But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system. This is confusing correlation for causation. Indeed, Bertrand Russell wrote:
> The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.
I have a strong suspicion that aristocrat homeschooling would still beat out public education system in many ways..
For example, public education system doesn't particularly touch on social skills, etiquette, rulership/leadership, Machiavellianism, business, investing, property management, etc.
no because that's the skills of a political and economic oligarchy. If you want to see successful education systems look at the Soviet Union, India, China and also France.
A boatload of testing, rigorous learning combined with high formal standards, that's to say an actual meritocracy is how you can quite literally churn out geniuses. Chess is a good example.
Took me a while to realize you are actually being serious. Those systems are terrible examples - just look at the state of those countries themselves. That kind of highly standardized, high pressure exam school culture drives all the creativity and joy out of learning. The ones who survive are the calculators who can't think for themselves. Great for communist dictatorships, yes.
>just look at the state of those countries themselves
three out of four of them are doing alright, and the one that didn't failed because it endorsed an economic system that engaged exactly in the kind of cronyism and bizarre political machinations that the OP actually wants on a school curriculum.
>The ones who survive are the calculators who can't think for themselves
Well neither can your average Ivy league humanity's graduate at this point so at least they've got that in common. Thinking for yourself is overrated. if you manage to produce engineers at a rate ten times higher than everyone else and manage to not destroy your economy with central planning you'll surprised how far that can take you.
> A boatload of testing, rigorous learning combined with high formal standards, that's to say an actual meritocracy is how you can quite literally churn out geniuses. Chess is a good example.
Isn't the way chess was taught essentially a system of tutoring? As soon as a 'prodigy' is identified, they started playing against Grand Masters outside of tournaments.
Of course there was. There was a nationwide infrastructure of chess clubs, tournaments, state financing and training that no other country had. This created the large base from which gifted players could be recruited
"But the real basis of the Soviet school was its colossal infrastructure, creating a pool of millions. As the huge Soviet training campaign bore fruit, and literally hundreds of players achieved master or grandmaster strength between the 1940s and 1960s, a vast system of rewards and punishments was built up, with endless in-fighting and denunciations. The life of a chess professional was a privileged one: stipends were much higher than average wages, and foreign travel allowed. Botvinnik and his successor Vassily Smyslov were awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian Soviet honour—no British professional has received so much as a knighthood."
we have chess clubs in pretty much every village here in Germany. My ~10000 people birthplace had one. Doesn't make chess hugely popular tho. It's still a niche activity and I would argue that interest is the dmoniating factor here.
Also Russia isn't dominting chess anymore. They have a single player in the world top10 and 3 in the top20. [1]
Have you lived in an ex-Soviet state? Have you seen the USSR from the inside with your own eyes? I have, and I am so much tired from people glorifying it.
Sure, but we don't make judgements on individual data points. The Soviet Union with the short Fischer interlude dominated chess entirely. Today Russia still averages the strongest top 10 players, India and China have risen to become the third and fourth strongest chess nations within a generation or two, and looking at immigrant engineering talent in the US paints a pretty clear picture as well.
And the educational divide globally and development of science excellence pretty much only grows. How is this even a discussion given the evidence, any countries around that run on 'aristocratic homeschooling'? Saudi royal family kids in Swiss private schools?
> Sure, but we don't make judgements on individual data points.
And yet here you are making a judgement on the effectiveness of a method of education purely based on the single datapoint chess.
But leaving the hypocrisy aside, I don't think chess is a good example to begin with. The reason why Russia dominated chess is because chess was there a lot more popular compared to other countries. That this theroy likely makes sense is supported by the rise of China and India with their massive population compared to other countries. Having a high amount of interest and good education are components that often reinforce eachother. More opportunities to learn and compete with strong players improves ones own skill level.
Why was there a higher interest in chess in Russia? I can only guess, but I would say the long and cold winters that make outside activites impossible most of the year play an important role.
On top of that the world chess rankings are actually quite diverse since the rise of internet chess. Russia only has a single spot in the top 10 strongest players. [1] The rise of video gaming that competes with chess for indoor mental activity has probably something to do with that.
> But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system.
By definition no public school can be as good as anything Russell got. Russell had the privilege of his brother teaching him geometry and hence set him on his path to mathematical greatness. He came from a distinguished family. No public education can replicate the personal 1 to 1 knowledge transfer/education.
> None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious
Yes. It's why people like Russell, Darwin, Turing, etc had the time to work on non-industrious subjects. If darwin, russell or turing were industrious, nobody would be talking about them today.
Public education system was created firstly to produce obedient soldiers for the state and secondly to provide drones for factories.
Isn't the important thing whether or not tutoring produces a higher percentage of Darwins compared to our current model of schooling? If it does, then shouldn't we expend some effort on identifying students that are more likely to become a Darwin and then provide them with high quality, publicly funded tutoring? We all benefit from the discoveries of geniuses like Darwin so it is in our common interest to make sure that we produce figures of that stature as often as possible.
What are you talking about? There is no shortage of geniuses who advance sciences today. If anything, the scientist class is wider than ever. Also, you're proposing segregation based on vague attributes which would be horrible for children and harm society.
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?
I believe at least part of the answer is that many of the would be geniuses went into financial services. Ed Thorp and Jim Simons come to mind as examples of people who made important contributions in mathematics, but spent a substantial chunk of their lives figuring out how to take money from people who are dumber than they are.
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
Leo Szilard [1] is generally credited as coming up with the concept of a fission bomb. He enlisted the help of Einstein, who had political clout, to bring it to the attention of the US government [2].
Sorry, I should have appended an "/s" to my comment. Einstein is associated in a loose fashion, and therefore by name recognition often credited by laypeople-- to creating the atom bomb, but has much less to do with it than many other people apart from theoretical groundwork related to the energies involved in mass. (to greatly simplify things)
It can very well be that we have individuals capable of doing that work but they hate academia.
I'm no genius but the only thing I got out of public education is that I don't want to have anything to do with it.
I know an actual genius (recognised by various organisations) and, after doing 5 years of academic life (post graduation), he ended up being a software developer in a mediocre software agency in a country with incredibly low rates for developers.
Public education is just another example where the resource limits that any public solution intrinsically have turn out to invalidate the most useful part of that idea. Sure, we don't have geniuses anymore, scientific research is in shambles, everyone hates school but I'm so grateful that my barista has a degree in political science (which I paid with my taxes).
At the same time, when something public is mainstream and paid by everyone by default via taxes, the private sector has a much harder time. It sucks having to pay for public school even if I don't use it and the lack of choice in private schooling in my country is annoying.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm not talking about watching videos on the internet. I'm talking about libgen, scihub, MITs entire curriculum for free on the internet, forums and chatrooms to discuss topics with others, and some videos on the internet. And that's just the free ones.
That's still not anywhere near the same though, a tutor is able to figure out what the student is missing through observation and also teach in a way that the student will learn fastest. Whereas any internet resource relies on the student being able to figure out what they themselves don't know and isn't tailor-made for them.
Having a person sit down with you and walk you through everything one on one is great. Having swathes of useful information available to everyone that's interested and determined is a sure way to create a much more highly educated society at a low cost. And as a bonus, geniuses are more able to hone their gifts so you get more of them.
The argument is that 1:1 instruction, or tutoring, is a superior way to acquire knowledge. Having lots of information available is great, but not a substitute.
The discussion here is about an argument that says basically without tutoring you can't create Einsteins. My only point is that we can now make them easier and cheaper than ever because they can make themselves.
On this specific topic, I must admit I do believe 1:1 tutoring is overrated. I've taught myself most of what I know, and the rest I learned in a classroom. I have never had one on one tutoring. I may not be representative of the population, but I bet most people don't need near as much tutoring as a tutor would have you believe, they just need access to accurate and well organized information.
Having a tutor is superior to simply having access to all of the information in the world. The tutor acts as a guide to that information, they structure the presentation of that information to you based on your individual needs which means you can quickly speed through parts that you pick up easily while spending enough time and having a ready source of answers and guidance on problems that you have difficulty with allowing you to master them faster. Sure, someone could reach the same level of understanding with nothing but the internet and motivation but they will arrive there much, much later than someone who is actively tutored from a young age. Think of it as like acceleration to some maximum speed, the one that reaches that speed earlier will be able to go much further during the time allotted. You could see that allotted time as the lifespan of the person but age also affects performance and could result in a drop off in ability over time.
An intelligent person who is privately tutored can be performing at a college level or above when they are in their early teens. They can be at a doctoral level when they hit their twenties and then spend the entirety of their most productive years making use of their education. Compare that to our current educational track which has most people achieving their doctorate in their 30s. Performance for the average autodidact would likely be much worse.
The article isn't about high performers. It is about world-changing genius. If you had a competent tutor, you would progress much faster and much further than you have by yourself.
developments in education technology is actually driving to to do exactly that, personalized learning curriculum designed to expose the user at their own pace and using heuristics to create learning schedules
Yeah 90% of them will. It's still exceptional, just not limited to those with connections. That still leaves an order of magnitude more people motivated to learn that didn't have the option to before.
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?
Andrew Carnegie drowned half a town before he started building libraries. Drowned as in a lot of people died. For a country club for his rich friends. This still ranks among the top civil engineering disasters in history, over a century later. Don't scrimp on earthen dams, folks.
(the Carnegie library in my old neighborhood is a bar. I don't know if the town lowered the main roads or they built the library on a hill in town on purpose, but it sticks out like a pretentious, sore thumb now.)
I've thought about this a lot. There are really only a few names that come to mind that I would call world class geniuses, but generally Jim Simons of Renaissance [0] tops the list for me.
Was he tutored? I also thought of Ed Thorp. But he was NOT tutored. He was kind of an autodidact according to his memoir. He had good teachers too, but not aristocratic tutoring by any stretch.
> Leo (Norbert's Father) had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.
The arts is also one area where one on one tutoring is still extremely common if not the defacto method of education. e.g. music lessons, "musical families", mentorship from fellow band members.
If you look at the sports world, you will see that its equivalent of tutoring is hugely beneficial and is alive and well. The Williams sisters and their father are one obvious example but if you dig deeper, you will see many more examples. Rafael Nadal was tutored by his uncle. Tiger Woods was tutored by his father. Also, look at coaches. They are often the sons and daughters of coaches.
Tutoring allows exploring and independence of thought which is really how you improve your thinking whereas standardized education mostly does not. Tutoring is bidirectional and standardized education is most unidirectional.
This is survivorship bias. I've played pick-up basketball with a ton of dudes whose parents sunk hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into training and coaching, and they're generally stunningly mediocre.
Tim Duncan, widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time, held a basketball for the first time as a freshman in highschool when hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool and he had to pick a new sport to play.
Basketball almost assuredly has to be an extreme outlier here though, in that outrageously rare physical attributes are almost a necessity to play competitively. I realize there have been some exceptions with very small players but they seem rarer and rarer each year.
This doesn't invalidate your point, but we might get a more accurate picture if we only looked at people who ended up 6'3, strong and athletic.
Tim Duncan is close to 7 feet tall. Supposedly roughly 20% of men 20-40 who are 7 feet tall are in the NBA. What percentage of men of average height are in the NBA?
When David Robinson was in high school, he was not considered an NBA talent. When he grew to over 7 feet, he was drafted first and is now in the Hall of Fame.
Height is a huge advantage in basketball. Larry Bird said that if he wasn't 6'9", then he wouldn't be in the NBA.
Tim Duncan was a great player, great mind, and great leader, but height was integral to how he played.
Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages?
I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10.
I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.
Wayne Gretzky is another one who was famously trained by his father Walter Gretzky practically from birth on Hockey. At least most of the people mentioned loved the game, the heartbreaker is Agassi who famously admitted he loathed playing tennis but did it because that's all he ever knew and his father pushed him so hard on it.
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.
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.
The vast majority of people buying expensive houses and condos are paying for prestige, location, and square footage, not quality of fit and finish. You can get stuff done better, it just costs even more, since the skills are rarer (as they are no longer needed for many projects, thanks to mass production and power tools).
Unless you're self-managing your project, the people actually doing the work for your contractors are generally coming from pretty similar places/skillsets for multi-million dollar places as for "basic" ones.
There's a reason "want something done right, do it yourself" is hardly a new aphorism.
I think a useful rephrasing of this: base-level, meets-code work gets you a guaranteed market. Work above that level doesn't do well on resale, so you do it if you have a buyer up front; home owners, in turn, only do that work if they're planning to stick around a while (and even then, only certain people.)
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."
Rich people can buy nice things but they can be scammed like anyone else.
The way it works is that some developer bought the plot, built a condo and sold it in advance to wealthy people. After pocketing the money they delivered something and that's the end of their obligations.
If the finish is crap, what can the rich people do? They likely don't have ground to sue and they were probably aware of whatever materials they were buying.
I've seen this happen with so many developers, I don't understand why people buy from developers at all.
Ok, they buy all the plots and normal people have a hard time buying plots, but I'd still pick an existing house I can inspect now compared to buying the idea of a finished product which doesn't exist.
I suspect the flow is something like:
1) Check real estate market
2) All the properties are crap
3) I don't want to deal with blue collars fixing my house!
4) This intriguing new developer with an ok track record is building something, we're going to have a new luxury home!
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.
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.
I could be totally wrong, but my hunch is that this is more related to the lowest hanging fruit rather than human capacity. Maybe scientific discoveries simply get exponentially harder.
In painting, it's very rare for someone to make anything original these days. We won't have any more Picassos, etc, simply because they were the first to explore a new terrain. It's really not a matter of education, genetics, or talent. The more explored a terrain is, the less there is to discover.
So the matter is really discovering new terrains, like the internet has been in the past decades.
I agree the "lowest hanging fruit" is likely a key factor, as well as tuttoring.
But I would also guess that being recognized as a genius was easier in past times, especially for aristocrat family members. The same way music artists will never be as huge as the Beatles or Michael Jackson once were because of the long tail effect, we now are exposed to so many bright minds, and not way to pick out an Einstein amongst them.
In other words: We might have all the geniuses we expect statistically, but when everyone is special, no one is special.
Is useful, worthwhile knowledge in a "sparse" search space? If so it will take more and more effort to reach anything new, and we'll need generations-long moonshot efforts to force young kids to skip their childhoods to dedicate time to nothing more than making the next, say chemistry, discovery by the time they're 45. Many are accused of manufacturing B.S. search spaces to explore in English departments.
If worthwhile knowledge is in a "fractal" search space maybe there's hope. Those kids can still have a childhood and discover something new by the time they're 30, something worthwhile.
Another problem with modern genius might be that there are plenty of geniuses, but the proximity of their deep-in-the-fractal landscape is so far from what can be recognized and acknowledged by gatekeepers of genius sainthood that their work never comes to light. There also are probably lots of geniuses doing outsized work at relatively menial jobs in places where nobody can see it, and their work is taken for granted.
To add my 2¥ I think this aligns with a generalised version of the main thesis of the essay too. It’s just that the modern variation of aristocratically tutored is along the lines of serendipity-induced tutored (meeting the right mentors/senseis at the right time in the sense that when you turned back and look at the past you can connect the dots nicely for your future endeavour. It is in this way that you can increase your chance to prevail in a field in ways that are your choosing and only yours)
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Hah, I was not aware of that. Although from the description on wikipedia, it seems the two were not quarelling at the time he wrote that phrase in a letter to Hooke.
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.
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.
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.
In other words "prepare them for adulthood" where those skills will serve them well. It's hardly like those guys have discovered a deep secret.
They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job.
Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral.
Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.
> understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then
dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you
can have as an adult.
You are in charge. That is the only thing you need to know about being
an adult.
One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius.
I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as a proxy for genius, are particularly great. Acclaim is a dubious proxy because because it's more influenced by popular attention than actual technical capability.
I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted.
If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)
I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.
My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.
I think people misunderstand the skills needed for progress nowadays (or maybe ever). We have clear avenues forward where we are basically just waiting for data to trickle in, then prune the falsified hypotheses, and repeat.
It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.
And even then we have the story of the quantization of blackbody radiation, when Planck was stuck and finally ended up using a formula that fot the data and called it a day.
As an addendum consider Paul Erdos. As far as I know everyone loved to work with him, he was basically running a big distributed institute in this regard. He did what organized workshops do nowadays, but in a slightly radical way, he basically changed "dorm rooms" every few weeks, and churned out papers like a machine on speed. Which in fact he was on all the time. And who can blame him? Stimulants are part of work culture anyway. Coffee, tea, anti-ADHD meds, etc. And with such drastically work focused "work-life balance" it's not surprising that he has results.
> It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.
Who says there are no more breakthrough to conjure out of the thin air?
There certainly are, but the later part of my comment tries to address this by illustrating how nothing is really "out of thin air" (still, the creative jumps from data/knowledge/premises/broken-models to a new hypothesis/better-models are invaluable, and almost always there's a prerequisite of years/decades of hard work to familiarize oneself with the data/old-models on such a level that the insight required for the jump basically comes intuitively "duh just try this, or that, or this helps to fit the data better" - which of course is intuitive to no one else, who did not put in those years).
I take issue with this, I don't see any discontinuous advances happening every year. I see incremental advances or the results of miniaturization and mass production making things small or cheap enough to reach mass market. Those are examples of progress but not of genius. Where are the revolutions? Why does it seem like physics has stalled, stuck on the same questions we've had for over half a century? We are making slow progress against universal scourges like cancer and Alzheimer's but there are no major breakthroughs that shake the foundations of biology and medicine. Psychology is still groping in the dark, unable to do much for the suffering millions endure. Where are the architectural advances beyond steel and concrete? The best we can do is 3D print odd looking homes. Why did it take almost 50 years to get ambitious space programs re-started? Even on the artistic front we are awash in a sea of nostalgia. I don't think genius is common at all and I agree with the article that we probably now produce them at a much lower rate.
First, Revolution is not the same thing as genius.
Second, even genius's don't bring frequent revolutions. Special and general relativity made very little impact on people's lives for decades. It took the Manhattan project, one of the largest industrial project of all times involving tens of thousands of people, to kickstart the nuclear age. And that involved a lot of things besides just relativity.
Third, we live in a world of revolutions that are so common people don't even grasp them. Ten years ago, Go was almost impossible for computers to play with any proficiency. Protein folding was still incredibly difficult and people were building dedicated super computers like Anton to try and make things faster. Now both of those effectively solved problems. Drone's have revolutionized battle fields in ways that are having very significant geopolitcal ramifications that effect hundreds of millions of lives. The raptor engines represent an incredible leap forward in the material sciences that will allow humanity to reach space more cheaply than ever before.
If there are no genius's today because cancer and Alzheimer's are still around, then Einstein wasn't a genius because he didn't solve those problems either.
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.
Genius is counterfactual:
"If this person did not exist, this thing wouldn't have been discovered or created."
Impossible to prove after the fact considering that in order for their discovery to be recognized, it has to be understood and somewhat built upon the ideas that are accepted today.
Taking private lessons for trombone put me way ahead of everyone who didn't take lessons.
In fact, talking to someone one on one in any depth will instantly reveal one side's mastery or misunderstading of a subject. One-on-ones for elementary through high school students would be an intersting experiment.
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.
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.
I don't see the author addressing most obvious criticism. There is no definition of genius. He mentions a lack of ideas, but doesn't talk about the effect that every field is much more specialized. You won't make advances in physics on the level of Newton or Kelvin. "The basics are covered" (with all the caveats that apply to this statement). He also ignores the pure genius that went into developing computing and the internet. Or the breakthrough that made our flat screens today possible that display digital information to us in the first place, like the invention of blue LEDs as a major scientific/engineering breakthrough. There are countless examples with an immense global impact, but the names of the inventors are barely known outside of their field.
The more specialized we get the less likely everyone will learn about it in general education and thus the inventor/genius will be less renowned. That doesn't make it less of a breakthrough or less genius. The article doesn't address this at all.
Further, there are many counter examples of genius that wasn't privately/aristocraticly tutored like Richard Feynman. For his point to stand there must be more privately tutored geniuses than non-privately tutored geniuses and today less intensive private tutoring. He doesn't have data for either of these prerequisites.
I found the whole article and reasoning quite lacking right from the premise.
Interesting, the article does mention von Neumann who as I understand it created the CPU/bus/memory computer architecture. I was a bit surprised to see a computer scientist discussed as one of the people who received this kind of education.
But yeah, my main response to the article is that "genius" and "the Western classics" are more social constructions than any sort of objectively defined term.
Or maybe we are so intellectually impoverished that there are a lot of orthogonal advances that we just do not see and do not try to pursue.
Like, most of modern chipmaking is just glorified analog photography, who knows what sort of microprocessors we could make through wildly different processes.
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.
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.)
Musk can start the school all he wants, doesn't mean it's tutoring. Don't round off the question "are Musk's kids being tutored" to "is a lot of money being spent on it". They are not the same.
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.”'"
"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.)
I was interested by the "Where's Beethoven" graph, and went to read the original article (which is better, and doesn't actually agree with the idea that it's measuring a decline of genius). I'm kind of astonished that neither article considers the possibility that the effect they're seeing is that opportunity for acclaim doesn't scale with population.
The absolute population has more than quadrupled since 1901. If I understand the data being used here, the "effective population" has increased over 100 fold in that time period. Yet the number of people receiving Nobel Prizes in any given field each year hasn't appreciably increased. And we would likely perceive the Nobel as less prestigious if they awarded 4 times as many a year -- certainly if they awarded 100 times as many. The same can be said of awards in art, music, and other fields.
Awards are obviously not the only way of measuring prestige. But the same could be said of coverage in prestigious journals, or by renowned critics. Nobody would reasonably expect there to be 100 times as many top-tier literary journals in 2021 as in 1901. It almost seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?
I think a limiting factor here is that acclaim is a matter of mass agreement. A single person can only watch so many films, listen to so many songs, read about so many scientific accomplishments in a day. A film critic in 2021 is probably not watching that many more movies a week than their counterpart in 1960. And it's not like movies are load-balanced between critics.
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?)
One does have to deal with the social aspects--not that all scoial aspect of secondary school are positive. But it seems obvious that 1:1 tutoring is generally positive beyond the cost. Certainly I got a lot out of independent study classes in grad school (and to a lesser degree undergrad).
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?
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.
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.
> 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
As a former homeschooled kid, I can testify that I had neither class nor test until I first went to school at 14yo. My parents did "force" me to do about half an hour of reading, writing and basic math. I ended up with a master in engineering.
They also bought lots of child-level science books and brought me pretty much everywhere they went.
It does take some dedication but children are hard wired to learn.
It is quite common in homeschooling to develop exceptional abilities.
The education system is generic and with a ratio of 10-25 kids per teacher following the same pace there is a lot of time wasted on waiting and on discipline.
Kids don’t learn to self manage their interests, to follow their curiosity, they learn to follow the teacher.
It’s not all negative, they learn to interact with different personalities, to defend themselves verbally and physically, they make friends, they learn from other kids.
With homeschooling it can also be hard to find like minded parents and kids who are not at school in the week to meet.
Another way to think about it would be: imagine that most grocery store where run by the government, what would be the impact?
>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.
I was homeschooled and did less than one hour of "study" per day until a was 14yo. 20mn seems quite likely.
I confirm that I found school very slow when I first went there, although I am happy I did since being at home with my mom all day long was becoming seriously boring (she decided to stay home when I was 1yo).
Getting used to middle school sure was a challenge but the academic part was fine. I did end up with a master in engineering.
The social side was more uncertain although, thinking back about it, I cannot decide whether I really was a weirdo or if that was just puberty kicking in. I certainly wasn't the most popular but I did have friends. I did sports and played music in a rock band (crappy but fun!), so...
Now, if I have a kid I am not sure I would homeschool her. Kids are hardwired to learn by they do need to be around an adult to learn by mimicking. It would require a serious lifestyle change.
I'd certainly be very interested in alternative schooling such as Montessori and the like though.
Don't misunderstand me: public school is great. It brings affordable education to everyone. It takes children off the streets. It makes society better.
But to be available to everyone, it is designed to be cheap and "industrial". Same content to everyone on the same rhythm, with very little variation. It is not difficult to understand that it cannot be optimum to every child.
>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.
This is far from a foregone conclusion and could lead to some bad consequences if, for example, we made school run five times as fast for everyone without checking to see which students would keep up with it.
Homeschooling sounds too cruel to me, I would have hated it to spend my time with my parents instead of the friends at school.
Surely, the state sponsored education is also a formation but what I found was that teachers are people too(from all kind of backgrounds and ideologies). Therefore, you don't actually get your kids grown by the design of the government. The teachers do the magic.
In proper countries, where education is primarily education and not propaganda, they tend to appreciate that different kids have different learning pace and needs and you often have options for appropriate education.
There's this contrarian singer who famously homeschooled his daughter, later said it was a huge mistake to do it because she grew up to be too naive to function in the society. Who is going to break the heart of your kids? How they are going to learn to cope with it? Who is going to lie to them and how they are going to learn how to spot a lie? Who is going to be unfair to your kids and how they are going to learn to make it right?
I can't see homeschooling my kids unless the country I'm in turns into a crazy dictatorship with propaganda as a primary objective in the school.
Not if they go to college and then get a mentally difficult/highly filtered (not the same thing) job. They could be surrounded by peers for the rest of their lives.
What are the best approaches for teaching homeschooled children how to work together in groups? Or does that just come naturally as children enter society as adults?
I’d be curious to hear the experience of those who homeschool as parents as well as those who were homeschooled as children.
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.
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?
When I read the article I thought about this in terms of the school system as well. There is so much you need to do only to get to the next "level" in the system, which makes it difficult to innovate or explore outside of that.
To me, it seems like the aristocratic tutoring gave those people the opportunity to work outside the system.
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.
I got to wonder how 11 year old Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Dawin would have turned out if they had been subjected to all the extremely compelling distractions that modern day kids encounter, aristocratic tutors and all.
How much greek and latin would have been learned with a PS5 in the room? How much of Marcus Aurelius would have been read if young Russell had had a Instagram account and a magic glowing rectangle that streamed entertainment around the clock?
Precisely as much as what today's kid are doing. Which means close to none for some, and quite a lot for others. And some discover it from books and some from wikipedia, reddit, YouTube etc.
Some kids with use those new resources to create amazing things, and some without any true purpose at all. That was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow.
There is no reason to believe that humans have fundamentally changed in few hundreds years. So yesterdays kid - deep down - really are the same as todays kid, the environment changed but they didn't.
> “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”
Socrates - talking about Plato's generation
your point implies that environment can have no effects and that you can dismiss them out of hand. Is that really true? surely some environments hamper learning? if you'll admit that, you should admit that you actually need to prove that we aren't in such an environment.
i.e. you assume a kind of "conservation of learning" without proof.
Not that environment has no effect, just that our current environment still produces you geniuses.
It’s quite likely that a different background would have pushed him into studying something else. But, shuffling who is remembered for what isn’t inherently a good or bad thing.
Some other things from the past which were argued to inevitably corrupt the younger generation from the "good old days:"
* Reading silently
* Ballroom Dancing
* Chess
As someone who leveraged playing and thinking about video games and emerging technology into a $300/hr consulting fee and being offered a "create your own role doing whatever you want" at a multi-billion dollar corporation after having been subpoenaed as an expert by the US government, advised cabinet nominees, consulted for about 10% of the Fortune 500s, and had CEOs flying in their oversees franchise management teams to hear me speak -- all before I was 30, I can acknowledge it was very corrupting indeed.
I left that career not just to play video games, but because I realized there's diminishing returns on personal wealth but inversely increased value on personal time as the available supply runs out.
If more kids these days figure that out earlier on, the world will be better off for it, not worse.
Besides, I'm less concerned with the loss of potential in kids these days not becoming wage slaves for maximum productivity and far more regretful at the lost opportunities for our ancestors born without the right anatomy, skin color, or wealth to pursue their own potential.
Even for those that did - given how much more interesting Da Vinci's notebooks were than his portraits - how much more interesting a world would we be living in were he and other geniuses to have not needed to finance their unfettered curiosity and interests with bullshit time wasting catering to the petty interests of the rich?
We only have so many hours in life, and in my experience much of society spends far more time at far less value on things like "stay at your desk until 6pm" than "solve this puzzle in this dungeon."
Video games are the least of the things holding back humanity.
Distraction is for less focused and less ambitious people. We don't have to look at Einstein level genius. Take a look at the competitive programming the kids there solve puzzles at such speed who are grown in the era of all the distractions. If one can not be genius in this era, there is no way they could have been genius in the past. The other way is not true due to access to knowledge in the past is very much restricted to select few.
Alternately, the markers of what makes one a "genius" have changed.
In the past, being a genius meant having enough leisure time to spend learning what was a comparably small body of knowledge. Then spending more of that time expanding that knowledge, ultimately transmitting it through a written or spoken medium to a broad body of people.
Today we often pay attention to raw skill in a field as a proxy for "genius". We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer.
> "We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer."
Competitive coding is still quite creative, which you contrast with brick-laying where muscle memory instead plays a big part. Perhaps compare instead to middle ages masonry experts who used custom cut rocks to build various curved outer walls and arches.
I agree that competitive coding is less creative generally than many other types of programming - often it is learned pattern matching combined with great quality execution.
The people being distracted by streaming video are the same people who would have been distracted by TV, before that radio, before that comics, before that chasing a hoop with a stick...
I feel you under estimate the sheer accessibility of content. Before content would run out. Just because you watch TV doesn’t mean you want to watch soaps or reality TV. There were certain shows you wanted to watch then it was over.
I had my X-Files night or Buffy night. Then I’d literally go and find other things to do: read, draw, program. Now I can easily queue up all the shows I want and just watch it all.
The fact that we have more compelling distractions than survival is because we have largely solved all the problems required for us to thrive.
The genius of prehistoric times would have been to discover better ideas to survive or hunt.
The genius of the previous generation was to improve computation.
We are here being distracted by TikTok precisely because of that.
The genius of the next generation would be something else important to the current time.
No matter what the context of the time is, genius will emerge.
The criteria of what genetics, skills and training you need to be a genius will definitely change to suit the time. Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Darwin are no longer going to be the geniuses of today the same way they wouldn't be the geniuses of the previous generation.
TLDR; Genius is an emergent phenomenon that is rooted in the valuable contemporary problems that need to be solved.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I kind of agree with your War theory. But obviously the war itself doesn't make things happen. Rather it is that it aligns a bunch of things - money, desperation/motivation, smart people.
Maybe lack of a world war is a reason.
Maybe intellectual property law becoming common.
Maybe increasing awareness of the competing billions around us makes for different impulses IE Bezos-aspirations instead of scientific progress. If you have enough money, you can BUY the idea/smart person.
Maybe the glorification of sports/fashion/music/movies/games rather than science/knowledge.
I disagree with the premise that there are fewer geniuses today. There are plenty of geniuses, if not more than ever.
They just don't all have a deep, cultural impact on the zeitgeist.
Take for example the resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem and Poincare's Conjecture. Or the work being done on the Twin Primes problem.
This article is probably better situated as an examination of culture. You could make a similar argument for why there isn't anything comparable to the Beatles at the moment.
The other thing is, that there is not much of basic math and physics left anymore for people to study and figure out something new.
Archimedes' buoyancy, newtons laws, etc. are all something that we know and learn about in elementary and high schools, and we remember their names, because they were either first to figure it out or more realistically, first to put it in writing in a way, that we can now use in "math/physics". Since the elementary to highschool curriculum is limited, we learn only "basic" stuff there, and most of that was attributed to historical physicists/mathematicians.
Now, in modern times, it is hard to invent anything "by yourself" (you need to work at a college and/or institute, to get access to proper equipment and mentors), and even when you discover something new, the discovery is so far away from "basic" math/physics, that the only ones who read the article and understand it are other mathetmaticians and physicists, kids will never learn about you, because the science is too advanced, and even when something attracts the mainstream media (to make you famous), the media then published that "scientists prove good exists" (the famous "god particle"), or worse.
I'm not saying that it's finished as in there-is-no-more-math-to-discover, I'm more saying that all the math at elementary-to-high school level is pretty much finalized, and kids will probably never learn about Chris Havens, even though for what he did, he probably needed to be a bigger "genious" than eg. Archimedes. Students at math courses, sure... but they learn about many mathematicians there, and most of them are not known by the geneal public.
They just don't all have a deep, cultural impact on the zeitgeist.
I think this is especially true in the sphere of art & culture. The enormous variety of work being churned out by artists and creators-- combined with such easy access-- means that something truly groundbreaking won't be seen by as many people because those other people are drawn to other content, equally incredible, that appeals more to their own interests, making it much harder for something to break through siloed interests to the zeitgeist.
Reminds me of László Polgár - 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've found similar line of thinking in the work of Polish writer, Jacek Dukaj. In his "Po Piśmie" ("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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Take optimization using Monte Carlo. What do you prefer, ten little innocuous steps or a single bold large leap over a barrier?
I dont see human endeavor as linear. I see it as an infinite dimensional space that we are somewhat directed to explore. In this PoV little steps get me nowhere.
Also, consider that ten little scientists will quickly dominate the institution and crowd out the genius who they cannot understand.
Results are non-linear. A 10x-er will produce results that 10 1x-ers can't. It's only "better" in the sense it's more "fair", not that it produces better results.
Everyone with an education was tutored in such a way.
We don't lack 'geniuses' we have more brilliant and educated people than ever.
It just so happens there are not a lot of low-hanging fruit of easy things to be discovered by 'gentleman astronomers with a telescope in their backyard'.
The only thing we may be a bit short on, are people who have focussed extremely hard on one thing.
Eddie Van Halen was nerding out in his bedroom for 10 years learning to spread before becoming famous.
I think with Social Media, a lot of people are constantly distracted.
But even with that said, the amount of talented kids with instruments is something else. Youtube is a source of inspiration and learning.
Of course 'the greats' are going to be coached and 'at it' since a young age, there's nothing new there.
"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others." - Aldous Huxley
An aristocrat believes that you need a specialised social class to do the thinking and deciding while the great mass of people do the "doing as they're told" part. Quelle surprise :)
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.
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:
* 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.
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.
I think 1-on-1 tutoring is great and I agree that there should be more of it. But whether "genius" has declined seems unclear to me. In my life I've personally met a handful of astoundingly smart intellectuals who work across multiple disciplines -- I imagine these people are probably as smart as the geniuses of history. And I think there are still intellectuals and artists who impact the world at large in a big way. Imo what has changed is only that for some reason these people aren't canonized as "geniuses".
I suspect that, like "top college", people are only considered a "genius" if everyone (or at least "every notable intellectual") knows about them, and there is only room in people's memories for several such people; but over time, the number of really smart people doing revolutionary work at any given time has grown from a handful to many thousands. As the ratio of "available genius spots" to "people who should be considered geniuses" has shrunk from near 1.0 in the distant past to a tiny fraction today, culture responded by giving up on canonizing geniuses.
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.
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.
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.
What is a genius? Not doubting the extent to which teaching practices are related to producing "geniuses", I think an issue with the topic is also framing (and therefore identifying) what defines a "genius". Taking into account the examples mentioned in the article, they all come from (understandably) "classical" (and broad) categories. I'd wager that there are more geniuses out there in the world, being that the landscape is much greater as there are far more niches to dive into. In my opinion the larger problem and why there's a decline in the "classical" genius is that it's being applied to a completely different frame, which are the present times. The definition of genius needs different criteria in order to make sense in today's world.
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.
I think there are two things going on here, that explain satisfactory why we feel like we see fewer geniuses now:
1) There are now so many people who would be seen as geniuses 150 years ago that they drown each other out, leaving little space in the spotlight for someone to gain the culture defining attention a genius in 1850 might have gotten.
2) In addition, the culture that would be defined by such a genius is now several orders of magnitude more complex than it was in 1850. That means getting everyone to agree on anything is a much harder feat now, much less to get the zeitgeist to agree someone is a genius. (Just look at people like Gates, Jobs and Musk - just as quickly as they are seen as geniuses by one part of the culture, another part wants to drag them down again).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
My two comments are that firstly, some fields don’t support the genius narrative. Consider the eradication of small pox. This is definitely in the top 5 best things humans have ever done, and may ever do. But there are no geniuses associated with this, it was a lot of small contributions over time.
Secondly, I think it is very obvious that there are some (not all!) potential geniuses who never achieve anything because they don’t get the right encouragement, support and coaching. Geoffrey Tozer snd Walter Pitts are two examples that come to mind, plus the no doubt many nameless female geniuses who never had any chance.
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.
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.
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.
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?
See also László Polgár and the upbringing of his daughters:
> László Polgár (born 11 May 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women's World Chess Champion.
> Polgár ... recalled that "when I looked at the life stories of geniuses" during his student years, "I found the same thing...They all started at a very young age and studied intensively."[3] He prepared for fatherhood prior to marriage, reported People Magazine in 1987, by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius."[4] In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained… When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."
FWIW, I believe it's very much true: we are born geniuses (if healthy, normal) and converted into the "dangerous intellectuals" we see today through a careful and idiotic process of what-is-called education. To me the weirdest and saddest thing is the way that people will force their own children to endure what they did, just because society says it's the "done thing". People like Maria Montessori are some of the greatest heroes in all history, from this POV.
I can barely imagine what it would be like to have a modern educational program that did things like teaching mnemonic techniques to radically improve memory, or hypnotic practice sessions where you can e.g. play imaginary musical instruments for imaginary hours (that take only a few minutes of real time) and improve. I experimented with a lot of this stuff when I was younger, and I can tell you we are barely scratching the surface of human capability.
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.
>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.
That's got it backward. Among the tutored, the geniuses could thrive. There were likely uncounted geniuses that spent their short lives tilling fields.
It seems obvious that mass produced education wouldn't produce geniuses.
A mediocre education for everyone will never make potential geniuses fall in love with education.
This generation's geniuses don't end up contributing to science and end up optimising advertisement click rate or finding the best way for banks and government to scam normies.
On the plus side, they're probably doing better than they would have in the past.
> 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.
Britain used to crank out popular music. Why that'd stop?
One theory is because the dole was ended. (Thank you Tatcher!) Aspiring pop stars generally started as struggling artists. Now they're just starving artists.
I assume that improving the safety net, eg UBI, will unlock amazing human potential. Give all those undiscovered geniuses a chance to follow their whim, vs grind away as fulfillment center wage slaves.
There's a role for truly domain-expert tutors (who deeply understand the material, not "expert at teaching"), but who will pay the correct price to lure them from every other profession? It doesn't scale because necessarily personalized (to address the subtle misunderstandings particular to this student)... so probably isn't the best use of the tutor.
"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"
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.
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.
The article assumes that we aren't living in a golden age. But in terms of pure science and technology you can argue that we pretty much are living in a golden age. Just look at physics, we're now in an age of gravity wave observatories, particle accelerators, and incredibly detailed surveys of the universe and a steady stream of high quality papers that would have drowned Einstein and the like.
Not to mention that science, math, and tech have become even more social and collaborative enterprises with large, sometimes huge, teams involved in making major breakthroughs.
So the article seems to be slightly lamenting that a single charismatic individual cannot corner an entire field in the public imagination any more? Or that they can, but they just do it for being an "entrepreneur"? Or maybe it's just that Elon Musk (for example) can only convince a small minority that he has expertise in any actually "real" field of endeavour (other than grift, PR, whatever) where in the past he may have been able to read a handful of books and sound a lot more convincing. Perhaps we just need to define genius more carefully.
As for whether highly privileged people will again decide to spend their money on tutors (instead of yachts or Rolex watches or whatever else they spend it on) seems to be a question of very niche interest and almost no social consequence.
A 90 year old is unlikely to make a mathematical breakthrough, so normalizing by total population is absurd.
If you wanted to know whether people are breaking marathon records in 100 years time, would you rather know the population of the earth or the population of Kenyan and Ethiopian men 25-40?
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:
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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.
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?
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.
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?)
The article is spot on. Liberal democracies should fund special schooling for a minority of smart kids; just try hard to make it as blind as possible to privileged home circumstances by picking kids up early into the program.
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.
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.
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'. :)
Feynman talks on names of birds being irrelevant. Also that there’s a hidden side to science not talked about and just assumed the student will pick up, that your weaknesses should be exposed. Also cargo culting.
Bart Simpsons karate teacher says first we fill your head with knowledge then we break bricks with it.
The article says tutors went on the grand tour. We’re full time live in always available.
The Huxley quote in this comment section.
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I wonder with SEO popularity marketing contests and polarised viscous populations, have people just learnt eyegouges? So now no one has eyes. How can a “naive academic” be produced in a trap filled landscape of litigious deconstruction?
Example, Feynman has a go at the reporter about asking why magnets work. Russels soft speaking. Could “we” allow these things?
I think you’re calling me a bot. That’s a shame.
I’ll reply literally: Feeding a comment thread, through regular reply box, with what I consider hopefully within the realm of suitability.
And personally: I think I have trouble conveying complicated thoughts (to me) without spending lots of words on background and hedging information. I hope to get better with practice. I hope that at least I don’t get in the way too much so I posted as it’s own comment not a reply to someone.
Hello, please excuse me for another post but I’ve been thinking about it since and I have more things that I’d like to add, I have updated by bot programming haha let me know if this is better formatting :)
Consider, if you will, a perspective of the book Lord of the Flies, in which a group of school children who are stranded on an island descend into chaos and violence. At the end, the children are saved by a passing ship and it’s crew.
Presumably, had the ship captain been there from the start things would have turned out very differently.
Is an aristocratic education analogous to hiring a sea captain?
In that vein, is sea captain an even better fit than educator?
To put some flavour back into the story from before, viewed as a group, as the group got older, the trials and tribulations of the world were exasperated by the inexperience or lack of wisdom of the group. And so had the sea captain been there, they would have acted as guidance, direction, wisdom type roles. For roughly all of life’s things.
The tutor would go on the grand tour and would live with them. They would often have multiple for different areas of interest, …
Ok so flip it around and now we’ve got a single child instead of a group and a group of sea captains instead of 1.
A group of sea captains of different specialities would approach total cultural transfer as the group got larger. For a definition of cultural that would be analogous to tesuji or clever reactions to the things that happen.
Therefore it goes beyond “teacher” in a modern school way.
So is it also therefore that the failure to produce geniuses is the difference between school in our context and life. Their context was closer or the difference smaller.
I’m going far field into blindly assuming that book learning, what we might call academic knowledge mostly remains, some might argue watered down or perverted but they at least still exist, where as non academic things, like you’d discover on the grand tour with Jeremy Clarkson have completely vanished.
If it could be shown that a focus on that version of academics has increased over time it might even be possible to say that more academia produces less geniuses, reword that into makes people dumber, smudge it a bit and: academics makes people dumber. Which would be quite funny.
End.
Ps. There would maybe be interesting things to find by looking specifically as the types of tutors and their life curriculum. Marcus Aurelius lists maaaaaaany things iirc. “and to Epiclitus I owe…” parts.
Ps. People argue about, paraphrased by me, life skills lacking in home schooling being problem with this but maybe I’ve shown that’s not necessity correct.
Ps. Similar themes to my preceding comment but I feel like it’s better. More of a statement than the beginning of a dialogue. More focussed and fleshed out even if relying on shorthand for some of it. Otoh I’ve introduced more of my own things and dropped threads for the sake of that focus. Still, I’ll think I’ll mark it positive progress. Good bot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
>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
It will lead to physical elimination of that 50%, and probably more.
>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.
Monkeys, from which we split off millions of years ago, have very strong hierarchies. It's great to believe we can fix everything with culture, but biology exists.
>The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources.
Resources will always be limited. Our wants, collectively, are infinite.
Just think about "thought influencers". It's nothing but status games, and that will not go away even if every single physical need has been taken care of. Why? Because the top influencer can program brains of millions, and some - even of BILLIONS of other humans.
How do you fix that with more resources, the competition over who gets to influence and brainwash everyone else?
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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?
Why so cynical about it? That's just what the situation was. The topology of our species' communication changed entirely within a single biological generation, from centralized orgs that delay and transform the signal, to the point where one node streams natively to any channel of their choosing, no transformations applied. How is that not worth mentioning in this thread, and how is it justifying cynic remarks?
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.
> 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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
None of that is possible without digital computers and those generalize to a much larger domain of devices and technologies that have revolutionized the world in thousands of ways. So no, the smartphone has not had a larger impact on the world than the invention of the digital computer. As for the other examples, GPS is not possible without the Theory of Relativity, video calls are not possible without motion pictures, the integrated circuits that make up the smartphone are not possible without plastics, and I doubt we would have many close connections with the rest of the world without air travel. Besides that, remote working and doctor's visits are possible without a smartphone, same thing with GPS which predates smartphones by quite a bit, same with access to entertainment. None of those things are really very revolutionary. GPS is the closest since it does provide a novel and superior way of navigating but you'd be hard pressed to make a case for entertainment or remote working being on par with manned flight or plastics.
> 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.
This argument is being framed incorrectly. It's the fundamental discovery that counts, not the implementations. The discovery of steam power is more important than Hero's Engine because discovering that you can do useful work with steam allows you to build all kinds of things that didn't exist before. Having a whirligig that runs on steam gives you nothing more than a few minutes enjoyment. Guns are definitely not a refinement of throwing things, someone who only knows how to throw something cannot build a gun. Guns are a refinement of the invention of gunpowder and good enough metallurgy to produce the gun itself. Similarly, rocketry is a refinement of gunpowder and the discovery that pressurized gasses escaping from a hole or nozzle can propel something. A smartphone itself is not a truly novel discovery, it's essentially a handheld portable computer. All the same technology exists or could exist in other form factors. If we compare it to something simple like a hammer, it is just a small hammer good for doing certain tasks and not others. It doesn't compare to the discovery that if you attach a weight to a handle you can hammer things. There are other specialized forms of hammer that are better for other tasks. i.e. a smartphone is just a specialized form of computer.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
...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!
"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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are several mentions of female geniuses who were developed by aristocratic tutoring, including Émilie du Châtelet, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You don't have to teach programming to teach computer graphics at the level of pedagogical example. The programming is bookkeeping for assets and occasionally a clever optimization(e.g. a Bresenham line rasterization, instead of one done by linear interpolation); the algorithms that are most critical to understanding graphics are often one-liners and analytic in nature, and so can directly reflect the underlying mathematics.
The kind of example you would get for matrix math would be something like: "Here is a triangle described by these points, here is a matrix that projects them in a 3D camera. In such-and-such 3D library, points are projected with the matrix by doing these steps. Compute and plot the result of applying the matrix to each point." And then in successive examples you can add some details about how you go about building up the matrix by computing the camera, translating the poly and so forth, and make comparisons to how it can be done in some scenarios using only trigonometry, and further comparisons to camera lenses and artist's 3D projection with horizon and vanishing points. If you put all those connections there in one place, you have the starting point, and then it can be elaborated on into both the pure math topics(why does this mathematical representation work) and the computing topics(how do I automate the process of plotting points).
What tends to happen is that the text doesn't allow enough of a detour to make all of those connections, so you instead get an extraordinarily brief allusion to application in a single word problem, after a completely abstract introduction.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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
It's kind of funny that you'd think this invocation would be harmful, given that the very premise is that how she chooses to move onstage is irrelevant to her musicianship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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!")
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.
purely anecdotally to my own experience, but I firmly believe that not only social media, but the screen size of phones themselves incentivize fast context switching shallow low quality reading, which has detrimental effects on cognition. Sure everyone has the worlds knowledge in their pocket, but all incentives are to only consume the lowest quality of knowledge
If I don't make it a daily habit, it becomes difficult to read a novel, I am unable to maintain the attention required, which phone scrolling im sure has exacerbated.
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.
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.
Didn’t read but it’s true now also. Mostly passed down hereditarily though by academics. Our ruling class are scammers and crooks who have no use for genius.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
That's only true if acclaim scales with population. Or more specifically, if the "number of acclaimed scientists..." would scale with the total number of scientists in the absence of a falloff in rate of their creation. That's the point: I don't think it does. I think it's reasonable to assume that in a larger population, a given level of acclaim is harder to achieve for any given individual. Same fish, bigger pond.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Still, there are conceptualists and there are problems solvers. E.g. Bohr and Bohr. While father was conceptualist, son was clearly problem solver. Both got nobel prize
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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?
>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?
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.
I dont remember the exact schools. He was looking for academic teaching/research position. But, he could not find the one. He got the patent job through his friend's father.
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.
> Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct.
1905 was very different from 1705. It was not particularly different from today, aside from cars, planes and computers. Hell, it was a golden age of physics research and incredibly well respected. The men and woman of the fifth Solvay conference [1], Emmy Noether and all the incredible mathematicians of the time- most of them did not come from means and could hardly be described as aristocrats.
> Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
I'm just not sure "smartness" is the limiting factor for progress. Astronomy is an old science and we're very much at the limits of our ability and understanding. "AI" is a very new field (maybe a science idk) and theres a lot of fertile ground of exploration and growth.
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.
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.
> The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.