addressed in the article by | the author. About 20% of the replies here are responding to the | title alone (and therefore focused on Einstein/progress in hard | science). | | The piece is about the kind of education the children of the | aristocracy received and how it has disappeared entirely. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | _Has_ it disappeared entirely? "The children of the | aristocracy" were very few. Do a few people receive that kind | of education today? Elon Musk's children? Bill Gates' children? | Some Saudi prince's children? | | Note also that some of the people were "tutored" by their | parents; homeschooling today could fill the same role. | | And, | | > So, where are all the Einsteins? | | > The answer must lie in education somewhere. | | That's a _really_ glib dismissal of all other possible reasons, | with almost no factual reason (or even argument) behind it. | gwern wrote: | Musk's kids don't. There's been some reporting on it. They go | to 'Synthesis School'/'Ad Astra School'/'Astra Nova'. It | seems vaguely like STEM Montessori in attitude from what I've | read. Relatively small student:staff ratio, but doesn't | appear to be anywhere close to a 1:1 ratio which is what | tutoring is. I haven't seen any mentions of supplementary | tutoring either. | | (I can't think of any tech titans whose kids do receive | exclusively tutoring either, instead of being sent to the | local Palo Alto schools or private schools or something | relatively middle-class.) | mcguire wrote: | I'm not particularly impressed with the quality of the article. | The first question that comes to my mind that the article | doesn't address is, how many geniuses did humanity miss because | education was very, very limited. Second thought: history shows | that the vast majority of aristocratically tutored students | were very much not geniuses; this article is full of cherry- | picking. | | Third, there's the "Where's Todays Beethoven" chart, " _Below, | we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and | artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total | human population with the education and access to contribute to | these fields)._ " | | Note: "with the education and access to contribute to these | fields". If you increase the denominator by many orders of | magnitude, no matter what the numerator is the result will | probably go down. | | " _Tutoring, one-on-one instruction, dramatically improves | student's abilities and scores. In education research this | effect is sometimes called "Bloom's 2-sigma problem" because in | the 1980s the researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored | students '. . performed two standard deviations better than | students who learn via conventional instructional methods--that | is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students | in the control class."'_" | | The 2-sigma problem points to | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem which | has, | | " _Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one | using mastery learning techniques performed two standard | deviations better than students who learn via conventional | instructional methods--that is, "the average tutored student | was above 98% of the students in the control class"._" | | The "mastery learning" method " _is an instructional strategy | and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin | Bloom in 1968._ " | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning), so there's | that. (I'm a cynic; "my way produces much better results" with | no further data tends to inspire distrust.) | | " _Consider the easy nature by which Darwin, at the age of only | 16 and already in university,..._ " | | And what proportion of university students were younger than 17 | in the 1820s? | | " _Indeed, it's remarkable how common aristocratic tutors were. | Essentially universal._ " | | One might suspect that where and when there is no more modern | educational system that tutors would, in fact, be the only way | to get any education. | | One further note: the US pays roughly $15,000 per student per | year as it is. Are you willing to work a full-time job for less | than $30,000 per year? How's your Greek and Latin? Math? | Science? Literature? (Assumptions: 2 half-time students per | tutor. Some overhead will be necessary for the tutors.) | adamisom wrote: | A two-sigma effect is mind blowing. You can say that makes it | more suspect but the magnitude of the claim must be | emphasized, that's just so frickin high of an effect size. | (Personally I assume the claim is at least mostly true: how | could full-time, good tutoring _not_ be incredibly better?) | humanistbot wrote: | I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped | making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" | issue. With the benefit of hindsight, we only remember the greats | (and the very worst villains) from past eras. While if we look | around today, we see all the people who will never make it into | the history books, just like we see all the songs and movies that | will never become "classics." | | Edit: And yes, the internet has brought about immense and | immeasurable benefits to science and innovation. It can both be | true that most people on Facebook are dunces and getting dumber | because of Facebook, and that there has been massive developments | in research and development that would not have happened without | the internet. | alfor wrote: | The problem is that there's not much control group. | | My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of | school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow. | | School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to | teach kids. | ViViDboarder wrote: | > School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really | to teach kids. | | That probably depends on each persons means to teach their | own children. | kosasbest wrote: | > While if we look around today, we see all the people who will | never make it into the history books | | I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market | themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with | genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or | other means, then you fade into the background. | | Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at | social interaction and can't be a 'Youtuber' or 'influencer' so | easily. | toyg wrote: | It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the | scale of the planet. | | Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were | officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became | about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All | these channels were very limited, so just by getting there | one could ensure they had a position among the officially | recognised elite. | | Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of | channels, from all over the planet, unloading talent in any | discipline 24/7. You can market the hell out of yourself and | the world can still decide they are too busy caring about | Korean singers and African memes. | | Which really is the beef I have with this article: genius is | not recognised anymore because now we are a global village of | billions, rather than an elite of a few hundreds of | thousands, and we consume all sorts of radically different | media rather than a handful of shared sources. So we simply | don't agree on what is "genius" anymore, at a societal level; | geniuses do their work in smaller groups, where they get some | recognition, and that's it. | atq2119 wrote: | > Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of | channels | | I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean | _figuratively_ or you 're wrong. | | The more important part: what about the cited evidence | that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" | _does_ make a difference in achievement? | toyg wrote: | For all practical purposes, it is _literally_ infinite. | You won 't be able to go through the entirety of YouTube | in a single lifetime, _and that 's just one channel_ of | distributed knowledge. And new channels appear every day, | somewhere on the global network. The firehose will never | stop, the network is effectively an infinite source of | content. | | _> what about the cited evidence that, correcting for | other factors_ | | I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" | can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to | resources, networking chances, _free time_ etc etc, the | aristocrats of the past would have been effectively | unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could | have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a | couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the | rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a | minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose | opinion determined everybody else 's view of them, | effectively unchallenged. | ozim wrote: | So survivorship bias. | | Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 | than it is now. | | Not saying that general relativity is well understood by | general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on | E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people | could not wrap their heads around. | | Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because | what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves | up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more | things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the | level where mediocre people were before. | | We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much | smarter than average Joe 100 years ago. | | And we should strive to move forward with that. | [deleted] | barrkel wrote: | That idea is countered right in the quoted passage by Tanner | Greer. | | In the past, it was obvious who was genius, even a few years | after people died. Now, it's less clear. | itslennysfault wrote: | This is addressed early on in the article. Maybe one of the | problems with lack of genius is that we don't actually read | anymore. Ponder that! Spengler began writing | Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead | when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years | deceased. But Spengler could state, with the full expectation | that his audience would not question him, that these men | belonged in global pantheon of humanity's greatest figures. | kixiQu wrote: | I don't believe it's addressed _well_. Many from different | intellectual lineages were then hailed whom we 'd not | recognize today. Many of the pseudo-quantitative takes | pointed to are pretty ... flimsy. ("I couldn't find a list | with both Kanye and Beethoven on it, so I made up my own!") | gmadsen wrote: | not only "geniuses", I'm sure the widespread reduction in | reading in the general population has had significant affects | across all aspects of society | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | do you have evidence for your claim? everything I can find | suggests that literacy is about as high as ever, as are | book sales. | waserwill wrote: | I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but | I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading | quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, | but the quantity of books sold says little about their | quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make | make profit rather than spreading good literature, and | this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of | unread books on my shelf, buying a book doesn't mean | reading it. There is an aesthetic appeal to books, and | though I want to read all I own, there will inevitably be | books printed and sold but unread. | | There are high literacy rates, but this says little about | whether material has been grasped and digested. | References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, | Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts | (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. | Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew | from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is | surprising. | pas wrote: | > While if we look around today, we see all the people who will | never make it into the history books | | because it's simply extremely cheap to create stuff. so we have | a glut of stuff. | | because nowadays everyone can buy an instrument and take a few | classes, and put it on youtube. and since there's enormous | demand for novelty, and there's a lot of styles, niches that | producers/creators can fill, quality isn't really a singular | thing anymore. | | > just like we see all the songs and movies that will never | become "classics." | | well, that's .. true, but also there's no classics anymore. | there's a gamut of things. hundreds of years ago we had a few | hundred/thousand extremely talented people who got into arts | _because_ they were talented, they visited each other in person | to learn from each other over months and years. it was very | very very homogeneous in time and space (and it was apparent | who 's the amazing real boss of that level/period/era) compared | to today's hyperfast superglobal heterogeneous all-in content- | bonanza, where it's impossible to consume all of it, impossible | to filter it, impossible to comprehend/contrast/compare all of | it to itself. | | Sure there was no point in comparing Van Gogh to Tchaikovsky | even then - but there was room for two, now it got even more | impossibler not less since there are so many new | forms/genres/styles and a lot more amazing feats of creation, | and more new talents each day, so relatively there's even less | room (less time, less space) to fit the contemporary greats. | duxup wrote: | Reminds me of the old "best music of the 70s" or whatever | decade you picked. | | If you had a CD of 20 songs, they were pretty great. If you got | a box set ... oh man you hit A LOT of stinkers. | lodi wrote: | I think that's part of it, but I also think there's some merit | to our intuition as well; sometimes you can viscerally feel if | you're in a boom or bust cycle. During the reality TV phase I | remember thinking "this is all garbage", and then shows like | The Sopranos and The West Wing kicked off an era that had me | thinking "I literally can't keep up with all the good shows; | there's too much good TV to watch." I think this was a pretty | common feeling, and not in hindsight but during the era. In | gaming I remember marvelling at a PC boom in 98-99, and then | hating the "xbox-ification" of PC games for a few years after | that. | dllthomas wrote: | > During the reality TV phase I remember thinking "this is | all garbage", and then shows like The Sopranos and The West | Wing kicked off an era... | | The West Wing and The Sopranos l started in 1999. Jackass and | Survivor started in 2000. | hexis wrote: | The Real World started in 1992. It was "credited with | launching the modern reality TV genre" - | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series) | p_j_w wrote: | Yes, but the reality TV boom didn't hit for quite some | time after. Maybe my memory is off, but it felt like a | mid aughts thing. | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: | Unscripted television had been bubbling beneath the | surface for a good long while (game shows have existed | since basically forever), but the 2007 writer's strikes | was the catalyst that caused MTV-style trashier reality | TV to take over. | bmhin wrote: | Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in | 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me | like when they found their "reality game show" formula | that was then replicated off of those base archetypes | into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does | feel about right for when the explosion happened. | | The more pure reality shows like original Real World or | COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't | spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. | Real World if anything morphed to be more like those | later incarnations. | yetihehe wrote: | I agree. It's just that there is so much innovation everywhere, | that those geniuses of old are not THAT outstanding. There are | many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work | by themselves, so their contributions are not _seen_ as | advancing a field by one big leap. The same with music. You | just need to search more. Youtube and spotify made this easier, | I discover totally new astounding music authors and songs | almost every month. Yeah, not everyone likes my music taste, | but I see that many people also find new music they love. We | just have so much variety now, that there is no single commonly | recognisable genius. | armada651 wrote: | > There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but | they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not | seen as advancing a field by one big leap. | | I think this hits the nail on the head. Because we now have | access to an instant world-wide exchange of ideas scientists | work more closely together on developing their respective | fields than ever before. By the time a major breakthrough | happens most experts in the field will have already seen it | coming. | | Breakthroughs consist of many smaller leaps in knowledge and | we are now hyper-aware of each small development, thus it | doesn't seem like we're making big leaps anymore. Rather than | creating new geniuses the Internet eliminated the need for | the classic "genius" to make a breakthrough in a scientific | field. | mwcampbell wrote: | > I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped | making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" | issue. | | Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the | complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably | autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to | karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers | everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enough singer | that one can record an impeccable vocal in one take apparently | not a prerequisite for a recording contract? | | Edit: To bring this back around to the topic of the article, I | think the discussion of autotuned vocals might hint at an | answer to the question about individual geniuses: it's not as | important for individuals to have extraordinary abilities when | technology can help us all do so much. I admit I was being a | curmudgeon above; I know that autotune can be used to subtly | improve mediocre vocals, in addition to enabling the obviously | artificial sound that many of us consider crap. | barbecue_sauce wrote: | Because the technical proficiency of a singer, or any | musician/instrumentalist for that matter, is not what makes a | song interesting or memorable. | yakubin wrote: | There is no single thing that makes a song interesting or | memorable, but technical proficiency is one of factors. Of | course, I don't think that being "at the top" in technical | proficiency makes a song any better than being just among a | broader set of "best performers", but autotune makes people | sound flat, generic, robotic, which is on the opposite end | of the spectrum. That it doesn't contribute positively to a | song is an understatement. | giraffe_lady wrote: | Does a trumpet with a straight mute contribute positively | to a song? Compared to an unmuted trumpet it has reduced | dynamic control and a flattened, generic timbre. But | using them is common, and the distinctive sound is a key | part of many well-known musical passages. | | The technical proficiency of a trumpeter is completely | orthogonal to whether they use a mute on a particular | piece, since it is just a simple hardware technique. And | the same thing with autotune. Incredible singers can and | do use it for its technical effect, because they think | that effect contributes to the song. | | As a listener you can disagree, just as I find the heavy | strings vibrato of classic pop a distraction. But you | can't assess how good a song is by categorizing | techniques used in it. Claims that new techniques rob | music of something ineffable, or just sound bad, are | ubiquitous for new musical techniques and are as old as | instruments at least. | | If you think autotune is the First Bad One when people | said the same things about piano pedals, metal violin | strings, geared tuning pegs, electric amplification, I | just want you to consider the company you're in here. | | You can not like it but stop claiming it's objectively | bad when it is not. | yakubin wrote: | You make it sound as if pop singers used autotune | selectively, judging when it's better than natural | technique. I wrote my comment in the context of large | swaths of pop singers who use autotune indiscriminately | in all their songs, throughout. (At least that's my | impression from songs recommended to me by YouTube in | incognito mode.) Now show me an acclaimed pianist who | keeps their foot down on a single pedal throughout all | their performances. I'd be surprised if the most common | motivation for using autotune wasn't being unable to hit | the right notes. | giraffe_lady wrote: | You're making assumptions about the motivations and goals | of the people making the music. It's likely they do think | it adds something to every song they use it on. The same | way almost all contemporary musicians use amplification | and digital mastering "indiscriminately." Not using those | techniques is a specific, intentional part of the "sound" | of some genres, and outside of that they are ubiquitous. | | I'm not saying autotune _is this good_. I 'm saying that | if nearly everyone is using it and continues to use it | after, at this point, decades, they must be getting | something out of it. Masterful singers _also_ use it, | some quite a lot, so it can 't be as simple as covering | up limited skill or range. | mhh__ wrote: | Because good musicians don't need to make pop music anymore. | thebricksta wrote: | Most superstar pop singers have fantastic singing voices and | great pitch control. Autotune shows up because of some mix of | 1) the modern pop aesthetic demands superhuman tuning, 2) | some degree of autotune artifacts are expected as part of the | modern sound, and 3) it can intentionally be used as an | effect (T-Pain). | | To give some more detail about both 1 and 2 - | | Pitch control is more than just hitting the note; its about | how well you can onset at the right pitch, how well you can | hold the pitch once hit, how well you can jump each pitch | interval and land on the right pitch, how well you can pitch | through different articulations, different vocal ranges, etc. | The modern pop sound has accepted that superhuman levels of | pitch control that lock the vocal into tune with the | perfectly tuned synthesizers/samplers are more important than | a natural sound. | | Also, since we've been using autotune for so long, it has | almost become natural. We expect to hear it to some degree on | every track, especially in more difficult vocal areas. If it | wasn't present, one might feel the song sounds "indie" or | worse, dated. | | Lastly, one thing that fascinates me about the autotune | complaints are that it's just one stage of a very long vocal | processing chain. To my ears, the tweaks provided by dynamics | processors are much more dramatic than autotune when applied | to a reasonably proficient singer. Autotune is just one step | of a processing chain that can easily run through 10+ | processors to end up at the right sound. | seibelj wrote: | Pop music is about so much more than being a good singer. The | hook is key, as is the content, the brand (artist), and how | it's marketed. It takes a village to manufacture successful | pop music. Being able to sing super well isn't required | anymore, but having an army of people to assist making it | popular most certainly is. The rare artist that goes viral on | a shoestring quickly accumulates all the same help that other | pop artists have to ensure future releases are also hits. | hansworst wrote: | My take on it is that because there are so many good singers | out there, people generally don't really care about that | aspect of music as much (anymore?). | | With so much technology available to basically anyone who | cares enough to learn how to use it, it's becoming much more | important to use that technology creatively than to have some | natural talent for singing. | p_j_w wrote: | >I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why | does pop music | | I'm going to stop you right there and point out that there is | an absolutely massive space outside of Top 40. If you're | willing to actually expend some effort to go looking, there's | undoubtedly music out there for you. And this is nothing to | do with age. I'm 40 and there's more new music coming out | that I like than I can keep up with. I was recently talking | to my almost 60 year old uncle and he finds the same to be | true. | lupire wrote: | It's because pops stars need to be gorgeous celebs and also | dancers, so singing gets replaced by computer. | brimble wrote: | I can't believe they autotune so much _kids ' media_ these | days. Daniel Tiger will teach your kid that their amazing | singing voice sounds wrong, because all the singing on DT is | auto-tuned like crazy and doesn't sound like actual human | singing. WTF. | kixiQu wrote: | Pop performers are optimizing for something outside what hits | a recording -- that is to say, in the same way that opera | singers have to have some theatrical ability in addition to | singing the music, pop performance these days involves a huge | amount of choreographed dance. A pop singer I'll not name | performed on a late night show and was a target of internet | ribbing for having brought only some semi-awkward samba-like | side-stepping -- though it's more than I or the karaoke | singers could do! Once you start looking at the best singer- | dancers rather than the best singers, you'll get closer to | the real prerequisites for that genre. | | (And of course, "the obviously artificial sound" can be an | aesthetic choice made by vocalists fully capable of recording | impeccable vocals: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc) | wutbrodo wrote: | > A pop singer I'll not name performed on a late night show | and was a target of internet ribbing for having brought | only some semi-awkward samba-like side-stepping | | For anyone wondering, I believe this is referring to Lana | Del Rey. Not sure what the purpose of redacting the name | was... | | Maybe that's not who you were referring to though? Iirc, | the criticisms weren't just about her swaying, but singing | that was described as "mumbling". That latter criticism is | explicitly the opposite of what we're discussing. | kixiQu wrote: | It was _not_ referring to Lana del Rey, that criticism | _would_ be the opposite of what we 're discussing, and | thus it's sort of funny you'd assumed that's whom I'd | meant... The purpose of redacting the name is that I like | the singer, her music is great, and I don't think there's | a point to invoking her as "a bad dancer" in a discussion | on HN of all places. | RC_ITR wrote: | Autotune is a tool like any other. Generally those who | consumed media before that tool was invented will be | skeptical of it because "things I like didn't need it." Those | who begin consuming media after the tool was invented don't | have the same biases. | | A 50-years ago version of that would be microphones on | broadway. It used to be a point of pride to fill a theater | without amplification. Now we don't really care. | mwcampbell wrote: | Fair. When I was a teenager in the 90s, my favorite vocal | groups made obvious use of overdubbing, and they sounded | different when performing live. | aqsalose wrote: | I am unsure if it tells more about any general attitude | about "tools" or more about Broadway. Microphones are still | not used in opera or classical music. | RC_ITR wrote: | https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/arts/music/wearing-a- | wire... | | Microphones are still not used by _purists_ in opera or | classical music, exactly because of the point I made | above. | alx__ wrote: | Been reading Chuck Klosterman's book, But What If We're Wrong?. | Which is partly that thought. The things that get remembered in | the global consciousness are not always the people or things | we'd expect. It's possible that we have a "genius" right now | that will be remembered in 100 years. But due to all the local | noise it's hard to see through that and remain objective. | | Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future | holds. | dav_Oz wrote: | I would argue that is actually the norm. The more I dig | deeper into the history of any field the more I realize how | many publicly unknown _geniuses_ there are. Mostly only | recognized and praised as such by the connoisseurs of the | respective field. | | And it makes sense, especially in our times, sophisticated PR | (and Einstein enjoyed that, too, in addition in being a | _genius_ ) just trumps any recognition one might get in a | life time, in the short term that is. | | If you are not seeking some grandiose recognition (like | Newton or Edison, famously) you are potentially a better | explorer of the yet Unknown not bothering wasting any energy | and being less corruptable by discoveries, you are happy to | share with others and helping to bring about. | | Off the top of my head: Three examples of rather unknown | "geniuses" in physics in no particular order: | | Chien-Shiung Wu, Oliver Heaviside, John Michell | | One could also argue, as I sometimes do, too, that _a genius_ | is just a convenient narrative device in order to highlight | and illustrate some important turning point with the | historical person serving as some responsible "actor" in | bridging over an otherwise complex and often self- | contradictory development into a tangible coherent state. | gotaquestion wrote: | I think there isn't enough distinction in the term | "genius". How do you even compare their contributions? It | is easy when you have someone like Euclid or Newton, who's | work is taught in pre-college grades. Who is the last | person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi? | It's been centuries. Then you look at someone like Einstein | who was discussed in every major magazine and newspaper at | the time his general theory was articulated. I think | Hawking got the similar treatment, but has he impacted what | is taught in 4-year college the way Einstein did? I think | Hawking's genius is too esoteric. | | There needs to be a new term. "Genius" is too limp to | describe individuals who radically alter the curriculum | taught to undergraduate students. | marcosdumay wrote: | > Who is the last person to have an impact on pre- | collegiate math syllabi? | | Shrodinger, maybe? He is a really large part of the | reason people study matrices before college, and then go | and complain because nobody can show them a use for the | thing. | dboreham wrote: | Showing a use case for matrices is extremely easy : 3D | graphics. At least 50% of school students will have a | good understanding of that field. | marcosdumay wrote: | Yes, matrices got everywhere in the 20th century. There | is basically no field that doesn't use them nowadays. | | But any demonstration requires modern knowledge, and | matrices are one of the very few modern thing students | see. If you want to show them 3D graphics, you will need | to teach programing first. Yeah, some will know it by | them, but schools also can't rely on that. | | (As an aside, chemistry also has some weirdly modern | knowledge on its curriculum. Also out of context, just | thrown in there because it's important.) | | The nearest application I can think of is for modeling | stochastic processes, but students see so little | statistics that I imagine that will only change the | object on the "why am I even studying X?" complaint. | mabub24 wrote: | This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books | we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon | release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular | then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly | forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are | much less stable than people think. | ceejayoz wrote: | Art, as well; Van Gogh died a failure. | vkou wrote: | Art's a little weird, because the price of a lot of | million-dollar art pieces is driven in large part by the | need for an appreciating-on-paper vehicle for tax | evasion. (That you can lend out to art galleries.) | | And the last thing these schemes need is a living artist | who can - upon his work reaching stardom - simply make | _more_ of it. | | In this respect, dead poets are much safer to bet the | farm on. | paganel wrote: | Even when it comes to philosophy I think it holds true. Up | into the 1930s Bergson was regarded as one of the most | important philosophers in Europe while Wittgenstein was | barely mentioned outside a few, select circles, even he had | already published his _Tractatus_. Nowadays Bergson returns | blank stares when you mention his name to an Anglo audience | while Wittgenstein is seen as one of the most important | philosophers of the last few hundred years. | Der_Einzige wrote: | Which is profoundly sad since Wittgenstein is only saved | by his prophetic beliefs about language - despite writing | like a post-modernist while somehow being considered part | of the "analytic tradition"... | | He is fashionable nonsense. | aqsalose wrote: | Funny, I thought his musics about "language games" was | the part of his output more amenable to fashionable | nonsense. I have met very few students who attempt to say | anything about Tractatus, but quite many who espouse | deep-sounding platitudes about "language is a game". | bwestergard wrote: | Have you read the Tractatus? After Frege, and Russell, | it's difficult to think of a philosopher who contributed | more to the analytic style of exposition. | | There is some irony in dismissing him as "nonsensical", | because he himself suggested the Tractatus was | "nonsense". The point of writing it was to demonstrate | that philosophy in his time (e.g. the logical atomism of | Russell) had gone astray. | ecshafer wrote: | A good example of this is the Author of the famously "bad | line", "It was a dark and stormy night" was Edward Bulwer- | Lytton, who was perhaps one of the most famous authors of | his time, who also coined many very common expressions we | use today. | gilbetron wrote: | I completely disagree with the premise, that geniuses are | vanishing - I think we have more than ever, it just takes a lot | more to make notable progress these days. However, the article | still ended up being a decent read, exploring how a lot of | geniuses had tutors. I think our education system is messed up in | a lot of ways, and we'd have a better society if kids got more | adult attention. Saying this as a parent of a middle schooler, I | really feel the issues in staff-constrained pandemic years. | | It would be interesting to have past geniuses sit in today's | world - I think we'd be dismayed that in the massive ocean of | knowledge we have these days, they wouldn't seem so legendary | anymore. | socialist_coder wrote: | I think the 1 easiest way to improve schools right now would be | to differentiate kids by ability. | | Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above | their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their | peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who | cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average | students. | | So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those | different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the | groups are being well served. | | If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per | grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class | has a more homogeneous mix of students? | | Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their | group of students and can teach to the class as a whole. | | I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the | differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic | split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be | getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done | now. | hhjinks wrote: | Agreed. It's like complaining we don't make Leif Erikssons | anymore. You can't discover a new continent every day. | gilbetron wrote: | That's a brilliant way of putting it! I'll save that for | future use :) | aunetx wrote: | That's true, but in the same time... We still have so much to | discover, no matter the subject -- I study physics and, even | at my level (not very advanced), there are obviously entire | domains that are not clearly understood even by the most | brillant minds. | | But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and | intelligence) needed in order to achieve something | significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow | everytime a Einstein discovers something. | Henk0815 wrote: | i think its also a problem of funding. the problems of | today are more resource intensive. i read that succesfull | test to use mrna for medical treatment were done 20 years | ago and nobody realy cared and knew about it. To realy | develop into something viable took years to get the | attention and funding. | regularfry wrote: | I think there's something in this. The "where's today's | Beethoven" chart would be completely explained either by an | actual decline, _or_ by it becoming harder to be rated a genius | against contemporaries over time. And that itself is mostly a | numbers game too: the human population now is 7 times larger | than it was at Beethoven 's death. Vienna's population | (relevant since we're talking about Beethoven) was about | 200,000 then, but it's 9 times that now. If part of the | qualification to be remembered as a genius is notoriety and | publicity, which it must be, then because it's much more | crowded at the top it's more than likely that _all_ the | individuals currently of Beethoven 's absolute talent level are | thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely | because they don't break away from the pack and individually | dominate the field. | dh2022 wrote: | Re: "it's more than likely that all the individuals currently | of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely | "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't | break away from the pack and individually dominate the | field". But doesn't that imply we should see individuals | heads and shoulders above Beethoven? If we see a lot of | Beethoven's at the merely "extremely good" level where | is(are) the one(s) at the next "genius" level??? | mcguire wrote: | I have a thought that comes up every time the "super- | intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are | decreasing returns to increasing smartitude. | | As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations | better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being | three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same | obvious difference. | | As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an | old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the | old days, baseball players were a normal distribution | roughly similar to the average population. With modern | selection and training, players are piled up against a sort | of semi-hard limit at the upper end. | amanaplanacanal wrote: | It's hard to know. In 100 years will the Beatles be | remembered more than Beethoven? Who knows? | | Edit: or if you prefer, maybe Miles Davis. | mcguire wrote: | The human population isn't really important to that chart. | | " _Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in | blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective | population (total human population with the education and | access to contribute to these fields)._ " | | The denominator has increased massively faster than the base | population. | SketchySeaBeast wrote: | Are they pointing out a lack of geniuses, or just a lack of pop | culture geniuses? And are the silos in knowledge so stratified | now that we as a culture just don't recognize those who are? | lordnacho wrote: | The article is mainly about educating children. | | One issue I found was that there might be some personal quality | required to get tutored effectively. Can everyone be tutored and | benefit from it? For the geniuses listed, there must be an army | of not so brilliant minds that we didn't hear about. How much | worse off are they in a normal factory school? | | Also, if you go to Oxbridge, you get a tutor several times a | week. I am not sure I'm that much smarter than someone who didn't | have this privilege. But of course I benefit from people thinking | that tutoring is magic sauce. I wonder if anyone has checked. | freddex wrote: | There's some research about this. [1] It seems tutoring is very | effective as a teaching method, but of course, not very | scalable. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem | User23 wrote: | Exactly. Tutoring is a huge advantage for your children if | you can afford it. One area where you still see it is in | music lessons. Any even moderately serious student of the | piano or similar instruments learns in a tutoring type | arrangement. | | Those individuals who have the potential for groundbreaking | genius, say the 4+ sigma crowd, simply cannot practicably be | adequately served by group instruction if they are to reach | their potential. It's up to us as a society to decide whether | we want to treat our intellectual superiors as precious gifts | that should be cherished or as affronts to our notions of | equality and fairness. I fear we're leaning ever more toward | the latter. It's too bad, because humanity is facing a number | of problems that will probably require geniuses to solve. | genjipress wrote: | The idea that we "made" Einstein to begin with is risible anyway. | 1970-01-01 wrote: | Pinning an argument to "based on Wikipedia mentions" isn't | scientific. Overlooking the lack of real data, it is a well | written argument. | jacknews wrote: | Perhaps the clue is "aristocratic tutors" | | Perhaps the problem is not a decline in genius, but that too many | geniuses are now given the opportunity to fulfill their potential | (whereas before they'd have lacked education, compared to | aristocrats), making it difficult to stand out and receive | popular acclaim. | yonaguska wrote: | Define fulfilling potential? If early childhood education was | something that a "genius" could afford to focus on(in terms of | opportunity cost), wouldn't the contributions of the students | far outstrip the potential individual contributions of the | single "genius"? My focus is on the availability of these | tutors for individuals. | | You can kind of see this in sports in the US. Sports are only | lucrative for the top performers, and those lucky enough as | well. This leaves a wide swath of very high level athletes | available to parents willing to pay. This also extends to | competitive public funded sports depending on where you're at. | | On one hand, it would be amazing for gifted tutors to be widely | available, on the other- the situations that would create such | availability are probably not going to be good. I'm just | thankful that my career will hopefully afford me the ability to | be a single income household, with the time and resources to | tutor my own child. | datavirtue wrote: | This is why I want UBI for my fellow man. So that people can more | easily persue academia and personally funded research and | development. We need more minds at work to innovate our way out | of many messes that are converging at the intersection of a | burgeoning population. | sam-s wrote: | One might consider the fate of Salvator Lombardo at Cornell | University... No "aristocratic tutoring", just a self-driven | genius, who was denied a stipend because he has the wrong skin | color and genitals. | balsam wrote: | are you serious. I know that guy. | [deleted] | gumby wrote: | Full of bugs that obscure the point the author is trying to make. | Just in the first couple of paragraphs they range from small | (it's _Oswald_ Spengler, not Olaf) to large (The compression | /parallax of looking backwards in an informal way distorts her | perception of "genius" and the speed of invention. | | The fact is it _is_ a golden age in the way she wishes; it 's | just that the benefit is spread more widely around, like peanut | butter. The ability to do work built upon the work of others has | massively sped up -- as a startup in, for example, pharma we were | able to rapidly search the literature, download relevant papers, | and pass them around 15 years ago in a way that was unthinkable | 15 years before that. The amount of information sharing | (including, in Silicon Valley but much less so elsewhere, | confidential info shared with winking approval of management) has | spread technological and non-technological development massively. | dboreham wrote: | Maxwell attended the Edinburgh Academy which wasn't even the best | school in town <ducks>. Then he went on to attend the local | university. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly | unusual about his educational background. He did come from a | wealthy family though. | atty wrote: | I think the author answers half of the question in his post: at | least in the hard sciences, it's becoming massively harder to | stand out because most, if not all, the low hanging fruit has | been picked. The second half is that there are far more | scientists/writers/artists/etc now than ever before, and more | people have access to all their work, meaning no one/handful of | individuals naturally rises to prominence. I think in general | this is actually a good thing. The only problem is it becomes | harder for the general population to follow what's going on in | certain fields, either in the present or as historical context, | because they no longer have very easily identifiable figureheads. | | Edit: to be clear, I think the idea that somehow genius or | general intelligence and deep expertise is declining is | laughable. If anything we're seeing an explosion of expertise in | all the fields I work in. | karaterobot wrote: | Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like | "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't | believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about | individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding | of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By | that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful | product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are the | Einstein-level geniuses? Someone in the thread said Whitney | Houston, but... uhh, anyone else? | N1H1L wrote: | Definitely John von Neumann was one. Argument could be made | that he was even smarter | torstenvl wrote: | Elon Musk in the niche field of government contracting for | space flight is the closest I can think of. | mtalantikite wrote: | That was me that mentioned Whitney, and I stand by it even more | if the definition is "...whose work single-handedly upends our | understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in | thinking". It's hard to overstate how important Whitney Houston | was for the culture, particularly for black women. I mean just | read her wikipedia [1]. Contemporary music just doesn't sound | the same without her. She's not often in my personal rotation, | but there's just no denying how much she changed, both in music | and in the culture in general. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston | amusedcyclist wrote: | Our understanding of the world is so advanced that | revolutionary changes are bound to be rarer and when they do | happen they're understood by a tiny fraction of the population. | In fact most people have absolutely no idea what Einstein did. | He was indeed a great scientist, but to the average person | Einstein is a just an idea of a genius, they were never touched | by his work. I studied physics in undergrad and I barely | understand anything about GR, though i have some understanding | of the historical context so i guess that gives me a bit of | appreciation for what he did | mettamage wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao | | There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but | Elon gets all the credit, he could still be one of them, I | don't know enough about their process. | | Maybe a few people in the biotech industry, I wouldn't know | about them but the innovation there with crispr and mrna | vaccines and other things seems quite crazy and cool | lern_too_spel wrote: | He was also aristocratically tutored, learning mostly at home | (first from his parents and then from a litany of | professional mathematicians who tutored him in what they were | interested in) and then speeding through classes all the way | through undergrad. | betwixthewires wrote: | And the next generation will be able to do the same thing | at a whim even in poverty with a little device in their | pocket, and not even have to pay for the classes. | thfuran wrote: | Watching some videos on the internet is not the same | thing as being tutored. | lamontcg wrote: | > There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but | Elon gets all the credit | | Lars Blackmore, Behcet Acikmese, and probably a large cast of | engineers. | h2odragon wrote: | Claude Shannon. Maybe rms. | | Its not that we don't have genius anymore; we simply built a | new pantheon out of the geniuses of the day about 150 years ago | and then haven't been keeping up with the work of canonizing | new members. | | Dale Carnegie and Elon Musk get the "demi-god" status, somehow; | we know their successes are the work of many others but who but | the most obsessed know _those_ names? | rm445 wrote: | Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence | People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the | industrialist Andrew Carnegie? | h2odragon wrote: | Yes, thank you. Shows which is more important I guess. | csomar wrote: | I think most people here are missing the point. This is not about | incremental progress but about breakthroughs. Religion was | breakthrough. Electricity was a breakthrough. General Relativity | was a breakthrough. The Internet was another breakthrough and now | we are enjoying these things. | | A similar breakthrough today could be: Quantum mechanics, Fusion | and a fully functional decentralized Internet (not to be confused | with decentralized web). | | My theory is a little different: War. War is the thing that, in | my opinion, enables all progress. The pandemic had some sort of | war conditions, and this forces people to get creative and create | new unusual paradigms. | | In the normal/usual day to day, people could not care less. They | want incremental improvements but rarely want a full disruption | of the status quo. They dream of remote work, but there aren't | enough forces (government, society, corporate, workers, etc...) | to make that happen. They just don't do fundamental changes. | [deleted] | mhh__ wrote: | Quantum mechanics was understood arguably before general | relativity was properly worked out in detail. | duxup wrote: | >I'll certainly admit that finding irrefutable evidence for a | decline of genius is difficult--intellectual contributions are | extremely hard to quantify, the definition of genius is always up | for debate, and any discussion will necessarily elide all sorts | of points and counterpoints | | I appreciate that they at least acknowledge my first thought. | They try although I really don't know what they mean exactly when | they mean by the title. | cosmiccatnap wrote: | haskellandchill wrote: | this is so insulating and misguided. we have the internet but the | people have no time to flourish. we are crushed by the boot of | our miserable economic systems. | parkingrift wrote: | Apple launched a chip last week with 114 billion transistors. | This person says humanity is run out of genius. | | Maybe some perspective is needed. | pesmhey wrote: | Privately would have been the better word choice. | Ardon wrote: | The article seems to define genius by how socially popular the | individual is? | | But that's a terrible metric. Is the difference between Einstein | and a cutting edge quantum physicist today _marketing_? | | He might be right in his conjecture that one-on-one tutoring | produces 'geniuses' but this article contains no evidence of it. | I don't think it even contains evidence the top intellectuals are | less common, just that they're less popular. | N1H1L wrote: | I am a researcher at a national lab. I am pretty smart myself, | and have worked with some exceptional people during my PhD and | even now. Thing is, we have become so metrics and busy work | obsessed that it's insane. | | Fully 75% of my time is spent chasing money. Which means writing | grants that have a 25% success rate (and I am told to be proud of | that number, others have it worse), filling out monthly, | quarterly and yearly reports for my grants and chasing the next | grant. The science that I do is honestly now a break from all | that bullshit. | | And then the stupid obsession with metrics. I have _technically_ | more peer-reviewed journal papers than Einstein, and I am not | even fit to touch that man 's shoelaces - let alone tie them. If | h-index is the only measure of scientific success, then don't be | surprised if fools are what you get. | | The system, all the way down from Congress is designed to fail - | and we are acting surprised? | stickfigure wrote: | The slate star codex article directly on-topic is _The Atomic | Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project_ : | | https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... | | Scott Alexander makes the not-politically-correct but plausible | case for genetics having a significant component. And that the | grim events of the 20th century may have significantly thinned | that genetic reserve. | | The first couple paragraphs are a pretty good hook: | | ----- | | A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek | mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in | Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a | generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable | for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence | were the children they had with local women. | | The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was | led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest | between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder | Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning | quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von | Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von | Neumann. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | It's wild that today's zeitgeist says that we're currently | experiencing the greatest pace of change in human history, while | also saying that we've stagnated. | pessimizer wrote: | That was also the zeitgeist 100 years ago. | nonrandomstring wrote: | Giroux is a bit too left for me, but the prognosis and message | for hope in this video is spot-on in my opinion. [1] | | According to this narrative we stopped making Einsteins because | it's simply no longer in the interests of the "elites" to have | smart people around. Education became a liability to those | cheering for cybernetic governance and social control media. | | Similar explanations are proffered by John Taylor-Gatto, Sir Ken | Robinson, Noam Chomsky, and of course Paulo Friere. | | While I don't fully agree with the ideologies of these thinkers, | frustratingly, from what I see inside higher education, | everything is designed to produce narrow-minded, uncritical, | docile people who will not ask too many questions or think too | hard. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-3_DIi5HM | yboris wrote: | Reminds me of Laszlo Polgar - who wanted to show the world that | if focused properly, any child can become stellar at something. | He chose _chess_ since it was an easy-to-measure-outcome mental | activity. Two daughters become the best and second-best female | chess players in the world. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r | AcerbicZero wrote: | Upperclassmen should tutor lowerclassmen and perhaps they should | even be graded on it. If you can't explain something, you | probably don't actually understand that thing - and I really | don't think school can get much worse, so perhaps adding a little | self governance would give them a chance at being successful. | [deleted] | trgn wrote: | It's too bad the author hinges the article on the perceived lack | of genius today, it is too hard to quantify. Genius, it's one of | those things, you know it when you see it. The incremental | progress on the margins that characterizes science today is just | not that, requires smart people maybe, but not genius. I think | that's the author's intuition (which I share fwiw). The typical | hacker news reader seeing the headline is immediately pushing up | their glasses up their nose, going, well, ecksjuwally, computers | bleep bloop self driving cars, space, space, space, how's that | for genius etc. | | But that's not really what is the article is about. It's about | the loss of a value system, one in which education was valued in | its own right, and not as a means for credentialing. Many | examples of the superiority of personal tutelage over classroom | education in it. The author draws parallels with a loss of | quality in other domains (art, clothing, artisanship, ...). | | The author is at the vanguard. There is a spiritual shift | happening this century. It is the rejection of modernism, the | progressive ideology that life and society can (nay, must!) be | completely mediated through technology, in order for it to be | efficient, equitable, predictable, bureaucratic. In other words, | modernism turned a person into a widget, that can be jiggered and | manipulated to be useful. It is modernism that gave us | pedagogics, the science on how to teach children useful skills | with the least amount of money (which is not the same as | education). It is modernism that razed our cities, so we can | rebuild them for cars, because cars are high technology that | moves things fast, and fast is better than slow. Modernism gave | us the chronically medicated, because our bodies needs to be | supplemented. | | The intuitive sense that modernism is a failure has existed for a | long time, first real criticism were in the 70s. The difference | now is we're seeing "regular" people making real changes now, | it's not just the new age weirdos. Homeschooling is taking off, | because it is better full stop for a child (as explained in the | article). Walkable neighborhoods are the most expensive to live, | clearly showing a preference. Fine arts and architecture are | seeing a return to more classical ideals. | | These are individual families now, but this movement is in | opposition to the current bureaucratic interests. It is also | inherently elitist, since it's families with means making these | choices. Curious how this will go, but it is a positive | evolution, because it puts the human individual central again. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I've got plenty of theories but nothing solid. Einstein and the | other Big Name Scientists at the time seemed to be part of a | small intellectual elite; it feels like this group of | intellectuals has since then increased, but since the big | discoveries had already been made, they spend their time | iterating on them. Similar discoveries made back then about the | nature of reality and physics were all made around that time, a | good hundred years ago. | | But I think that, quite likely, that was it. There's no new Major | Discovery that could propel one scientist into fame to be made | anymore. At best we have e.g. Stephen Hawking who introduced some | new concepts about space (building on top of e.g. Einstein) and | who made theoretical physics more accessible to the masses. Or | Oppenheimer who is credited (although by a long shot not the | "inventor") with nukes. | | The other part is that Einstein and co - at least, reading their | biography - were part of the elite, a small group of people, | aristocrats, rich folk, who didn't have to work but could instead | attend universities wherever they wanted, take long walks in the | park to talk and think about the sciences, write long letters to | colleagues, etc - people for who intellectual pursuits was what | they could spend all their energy on. But, this is hindsight and | idealisation based on biographies and surviving letters, so take | that with a grain of salt. | | Anyway, I think there's plenty of Einsteins out there, but their | work is in smaller, less revolutionary increments. | | That said, as a society we need to make sure there is enough room | for intellectuals, that is, provide funding and livelihoods for | them and universities they belong to, and provide budgets for the | projects to put their theories into practice, e.g. nuclear | fusion, the Large Hadron Collider, the James Webb space | telescope, etc. | Beltiras wrote: | When Einstein proposed General Relativity it could be tested by | nothing more complex than a camera. If anyone comes up with a | theory of physics to explain further what we observe about the | world the test usually entails a multi trillion dollar machine, a | team of thousands of scientists and decades of engineering to | bring about a test. Usually these things require novel | engineering and for environments where we have no experience. | Just look at the JWST. Even then the theories being tested by the | JWST are predictions traceable to Einstein. I think we need a | better "standard candle" than Einstein to go by. We have plenty | of very clever people working on hard problems and coming up with | clever solutions. Einstein also wasn't infallible. He's treated | like a singular genius that erred in no thing. Einstein rejected | Plate Tectonics just to name one scientific area where he managed | to blunder badly. | Iwan-Zotow wrote: | > plenty of very clever people working on hard problems and | coming up with clever solutions | | this is not what this all talk is about | | Einstein is an (prime) example of conceptualist - man, who | introduced revolutionary concept into our understanding of the | world. | | There are a lot of Nobel laureates who are (hard) problem | solvers. | | But in physics looks like we truly need a conceptualist, new | Einstein so to speak | Beltiras wrote: | Those only come about every several generations. Many of them | needed the entire thinking population of humans in the | meantime to package up ideas in a different way so they could | bring about their flash of insight. | mhh__ wrote: | Nearly all physicists are conceptualists though. Fundamental | physics pretty much relies upon an aggressive pursuit of | information density rather than the classification of | evidence. Theoretically at least. | motohagiography wrote: | Worth examining what aristocratic means. Most people have a kind | of critical cartoon anti-idea of it, but aristocracy and nobility | essentially mean rule by the best and being actuated by | principle. There is some kind of rhyming crossover to | Aristotelian virtue as well, which is a pretty sound foundation | for personal growth, and for the process of education as "drawing | out," instead of "putting in." | | When you read the works of geniuses, it becomes clear that they | haven't climbed an intellectual hill so much as related to the | world in a particular way that allowed them to surmount them. To | explore at all, you need confidence, which comes from exercising | skills and ideas, making mistakes, and handling them with the | aplomb of someone whose basic relationship to the world is that | where it is there to be discovered, and there is a some force | that wishes for you to thrive. Everything I have read on | excecptional people involved this drawing out of brilliance and | the liberating of a mind to explore. This is the opposite of the | industrial cog education we have now. | | The aphorism that all things are shaped by the forces they oppose | is a useful metaphor, where to develop fully, you can't be kept | in a small intellectual tank, like a fish that only grows to the | size of its bowl. This freedom from constraints is the necessary | condition to grow brilliance, and coincidentally, that freedom | happens to come with nobility and aristocratic ideals. Another | simile I use is from working with animals, where without free | committed forward motion, instructing or guiding them is | meaningless and even harmful, because you aren't teaching them | anything unless they are already committed to a direction that | you augment. The way we educate kids today is like cornering an | animal and then rewarding it only as it submits and compromises | itself to avoid punishment, and then recognizing it as educated | when it is finally so spiritually broken it no longer tries to | escape. | | Without a kind of liberty, a mind will only be shaped by its | constraints. Nobility and elevation in this sense can absolutely | be acquired, but it has to originate from within, and it is not | symbolic, it's the effect of _techne_ and the exercise of freedom | and competence, and not an artifact of the reflected approval of | mediocre others. There is even a spiritual element to it, where | belief in a divine intent provides that foundation for relating | to your environment and the world with principle, and which | deflects the constraints that would limit and mis-shape your | development. This is why religious education is still considered | valuable even by atheists, as it provides this foundation. | | Adapting these ideas to life in a modern city, which is | essentially a closed tank of mental constraints that emphasizes | navigating relationships with people without any sense of | exploring something greater - would be a really interesting | question. How do you liberate the mind of a kid who lives in a | box, whose existence is moving from box to box, watching glowing | boxes, with the only differences being symbolic in the context of | relationships with other box people, and which is not rooted to | any physical principle or objective notion of good or hope? It | makes genius almost impossible. | | Thank you to the author for such an important essay. I hope it | gets more traction. | glitchc wrote: | All geniuses were a manufactured product, bar none. Einstein and | Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing | campaign. No different from Gaga or Beyonce in the present. | Beyonce exists as an idea more so than a person. | | What is nominally a group of individuals working collectively to | solve a problem became attributed to a single person purely for | marketing purposes. It is easier for most people to remember one | name, or attribute an effect to a singular cause (by extension | causer). | | What we remember through the mists of time is not the best, but | what garnered the most attention in that era. Those two are not | the same, never have been. What you call genius mow was back then | an influencer. | | Now modern technology has made it possible for anyone to become | an influencer. And so, geniuses are everywhere and nowhere, all | at once. The influencers that survive into the next era (I'm | looking at Elon) will be the geniuses of our time. | threatofrain wrote: | Product implies that we can reliably deliver via process. How | does one reliably produce Beyonce? | ghostbrainalpha wrote: | I like where you are going with this, but the Newton example | seems really bold. | | Didn't most of his discoveries come during a pandemic where he | had to work alone from home without much contact with the | outside world? | | Viewing my 4th grade history of Newtown knowledge through your | lens, I am questioning how much of his story was now marketing. | | But to do have specific examples of how his accomplishments | came from a collective? | mardifoufs wrote: | It's useful to be skeptical of Great Men Theory narratives but | I think that you are taking it too far. Yes, we absolutely | should avoid overstating the impact of "great men". It usually | leads to wrong conclusions & a hyperfocus on the role of | individuals as of they were independent of the society around | them. | | Yet, completely dismissing the possibility of remarkable | individuals having very oversized impacts on humanity and | history is also extremely diminutive. Yes, they were usually | also lucky to be at the right place, at the right time and | being surrounded by the right people. But their individual | actions/efforts were still crucial catalysts to actually put | all of those things together. It would be just as weird to | dismiss the impact of individuals in history or science as it | is to focus too much on them | gilleain wrote: | Really? What about Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught | mathematician whose solutions to problems were generally | considered completely novel and unconnected to other's results. | Eventually he worked with Hardy, but sadly died early. | | Or Alexander Grothendieck, who when given at university a | choice of 14 open problems to pick one to work on one over a | period of several years, solved several within months. Again he | had a mixed experience of early training, and worked | independently at first. Of course, he later collaborated with | many others. | | Newton literally said "If I have seen further it is by standing | on the shoulders of Giants" because he acknowledged that his | work built on that of others. Indeed, if he had communicated | his results earlier, maybe he would have worked with Leibniz on | the calculus. | | While people do like to focus on a singular visionary - rather | than a history of invention or scholarship - that does not mean | that there were not extraordinary individuals in history. Yes, | they also had to be in the right place and the right time. They | also had to have the time (usually, enough money) and the | connections. | frazbin wrote: | Nailed it. Also Terry exists. | hwillis wrote: | > Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an | ancient marketing campaign. | | You managed to pick two of the most alone geniuses in history. | Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he | was worried about being mocked. Einstein's miracle year was | done completely outside academia and the only two other people | in the Olympia Academy said they had nothing to do with it. | mcguire wrote: | " _Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus | because he was worried about being mocked._ " | | He was more worried about being scooped. And he was the | president of the Royal Society when that argument broke out. | | Would Einstein still be more famous than Edsger Dijkstra if | he hadn't become the media's face of science? | recuter wrote: | Hindsight is 2020. Einstein had some help with the boring | bits of math and the ideas were vaguely "in the air" at the | time and being worked on by several individuals, fair | enough. | | Even still, I haven't met anyone who, for example, knows | and understands the full derivation of his most famous | equation that would say his fame is overstated. | jacobedawson wrote: | You could probably argue that in the soft domains of music & | literature, the explosion of widely available content might | actually be a cause of the "decline" - it's not unlikely your | undiscovered genius looks at everything out there, thinks "I | guess it's all been done, and I probably won't be noticed in | amongst all this noise anyway", and takes a well-paying job | instead of creating the next great work of art. | tomp wrote: | Literature has been widely available for a while, but there's | still great works produced (well, probably great... needs some | historical distance still) disproving your hypothesis. | coffeecat wrote: | This seems about right. For most endeavors nowadays - music, | art, science, technology, business - the process of reviewing | what's already out there is just overwhelming. Then you | actually review the existing stuff, and find that five other | people have already pursued your great new idea. Over time, | this cycle tends to erode your enthusiasm for pursuing new | ideas. | jmyeet wrote: | This is an interesting analysis. I see a number of factors in | play: | | 1. Population size: the more people you have, the more likely you | are to make "geniuses". The genius chart late in the piece maps | with this hypothesis; | | 2. Baseline education: the idea here is that geniuses are less of | a gap if the normal level of education and competency is higher; | | 3. Low-hanging fruit: things seem obvious in hindsight of course | but it's also true that some of the big jumps in certain fields | come down to what were fairly simple ideas. Those who come up | with them are typically labelled "geniuses". That may or may not | be the case. But the point is that progress in fields isn't | smooth. We've now been in a period in physics where for decades | now we've simply confirmed what we already suspected. Useful of | course. As is disproving various theories (which is constantly | happening). | | But the 20th century had 2 massive jumps forward in physics: | namely relativity (obviously) and the various quantum mechanics | related fields (QFT, QCD, etc). This isn't my area of expertise | but my understanding is that a big part of this was realizing | just how deeply tied physics and certain areas of mathematics | are. | | Oh and for the record, I'm really talking about fundamental | physics here. Other fields like condensed matter physics are a | completely different beast. | | But is the 20th century typical? It's hard to say. I suspect it | isn't. I once heard research described as spending years of your | life working on a problem and your reward is you get to throw a | few pebbles on a pile. Eventually that pebble pile becomes a | mountain. Someone throwing more than a few pebbles on is | realtively inrequent. | | I'm not sure how much "aristocratic teaching" really has to do | with it. | alfor wrote: | The goal of the education system is to flatten society. | | Both of my kid have been homeschooled up until 5th grade. At home | they used to do less than 20min per day of 'school'. | | After a few month at school they now find the pace incredibly | slow and they can't stand the waiting they have to endure. | | They both score 80-95% in all classes. | | My son is learning programming and video editing and piano by | himself, my daughter is writing small novels in a second | language. | | We didn't teach them much at all, they mostly learn just by | themselves. | | They now want to go back to homeschooling so they don't have to | wait to learn nothing. | | They might be a bit gifted, but I think that the main difference | is that they didn't go to school, they didn't get used to waiting | and learning at the same pace as everyone. I think that most kids | a much more capable than we think. | | Now I think that unschooling + a bit of tutoring would be | incredibly powerful. | sytelus wrote: | Your general grandiose advice should come with plenty of | warning labels. A lot of people try to do homeschooling but | they neither have expertise, patience or discipline. For | successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each | class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests | and _consistently_ have time to do everything by yourself. | Majority of people don 't have these skills which is why there | exist teacher degrees and training. That is why experienced | teachers do much better than inexperienced. The 1:1 with | incompetent teacher is not better than 20:1 with experienced | teacher, IMO. | | It is dangerous and false to say that just having 1:1 | interactions and just igniting interest would make everything | better. In your case, likely your kids are fairly gifted and | even downgraded teaching won't matter. But that is not the case | with everyone. Most people should also not be looking for | raising next Einstein but rather a well rounded and functioning | individual. | markdown wrote: | Be interesting to see what the isolation does to them. After | all, they'll eventually have to live and get along with all | those "slow-learners". | | We Live In A Society(tm) | [deleted] | mtalantikite wrote: | "Is there anyone who died in the last decade you could make that | sort of claim for?" | | Sure, Toni Morrison. Whitney Houston. Prince. Steve Jobs | (slightly over a decade). I don't know, the list goes on? There | are plenty of culture shifting geniuses among us. It just doesn't | look the same as it did in the 19th and early 20th century. | johnNumen wrote: | None of those people are geniuses. | mtalantikite wrote: | If Beethoven is on that list, so is Prince. If Thomas Hardy | is on that list, so is Toni Morrison. Mozart could write a 5 | voice fugato, and Quincy Jones can score out an orchestration | without even sitting at a piano. | | There is no shortage of exceptional people changing how we | think about and interact with the world. Again, it just | doesn't look the same as it did in the past. You might not | like them -- I really don't care for Thomas Hardy's writing | and Freud is largely cast aside these days -- but that | doesn't mean they aren't geniuses. | HotHotLava wrote: | According to whose definition? If Tolstoy, Marx and Beethoven | count as geniuses, I don't see an argument for excluding | Asimov, Musk or Eminem. | Claude_Shannon wrote: | I've found similar line of thinking in the work of Polish writer, | Jacek Dukaj. In his "Po Pismie" ("After Writing") he had also | remarked on the fact that education you would get in higher | classes is not the education you get in lower. You're taught how | to deal with boredom (as in you were not supposed to work), so | you'd be more creative. | sologoub wrote: | While I have not read Jacek Dukaj (I'll add to my list), I | wonder if it's less of not supposed to work vs had the option | of indulging in less lucrative pursuits than even todays elite. | Historically, wealth was largely land-driven and the elites did | not work that land themselves. The historical "job" for the | elites was war, which came in waves and left a lot of time for | other things like poetry, philosophy and science. Todays upper | middle classes are all wage workers with often longer and | longer workweeks. Ideas like FIRE (financial independence | retire early) are picking up steam, but are far from | mainstream. This business of the parents combined with lack of | tutoring or other one on one education has to be taking a | negative effect on the quality of education. | [deleted] | hereforphone wrote: | There are different levels of suitability for everything, | including scientific and technical innovation. Combine | advantageous intellectual predisposition with a "privileged" | education, and you may get a "genius". I appreciate these people, | but I'm more impressed by those who excelled (even if to a lesser | extent than their aristocratically educated contemporaries) | against all odds. Especially when the underdog is working | actively against their disadvantages instead of lurking on forums | pasting about the unfairness of society and the plight of the | proletariat. | jzellis wrote: | We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work | on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're | figuring out how to use AI to sell more dick pills and artfully | distressed furniture to people devoid of erections and taste on | the goddamn Internet, for more money in a year than Einstein saw | in a decade. | tonguez wrote: | Why are there no more Einsteins, von Neumanns, etc, anymore? Is | Terry Tao the closest thing we have? Does DARPA (or some TLA or | foreign equivalent) just snatch these people up early on in | life? Why isn't Srouji working for something like DARPA? Are | there people even better than Srouji working for something like | DARPA? | leobg wrote: | I don't think Einstein was optimizing for owning Lambos. | amusedcyclist wrote: | Thats vaguely insulting to all the people who do work on | astrophysics, I work in AI and i'm pretty certain the average | astronomer is a lot smarter than the average AI researcher. Its | mostly a matter of pop culture perspective, astronomy just | doesn't get the kind of media coverage it used to | teachrdan wrote: | > i'm pretty certain the average astronomer is a lot smarter | than the average AI researcher | | Perhaps! But is the smartest AI researcher / quant / etc. | smarter than the average astronomer? The fact that so many of | the smartest people in our generation go into these fields is | surely bringing the average down in the hard sciences. | hwillis wrote: | > We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't | work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. | | Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he | published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the | way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the | existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of | mass and energy (leading to atomic energy). | | From the beginning Einstein wanted to be a teacher and had | little interest in money. Has money suddenly become more | important to everyone? | adamsmith143 wrote: | >Has money suddenly become more important to everyone? | | Check out career fairs at "top" universities. Kids are | clamoring to get into IB and Consulting and giant tech | companies. Legions of the best and brightest are literally | just chasing prestige and dollars. I mean the number of MIT | Math/Physics/CS/etc PhDs alone that go on to do Quant finance | is dizzying and should make people think twice about our | current society and how it incentivizes work. | | It's pretty simple, why go on the Academic Research Post-Doc | -> Faculty grind to make relative peanuts when you can walk | into a hedge fund and make 300k+ your first year out of your | phd? | marcosdumay wrote: | > Has money suddenly become more important to everyone? | | How often people could afford a home and basic necessities | for a family (including stability) without focusing on money | back then? And how often can people afford those now without | focusing on money? | | It is very, very likely that it has. | Gollapalli wrote: | Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party | of some learning whose work was correct. Now you have to be a | "professional" or endorsed by one. It's a status competition | with real resources on the table rather than an aristocratic | hobby for the few who were interested. | watwut wrote: | Einstein applied to higher institutions where he wanted to | work, but he was not admitted. The patent office was the | available job, so he took it. | hwillis wrote: | Yes. As I said, from the beginning he wanted to be a | teacher. And despite having a job of necessity, he worked | on physics anyway, and revolutionized the field over a | single year. | | Maybe the answer is that we have become more effective at | detecting and monetizing genius; Einstein might have | languished for the rest of his life if he were less driven. | Or maybe it's the opposite; we don't give smart people | enough time or money without draining them of the time to | work on novel discovery. Or both at once. | boppo1 wrote: | Einstein got rejected? From where? | jklinger410 wrote: | Einstein was a bad example. What is true though is that | intelligent people choose not to risk their health and safety | by living in poverty. | | There is this narrative parroted by the ultra-rich and | corporations that life is much more livable for the poor in | the modern era (because we have microwaves), but that is | simply not true. | fmvab wrote: | I do think so. I think wealth disparity has enabled | intellectual folks to, very quickly, propel themselves into | the upper class, by essentially being part of the money | machine that keeps rich people rich (hedge funds, ads, etc.). | I don't have any data to support this but I believe this was | literally impossible before some decades ago. Certainly was | not available to Einstein. | | More evidence: people literally write songs about | wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. | We live in a disgusting age. | chronofar wrote: | > Has money suddenly become more important to everyone? | | Quite possibly, or dare I say probably. The amount of | available products and experiences one could purchase with | more money was significantly smaller in Einstein's time than | today. I think it'd be quite a reasonable hypothesis to posit | the explosion of consumerism coupled with the everything | everywhere effects of online life have caused folks to be | considerably more aware of, and interested, monetary gain. | mettamage wrote: | IMO, the real smarties work in hft. | [deleted] | amusedcyclist wrote: | The smartest of them all teach math in universities | vajrabum wrote: | I'm not so sure. At VMware in the 2000s we had Marketing | Executive who had been a tenured math professor at | Stanford. He joined early probably following the primary | technical founder at VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, but still. | roywiggins wrote: | How much money was in physics when Einstein was working in it? | toyg wrote: | Tenured university members made pretty good money. As they do | now, to be fair - it just got much harder to get there, | because of larger and fiercer competition for a shrinking | number of positions, so the effort/benefit ratio has fallen | quite dramatically. | samth wrote: | It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is | harder now than in 1905. | adamsmith143 wrote: | >It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is | harder now than in 1905. | | What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of | tenure track positions available in any given year. Far | more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely | need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an | interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get | a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes | without any published work outside their dissertation. | Talanes wrote: | Really depends where you define the starting line. | Compare the two starting from birth, and definitely | harder in 1905. Compare them as fully qualified | individuals ready to apply, probably an edge in 1905. | Datenstrom wrote: | While I feel the same sentiment about the brightest working on | those or similar problems, is it that in the past there was not | a similar proportion of the brightest working on similarly | pointless and wasteful problems and that now they are all | forgotten while Einstein is not? | | I feel like a large portion of the brightest may have always | sold out, maybe Einstein was just obsessed with a particular | problem enough to chase that an avoid the more lucrative but | pointless problems. | rmah wrote: | "is it that in the past there was not a similar proportion of | the brightest working on similarly pointless and wasteful | problems" | | It is that in the past a large portion of the world's | brightest were working in the fields or fishing or mining or | making bowls or adding up numbers as a clerk. | giraffe_lady wrote: | still are tho | strikelaserclaw wrote: | maybe we do have Einsteins today but since the problems are so | deep and the fields so vast, it is hard for one man to truly | stand out as dominating a whole field. Not to mention that so | many more people have access to compete in the modern world | compared to Einsteins world where only a subset of people from | rich countries were being educated. | jpgvm wrote: | There are modern day geniuses, they just look different to the | big name scientists he is lamenting. | | I would argue Fabrice Bellard should be in contention, DJ | Bernstein, etc. There are geniuses all around us and that is what | has changed. It's by no means normalized but extraordinary | doesn't seem as extraordinary when the world is literally powered | by tens of thousands of extraordinary people doing awesome things | day in and day out. | | Those are just two public examples I can think of, imagine how | many genius level brains are working at Intel, AMD, TSMC and ASML | that make the physics of what we consider "normal" tick. | [deleted] | DrBazza wrote: | I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. | That's why we're not seeing "Einsteins" everywhere. | | In fact, there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) | where certain members of society exist only to make connections | between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has | become so vast. In fact, I'd say we're not far from that now, as | there are more and more stories along the lines of "an obscure | corner of maths has been found to explain 'X' in physics". | cf141q5325 wrote: | I think much of it is caused by the way we work on problems. We | work on individual problems that get more and more complex and | demand an ever increasing entry hurdle to be able to have a | meaningful conversation on the subject. We zoom into existing | problems. Yet most of the fundamental breakthroughs were often | in hindsight "trivial". Because very often what it needs is a | new perspective that allows for the creation of much more | efficient alternatives. True innovation. | | Add to that the ever increasing time pressure and funding | problem. Remember, Einstein was a patent clerk. Most people | simply cant afford to invest their time into allowing | themselves to think freely. I am confident we could get the | genius rate back up with something like UBI. | mhh__ wrote: | Also as things get older they get better and better explained. | | Some things, like relativity are simple mind-blowing concepts, | but other very important aspects of physics can feel like no | one is doing such groundbreaking work because you're actually | looking at a modern interpretation of something which has been | condensed over a century e.g. a lot of papers from the early | 1900s are _very_ long winded, so the utterly beautiful ways | they may be now treated (Noethers theorem may be an example) | are not representative of how they burst onto the scene 100 | years ago. | pdonis wrote: | _> there 's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) | where certain members of society exist only to make connections | between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has | become so vast._ | | The story is "Sucker Bait": | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Bait | sva_ wrote: | > _I 'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been | picked._ | | I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from | now will think the same about today's time. That's because | hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come | to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and | obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with. | PaulHoule wrote: | I see how "aristocratic tutoring" brings up people at the wrong | end of the curve (like G. W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind") but I | don't see it creating genius. | twsted wrote: | Idiocracy | myfavoritedog wrote: | XorNot wrote: | Technology is not a linear or even guaranteed path. | | Asking "why don't we have more Einstein's?" ignores that | Einstein's great contributions could _only_ have been made at the | point in history he existed: without the Michelson-Morley | experiment, a fixed speed of light was not a known problem in | physics. | | Today in particle physics though we lack such an experiment - | there are no substantial inconsistent results which can form the | basis of new theory: no results which conclusively point to any | of the myriad new theoretical approaches being right. | | If such a result is found, then it's likely a theoretical basis | which has already been written will prove successful in helping | explain and develop a new theory to extend our understanding, and | some Nobel prizes will be given. Is it's developer an | accomplished scientist? Yes. But were there peers and competitors | somehow not as talented? _Maybe_ , but more likely they simply | weren't first - and weren't lucky enough. | edmcnulty101 wrote: | The problem is not just the availability of information. | | The problem is the time that capitalism requires just to survive | leaving very little extra time to do stuff even for a genius. | | It takes not just genius to do great things but a mountain of | free time and resources, which the aristocrats had in spades back | in the day. | | Elon Musk is one of the few people with the confluence of all of | these factors and is doing great things. | gcthomas wrote: | Capitalist tech investor with piles of cash and political | influence, yes. But is Musk a genius? That case really hasn't | been made yet. | edmcnulty101 wrote: | I'd say he has to be way above average at a minimum. | | He has to understand Rocket Science and Astrophysics to | enough of a degree to communicate and make decisions with | other Astrophysicists and Engineers at his space company. | | He has to understand chemistry and mechanical engineering to | enough of a degree to communicate with the lead engineers and | make decisions at his EV company. | | Not to mention how he got his start with Pay Pal and | understanding computer technology and encryption. | | He may or may not be a 'genius genius'. | | But there's zero doubt in my mind that he 'ain't no dummy'. | :) | garbagetime wrote: | There is still room for genius in the most controversial areas of | philosophy. There's room for great, era-defining theories in | politics and in genetic engineering of humans. | betwixthewires wrote: | I'm not convinced. | | > I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during | the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to | the entirety of knowledge and that didn't trigger a golden age. | | We _are_ living in a golden age. The beginning stages of one | anyway. Where once a genius needed aristocratic tutoring, now | genius is becoming so common that they 're not the notable man of | their time anymore. | | > Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems | impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how | genius is produced. If genius were just a matter of genetic | ability, then in the past century, as the world's population | increased dramatically, and as mass education skyrocketed, and as | racial and gender barriers came thundering down across the globe, | and particularly in the last few decades as free information | saturated our society, we should have seen a genius boom--an | efflorescence of the best mathematicians, the greatest | scientists, the most awe-inspiring artists. | | This is 100% the case. There are so many brilliant people out of | the ~7.5 billion of us that genius just isn't as notable anymore. | And that genius, instead of resulting in household names like | Einstein, results in the marvelous modern world we live in. We | see the evidence of it every day in our day to day lives. It's | easy to lose perspective on this because it's the every day world | to us, but the way we live today is just not the way we did even | 30 years ago, not to mention 70. | | I can name some great thinkers alive today, right now, and | recently dead, in all sorts of fields from philosophy to | mathematics to hard science. Peter Shor. Noam Chomsky, Sam | Harris, Richard Dawkins, I'm sure anyone in this thread can name | 10 more. There are unsung geniuses right now working for all | sorts of companies, or just tinkering away anonymously in their | bedrooms at their desktop computers. Just wait til the | information availability afforded us by the internet breaks the | institutional education system and begins producing scores of | self taught polymaths and specialists at home. That's what the | younger generation is going to live through. | | Art: you can right now find with simple internet searches art | made by artists that is mind blowingly wonderful with infinite | scrolling. Of course 90% of everything is crap, but I guarantee | you can find excellent art of all kinds in seemingly endless | supply by people you've never heard of within 5 minutes of | reading this if you try. | | Its just good ol days nostalgia to me. A time when information | availability was monopolized and bottlenecked of course will only | produce a handful of notable people. When that bottleneck is gone | as it is now they're just not as notable, and that is a good | thing for them, us and everybody, except maybe the ones that | controlled information flows before. | mandmandam wrote: | Some food for thought, for the people interested in this: | | Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on- | one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 | textbook curricular politicized 'education'. | | However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any | broad genius decline. | | I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of | reasons: | | * depleted soil | | * pesticide residue | | * fertiliser residue | | * contaminated water | | * dodgy preservatives | | * corn and sugar subsidies | | * poorly understood food additives | | * selection for looks over nutritional quality | | * ocean pollution - mercury in fish, for example | | * Over-processing | | There's environmental factors to consider: | | * air pollution | | * water pollution | | * forever chemicals | | * lingering lead and the like | | * noise pollution | | * distractions - ie; porn, gaming, porn, movies, porn, TV, | tinder, phones, porn, etc. | | Cultural and societal factors: | | * All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, | or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and | advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the | latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves | to satisfy publishers. | | * Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly | emphasized in many ways. | | * Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing | propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of | fear. | | * Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism. | | * Scientism | | * Media priorities | | All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better | and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... | Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual | profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo. | zozbot234 wrote: | https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-ge... | is about essentially a very similar style of intensive | individualized tutoring. (This SSC review links to a new English | translation iof this work.) | | I'm not sure that intensive tutoring ever "went out of style" | though, so much as gradually becoming infeasible because of (1) | the amount of high-skill effort involved, which became more and | more costly due to the expanding alternate employments of | similarly skilled work; and (2) general progress meaning that | even with intensive tutoring you could not reach the research | frontier any more effectively than others, so making | "genius"-level contributions would still be hard. | | It's an interesting argument regardless, and intensive "tiger | mom/dad" parenting, while generally less effective, still derives | much of its general orientation from these 'aristocratic' norms. | m0llusk wrote: | Is there proof that tiger parents are not effective? Many high | achievers I have met have had parents that pushed them from | early on. Casually dismissing this effect without any metrics | seems an error. | gcthomas wrote: | Is economic 'high achievement' the key sign of success, or a | sign that wider indicators of a successful upbringing have | been ignored? | FooBarBizBazz wrote: | > most of the time life as a tutor was essentially a cushy | patronage job, wherein you instilled a sense of intellectual | discovery into a young child in return for a hefty salary that | left most of your free time intact--surely that's what the tutors | living on the Tolstoy estate must have felt, whiling away the | evening hours chasing the local peasant girls after educating the | young writer in the morning. | | SOLD! | | WHERE DO I SIGN UP. | phonescreen_man wrote: | No mention of female genius. What about Mary Shelley, Ada | Lovelace, Grace Hopper ...and on and on | mhh__ wrote: | What did Lovelace actually do to put her in that category? | | Hopper I agree with (also Frances Allen!), Shelley is an | obvious entry, but I've never really been sold on Lovelace as a | genius versus merely interesting. | kaetemi wrote: | Geniuses are hidden under the noise of that infinite information | access we have now. | ghotli wrote: | I've started thinking twice about clicking x.substack.com | articles around here. | | Why? Clickbait titles often filled with hot takes that at least | in my experience don't have much signal vs noise and there's a | tendency for it to just become a "this person is wrong on the | internet" comment section. | | Just a sign of the content mill cult of personality hot take | times we live in and this one apparently got me go ahead and | write the comment that's been on my mind | | P.S. Not a critique of this article specifically and I'm sure | there are decent substack publications. I mean I know they exist, | I've read them. Just an observation | fullshark wrote: | Like any platform without (human) editors in control, the top | 1% of content can be great but the bottom 99% mostly terrible. | ryanthedev wrote: | This is an article that was written to support a conclusion that | todays education is bad. To support that conclusion the writer | choose click bait evidence to support it. | | I don't agree with this at all. Genius is a subjective. There is | no absolute measurement to gauge it. The best approximation would | be IQ. | phonescreen_man wrote: | Not much mention of female genius, Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, | Grace Hopper, etc | lern_too_spel wrote: | There are several mentions of female geniuses who were | developed by aristocratic tutoring, including Emilie du | Chatelet, Ada Lovelace, Hannah Arendt, and Virginia Woolf. It | is certainly true that historically, girls were given this | benefit less often than boys, so we should expect fewer | historical female geniuses than male geniuses if we believe the | author's hypothesis. | mcculley wrote: | I am annoyed every time I read a statement of this form: "most of | the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of | knowledge" | | No. Only people who have never used a university library would | believe this. Most of humanity's knowledge is locked behind | paywalls. | | Once Sci-Hub and related efforts are done breaking down the | paywalls and we have a generation growing up expecting knowledge | to be available, we might see a big difference. | AQuantized wrote: | I think the writer is so completely wrong in his characterization | of the internet and all of its free information not even | producing "some sort of bump." How could you fail to recognize | the massive change and pace of technological innovation in the | past 2 decades? I don't know what sort of obtuse measurement | they're using, but it doesn't seem to correspond well to reality. | | However, I think I essentially agree with the importance of | tutoring and 1-on-1 attention for nurturing potential 'genius'. | John von Neumann is a fantastic example, but perhaps more | obviously illustrative is Susan Polgar and her father's explicit | attempt (and success) in creating a chess genius. Susan Polgar is | the greatest female chess player of all time by a gigantic | margin, and it would be hard to deny it's the result of Laszlo | Polgar's efforts from her young age to make her so, especially | given the success of her siblings. | | His teaching wasn't mind blowing. It stressed cultivating | passion, presenting progressively more difficult problems to the | student, but with everyday consistency for over a decade. | | However he was an excellent teacher (that being his main | profession), and skilled at chess himself (although not as good | as his daughters would be), something most parents aren't likely | to be for a given field they wish to inculcate greatness for | their child in. Accessibility of this simple yet difficult | program is unlikely to be accessible to most people then. | | Perhaps we could structure education systems to offer as much of | this tutorship exposure as possible? We already know the lecture | format and inactive learning is quite ineffective, so perhaps | refocusing resources as much as possible on a more effective | method, even with mediocre implementation, would produce better | results, especially for those with aptitude. | wcarron wrote: | I think the author has got it mainly correct. There exists a | perfect analog to this 'genius problem' in plain sight: | Architecture. Back in the day, especially the art-deco era, | buildings were adorned with beautiful facades and friezes and | carvings. They had style and substance and actual design. | | Today, all you get are construction companies shitting out glass- | paned bricks with shoddy materials, poor usability | considerations, zero design considerations, etc. "Luxury" | apartments slapped together so poorly I'd sooner bet on the | structural integrity of a literal popsicle-stick house, are now | the norm for new construction. | | It's a classic case of quality-vs-quantity, and this too the | author pointed out. Everything about America and its culture is | tuned ferociously towards maximum effficiency, reproducability, | and simplicity. There is next-to-no room in American for focused, | well considered, small-scale solutions. Not unless you are the | ultra-wealthy. Normal people cannot afford craftsmanship anymore, | because quality itself is now a luxury. In the same way, | "Geniuses" (in the way the author describes) aren't produced here | anymore. | | The reason is simple: America has, for decades now, sacrificed | quality (with brutal zeal) at the altar of quantity. | lkrubner wrote: | Back in 2010, I was invited to a party in a building down at | the south end of Manhattan. We were 4 blocks from Wall Street. | It was a new building, my friend had just moved in. The | building was for the "$400,000 a year working stiffs" of Wall | Street, but that line is from 1987 (the movie Wall Street) and | nowadays they all make a few million a year. | | I was surprised by the relatively poor quality of the building. | All the walls were covered with carpeting, but the carpeting | was falling off in some places. Some of the light fixtures hung | awkwardly slanted from their slots. The door knob (of the | apartment) was very cheap and was already showing signs of | wear. | | Keep in mind, this was a new building, built for wealthy | people. | | Something feels broken about this culture, where even the rich | cannot buy nice things any more. | molopolo24 wrote: | It's just the illusion that the West is rich. Like, have you | ever asked a Scandinavian about their country? People living | like in identical dwellings, having identical tastes, going | to the same bad food places and persisting on OMGZ we have | the best countries!111 | | I once heard someone say the food he ate growing up in the SU | was way fresher than anything that could be bought in a store | or restaurant. | | The US is all about the pretension of "I can't believe its | not Butter." | | "I can't believe it's not a luxury Apartment building." | gr1zzlybe4r wrote: | Potentially - but the quantity focus that you're talking about | is a direct result of the construction and development that we | allow. We basically prohibit people taking risks in | architecture and design because it's impossible to build a lot | of "interesting" stuff due to zoning (which is what you can | build) and structure (which is how you can build) regulations. | | All of the pretty architecture that you're talking about was | built when the legal handcuffs for doing it didn't exist. | | Tl;dr - I get what you're saying but can't ignore the structure | of what we've set up that encourages/enables it. | wcarron wrote: | Yes, the legal structure is dumb. We as a nation traded | quality for standardization and accessibility. Poor choice, | in my opinion. I'd rather have fewer, riskier, smaller, | beautiful buildings than the mass-produced, nondurable, ugly, | no-risk construction we have today; and same with education. | darod wrote: | Is there be something to be said about how difficult notoriety is | these days? People are so connected and the competition much | greater to get noticed vs historically where publications were | limited. Today it feels as though in order to become a famous | genius, you would not only have to optimize for your field, but | also the SEO required to get a high ranking on a google or | youtube search. That in addition to the storytelling skills | necessary to keep your readers and viewers engaged because | there's a cat video next on the feed. Which makes me also think | what's tech's responsibility in causing all this? Are we | preventing people from attaining this genius state because we're | sucking all their attention with social media? | Bjorkbat wrote: | I think a more convincing theory for me is that society abounds | with "IQ shredders". Sure, we're now living in an era of abundant | information, but we're also living in an era of abundant | distractions and hazards. | jvsg_ wrote: | fyi, IQ shredder means social and technological innovation that | keeps higher IQ people from reproducing, and hence lowering | down of IQ over generations. Nothing to do with distractions | and hazards. | bigbillheck wrote: | This article has a chart from and links to https://www.cold- | takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#books-th... which is even less | convincing than the original. | tippytippytango wrote: | We need a definition of genius and a way to measure this. I see | genius all around me. It doesn't get recognized because so much | genius is getting actualized now we just expect it. People are | upset with Apple because they don't come out with a new game | changing innovation every 6 months. | kkfx wrote: | Education is an important, but not unique, part of the puzzle: | slowness and resources are the rest. In the past researches was | made ALSO for profit, but also just as mere research, there was | no management no "time-to-market" push like these days and things | evolve slowly so there is time to produce valuable things. | | These days books are written and re-written with purposes like | "publish-or-perish", "we need new ed. for profit" etc. the | outcome is obviously mostly garbage. There is not much _public_ | research just done to research, with economic tranquility and | slow thinking, again the outcome can 't be mostly different than | garbage. | rvieira wrote: | If we consider Einstein as a "10x scientist", I for one, I'm glad | that society is realising that it's better collectively to | increase slightly the performance/achievements of 10 scientists | than relying on a single "10x" one for innovation. | AlgorithmicTime wrote: | riskQtempAcc wrote: | auggierose wrote: | Don't worry, they are around, but everybody is so busy with their | own stuff, you will not spot them. | al2o3cr wrote: | LOL at the two sources of actual quantitative data in the article | not having data past 1950 or for the entire twentieth century | damm wrote: | It is difficult to be a Genius when you are poor. | | Meaning we have people who are highly intelligent now but they | lack the resources to create their vision. | | While we have people who are one of the most richest individuals | in the world trying to start a fist fight with Putin over the | future of Ukraine. | | > Yes I know Elon wasn't serious it was just him getting | attention. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-16 23:00 UTC)