[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.
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