Wait, if many people figured it out independently, wouldn't that be evidence that it *is* low-hanging fruit? Since multiple people were smart enough to do it without help?
Like, the population in the Neolithic was a few million people. If pottery required more than "one in a million" smarts, it shouldn't have been invented more than once or twice. Something only one in a million people can invent isn't "easy", sure, but Einstein was one in almost two billion, so the definition of "low-hanging fruit" is actually pretty high-hanging!
(It's also possible that pottery has intermediate steps to its discovery - *good* pottery requires multiple steps, but maybe shitty bone-dry clay that's really brittle and can't hold liquids is still enough to let you realize there's something useful to discover there.)
You're not taking into account how *long* the Mesolithic/Paleolithic was. Sure, there were only a few million alive at any one time, but multiply that figure by a thousand generations or more.
Indeed. The Eureka example of Scott quite nails it: the earlier you go, the more the inventions/accomplishment feel like Eureka moment: something hard to think of initially, but once you get the idea, it's kind of obvious for your clever (non-geniuses) fellow humans. The typical "Why didn't I think of it first". Even many Newton accomplishments fall in this category: I would not have been able to come with any of his ideas idea, but I am able to understand them very well and use them, since end of high school and during my engineering studies. Some of them even came naturally after the eureka moment: Calculus for example, build on limits itself build on some series arithmetic. Not rigorous of course, but I think it was not so rigorous when first set up by Newton either.
Go back in time, if you are a little bit technically minded, get exposed to inventions like a wheel, a bow, a blowpipe just once, and you immediately understand it and can even replicate it (a functional if not great version). I know, I did excatly that end of my childhood, usually just after national geographics documentaries ;-). Boomerang also, even if full understanding is less immediate (you need to understand wing profiles and precession)
But the more you advance in time, the more the theories and inventions feels harder to grasp, or replicate, even when fully explained....That's exactly the low hanging fruits effect: you need to be of much higher than average intelligence not only to come up with the idea, but just to understand it.
Vulgarisation is the attempt to bridge this gap, but I feel it tends to become less successful, loosing so much in the simplification process that the layman version of the theory becomes unusable or worse: misleading. It's a vulgarisation failure, almost a parody of it imho....A common pattern with post-newtonian physics, again consistent with the low-hanging fruit idea...
That still seems like low-hanging fruit to me. Inventing pottery is non-trivial, but it's easier than inventing bronze, which is easier than inventing bakelite, which is easier than inventing Yttrium-Barium-Copper Oxide.
The hardest part about inventing pottery is in realising that inventing new materials with useful properties is actually a thing you can do.
Mozart: I think that you can't get his type of tutoring. the kids is forced to spend much of his time at school and doing homework.
a single minded quality focus is no longer allowed at young age.
Edison and Newton too, MIGHT have been banned, or conditioned against their self taught experimenting. definitely would've been limited in time and options.....
Homeschooling requirements are really lax, especially up through middle school. A relatively bright kid could definitely spend a couple hours a week on traditional education and the rest on their specialty.
They _could_, but do they? The kind of upper-middle-class parents who are going to hire a full-time musical tutor for their kid are going to want to hedge their bets, give their kid a reasonably broad education in case the professional-musician thing doesn't work out. Things were different in 18th century Austria where there were more professional musicians and fewer alternative employment opportunities.
I wonder how many geniuses video games and other forms of entertainment takes from us? You homeschool a kid like that and now instead of wanting to learn math or the Violin they might play COD all day, talent notwithstanding. If that goes on for their whole life their potential is never released.
We did home unschooling. No time spent on traditional education, just encouraging kids to pursue whatever they were interested in and helping them do it.
That was in California where home schooling is, I think by accident, essentially unregulated.
Not entirely, since an unschooled kid may end up taking harp lessons, as our daughter did, or apprenticing in a computer repair shop, or doing something else that involves learning from a skilled adult.
Mozart's father has been described as "obsessive" in his tutoring of Mozart, and only in music, music, music. Teaching your child to do compositions at the age of 5 and taking them on tours of European courts seems rare now-a-days.
I don't know about the tours, but I wouldn't be surprised if we had several kids being intensely tutored like that in my city alone. (Though, disclosure, I live in Singapore.)
I doubt anyone alive is tutored like Mozart; even Edison had a professional schoolteacher for a mother, who homeschooled him. That’s incredibly rare as a matter of effective population, which now huge. I have heard from several tutors and all say that aristocratic tutoring is dead. But I will write an official response to this as part of a follow-up anyways.
What about the Polgar sisters? Judit polgar was intensely tutored in chess from a young age, and is considered the strongest female chess player of all time.
David Friedman is a (now retired) Law/Economics Professor who has talked here about homeschooling his children. Similarly, Bryan Caplan is an Econ professor who talks on his blog about homeschooling his children. That's only two examples, but it suggests that some level of homeschooling by skilled professional educator parents is still going on.
IIRC, most research also shows that schooling type (private, elite private, public, whatever) has no impact on future life outcomes when controlling for IQ and parental income. Which aligns with your conclusion.
Yes and no. On average it doesn't, but if you look at where US presidents went to school, for instance, it seems like it does. In my opinion, research on educational and life outcomes is still pretty muddled, just because it's so complex.
I could be wrong, but if we're controlling for parental income isn't that just a proxy for parental status? And there could be more accurate (though less elegant) proxies for SES than just income.
But even Bryan Caplan, who wrote a book with that thesis based on that research, homeschooled his kids in part because he thinks at the extremes different education styles can make a difference: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/09/why_im_homescho.html
Much of his reasoning makes sense, but it's also a hilarious case study. "Don't worry about it because you're not an outlier, but I'm not going to follow my own advice because I'm an outlier."
Caplan is objectively an outlier, and his twins are even more so. I’ve met them a few different times and at 12 they made most college freshmen seem shockingly ignorant.
It's interesting how many children of professors seem this way. I don't believe Caplan is a professor, but he is probably unusual in some of the same ways that many professors are, and his kids turn out unusual in some of the same way that professors' kids often do (but definitely don't always do).
Bryan Caplan is a professor at GMU. I have spent a fair bit of time with him, and he is unusual in a lot of ways, many of which are very uncommon among professors even :)
Ha, i just looked up Bryan Caplan as name didn't ring a bell, and turns out I read his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids a few years ago and agreed with most of it - somehow his name just never registered. I also heard separately of his book The Case Against Education, haven't read but suspect I'll agree with most of it as well.
Yeah I don't really get it since his book was positioned against Tiger Mom when released, and he seemed happy to engage in that debate saying Tiger Momming is unhelpful. But that blog makes it seem like his book could easily be interpreted as "people need to Tiger Mom even harder."
(I'm sure he's responded to this criticism somewhere since he is happy to hear and rebut critiques, but I'm not a Caplan completist so I don't know where)
School voucher lottery programs and their failure to meaningfully improve performance casts doubt on the idea that "good schools" are even a thing indpendent of the student population
I doubt the research has been done to properly tease out the details, but there's an alternative hypothesis here. If you take a select group of students and put them in a better educational environment, they may excel above that same group of students in a normal educational environment and above a normal distribution group put into the better education. Intuitively this makes sense to me. For one, teaching higher level materials in a way that engages the students *should* have a positive impact on students learning. Also, they don't have teachers dealing with unruly students, or teaching the same lower level material repeatedly to keep the low performing kids going, etc. It also makes sense to me that if you take an average student and put them into this school, they may or may not perform better. They may feel overwhelmed by the other students and the high level curriculum, realizing that they are not as prepared as the other students. A pure lottery would be worse, as much of the problem with public schools comes from the mixture of unruly and disruptive children. Those students take up a disproportionate level of teacher and administrator time, and can heavily disrupt the learning of the other students by interrupting class, bullying kids, or even just taking more teacher time to keep up on the course requirements.
Yeah, but (1) it's social science research, so requiring a gram or so of NaCl per page, and (2) it draws conclusions about the average effect on the average person. Pretty much by definition it says squat about people way out on the statistical tail -- the would-be geniuses.
For that matter, it would be *extremely* hard to study people who are geniuses, or who have the makings to be, but don't turn out that way. Just the demographics alone are daunting -- how many college student volunteers do we need to solicit to get a few hundred with IQ 160+? -- and then you have the difficult problem of identifying them *before* they demonstrate genius, so you can study the progression free of hindsight-driven rationalization and distortion -- and the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect[1] means it's pretty hard to distinguish a genius in the bud from a lunatic.
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[1] It's hard to understand how smart someone is without being almost as smart yourself.
I mean sure, if I thought there was strong evidence for aristocratic tutoring I'd cheerfully throw those studies away. But the existing evidence for it is just as shaky! Right now my prior is on schooling having little effect *especially* on the high end. No matter how well you're tutored, eventually you start hitting diminishing returns at a point determined by talent. A genius will overtake their peers even if tutoring got some of them to that wall faster.
I'm familiar. I have no doubt tutoring will convey you to your personal wall much faster, potentially even get you a little further up it, but once you start hitting those diminishing returns it won't matter as much. Besides, study after study suggests that interventions which increase academic achievement tend to have less and less effect the further one gets from school, even on the order of a few years.
>Pretty much by definition it says squat about people way out on the statistical tail -- the would-be geniuses.
I agree with this. It seems intuitive that of course """better skoolz""" isn't gonna make a 100 IQer any smarter than a 100 IQer can be (that's barely passing Algebra and then taking a job that never requires it btw). Meanwhile, trapping a 145+ IQ creative outside the box genius in an average school to do busy work all day can certainly impede their genius.
TIMMS indicate your statement is correct. Btw: TIMMS showed 2/3 of S-Korean 8th graders can do the most basic Algebra task. As can a bit fewer than 1/3 of US-kids. Yeah: school/tutors can make you reach your potential (or not), but there are some who can not do Algebra, and even extreme Korean-Teaching won't change that.
I agree. Hoel doesn't really define what he means by genius, but it's important not to confuse prodigy genius with IQ genius. Hoel's definition seems to boil down to someone who gets a mention in Wikipedia for making an important contribution to our culture, so prodigy geniuses like Mozart get confused with IQ geniuses.
He uses Einstein as the exemplar for genius, but it's difficult to judge which category of genius Einstein falls into. AFAIK Einstein never took an IQ test. People assume he had a super high IQ, but he was challenged by higher maths and he scored poorly on his exams at ETH Zurich. OTOH his ability to work up theory from Gedankenexperimente could be considered a prodigy type of genius. (And it's unclear how much his wife, who he met at ETH, influenced his formulation of Special Relativity.) So, Einstein, despite his achievements, is probably not the best example of genius qua genius. ;-)
The research argues that all the different kinds of "lock 30 kids in a room with one teacher" are pretty similar, but research on 1-on-1 tutoring is very clear that that provides *much* better outcomes - 2 standard deviations is the figure usually quoted - it's just that there's no way anyone's figured out how to make a national school system where every kid has 1-on-1 tuition, it doesn't scale. (Hence Scott's comment about Democratic norms)
Still, if tutoring is all that great then it's surprising how often it doesn't happen, even among parents with plenty of money. Wealthy parents who think nothing of spending $40K a year for private school for their kids would nonetheless balk at the idea of spending $60K a year for a full-time tutor.
Possible explanations:
1. It's clear to you and I that private tutoring is better, but the message hasn't got through to the average rich person yet.
2. Rich people understand that social skills are more important than technical knowledge, and believe that being socialised in a school like everybody else is important for having adequate social skills in later life.
3. Actually a lot of rich people _are_ doing the private tutor thing, we just don't hear about it.
4. Rich people have fond memories of their own school days and would hate to deprive their kids of those opportunities.
5. Individual tutoring is only really effective for kids who are either very smart or pretty dumb. For an ordinary upper middle class kid, they're better off in school.
6. Risk aversion. It's hard to do something unusual to your kid, knowing that you'll feel responsible if they wind up screwed up. Far better to send them to school like everyone else, and if they wind up screwed up it's not your fault.
I've heard that the primary benefit of an Ivy League education is the networking opportunities. Taking a kid out of school to get twice as good an education but no networking could very well result in a worse outcome for that student, if networking makes a big enough difference (which I think it likely does).
Also, lots of parents do hire private tutors - they just do it in addition to more social modes of school rather than instead.
I have an Ivy League education, and my wife does college counseling and has had some clients get into Ivies. It's true today as it was forty years ago that lots of people _say_ that the primary benefit of an Ivy League education is the networking opportunities, including a lot of people who are directly involved (as students and/or faculty) at the Ivy League schools.
That particular cliche is, like many, based on a kernel of truth. I've no doubt that the Ivy League schools generate for their alums _more_ networking opportunities than do most other colleges or universities. But as stated that cliche is a pretty big exaggeration....my own observation, and I think my wife would agree from her perspective, is that if we had to pick just one "primary" advantage of attending that sort of school it is living for a while in a bubble of absurdly bright and/or talented peers. That was pretty stunning (and sometimes overwhelming) back in my era and I gather that it is even moreso nowadays.
Your last statement is part of what people mean when they say it is about networking. Undergrand education at Harvard vs Washu or even like The Ohio State or Mizzou is pretty comparable. It is the other factors that matter.
Eh, I dunno....hard to say directly since I only experienced one version of undergrad education. But from the descriptions by spouses/siblings/friends over the years it has often not sounded like the educational experience at a lot of colleges was "pretty comparable" to what I found myself dropped into. (And in some ways not very well prepared for despite the qualifications that had gotten me admitted.)
Also when people talk about networking they mean something much more overt than simply exposure to the undergrad population.
I'm not rich and no one I'm related to is. But I did go to college with a good number of rich kids, and in recent years my career has brought me into close contact with a fair number of seriously-rich families. I think your list of possible explanations is pretty close to spot on but in the wrong order of priority/likelihood, and also is missing one.
The missing item is (7) peer pressure, not among the kids but among the parents. Both K-12 school choices and college acceptances have become objects of fierce competitive focus among rich parents. This discourages the private-tutor concept in two ways:
(7.a) having a child or two at whatever is the local elite prep school is a bragging right that many are reluctant to give up; and
(7.b) everyone is basically convinced now that the way for the progeny to get into Princeton or Stanford or wherever is with the kind of extra-curricular-rich high school resume that the Dalton Schools of the world help a kid generate and document.
With that addition noted, I'd rank your 6 factors plus my #7 as explanations for the disinterest in the full-time-private-tutor route in about this order:
Oxford and Cambridge do a lot of one hour conversation per week with a professor stuff. Paul Johnson has written about what it was like to have C.S. Lewis as his tutor (good).
There is very strong evidence that even 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, as long as none of the students are "disruptive", is also vastly superior to 30. You have diminishing returns shrinking peer group sizes.
It looks like he got enough attention from a patron to get sent to college at age 15, but was already producing remarkably novel work by age 17, and didn't obviously have private tutoring?
I have a lot of thoughts here, but I think my main takeaway is that he's saying "I (and some cherry picked people like me) don't like the current state of the modern novel, and I blame MFAs." He doesn't really provide any compelling evidence that MFAs are causing the problem--I could write ten equally convincing articles blaming this issue on any number of things. And whether or not this guy likes the modern novel isn't an objective quality problem. It's just no one is writing the kinds of novels he likes. I hate marvel movies, but that doesn't mean cinema is dead.
Thanks for dropping the link! I made the mistake of majoring in Creative Writing, so let me offer my two cents from the inside of the kind of program he's describing.
On the one hand, he isn't providing evidence that people who didn't go through a BA/BFA/MA/MFA for Writing would recognize. On the other, I know exactly what pattern he's pointing to, and I honestly don't know how I'd describe it any better. There is a certain pattern/thought process ingrained when you do a bunch of workshops and read the same (realistic fiction. only realistic fiction. autofiction is king) novels and short stories where your prose really does end up terse, short, unattackable, and LIFELESS. While some of these novels are rather enjoyable (*The Lost Book of Adana Moreau,* say, or maybe *The Boy in the Field*), they really do blend together stylistically in a way that quickly becomes boring.
Personally, I would blame the publishing industry--but *you can't get a job in the publishing industry without a recommendation from your MFA professors anymore.* There really has become a pipeline from college to publishing and if you don't toe the academic line, you're not getting one of the very few jobs available that year. (This would be why I am no longer aiming to go into publishing.)
I'm with you in that this does not mean "the novel is dead," I think Hoel is sounding the alarm much too soon, but also there's a big difference in enjoyment between any of the modern novels and, say, *Brothers Karamazov.*
Thank you for sharing your Institutional experience! Though I may be imagining it, I feel your comment is a great distillation of what I was warned about as I asked my MFA-wielding and published friends to write me letters of recommendation to apply to a program (which I didn't get into).
This all seems to be a special case of Scott's multipolar trap theory, in which iterations of a kind of toothless brand-algorithm have eroded the jagged stones of every hopeful writer of realistic fiction into the same undifferentiated sand. Pretty, in its way, but largely unaffecting precisely because it's been workshopped to death.
A last comment closer to this article's subject: perhaps our gatekept culture is too overfit, broadly, in its fractionalization of demographics to allow a broad-strokes genius to emerge. Someone who has the breadth and the depth to articulate universal truths from their own idiosyncratic viewpoint. For it to happen, there may have to be some minimum of social flexibility (for instance a baseline level of literacy required for a writer to flourish) together with a capacity for generosity that I guess I'd originates from a kind of childlike wonder that it seems few would publicly defend, much less cultivate, any longer.
I agree that it's something like a multipolar trap--do you have a link handy for anyone else stumbling on this thread?
There was a thread similar to your last point elsewhere in the comments, but I think you put it much more kindly. Cynicism has been in fashion for a while, and that makes me sad. The pieces that always got the best responses in workshop were the ones that approached the world with a wide-eyed optimism and love, and yet so few students would take a chance and write something like that! (I, too, was a coward--after all, I was getting graded on said pieces... and that cowardice, like the gunk that builds up in a sink drain, sticks around for a while unless you go get your hands dirty removing it.)
There is a deep disconnect between my understanding of the world and what you guys are talking about. I suspect I'm missing something here.
What novels are you guys reading where you feel like the author isn't articulating deep universal truth? Why are you reading them? Is it really hard to find the specific sort of novels you enjoy? As someone who has never had this problem I'm genuinely flummoxed.
I think the disconnect here is that the premise of the article is talking about an academic setting, and you're literally talking about The Common Man. In the academic setting, *you don't get to choose what you're reading,* beyond which classes you take. And even then it's still pretty limited.
And novels with universal truth =/= enjoyable novels. There are important things in *Absalom, Absalom,* but I will die on the hill that says "Faulkner sucks."
Thought I'd comment on the specific tenor I was bringing.
So, I don’t mean to be rude, but there is a deep distress I feel from this idea. The concept that the contour of a life in art is really a matter of gustation, and the world’s billions of real, living, striving, and struggling minds are so many sommeliers for our assistance at La Grande Bouffe. In fact, in exact specific outline this *is* my argument for why the bleached institutional halls and workshops and programs are so full of a quiet desperation. It’s as though all the world’s most talented writers decided they agreed with the premise (or bent to it for the purposes of professional advancement) that shit was just for them to enjoy, including eschatologically heavy work if only of the personal kind. But in actual fact we all have literal callings, to things that are unknowable to the personally inflected tastes and whims of our circumstance, and after we do or do not achieve them and the hours of our life are past, we are all faced with the actual literal apocalypse, if only of the personal kind.
This substance of work, of turning the attention of the art form called a novel onto such subjects, is a difference not in quality but in kind. This is the meagerness of contemporary MFA work, of pitilessly workshopped material.
I’m happy for you that you can enjoy it. I’m just gesturing toward something else.
That reminds me a bit of academic publishing: because peer reviewers can reject an article for basically any reason whatsoever (and editors virtually never decide to go against a reviewer's recommendation), the best way to get published is to be as cautious and uncontroversial as possible -- or "unattackable and lifeless", as you put it. Virtually none of the great philosophers of the past would be able to get a job in academia nowadays.
I have been out of academia for a good while, so I have no idea if university culture is as bad as is claimed, but is there still room for obnoxious or eccentric geniuses?
There are plenty of obnoxious and eccentric people in academia. Whether they count as "geniuses" is a difficult question to answer independent of whether you think there are too many or too few.
"I think Hoel is sounding the alarm much too soon, but also there's a big difference in enjoyment between any of the modern novels and, say, *Brothers Karamazov.*"
What makes you think this, though? If you gave a thousand readers Dostoevsky and also a modern novel, I suspect most of them would prefer the modern novel.
I can see making an argument for "novels are becoming more homogenous," and that's probably something that you could back up. But that just seems like a good thing for people who like that style and a bad thing for everyone else.
This comment can possibly make one feel that you have very different sensibilities than the average reader. Everyone I know would prefer Dostoevsky over almost any modern novel hands down.
Hm, I mean this is a difference of empirical fact, and I'm not sure how to measure it. It seems unlikely to me that the average US reader even has the reading comprehension to get through Dostoevsky. I know the average US reading level is somewhere around 7th grade, but obviously most of those people don't actively read novels. But given the simplicity of truly popular fiction I'd imagine Dostoevsky would be a pretty big leap for most people.
As far as I can figure out, the top selling novel in 2021 was It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover https://www.amazon.com/Ends-Us-Novel-Colleen-Hoover/dp/1501110365/ -- I've never heard of it but it appears to be classified as "Women's Domestic Life Fiction" and appears to involve the ever-popular plot of an undistinguished female protagonist pursued by two super handsome high-status men.
I can't find exact sales figures, but wouldn't be surprised if it sold more copies in 2021 than The Brothers Karamazov has sold in its entire history. Wikipedia notes that it was very popular on TikTok.
Without reading a word of it, I feel like I can predict that this particular novel isn't as good as Dostoevetsky, but that the problems with it are probably completely orthogonal to MFA syndrome. (The author, for what it's worth, graduated Texas A&M with a degree in Social Work, and does not appear to have an MFA).
I think that, depending on what you mean by a "modern novel", you'll get a different answer, but both interpretations show an important difference with past classics.
If you mean "novel" in the sense of "literature as a genre", you run into the MFA circle-jerk stuff others are talking about in their comments; I don't read that genre at all so I can't comment on the accuracy of the discussion.
If you mean "novel" in the sense of "book", then popular modern novels are usually fast food or snack food compared to the classics - chips are easy to eat and pleasurable in the moment, but they aren't fulfilling the way a proper hearty meal is.
Of course, most books a century or two ago were also mostly empty entertainment - cf penny dreadfuls - the argument is that the rare exceptions have become much rarer, which is harder to assay than any argument about the bulk of fiction.
I saw the same thing in philosophy. There's a tendency in the academy to retreat to defending only analytical, unambitious positions which can be defended beyond critique, and it's stifling.
This might be why there has been a huge surge in literary quality in certain bits of genre fiction in the last decade or two.
Writers with literary skill who didn't fit into the litfic paradigm went into genre because the gatekeeping wasn't as harsh.
There was a huge fuss in science fiction a few years ago (look up the sad puppies), which was partly driven by opposition to the arrival of lots of literary writers into sf (there was more going on than that and I don't want to distract from the point).
I don't know what the arguments are in romance or mystery or whatever, as they aren't fields I pay attention to. But perhaps someone else can chime in?
As a sci fi fan, I don't want to say that the new style of writer shouldn't be there, but it does highlight how fuzzy and often useless the definitions of genre boundaries are. "Slice of life in space" is not really the same genre as "detailed narrative of fictional military conflict, with extensive focus on the hardware", or "exploration of how new technology changes the structure of social fabric". The later two aren't really the same genre as each other either, fwiw.
I think the animosity that has been expressed was more centred around various awards than the existence of the new subgenre, in that an award shifting abruptly from one subgenre to another without much overlap in audience is rather antagonistic. (and yes, I know there was a lot of other messy politics too, with awards caring about who the authors were instead of about the contents of the book, but even without that part there was an underlying issue)
I haven't read any of the recent Hugo winners (they depress me, to be honest) but a couple of years back my beef with one winning entry was "This isn't SF. This is a coming-out story for a Chinese-American guy to his traditional parents, with a few SF words slapped over it". It was a good story, but it was a conventional literary magazine piece with just "let me throw in a bit about genetic engineering and magic rain" for the SF requirements.
I don't mind new blood and new concepts, but I do mind "the award for Best Detective Short Story goes to this recipe for chicken casserole". It may be an excellent recipe, and when I want to cook a chicken casserole it may be just the thing, but it's not what is described on the tin.
I think it's fair to say that different parts of the broader sff genre have come into prominence, though I don't think that sff novels are as plotless as so much mainstream fiction (indeed, if they were, I wouldn't read them!). Also, "slice of life in space" has a lot of overlap with "exploration of how new technology changes society", it's just more implicit and less explicit.
And I don't think there is so much real change in the content of plots so much as how they are presented. If you read the synopsis of the Ancillary Justice series on Wikipedia, it reads like a pretty conventional space opera; it's hardly plotless slice of life - you can say similar for the other recent winners (The Three-Body Problem, the Broken Earth series, The Calculating Stars, A Memory Called Empire and Network Effect - I tend to the view that Ancillary Justice winning Best Novel is the point where it changed, no-one would describe Redshirts as literary).
I was going to say that Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was the only plotless novel I can remember even being nominated, but it turns out that it wasn't actually a nominee, unusually for the Vorkosigan series (which has eight nominations and three wins in that category). It came 14th on the nomination ballot, with only six nominees.
Of course, Among Others is pretty close to being plotless, but it's about the love of SF writing and fandom, and reminds me of nothing so much as Fallen Angels (Niven/Pournelle/Flynn).
Short fiction in the Hugos, sure - but that's always been a space for more experimental work.
Interesting! I’m a fanfiction reader, which often runs adjacent to romance as a genre/form, and while I can’t speak to romance in mainstream publishing, I can say there are an abundance of gifted writers telling quintessentially romantic stories with a literary bent in the relative freedom of fandom spaces. Can’t say if that’s a new surge of literary writers (given the form of fanfic is, in its current form, less than 50 years old) or if it’s merely due to how low-stakes/meritocratic fanfic can often be.
"which was partly driven by opposition to the arrival of lots of literary writers into sf"
Let me demur. There has long been "this Big Literary Name wrote SF or Fantasy, but since that's genre fiction not Real Proper Fiction, we don't count them as one of the filthy pulpeteers" tradition in literary criticism. Kipling is one such, but E.M. Forster is another (he wrote ghost/fantasy stories as well and his "The Machine Stops" is a seminal SF story, but good luck seeing him described as such a writer).
In the 70s, when SF was shaken up by the arrival of the New Wave writers (and it needed a shaking-up, no denying that), some of the big names in SF rather lost the run of themselves and started insisting they didn't write "science fiction" (since that was about robots and rocketships), they wrote "speculative fiction" which was ever so artful and high-brow and important social commentary (and also adapting that label had the happy effect of both permitting their publishers to shuffle them nearer to the Proper Literature on the bookstore shelves, while retaining the cash sales from the grubby unlettered fans of science fiction). J.G. Ballard was one of those, Margaret Atwood another (she has wavered, depending on the interview and the year, between "no I don't write SF I write proper fiction" and "yes, I'm totes a yuge SF fan and writer").
So the modern wokies are not the first upspringing of the event of literary writers into genre fiction, their predecessors and precursors in the 60s/70s were (and it also extended into crime/detective fiction, horror, you name all the popular genre fields). What may perhaps be somewhat different this time round is the (failed?) literary types who dress up their 'average literary magazine story' with a very thin veneer of SF language and win the prizes and get gushed over for being *so* ground-breaking and talented etc. etc. etc. But there is still definitely the old strain of "I don't write the rockets-and-robots stuff, I'm *Literary*" out there.
Will N.K, Jemisin make the crossover to Proper Literarture? Will she be regarded in the future as a great writer? Or is she a flash-in-the-pan currently popular for the topics she treats big fish in a small pond, where if she was writing the same stuff but not as SF, she'd just be one more progressive black female voice struggling for a slice of the pie in the Proper Literarture world? I see she has received a 'Genius Grant' so time will tell!
SF "outsiders" who write good stories seem to often get around the literary gatekeepers and not need their blessing in order to find audiences. Let the MFA professors toast their magic truth rain authors. Such authors seem unlikely to change the lives of their readers like the Neal Stephensons can. Also, I have a feeling that other countries might not stigmatize rocket-robot stories like the US gatekeepers do. Cixin Liu seems to be getting serious mainstream love in China for some brilliant but so-pure-it-almost-hurts scifi. That's an encouraging sign.
Are you including genre? I think there are modern science fiction and fantasy authors who write very good novels. I don't read litfic, and your comment could be true of it.
Are we talking about Raymond Carver-type short stories, like the play Michael Keaton is trying to put on on Broadway in "Birdman"? Is Raymond Carver still the template for MFA fiction training?
Maybe the problem is that there's virtually no market anymore for short stories, unlike in 1950 when American magazines published dozens of short stories every week. So people only write short stories anymore as career advancement tools to impress other people in the literary fiction industry: publishers, editors, creative writing professors, and other writers. And they've settled upon one fairly standardized style, Raymond Carver's, as a test of skill to determine career potential.
You are right, and so is Grateful College Student. Just different buckets. I felt Hoel could have written his take with "contemp. German literature" in mind, too. The novels that get on the long-list for the "important" Book-awards. If I open one: "Yeah, well written, indeed - Das IST Literatur! - do I want to read it? - Nah." - Hoel is not writing about Jonas Jonasson ;) - that was a fun read, though
Don't know if MFAs hurt writers, but they sure don't seem to help. The question is why do wannabee novelists continue to get MFAs when they obviously don't help? My guess is it's privileged people staying in school in order to delay life.
MFAs create a monoculture that isn't good for independent thinking--the very thing traditional novelists excelled at. Most great novelists were autodidacts. Who was Cervantes' tutor? I forget.
The death of the novel is probably down to commercial and cultural reasons. The greatest novelists alive are Knausgaard and Ferrante (And Kundera is not yet dead)--yet what percentage of readers of this blog--where all the readers are well-read--have read them? In the age of Hemingway the answer would be ~100% whether you liked his books or not.
I think Philip Roth was correct when he said about a decade ago that the death of the novel was nigh. He said that some people would still read novels just as some people still read Latin poetry, but that reading novels as a normal thing for normal people to normally do is beyond its twilight. I don't get the feeling that our erudite host reads many novels, new or old.
As Frank Zappa said at a keynote address to modern classical composers: Why do you continue to compose modern works when you already know that nobody gives a fuck?
"when they obviously don't help" - just because they might not make one a better writer doesn't mean they don't help if eg. they provide plenty of industry contacts. A publisher is more likely to publish a mediocre book from a friend than a good one from a stranger.
+1 (Love the Zappa quote btw, although since he got Pierre Boulez to conduct The Perfect Stranger, I don't think he meant it quite as dismissively!)
From having spoken to a few people pursuing MFAs, I think its really a problem downstream of culture; if you want to be a *serious person* today as a rising student, you apply to really intensive, competitive programs that are prestigious - medical school, Investment banking, working as a FAANG developer. If you are an ambitious student who wants to be a writer and all your friends are joining tournament-style competitive programs and somebody puts one in front of you that says "apply here to be a novelist" then your lizard brain sinks its teeth into it before you can even ask "but will this help me write?"
Its the product of a long category mistake that assumes that "great novelist" is just another prestigious job that can be attained by being the best student in your cohort, as opposed to say . . . the special province of some weirdos that relate to the human experience in a particular way. But if a college can market a program that will turn you into Hemmingway-lite (so Norman Mailer I guess?) then they're going to take the money.
This comment is already too long, but one last thought; the prestige TV drama has replaced the novel as the preferred class-signaling mechanism of the bourgeoise. Ironically films are much more like short stories in that they are self contained and intended to be consumed as a single unit; the serialized nature of TV has allowed for additional character development and nuance not available at the cinema. But mediums live and die; I don't think bas-relief has been a vital medium since the middle ages, but we can still appreciate a good frieze.
Another factor to consider is that in 1926 when Hemmingway published the "Sun Also Rises" there were ~16 American novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1926_American_novels) while in 2004 when Knausgaard's "A Time for Everything" came out there were ~300 American novels published (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2004_American_novels). Not to mention other competition for time (music, movies, video games, affordable travel) but it really is no surprise that there is less monolithic culture now compared to the past.
Those numbers look awfully small. I think those are only the novels which have a Wikipedia entry. I can believe that more novels get publishes nowadays than in the 1920s, but we can't tell from those lists. Eg Wikipedia might have a recency bias?
Of course, people don't just read novels from the current year. As time passes, the back catalogue tends to get larger, too.
It's possible but I would definitely expect an increase in the number of novels published. You're also correct about the fact that the back catalogue affects how many novels you can read each year and contributes to the splitting of culture
It's a pretty anodyne essay about the effects of institutionalization on contemporary writing. Even if you disagree with it, to say it is "truly insane" is probably way too far.
I think it has more to do with specialization of knowledge, in a few aspects.
First, if you make a great discover in your field, your work is now largely incomprehensible to everyone else on earth. There are maybe thousands who understand your work. Compare that to Darwin, where any educated reader could grasp it. Perhaps less true with Einstein. Something to look at might be the role of popular explainers of scientific achievements. I don’t ever recall seeing such a thing in history, prior to Einstein.
Second, because you have to specialize in a field, you probably can’t excel in multiple fields. So wheee a polymath might rise to high acclaim previously, then might now only have the one or two discoveries in their own field. Again, Einstein feels like a turning point. His annis mirabilis was all in physics. Compare that to Newton -- astronomy, physics, and calculus.
Third, some extreme version of the 80-20 rule applies. The reason that Newton could make big discoveries in multiple fields was that there was a lot to be discovered by the straightforward application of genius. Now we are to the point where you have to learn loads to contribute to the body of knowledge. So much more effort has to go in to move the needle. You said something very like this, but I call it out because it is the driving force behind my prior two points.
Yes, I was going to say this, but you beat me to it and said it well. In the 19th century, my great-great grandfather had a Masters in English Lit from Yale, and wound up as the Kansas State Botanist. I don't see that happening anymore; you have to pick your discipline and "stay in your lane."
I saw an answer on the web for how many physicists there are -- 372,000. Of those, there was an estimate with no citation that 8,000 were astrophysicists. That seems like a reasonable data point supporting “thousands.” Yeah, the data might be unreliable.
Those numbers seem reasonable but radio astronomers typically have little contact with xray people with gravitational modelers, etc. Many, many subgroups...
I would have thought that they can still largely follow, read, and absorb the implications of each others’ work. But I don’t personally know any astrophysicists to ask!
Yeah, depends on subfield. In pure math sometimes it's a dozen, give or take. In the social sciences even I can read the papers, and I'm not trained in the social sciences.
You may not be familiar with the practical issues in the field, even when the *words* are comprehensible to the layman. You may not know that you should be suspicious of papers using the Frobinator method because everyone in the field knows that it's all just confounders and anyone who cares about integrity would be using Blorks instead.
Any academic can probably name several people in their field who they'd consider geniuses, but their names would be unknown to the vast majority of people
Indeed, I can list several mathematicians of the 20th century whose work was shatteringly ground breaking, and several of them are still alive. It's just that you can't even understand why their work was so important until you have two years of grad school in pure mathematics under your belt. (Heck, a number theorist and I would likely give overlapping but different lists.)
"If people are still working on AI a hundred years from now, I expect them to talk about Hinton in the same way biologists talk about Darwin now."
This seems (very) wrong. New fields are discovered all the time. People who enter these fields quickly grab all the low hanging fruit. Some of these fields also go on to become important in the future. However, these researchers aren't generally recognized as Einsteins in their own right.
Darwin didn't just create a new field of knowledge. He fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves, religion, pretty much everything. Man was not created in the image of God; he evolved from apes. And so on. Comparing Hinton to Darwin seems ridiculous, although I am sure Hinton is a very fine researcher in his own right, as are the 100-200 researchers alive today who have created their own fields and proved some interesting results.
The assumption here, is that AI will have achieved great things, leading to it becoming a major field of study over the century.
The theory for Universal functional solvers had existed for decades before Hinton. However, they seemed to be useless in practice. Hinton's (and his peers') main contribution was identifying the key bottleneck in their practicality. He showed that arbitrary universal function learners CAN practically be implemented, as long you figure out how to facilitate a 2-way information superhighway between input data and labels. (the 4 big moments= Backprop, Imagenet , Alexnet, and IMO, now Self-attention)
Just like Darwin, Hinton's key observation was a philosophical conception of knowledge, a couple of layers upstream from the domain it influenced. We now see it expressed more concretely in the "Bitter Lesson" : http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
If the AI revolution truly delivers, and we build models that are as effective as humans; then it will fundamentally change how we perceive sentience, intelligence and knowledge. If human intelligence, life and learning are recast in a computational view, then I can see Hinton's (and peers') contribution being considered to be as important a Darwin's.
Depends on how you look at it and it is a great question.
It was a scientific advance in the same way that "human crowds operate like fluids" was a scientific advance. It did not introduce new math (so not calculus or complex numbers level), but it was the first and otherwise unintuitive instance of applying a pre-existing mathematical idea to a field.
What makes Hinton's insight special, is that it wasn't a solution to a problem. It was a conception of the problem itself. That is to me, the key distinction between that and Alexnet, self-attention and imagenet. They came out of careful inquiry of a well understood problem. For me, the former is a lot harder.
Note that Darwin didn't do all that - the interpreters of Darwin did. I would not be surprised if, a generation or two from now, people see Turing as the one that did what you are now attributing to Darwin, and which previous generations attributed to Copernicus.
It's hard to distinguish Darwin and the interpreters of Darwin here. There's hardly any extrapolation required between what Darwin said and all of the above. The credit given to interpreters should increase with the extrapolation required, and there is hardly any here
I think you should take another look at "On the Origin of Species". :) All the big stuff is there! I felt like I was rereading Dawkins when I finally read the original.
I think Mr Hoel does count parental tutoring as tutoring, simply because it’s one-on-one; this presumably has less of an effect if the parent isn’t an expert in the field, but would result in, eg, homeschooling producing higher SAT scores that can’t be entirely chalked up to genetics. But I don’t know if that’s actually the case.
Discounting parental tutoring is pretty egregious. So many extremely smart people I have heard of had parents in their field who took a very active interest in their education, and while my parents were in a different field, just doing simple experiments after watching YouTube together and debating problems and answering questions while doing simple things like driving or grocery shopping, were pretty influential for me academically.
He could argue that the mass replacement of homeschooling with public schooling has caused today's lack of geniuses. (ie, It takes a *lot* of parental tutoring in a specific subject to make someone a genius in that subject.) Dunno if I'd buy that, though.
Umm, only if the rates were somehow identical. . . How many older brothers introduce their younger ones to Euclid's proofs now-a-days? (as Russell's elder brother did)
You sure can, if you observe that the time children spend with their parents has drastically decreased over the past 200 years. If you were a child in a modest artisanal class family the 1700s, you probably spent near 100% of your day in the immediate company of your family. Your parents would not have dropped you off at daycare or school on the way to work at 8am and picked you back up at 5.30pm.
Right, of the six examples Scott gives for not being tutored, literally three of them were homeschooled and tutored by their mothers or fathers, and two of their mothers/fathers were schoolteachers. So it was direct aristocratic 1-on-1 tutoring in many of these cases.
Yeah I noticed Hoel's post seemed to assume that the only thing required to become a world-famous genius is to be above a certain, fixed, ability threshold. It seems much more likely to me that there's a fixed pool of fame available and today it's divided among many more people, so even if they're as brilliant as past geniuses or more they get much less attention.
In other words it's a pretty straightforward case of Syndrome Syndrome: "When everyone's super, no one will be."
Also Hoel doesn't prove that there are fewer geniuses, just a lower percentage. For things like physics where there is space for only a handful of acclaimed geniuses that will by necessity lower the percentage over time.
Precisely. Genius per capita is not what's being measured, acclaim per capita is, and acclaim feels like the sort of thing that there's a constant amount of no matter how much the population grows, leading to far less per person over time
What does this question even mean? Who's the artist that will be the most aclaimed in a century? Who has some objective level of talent greater than his peers, as judged centuries later? Who has lived a monomaniacal life and produced art that will endure for centuries?
I mean, the answer is obvioulsy Prince, I just don't know what the question is.
Maybe Billie and Finneas. They’re young enough right now with a body of work that eclipses many veteran composers. Of course the Beatles will be remembered in a century. Are they Beethoven level genius? Maybe.
Can’t say I generally listen to any of those, but Billie and Finneas (it’s really a writing duo) have produced some excellent songs already. And they are yet young.
See also: video games. It used to be that a lone genius could crank out a hit game in a week, but now you have thousands of games that noone has ever heard of coming out each year and even the most creative are basically praying for a lucky break to go viral and actually make any money.
One additional aspect for the sciences: even if you have a genius doing genius stuff these days, there will only be a few people who are actually able to understand how genius that work is. Not enough to make anyone famous.
In the arts, on the other hand, I think there's just too many geniuses at work. This diverts the attention of the public and again, prevents any particular genius from actually becoming famous.
Don't know much of your personal taste and circumstances but I think many people in that situation would benefit from either a) improved filtering that brings them into contact with more of the specific niches that would appeal to them, or b) treatment for depression so they become more capable of enjoying things in general.
I agree on both counts. To the first, it seems that filtering/recommendation systems have improved, but not enough to account for the low quality of newer products. For the second, I tried that, didn't do much. It definitely didn't make me able to enjoy e.g. new movies more than older ones.
I would be open to a 3rd possibility that the producers of popular culture are selecting more for crap than they did before, such that by the time cultural products that require a lot of money get produced you don't get good things getting made anymore. I wouldn't be surprised to find Hollywood is ripe for a big upheaval, or perhaps some way of finding books that get a lot of genius authors found.
Which old movies do you enjoy, and which new movies do you see them as in opposition to? People still make all kinds of new movies, it's not just Marvel cinema. Marvel gets all the headlines and cultural attention, because lots of people watch it and it makes boatloads of money, but if you want other varieties they're certainly out there.
Those are some perhaps unusual preferences, but I see quite a few I enjoyed as well on that list! I really need to rewatch The Thing... I think I saw it when I was like 10 and really wasn't in a position to appreciate it at the time.
I am taken by the fact that only 6 of the latter list are post writers' strike (2008). It seems to me things really went downhill right around then, 2010 or so at least. I also note that Suspiria (2018) is a remake of Suspiria (1977). (Have you seen the original? I have heard good things about both, although that sort of movie isn't really my thing.)
Really, up until maybe Endgame, Marvel was making most of the good modern movies. Not brilliant works of art maybe, but good. Then things took a turn...
Going farther back, Lord of the Rings trilogy was good; the Hobbit trilogy was confusingly awful. You can easily see why: gotta make three movies, cram in lots of excess stuff to get crazy CGI action, shoehorn in characters we know, everyone is a goddamned orc killing super hero, yadda yadda. Less obvious, the screen writers had no idea of what the story was actually about.
Most movies now seem to be remakes/reboots. When was the last really good comedy? I might be a little biased since I have little kids, but for a while and up until a few years back Pixar was about the only studio that seemed capable of making a really moving story, now they are in the hole.
I suppose if one wanted to identify the crash in movie and tv quality you would first look at the writers' strike back when. I don't know that it was the actual driver instead of merely proximate, but things have been sharply downhill for 10-15 years.
"The Hobbit" movies are a good example. The LOTR movies were insanely successful, so naturally the studios wanted to milk the cow some more. The only other finished work, and one that had Bilbo and explained the backstory to how he got the One Ring, was "The Hobbit".
But that was a kid's book and honestly only has the content for one movie. *Maybe* you can stretch it out to two movies, but then you run the risk of "butter over too much bread". But the studios wanted a trilogy because they wanted to repeat the success of the LOTR movies (and more movies = more money). Hence the amount of padding that had to be introduced, including the Kili and Tauriel romance which was just plain nonsensical.
However, while I do complain about the Jackson movies both LOTR and The Hobbit, when they get it right, they really get it right (mostly by stepping back and putting on screen what Tolkien wrote on the page, expanding it sensitively where needed):
Personally I find that filtering by "Made outside of America" is incredibly effective at improving the average quality of the media. Whatever problems there are with script writers, they've not really hit Europe much yet.
perhaps but some trends are real, let's please allow that to be at least a hypothetical possibility, which in some cases could turn out to be true instead of your other options.
Yeah I was skipping some steps there, but if other people consider there to be a lot of high quality products available that's evidence that the problem is less an overall decline in quality and more you personally having trouble finding or appreciating the good products that do exist.
That's the surprising part for me: for how much stuff gets made now such a low percentage is seemingly any good. With any kind of constant level of artistic achievement you would think there would be a constant percentage of good stuff, so more good stuff per year than in previous decades. Instead it seems like you are lucky to get even as much as before. Considering how much recent movies and tv have been pulling ideas from other media and older movies and tv, that seems even worse... if everything was new creative stuff, sure, that's going to be harder, but working from pre-established quality and it still gets messed up? (Then again, maybe adaptations are far easier to fail at then people think, and the few good ones buck the trend. I don't know.)
I've said before, for decades, normies were basically subsidizing cinephiles wants and desires, because both filmmakers and the people in charge of Hollywood studios were both fans of cinema, to some extent, so even though it wasn't perfect, there was some space.
But, then, those studios either merged with or got bought by bigger corporations, and people whose job was to make money came in, and realized, "why are we doing all this extra bs in an action movie?" That's how you get series like The Fast & The Furious (which I enjoy) which are basically two to 2 1/2 hour thrill rides, devoid of anything but very base themes, and are insanely wildly popular all around the world. Because that's what people actually want.
People point to the past when even popcorn flicks were supposedly more high minded, and try to blame the audience, but my argument has always been, that same audience would've been fine, and in fact, probably happier with some dumber films. However, if you only give people a choice between a bunch of popcorn flicks made by auteurs, they're going to choose one of them to watch, even if they grumble about the more fancy schmancy parts of the movie as they leave. If anything, and I say this as somebody who loves many of these films, there's lot of movies from the 80's and 90's that could've been even more successful if they were 20% dumber.
back in the 70s, people made porn movies with actual plots and some (aspirational) real acting. Then folks realized customers skipped over these parts and only cared about the money shots, and now the industry mostly just shoots "scenes" without plot. So basically you are saying fast & furious is similarly just distilled action scene porn.
I think the history of movies cuts against your 20% dumber hypothesis. If we look at sequels in the 80's and 90's (in general, really) we typically see a decline in revenue, Back to the Future being a notable exception. Yet we should expect the reverse: you have a known good thing, they are making more of it, the audience knows they are going to like it if they liked the first one... should be easy to make as much money. Unless lots of people saw the first one by mistake and so were warned away from the second, it should be more successful. Yet almost as a rule they were not. The Die Hard movies definitely got dumber with each iteration, and kept shedding fans and making less each go around, despite increasing wealth to spend on seeing movies.
Now, if you were to argue that Die Hardest: Viagra Overdose was WAY more than 20% dumber than the first one, and that most sequels way overshoot 20% dumber, I could totally agree. I just think that we would need a way to dial it in to be sure.
Previously, timeslots on TV channels and showtimes on big screens were rate-limiting factors, so the industry was structured to make optimal use of those scarce resources, which implied fewer, higher-quality productions.
Over time, those resources became less scarce: cable enabled more channels so there were more timeslots (think about the relative quality of shows on broadcast networks v. those on basic cable channels); VCRs enabled studios to show movies to people other than during a limited run on a finite number of screens (again, think about the relative quality of theater releases v. that of direct-to-video movies).
The trend has only accelerated as more avenues to access audiences open and fewer viewers are only accessible via the traditional mediums. The optimal strategy has shifted toward more, lower-quality productions.
Well, not reliably in every type and genre, but in principle, yes. I'd even say it's possible to come up with objective-ish criteria. There's art that is deeply impressive, in idea or execution or both, even if it is by no means perfect; and then there's enjoyable highly polished art that is so generic it might as well have been created by an algorithm.
Advancements in technology, marketing, and disposable incomes might make it a little easier to make and sell good art, but much much easier to make and sell bad art, thus diminishing the ratio of good art to bad on the market.
You don't need to understand a scientist's work to know that they're a genius. Everyone knows that Einstein was a genius, but few can explain what he did.
People still understand that changing how we think about space and time is significant, even if they cant explain what changed. if you look at the list of recent Nobel price winners and things they earned it for, it doesnt feel as significant, but that doesnt mean these people are less genius.
Einstein only became publicly regarded as a genius because of some very unique circumstances around the popularisation of nuclear theory in the early 20th century that made it much more salient to people. There's a dozen equally good physicists from the same period whoost people have never heard of.
I think it's hard to make the case that there are a dozen equally good physicists from the same period. Einstein is one of those rare people like Darwin or Turing where just reading something of theirs that you've never heard of, you realize that it has important insights for another field, and that it eventually got picked up decades later. (Very different from Newton, who produced a lot of duds as well as genius.) Sure, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Planck, Curie did some really important individual things, perhaps in some cases as significant as any individual thing Einstein did. But just seeing the role Einstein played in generating relativity, in generating quantum mechanics, and in confirming the theory of molecules, all in 1905, it's clear he was something special.
I don't agree with that. Einstein is certainly a very smart fellow, and his insight into relativity is unparalleled. But Dirac and Gibbs are at least his equal, in terms of sheer creativity, and could be said to be equally foundational in their fields (relativistic field theory and statistical mechanics, respectively) and I would say are far less well known.
What did Einstein have to do with generating quantum mechanics, by the way? If you're thinking Bose-Einstein statistics, that just takes QM as an input, it is otherwise classical reasoning.
Dirac is one of the few I was thinking of as possibly on his level (though I don't understand what makes the relevant people I know put him there). Gibbs I haven't heard of in this same way, but even so, it's not a dozen.
I'm thinking that the paper on the photoelectric effect is really one of the important instigations of quantum theory - as important as Planck's work on the ultraviolet catastrophe.
Don't see how. Planck invented the photon, Einstein showed how it could explain the PE. Very solid work, don't get me wrong, but not the kind of originality found in relativity -- or by others in QM. (I don't actually include Planck in that, Planck invented the photon as a kludget to get the right answer, and without any genuine insight into what it meant.)
Here's a more simple reason - it used to be geniuses got a lot of attention because the only people who cared to pay attention was bored rich people without a lot to do, and thus, they became famous. Now, in a world where the normal person has a lot more money and ability to focus on attention on what they want, it turns out the mass want to pay attention to people who are attractive, sing well, and are entertaining.
In 1650, the equivalent of current AI researchers might've been famous, because a few rich lords cared about that issue. Now, they're decently to very well paid people whose names won't be known unless they happen to create a company that gets bought by Google.
I'd argue there are indeed, a lot of very smart people who are doing work close to the geniuses of the past - it's just more esoteric, because all the simple stuff has been found, and so it's more confusing to the laymen and takes more work. Gravity, evolution, etc. is simple enough for even a less intelligent than average person to grasp, even if they disagree. The things we're looking at now, not so much.
Without any explanation of what you are talking about, who can tell if "what we are looking at now" is much more esoteric. What's replaced Darwinism? Of course the general theory and quantum physics are far from being non-esoteric, or easily understood by laymen, or even physicists themselves.
Maybe its string theory but the jury is out on whether that is even useful.
I wonder if it could be that, in a world where economic growth has established unheard of levels of general affluence (in developed countries) that there's less fitness advantage to superior intelligence than there was when material depravation was something like the norm. Like, it's still an advantage to your perceived attractiveness to be smarter now, but a moderately-intelligent partner can provide a level of comfort and security that was once reserved for the truly exceptional, such as the exceptionally intelligent.
You may be on to something. To be a renowned genius in science, art, or much of anything else, requires both superior intelligence and superior diligence. Or ambition, "grit", "hustle", what have you.
In a poor society, intelligence alone is no bar to starving in the gutter if you're lazy. Or maybe you muddle through without starving, but an undateable unhappy loser. So even the smart people, learn to be diligent as a matter of course. In a wealthy society, particularly a meritocratic one organized along our present lines, a smart lazy person will still get straight A's in high school, a decently high SAT score, and from there the obvious path to an upper-middle-class desk job without having to really stretch themselves. So genius is less likely to be accompanied by diligence.
And to tie back to the original thesis, one thing private tutoring might be good for is imposing diligence on lazy clever lordlings, in case their being embedded in a local cushion of prosperity might otherwise have let them slide by. The clever non-rich would have had to learn diligence the hard way, or starve.
I actually think you have this backwards. At least in the US, we switched from assortive mating on objective measures of attractiveness (facial symetry, various hip/stomach/chest ratios, dental quality) to IQ. We used to have more of a fitness advantage to being attractive (for make babies) and physcially fit (to pay for them) to being smart (now good for both making babies and paying for them). The fitness advantage is now about living up to your intelectual potential instead of your physical potential.
How what percent of potentialy world-altering intelects were farm hands, dock workers, or laundresses in 1822 compared to 2022? Hard to stand out when there's a reserve army of intelectuals.
Actually I think there's an opposite problem - SV (and to a lesser extent finance) brain-drains people from useful fields. Why bother with grants and tenure-hunting if you can just do hilariously easy work, print money then go FIRE and do whatever you want?
I've met a lot of scientists in the last few years, and I've never talked with one that was even remotely motivated by money. Software ate the world and took all the greedy people.
A 4th option related to number 3 might be called "The low ceiling syndrome" wherein the number of obstacles to doing anything mounts up so high that the sorts of things people used to do and be called genius is now very difficult. Just off the top of my head, going to college at 14 is probably nearly impossible now, much less working early, starting a physical business, things like that. It has been pointed out before that much of the rapid breakthroughs in software were done by the young, partially because they didn't have to ask permission, and at most forgiveness. You can't get big innovations in many fields because getting permission is so difficult.
Related perhaps is how one gets recognized as a genius. Academia is almost certainly not a useful way to spend much time if you are a genius, but that's where we put kids when they are smart. How many geniuses spend time writing papers no one will read instead of solving actual problems? How many geniuses spend time in finance making money off trivial things?
I actually know a person who started college shortly before the age of 13, and received her PhD at 19, and while she was certainly highly intelligent, I wouldn't describe her as an extraordinary genius, nor did she make any pretense of being one. The way she explained it, there are only a couple large programs in the United States today which systematically put young gifted students into a university setting, and she was in the larger of those two. When I met her in her late twenties, she was the head of a university writing department where all the professors under here were older than she was. It's exceedingly unlikely anyone else in this discussion has heard of her.
I think answer "there are lots more scientists now" answer is more important than "good ideas are rarer" or "democratic norms". But I also notice that I know more geniuses from among my personal acquaintances than from the newspapers, and that acclaimed scientists today are much less likely to be regarded as being at the top of their field than previously. Famous scientists of the first half of the 20th century were great scientists; famous scientists since 1970 were great communicators, like Carl Sagan or Neil de Grasse Tyson.
I think that social organization has changed so that geniuses are no longer identifiable, so they don't get the support they need, and (more importantly) the share of attention they would need to become *known* geniuses.
One part of this is simply that there are more scientists. But I think there is also a more sinister dynamic at work: our filters are no longer high-bandpass filters, but bandpass filters, which filter out both the lows and the highs. In some cases, notably philosophy and the arts, they've become low-bandpass filters, which are likely to filter out anything reasonable and amplify anything bizarre or insane.
Another important factor is that, after 1970, we began using acceptance into an ivy league as an all-purpose filter for everything. Take a student who wants to become a prominent scientist, and whose SAT scores are in the 99th percentile. The odds multiplier that student gets from attending an ivy-equivalent (top 20) school was about 80 in 1997 (at least in physics, the field I used for my informal study). The odds multiplier for winning a Nobel prize became infinite after 1970--I didn't find a single case of a physicist who attended college after 1970, won a Nobel, and never attended a top-20 school in their subfield. Neither of these were true before 1970. And can you guess what odds ratio multiplier you get now for being on the Supreme Court by attending Harvard? I won't even say; guess, and then check the Wikipedia list of Supreme Court members.
Meanwhile, the ivies eliminated merit-based scholarships in the 1960s, which would have prevented more than half of Nobel-winning physicists who *did* attend the ivies before 1970 from doing so. And they escalated the price exponentially over time, and de-emphasized intelligence and academic work as criteria for admission, while emphasizing race, sex, and community involvement.
They've also been adjusting their practices to game the US News & World Report rankings, which doesn't have any criteria that measure the quality of education, but only the success of students who are admitted. So using their enormous wealth and omnipotent social networks to provide advantages to their graduates is essential to stay in the top 3 spots in the ranking. It's nearly impossible to flunk out of Harvard or Yale now, because having fewer than 99% of students graduate would tank their US News rating. (And I'd guess that 1% who don't graduate is mostly people who quit to start companies.)
Yup, Goodhart's Law strikes again. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The intensity of intellectual monoculture in the US makes pre-1845 Ireland look like the Garden of Eden.
Holy shit, it just clicked where your little icon is from. Or I had a stroke. Either way, well done! I need to look up old episodes of that show for my kids.
_Square One_ was wonderful and the writing on _Mathnet_, in particular, had lots of little touches that I now appreciate as an adult, e.g. George planning a vacation to Nomanisson Island.
I'm not even sure that he's that great of a science communicator given the pool of talent. Tyson does not appear uniquely gifted here. Rather he's the one plucked and booked to have science communication jobs on because, on some level, it's got to be somebody and media branding is self-reinforcing. Some of the comments in this thread seem to retroactively assign genius to the person who was in a position, by luck or prior social status, to be the influential or remembered one.
He fizzled out on his first doctorate, dicked around for the 80s, and then finally got a PhD in his early 30s. He's never done any real research.
The only real explanation for Tyson's is he's reasonably decent looking, gets to talk about the stars, is a good salesman, and he's black. Felicitous combination of skill and genetic happenstance. But not exceptional brains.
+1 on the great communicators part. Many scientific fields have advanced to the point that they are incomprehensible to the intelligent, educated non-expert. For some fields (high-prestige fields maybe?) we see popularizers like Sagan and Tyson. (I’d have said Jacques Cousteau, as my daily throwback.)
Well, in fact Einstein wrote a very nice little semi-popular book (it had equations) called "Relativity", which explains special relativity in-depth. I read it when I was at most 12 (I only know I read it at an Indian Guides camp, and I think 12 is their age limit), and I probably didn't know anything about Einstein then other than that he was famous. I have to say, he was a great communicator--I doubt I've ever seen a difficult idea explained so simply and clearly.
Why would eliminating merit-based scholarships have prevented those past people from attending? Anyone with below-average household income now gets a free ride, and the only merit you need is enough merit to get admitted. It's only the children of the rich that have to pay those sticker prices.
Because there is a finite number of slots, and if merit spots are removed in favor of "whatever else" slots, then if you have merit but not whatever else, which might be money, you are out of luck.
Merit slots haven't been removed. Rich people who earn merit spots are no longer paid for, and poor people who earn those merit spots can now get them if the rich people turn them down because of the price.
I read the biographies of Nobel winners in physics, and many of them were quite poor, and some even wrote that they'd never have been able to go without that scholarship. The more-generous financial aid they have now didn't exist until about 2000. When I was applying to colleges in the 1980s, Harvard's financial aid policy was to assist low-income, low net-worth families, but the value of your house counted, and the ceiling on net wealth was less than the value of a house; and the formula didn't consider how many other kids your parents wanted to send to college. So for 20 or 30 years, nobody who was in-between "poor" and "rich" could go to the Ivies, especially if they had siblings.
The merit-based free rides were quite abundant before the 1960s; I remember that one college--I think it was Columbia--had an entire dormitory just for students on merit scholarships. They were eliminated for football. The Ivy League is a football league, and sometime in the 1960s passed a rule that members couldn't have academic scholarships, because schools were giving them to good football players in order to win games.
It sounds like it has gotten a lot easier for low to middle income people to be able to afford these universities since now *all* of them that are accepted get the full ride instead of having to earn a special “merit fellowship” on top of admission.
They should cut back on sports and eliminate legacies though.
They don't get a free ride. From Harvard's financial aid office: "We base aid awards on need, not on merit... we meet 100 percent of our students' demonstrated financial need."
But the computation of "need" is much more generous than it used to be.
I noticed about 30 years ago that the Ivies seemed to actually be *proud* that they never awarded anything based on merit. I only learned recently that they *are* proud of that fact. Marxists began promoting the idea that merit-based aid in education is evil around 1968.
George Church is certainly a great scientist, appears literally in every worthwhile project everywhere, nobody recognizes him other than people already in bio.
Unless you do Nikola Tesla levels of controversial wizardry you'll be unknown among normies, regardless of your genius.
No arguing with the numbers, but here is how I see the direction of causality: Top universities are pretty good at sniffing out which researchers, law students, etc., are on their way up, and they then vacuum up these people and take credit for their eventual success.
1. As I partly explained, there were decades somewhere between 1970 and 2000 (I don't know just when it began & ended, as historical info on financial aid is very hard to find) when few middle-class white males could afford to go to most of the ivies, as there were no merit scholarships for them, and they were too wealthy to qualify for financial aid, but not wealthy enough to afford those colleges. I know this because I was one of those people. It's implausible that zero of those people could have been top scientists or lawyers.
(There were always some merit scholarships for anyone who wasn't a white male, usually provided not by the college, but by some non-profit or alumni association. There were also sometimes full-tuition merit scholarships not based on sex or race for students entering particular fields, provided again not by the college, but by professional organizations. I had a friend who got a full ride into engineering at Stanford in 1985 that way. And there were always small merit scholarships, like that provided by the NMSE; but they were peanuts compared to tuition after 1980. There was also one special exception: if you were going into astronomy, you could attend the University of Arizona cheaply, which was considered a top school in astronomy because it had great telescopes.)
2. Harvard can't be so good at identifying great law students from their high school transcripts that they vacuum up more than 90% of those with the potential to be Supreme Court judges. And even if Harvard *were* that good at identifying them, wouldn't Yale be just as good at it?
3. These decisions are made about people at age 17. People change. It isn't plausible that decisions made about people when they're 17 have that much predictive accuracy for their performance decades later.
4. The data these college actually have to base their decisions on--test scores, GPA, recommendations, essays--have too great a variance, both in their predictive ability, and (for subjective data) in the accuracy of judging them, to have that much predictive accuracy.
5. People at the ivies are median 98th percentile. Impressive, but not genius level. The objective data these colleges use weren't designed to discriminate between people above the 98th percentile or so; they were designed to work around the median.
6. I have known and worked with many people from Harvard, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, as I lived in Boston for years, working for a company full of Carnegie Mellon grads, and have also worked with Harvard & Stanford grads at the NSA, the NIH, NASA, and at the J Craig Venter Institute. I've also interviewed and sometimes hired people from Harvard and MIT, and dated a girl from Yale. They're smart, but only two of the very smartest people I know attended an ivy (as far as I know, anyway).
7. Scott didn't attend an ivy-level school, or at least didn't mention one when describing his educational background on his website.
Thank you for the clarification. I didn't realize that your numbers were restricted entirely to undergrad programs. Were they? You were talking about how few of the top physicists "never attended a top-20 school in their subfield" - so I assumed that someone who went to Iowa St. for undergrad and Harvard for PhD had attended a top-20 school in their subfield. If you were only counting undergrad institution then I have to seriously re-evaluate some stuff about physics.
That's a good question! Unfortunately, I can't find my data; I think I had to purge it, because back in the 1990s my student account had only a few megabytes of disk space. I began this survey when I was near completing my PhD at a third-tier school, and only then discovered that almost none of the men I was in grad school with were able to find academic jobs. I wanted to know what my own chances were of finding an academic job after my girlfriend, who was also in the department, told me that, as a male graduating from that university, they were essentially zero.
We had, IIRC, 4 female and at least 30 male grad students attending at the same time as me. 3 of the women and 3 of the men got academic positions after graduation. THESE NUMBERS ARE VERY UNRELIABLE as I made them years later from memory plus a little googling. That gives an odds-ratio multiplier of 27 for being female. It would have been infinity, as the one woman who didn't eventually find a position had technically failed out of the program; but her husband was the university's best sysadmin, and would leave if they kicked her out. (That wasn't a threat; it was just a fact--she'd have to go to a different school, and he'd have to go with her.) The 3 men who did find academic jobs all had many publications before graduation; 2 of them had organized and run a conference. The positions they found were at colleges I'd never heard of.
(This great advantage to females wouldn't show up if you did a study of people hired, because the advantage to females is much less or nonexistent among grads of top universities.)
My recollection is that (a) I counted either grad or undergrad as "attended a top-20 school", (b) it was unlikely after 1970 (less than half, maybe less than a third, but I don't remember) for someone who went to an ivy-equivalent grad to have gone to a non-ivy-equivalent undergrad, and (c) after 1970, it was significantly less-common for anyone to go an ivy-equivalent grad school who hadn't gone to at least a second-tier undergrad (say, U of Michigan in engineering).
On the other hand, of the "2 very smartest people" I know who went to an ivy-level school, one of them was Sasha Chislenko, who never went through the admissions process, but just hung out at the MIT AI lab until someone--Minsky, I think--invited him to be his grad student, not knowing he wasn't even a student. So that kind of recruiting can still happen, but it's extremely rare nowadays in academia. (Although it's the norm when it comes to finding good football and basketball players. Universities are MUCH better at seeking athletic talent than at seeking intellectual talent.)
I've been on numerous job search committees, and was always shocked at how automatically people in industry assume that the ivy-league grades are the best candidates. They literally rank all the data on the resume backwards with respect to its reliability: They first sort the pile of resumes by college. Going thru the pile, they would probably check GPA; they might check SAT scores; but I don't think anyone but me ever checked references or read publications.
We always interviewed the ivy-league candidates first. They would be of above-average ability; but if we made them an offer, they'd jerk us around by starting a bidding war with other companies; and if we hired them, half the time they'd quit after a few weeks for a late counter-offer; and the ones who stayed on permanently, weren't worth what we paid for them. Then we'd invite the state university grads, but by then half of them would have found a job. Sometimes we worked our way down the stack all the way to people from obscure colleges, but usually not.
I checked back with my own references after sending out about 500 job applications over a period of more than 20 years, and not one of my references had ever been contacted by anyone, not even by the companies that hired me. Even the Defense Department, when doing background checks on me, never contacted my references, though they did contact my college roommates and next-door neighbors.
I've attended, I think, 7 or 8 colleges myself, ranging from community colleges to Johns Hopkins. The best instructor I ever had, who was ruthless about ensuring his students learned the material or failed the class, was at a community college; the worst was at Johns Hopkins. (The /very/ worst was a professor teaching an online course at Stanford, but I'm not counting online courses.)
There are, though, a lot of geniuses who went to school who performed badly there and hated it, and/or are quoted as being very critical of it.
For example:
"I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of my class"- Thomas Edison
"Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."- Plato
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school" - Margaret Mead
"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." - Beatrix Potter
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."- Thoreau
"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school."- George Bernard Shaw
"How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home." -Winston Churchill
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."--Einstein
On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder about PhD programs: Its hard to get away from what your advisor believes and wants to study. Programs become a way of replicating professor's thoughts and biases. Maybe it was easier for a Mozart, Darwin, or Einstein to be somewhat self-taught, and come to unconventional ways of thinking.
The guy making his own integrated circuits from scratch in his garage might qualify for engineering. He doesn't have any formal education in silicon lithography at least and he's making a fair bit of his own equipment.
I think a big part of the difficulty is that you can't get access to the sorts of instruments that you would need to do worthwhile research outside of academia (which has major issues) or industry (where you'll be unknown outside your field unless you happen to co-found a big company). They're just orders of magnitude too costly. How do you self-teach and get to the point where you might be able to contribute meaningfully to most fields? Software is one of the only areas where the barrier is low enough.
Suppose we extended this argument to a sport with objective measurements like the 100 meter dash. The objective results show a vast improvement. But there would probably be only one or two "geniuses" at any point. This same analysis would seek to explain how the old methods of training were much better because they produced a greater proportion of "geniuses".
I don't think that analogy is apt. With sports you are very limited to how much you can benefit from previous athletes' contributions. If someone runs a 12 second 100m, that tells me 1: it can be done (important!) and 2: if I train more like them I might do better. I don't get to start at their point and work forward; I still have to train to get myself to run a 13 second. In theory, at least, I should be able to stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to art and science and show me genius thusly. Newton didn't have to reinvent math from scratch to come up with calculus, he just had to learn it.
I'm not saying that sports proves anything about genius in science one way or another. I'm saying that the authors way of identifying the decline in genius fails badly for sports.
I think you're right that the public can take note of only a very few people in any field, and there are many more people now in every scientific field. But the number of recognized geniuses shouldn't go /down/. How many people on the level of Einstein, von Neumann, Turing, and Schrödinger are working today?
The biggest science superstars today that I can think of are Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and George Church. It's hard to say what Church has done, because he's on the boards of 19 different companies, has founded 14 biotech companies, and has his name on a lot of papers which he may or may not have contributed much to. But I doubt any of them would claim to be on a level with von Neumann or Turing.
Marvin Minsky used to be regarded as the smartest person in AI. But his work was a dead-end; and his most-famous book (/Perceptrons/) was a fiasco; it killed neural network research for over a decade because he analyzed only linear neural networks, then declared all neural networks hopeless.
"Church has seven zillion grad students, and is extremely nice, and is bad at saying no to people, and so half the biology startups in the world are advised by him."
The number of *geniuses* shouldn't go down, but why does that say anything about the number of *recognized geniuses*? I can think of 2 fellow PhD students in my field in my institute that were studying at the same time as me that were definitely geniuses, even by the lofty standards of particle physics - and if I knew 2 out of a pool of a couple of dozen, even at a top university, then there must be a lot in the world - but even if their research over their careers is as innovative as I expect it to be, I doubt they'll ever be household names.
If the number is limited by the memory capacity of the public, the number shouldn't go down. If you're thinking that fame is distributed evenly among physicists, it isn't. All academic fields that I've seen distributions for that were of any significant size have a power-law distribution of fame, which is scale-invariant: the fame of the nth most-famous, divided by that of the (n+1)th most-famous, is independent of the number of people in the field, for n well beyond the largest n we could call "famous". ("Fame" is usually measured by number of citations, or citations weighted by journal prestige.) That means increasing n should have no effect on how many of them the public can take notice of.
Actually I think that power-law distribution should be up there as cause #1 of the lack of increase in "geniuses". It also accounts for much, maybe most, of the increase in wealth disparity as population rises or as economies grow. This also applies to fame of movie stars and authors, and is why movie producers and book publishers are focused on blockbusters. It does NOT apply to any measure of quality or ability, which don't have a power-law distribution.
The math is pretty simple: If you begin with a power-law distribution of fame, and there is no difference in quality between anyone in the distribution, but only a difference in fame, then the number of fans drawn to the nth-famous person in some interval of time is proportional to 1/n. So that's the derivative of change in fame. Do the math, and you'll see that once a power-law distribution exists, it sustains itself as population increases. Do some trickier math, and you'll find that starting with a normal distribution inevitably leads to a power-law distribution.
Gatekeepers, like news media or book publishers, would make this worse if they skim off just the most-famous people and shut out the long tail. I don't know if they do. Possibly they in fact allocate public attention proportional to fame. But I suspect our current financial incentives favor skimming off the top. To optimally incentivize finding undiscovered talent, you'd probably need to reward the talent scout with a fraction of that person's future life earnings. (I haven't done the math; that's just my gut instinct.)
There's a phrase for this phenomenon, but I always forget what it is. Anyway, this is IMHO the major cause of inequity in societies larger than Dunbar's number. Many social ills would be eliminated if people just had more memory, or more ability to discern quality; or if there were more financial incentives for trawling the long tail to discover talent (e.g., as in professional sports, which probably do a better job than anyone else at rewarding ability).
This implies that the share of "celebrity capacity" allotted to every field stays constant, which is clearly false. Some fields fade from public attention, with brand new ones taking their place. Fundamental physics in particular seems much less relevant these days than in the first half of 20th century. The biggest development since then is the discovery that we know almost nothing about the stuff that 95% of the Universe is apparently made of, hence the embarassing placeholders like "dark matter" and "dark energy". While on the practical side of things, fusion energy continues to be decades away, and the LHC is mostly meme fodder.
Okay, that could explain the decline in the number of famous physicists whom the public is aware of. The power-law distribution within the field still holds, though, with the consequence that the number of geniuses famous to others in that field should remain pretty constant.
And this very well may be true, I wouldn't be surprised that the total number of contemporary celebrities that an educated person today can name would be about the same to that from a century ago. How many of those celebrities would in some sense deserve to be called geniuses though is another matter of course, and the general opinions seem to be that the "true genius" share is on the steady decline.
Agreed with the maximally boring reasons but would add: I sometimes wonder if across the web of society, distributed so it’s not the intent of any single person, we don’t all understand there have to be certain limits on progress in order to maintain stability and set up systems that hinder radical growth. An Einstein every thirty years would produce enormous growth. An Einstein every six months would destroy the world. I can’t quite make it explicit in my own head so I’m suspect of it myself, but I wonder if there’s a sort of selection pressure at work here with large corporate-style structures where it’s more important for paperwork to be filled out and risks insured than for people to take initiative so just as a natural by product genius is down regulated. The sort of tutoring described would be anathema to that and also down regulated. So much is now intellectually uniform and so little bespoke. Very smart people told nurses at the start of the pandemic that they weren’t allowed to get their own masks if supplies had run out, with a whole complicated piece in the middle about insurance and liability, and it to my mind it was because for their entire lives their minds had been turned toward optimally completing paperwork. Those might be totally unrelated and I’m not sure there not but there’s a ladle there I can’t quite make come out of the drawer.
I think that maze of bureaucracy exists but I strenuously disagree that it's good. Radical growth upsets the status of the people currently in charge, so they don't like it, but were it to happen it would be a tremendous boon for humanity as a whole
I don't think it's conceptually possible to have an Einstein every six months. Einstein's ensteinness depends essentially on his having arrived at a field at the end of its normal science, but with lots of hints about how the revolution will go (Planck, Lorentz, precession of Mercury, etc.). Einstein became great because he digested all that stuff, added some mind-blowing insights, and gave everyone else time to digest those insights. That cycle cannot happen arbitrarily fast, and I would argue that as a discipline generates more research volume, the disciplinary digestion cycle actually slows down. It's easy for me to picture 2022 Einstein being received like this: "Yeah, he got some really impressive results and the work is definitely rigorous and promising, but I also think that there is hope in [some other parallel] approach B. So I'm just gonna chip away on B and hope for the best, because that's my lane, and my advisor's."
I believe I agree with the point you’re making about needing a certain amount of existing data to work with before you can have a revolution. That’s a definite rate limiter and I think it would probably even apply to a super AI. But then I think about other fields, with existing knowledge, and return to the original thought. I sort of see human scientific progress as this big circle of light floating in the dark. The surface area of that sphere is bigger than it was in Einstein’s day. So if you make an equally large contribution it doesn’t proportionally grow as much. Shouldn’t we have Einstein’s littered across several fields? Maybe an individual field only gets a revolution every thirty to fifty years but with so many different domains you’d think you’d see it more often. I do worry that im indulging in a Golden Age fallacy when im having these thoughts, but I keep coming back to the size of London when it was spitting out the first members of the Royal Society. It seems it might have been more productive creatively when science was a bunch of people sending letters back and forth about things they noticed instead of professors trying to navigate a bureaucracy.
I think a large part of the decline is forcing every child even if they are relatively rich and smart, to care about school and grades, the overwhelming complexity of life and the constant tax by technology on attention.
This HN comment on the article exactly pinpoints the feeling:
Would Darwin be considered a genius? I thought the thing with him was not super high intellect but that he was very cautious, rigorous, and Bayesian. Agree with the overall point, though.
I read Julia Galef's book Scout Mindset, and she had some biographical details about CD. He was very evidence-driven and acutely sensitive to feedback and criticism. Was constantly checking over his work, updating and making sure everything was right.
Some have claimed Darwin was a 'fact-collector' most of all. (I am a fan, though, to be clear).
On a rationalist-adjacent forum, I recently brought up the fact that Richard Feynman claimed to have tested at 125 IQ. A few posters went ballistic, denying the possibility. Some begging-the-question was involved ("he couldn't have that IQ and produce that kind of work, because that kind of work would necessarily demand a higher IQ").
As I pointed out, it may be that not all qualities that go into producing big ideas are g-loaded. That article does a good job of examining some.
I can believe that Darwin might not have been exceptionally high g, but I can't believe that of Feynman.
Just being able to understand quantum electrodynamics (let alone invent it) requires a high level of the sort of conceptual-symbolic manipulation intelligence that IQ tests tend to measure.
Of course an IQ test can only measure how good you are at answering a particular batch of questions on a particular two-hour period of a particular day, so the results of any particular IQ test shouldn't be taken too seriously.
"Of course an IQ test can only measure how good you are at answering a particular batch of questions on a particular two-hour period of a particular day, so the results of any particular IQ test shouldn't be taken too seriously."
i can see that being the case if someone merely memorized the set of questions and answers. otherwise, i have to ask: what caused someone's answers on an IQ test? compare to math tests: you learn some general skills, which can be applied to an infinite set of possible questions. you don't have to memorize every individual question-answer pair.
I was thinking more of the ease of getting a particularly bad result than a good one; that can be done if you're distracted, sick, having a really bad day, or just don't particularly give enough of a crap to apply full mental effort to the set of problems that has been placed in front of you. Did one of those happen to Feynman? Sure, maybe, who knows?
The opposite problem of getting a particularly high result is less easy for obvious reasons, but I do believe that IQ tests can be gamed to some extent since there's only a finite number of classes of problem that get asked in IQ tests (complete this pattern, rotate this shape, name the next number in this sequence) and if you've seen a lot of problems like that before then you're more likely to have a good strategy.
In my countries there's definitely an industry of teaching (largely Asian) kids how to improve their IQ test results in the hopes of getting into selective high schools.
"Genius" is a very complicated word for precisely this reason. Darwin is one of those people who produced a huge amount of very good work, in addition to some marquee achievements that get him fame. He's certainly a more significant intellectual than someone like Richard Feynman, who more clearly fits the "genius" label.
I think that (2) might have as much to do with how we remember history as it does with actual change over time.
Darwin was obviously building on other people's ideas, but those people are no longer around to demand partial credit. And sifting through nineteenth century priority disputes is really boring and irrelevant to most of our purposes in remembering Darwin. We are free, in our telling of history, to let Darwin stand in for an entire intellectual scene. But, if you try to do that about a contemporary intellectual scene, the second and third and eighty-fifth most important members will get mad at you (both self-interest and (3) come in, here).
I have taught at different universities, including Oxford/Cambridge and their tutoring system in which 1 PhD tutors 1-3 undergradute students is incomparable to traditional large classes/limited interactions in terms of allowing students to progress. Sure Oxford gets to pick the best students, but it can also take them much further. The fact that Oxford/Cambridge disproportionately produces elite scientists (including Hinton) might support Hoel's point.
I think he means 1 PhD tutors 1-3 undergraduates. I know when I was in school, both teaching and as a student, the most effective time learning was in 1:1 or small group discussions after class, during office hours, whatever.
Sure, I just meant that PhD programs should then have produced a high number of geniuses as well (which they haven't), unless you mean one-on-one tutoring is effective only at an earlier academic stage.
I see. I don't know how PhD programs work in general; I know the program I was in was unusual talking to grad students from other schools. Many PhDs seem to spend a lot of time isolated and working on some project for their advisor that they are not interested in, then getting trapped doing that work instead of what they want to do until their career takes off. I don't know about that personally, but there is a REALLY shockingly high level of mental problems like depression among grad students. Possibly the filter is based more around resilience to misery instead of genius?
Yes I edited sorry for the confusion. I would argue undergratuate training is the crucial step in future science success since it will provide strong bases and enable you to join elite labs for PhD Training. "Aristocratic" style tutoring also gives confidence and this ties in with idea of the "Hero license" previously discussed in Secrets of the Great Families.
I did both my undergraduate and PhD (or rather DPhil) at Oxford and the experience of being tutored felt extremely different from the experience of being supervised. As an undergraduate, my tutor had an agenda as to what he was going to teach that week whereas PhD supervisions felt more like a weekly discussion, not quite between peers obviously, but more like that.
Do Oxford and Camridge produce students that are that much better or do their oxbridge pedigrees get them more prestige, better positions and thus better research students and financial support and thus more output. I certainly haven't noticed oxbridge graduates to be any brighter than those of other decent schools... Their marginal value doesn't seem that high in terms of brilliance...
a) whether this is the case (i.e. comparing similarly talented students who've gotten Oxbridge treatment vs more traditional schooling in longitudinal studies)
b) how to isolate the effect of this Oxbridge tutoring from, say, having the Oxbridge brand name on one's CV, or having access to the Oxbridge network, etc
I personally love tutoring and being tutored, so this is really me trying to examine my bias for it a little more closely.
I can't emphasize how unnatural it is to read that current work in AI safety is comparable to Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
In some sense, AI safety is a field whose time has come. AI is getting better. We've had sci-fi suggesting a robot takeover for very many decades now. It is not difficult to speculate that we'll build a machine that is smarter than us, and will hence take over the world. Had Yudkowsky not created it, someone else might have.
Darwin's theory of evolution was not "in the air". If Darwin hadn't obsessively studied skeletons and beaks on his now-legendary voyage, probably no one else would have for hundreds of years. There were no scientific trends that Darwin was extrapolating. He created a mind-bending theory out of nowhere. Even Einstein's theory of relativity had more precedence than Darwin's theory, because it came out of the Morley-Michelsen experiment's inability to detect the ether.
Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly not as "in the air" as AI safety is now, but didn't Alfred Russel Wallace have basically the same idea around basically the same time? It was shocking to the general public, including readers of scientific texts, but I can't believe that it would've waited for hundreds of years. Its time had come.
(A similar case with Newton and Leibniz independently discovering calculus at roughly the same time. Newton and Darwin did it better, realizing more of the consequences, but Leibniz and Wallace did it too.)
Thanks, I just read up on Wallace. It seems to me that Wallace and Darwin were in constant communication, supportive of each other's hypotheses, and in fact also published many findings on the transmutation of species together.
The definitive evidence of an idea being "up in the air" is that multiple people or groups discover the same idea **independently**, and at around the same idea. This clearly did not happen here. Perhaps the strongest argument one can make is that Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of evolution together.
Also, didn't Darwin's grandfather do some research that helped lead him in the direction of evolution?
I think Darwin is a good example of technology enabling theoretical progress - long sea voyages to remote islands were simply much more feasible than they had ever been before, and though the Galapagos finches might not have been strictly necessary in hindsight, seeing such similar yet distinct species in such close proximity might well have inspired whichever naturalist saw them, in a counterfactual where a different naturalist was chosen for the voyage of the Beagle.
This is interesting, although I am not sure about the point of sea voyages having suddenly become easier/more common. Ships had been the primary mode of transportation for centuries by this time. I do agree that Galapagos was a great place to have discovered evolution though
Transportation over any distance had been a thing most people did zero or one times per lifetime for centuries by that time, with "zero" being far more common. I'm not sure about it becoming significantly less rare in Darwin's time, but it is plausible.
Yes, regardless of whether transportation by sea was common, if the number of people travelling by sea didnt change significantly during Darwin's time, this point is moot
It may not have been "in the air" but Robert Bakewell had been systematically studying artificial selection (and documenting it) since before Darwin was born.
The wikipedia article on Bakewell suggests that he practiced selective breeding of cattle, and this was used by Darwin as evidence for theory of evolution, like you mention. Hence, the lead from selective breeding to evolution is a big one, and we have to give Darwin most of the credit for that intellectual leap.
Yes, I feel that my argument should be weaker than I claim, although stronger than you claim. Evolution was clearly much less "out there" than "AI will become stronger than humans".
Oh, I make no claims about how Darwin compares to anyone in AI, since I don't follow that world. I was responding more to the idea that there were no previous trends Darwin was building on. He was definitely building on both naturalists like Lamarck and deist philosophers who believed the universe is a kind of self-regulating machine. The average person probably hadn't heard of a lot of that stuff before Darwin though, so he seemed more like a bolt from the blue.
Yeah this is emphatically not the case based on my understanding. You have Wallace on the one hand; Jean-Baptiste Lamarack on the other. And who anticipated Lamarack but . . . Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. Meanwhile, Mendel is a contemporary and he develops the math of heredity without even being really plugged into the wider scientific world. I'm not detracting from Darwin's vital work, but the seeds of his discovery are scattered far.
For the record - I do think Darwin made an incalculable leap, which was to view evolution as a statistical, rather than deterministic or biological, process. His ability to grok that populations were changing, not individuals, is really an incredibly powerful idea for explaining things.
That chart at the top of the post can be at least partly explained by the principle of "graded on a curve."
There were more "geniuses" relative to the general population because of the wide difference in education from the top to the bottom - how it was delivered matters little. It may be we have fewer "geniuses" now because they don't stand out as much due to the current minimum education standard being much higher than it was 6-700 years ago, and thus more (but not all, of course) people are closer in education to what was considered a genius level in the 1500s.
That doesn't mean there aren't absolute geniuses that "break the curve" - like, say, Leonardo Da Vinci.
I disagree that most AI researchers would consider Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, or Schmidhuber (the big famous names in neural networks) to be geniuses. They are certainly people who were extremely creative and worked very hard, and were right when nearly everyone else was wrong. That's not nothing, they are definitely great scientists.
I don't quite know how to articulate the difference, but I don't think their success came from the near-mystical intellectual insight that I associate with genius. There aren't (yet) any profound, earth-shattering conceptual breakthroughs in neural-network-based AI. Hinton's most famous contribution, when you look at it, amounts to a more efficient way of coding up the chain rule from calculus (edit: and Hinton himself says the idea was in fact discovered earlier by others in various ways).
I'm not trying to put them down, as I think these achievements were obviously era-defining, and other people did not come up with these ideas even though they could have. But it's a different kind of thing from the profound insight Darwin and Einstein had.
AI research just doesn't seem like a field, currently, that rewards genius very much at the margin, compared to other traits such as creativity, persistence, and executive skills. So on the one hand, this adds support to the thesis of your post that geniuses get outsized credit for being early; on the other hand, I do think it's still possible that someone will have some amazing breakthrough that makes deep learning "make sense", and we will actually remember this person as a genius.
We can find geniuses easily when the internet reaches remote areas at a very low price and genius people have time beyond daily survival. As school allows people to specialize sooner and connect with information, people and problems. Changing needs arise with new solutions or develop old ones. As space is accessible, new ideas may come out. As genetic engineering takes off and computers are allowed to be the geniuses or genius's best friend.
I think the nature of the discipline may matter. Chemistry, mine, is a "working class" science where remarkably few faculty come from white collar backgrounds, generally first generation college, or near so (i.e., a high school teacher as a parent). If you peruse the links in the list of chemistry noble laureates, you find few that had elite tutors.... I've known a few of these scientists personally and many by 2 degrees of separation and they are clearly geniuses!
The people considered the fathers of the field, like Lavoisier and Boyle, weren't exactly blue-collar! But largely I agree with your point. It may be easier to get notable results despite your background in chemistry (as I'd argue it's more receptive than other fields to perseverance, and less responsive to theoretical knowledge obtained prior to experimentation; without experimental confirmation, essentially no theory gets off the ground.) But I do wonder if geniuses in chemistry have as wide recognition outside the field as geniuses in physics, mathematics, or music? The only chemists I can think of as having a similar level of public recognition to Einstein and co. are the Curies, Nobel himself, and perhaps Haber and Rutherford. I may be miscalibrated on this, however, but it seems that either chemistry has either a preponderance of extremely impactful results that together appear to be "relatively equal" and not "genius" despite their importance, or it has relatively few results that are understood to have permanently changed our understanding of the world. I lean towards #1, and it also leads me to believe that in general, our current lack of geniuses in many fields comes from, well, having too many of those that would be considered geniuses in the past. Due to the relatively low cost of entry for chemistry and its heavily experimentally-focused beginnings, it may have underwent that transition sooner.
Yeah, just look at the tiny number of chemistry papers in Science or Nature. You have to be deeper into the field to see paper's significance. If you publish a paper on inbreeding in Bolivian green tree frogs and it's effects on jump height at least people can understand what you are talking about and a significant number will be frog fans and think it's cool... It's hard to make chemical results accessible to the literate lay person and many, many such efforts by, university outreach offices, show little relationship to the actual importance of the work....
I do think that the blue collar reputation of the field hurts its prestige. The infous "studies have shown" that the economic payback of chemical R&D is very good (that's why companies do so much) but that it has much less of the superlotto potential of, say, molecular biology or solid state physics. .
If you look at the graphs in the post linked there is no decline in geniuses per capita. Instead there is a decline in the number of geniuses per educated person. But that assumes that education was random! If geniuses were identified among the general public and preferentially exposed to more education that would be enough to explain the supposed decline on its own.
A very important point. I rather suspect you're right. Genius is clearly something on its own, a genetic sport. You have to be *born* a genius, you can't be educated into it, if you don't have the right DNA, any more than a generic couch potato can run the 100m as fast as Usain Bolt if he only gets the right training.
So if loads more people are educated, it's hard not to see how geniuses per educated person declines, even as geniuses per person does not.
This assumes that genius was reliably recognized and selected for education in the past, across the whole of the population or some large segment of it. I'm not sure that's true enough to explain the observed effect.
I think the move to general education is partly to blame. It used to be that you were being educated IN something. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Violin playing. Smithing. Whatever. If you ran ahead of the subject matter you'd just move on to harder lessons.
No one is a genius at "general education" because it's not a subject. You are encouraged not to specialize or go deep but to go wide. And depth is only rewarded to a point through advanced classes (and only in concert with a bunch of other things). No amount of being an amazing math student will get you out of your English classes even once you're past the basic level.
Was Mozart any good at physics? If so we have no evidence for it. If he'd been forced to spend an equal amount of time in math and physics and history as he did on music then he'd be less likely to be a genius in my opinion. And if he was very bad at one or two irrelevant (to music) subjects like history or math then he might have trouble getting into top schools.
The end effect is that we've raised the barrier. You need to be both a genius in music and a passable mathematician. If not then you'll have trouble getting seen by the big institutions that are necessary to back genius. (And were necessary back then too!) It's no surprise less of them manage to make this leap.
Compare how Mozart was invited to play in front of the Emperor to what the Juilliard requires of applicants. And how credentialist biases make things like Juilliard more important. Or compare Edison and his long period of basically solely mechanical education (through self-teaching or apprenticeship) to what your average engineer goes through both in education and hiring today.
Interestingly, any substantial focus on General Education is mostly an American thing. It basically doesn't exist in other countries, especially English speaking ones!
It might have some, limited, value if done as it ideally should be, but, in practice it mostly consists of a bunch of low level survey courses, increasingly taught by adjuncts. That give a veneer of shallow ideas over a lack of depth. Almost all students consider it largely a waste of time that, if pressed for a justification, mostly helps by decreasing their workload and so allows more party time...
The Humanities and Social Sciences that dominate GenEd are no less rigorous than STEM at upper levels but their GenEd offerings have to compete for student customers and this thermodynamic force hurt the course quality...
Agreed. I often point out that many advanced countries have very strong tracking systems where you do exit gen ed by the age of like 12-14. Basically, school from like 5-12 is a combination of daycare and really basic skills. Reading, writing, basic math, language. Then you start to specialize. Humanities college tracks, doctor tracks, trade tracks. Tracks for music or even makeup design. I don't have the numbers. But I strongly suspect this performs better than the American one size fits all approach. It's actually really weird that the vast majority of Americans don't pick a specific course of education until they're in college.
I'd expect this has something to do with the US's obsession with purported freedom of choice, and "forcing a child into a specialization" early is believed to interfere with that choice. Note freedom of choice isn't a bad thing- but in order to have that, impactful choices have to be offered early, instead of preventing people from making any decision at all until you decide they're educated enough!
Also, to be blunt, many left-leaning people, including myself, even if we're OK in theory with a tracking system, believe that a system in America would lead to little Noah and Madison still being put in the "college" track no matter what and Marcus & Maria being pressured to go on the non-college track even if they have the skills and grades.
A lot of countries do it by standardized tests. The ones least likely to use them are arts which are probably not a place to fear a lack of minority representation.
It's also not necessarily a directly hierarchical system. For example, between the person who goes to a school to be an engineer, a humanities professor, and a model, who is higher social status? In many the hierarchy tends to be WITHIN tracks with people being "the best art school" vs "the best engineering school" rather than engineering being clearly superior to arts.
There's also a weird denial of the fact that education is funded for economic reasons. If you were to ask the South Korean or German government what it built its schools do they would tell you to prepare an educated, modern workforce.
Interesting comment. Another aspect of the experience of “general education” is that it changes one’s relationship to the experience of failure. Unless the new Mozart is genius at everything, he is having periods of hesitation, misunderstanding, and struggle which are not then rewarded with insight/achievement. In music, for him, there is a further side to experiences of struggle. Somehow the gears mesh and he continues to envision and create genius work.
But today, there he is in gen ed spending hours a week failing/struggling and not getting over it. I’m arguing that too much grinding academic failure will affect someone’s ability to continue to achieve in what they’re actually good at.
One of the values of 1-1 tutoring is that it means being specifically lifted out of intellectual/emotional/creative pitfalls. If Mozart had to bring home years’ worth of Ds in history (for example) having to struggle on still bad at it, he might emotionally accommodate himself to needing less zing in his success. He wouldn’t be learning history, he’d be learning to fail, and eventually that would have an impact.
It also affects their experience with success for roughly parallel reasons. And it likely means success can be nurtured and rewarded at a higher level. And is more likely to be regained in a competition with similar people.
Interesting! I would have said precisely the opposite! In the 17th century, someone like Leibniz could make major contributions to philosophy, mathematics, engineering, etc. and Descartes can make major contributions to optics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, etc. By the late 19th century, you can't do all that any more, but someone like Einstein could make major contributions to every area of physics, and someone like Hilbert could make major contributions to every area of mathematics. These days you have to be more specialized to make an impact.
Leibniz studied philosophy and law. His initial learning in mathematics and science came from being a secretary and later legal advisor to a scientific society. He came into contact with other scientists/mathematicians/etc because he was contracted by a prince to help with various legal tasks at court and met them there. He later asked some of them to help him get better and eventually became Leibniz.
Descartes studied to be a lawyer too but started in philosophy and general subjects to get there. (The more things change...) And then he decided to become a soldier. He was actually not that good of a soldier though good enough to have a small political/military career. That taught him some basic geometry, engineering, etc. He claims he wasn't very good at it until he had a spark of divine revelation to apply philosophy to mathematics. After that he sold his family property to retire early to a university where he began to write what we know him for. Starting with his philosophy. But he also asked people to help him with things he'd been thinking of and increased his range.
In both cases they became educated in many things. But they went to school in the sense we think for just one. Two if you count Descartes having some military background and then being trained as a soldier.
Maybe it was easier to learn more back then. But I take men like Leibniz and Descartes as evidence that being educated with one profession in mind doesn't handicap you for life. It actually was probably necessary for Leibniz. If he hadn't been so thoroughly educated in the law from a young age then it's unlikely he would have gotten a position at court so young.
My impression is that as far as the formal education goes, this is exactly the same in contemporary European universities. A friend of mine who went to university for philosophy, and had interests in logic, wasn't allowed to study mathematics, because that would take him outside his course of study. (He was eventually able to make up for this by coming to an American university.)
I can't speak specifically to your friend. But yes, it's much more common in the rest of the world. I once met a South Korean woman who worked for a makeup company. She'd gone to an arts college for modeling, makeup, fashion, etc. And then went on to some kind of college level program. She actually seemed like she'd gotten a pretty broad spread of topics ranging from chemistry to history. But it was all from the lens of arts and, in her case, makeup.
I find it very hard to think she was greatly hampered by her lack of formal logic or calculus. In fact, I think it helped her. She once told me, "National history bored me. Who cares about old wars?" Yet she was actually pretty good at history/geography/etc because she knew the fashions and looks of various times and places.
Yes, and because american bachelor degrees are so crowded by GenEd, a lot of core disciplinary content gets pushed into graduate school. As a consequence. American PhD students spend 2 to 4 times more time doing formal coursework than do those in non-US PhD programs.
I've heard this and while it might be somewhat true: Are there any people who were musical and mathematical geniuses? I can think of, for example, people who made great contributions to mathematics and physics.
I don't want to denigrate music at all. But I've always heard this by musicians who want to insist music is valuable beyond its immediate applications. Usually in a bid for arts education. I would fund music more if I could. But that's because I believe in music itself.
I, a chemistry prof., have heard from usually reliable sources that early music training in younger kids helps their later math ability more then intensive math training as young kids...
Interestingly. Being aways along the autistic spectrum seems to be exceptionally common in mathematicians and musicians (and chemists too).
In the 1990s I had a math professor (who finished the PhD sometime late 60s/early 70s, not too far from retirement at that time) who insisted that computer science was ruining the math students. A combination of the comp sci department getting more majors (more fun, more drama, better money) and something about the necessary habits of thought in those two fields being somewhat mutually exclusive.
I think someone sent me an article about the early music lessons helping kids in math, not too long ago. It makes sense to me, to a point. I have a lot of doubts about math teaching in general. As a kid I could tell fairly young who enjoyed abstract thought enough to bother to get better at it, we sortof gathered together. People might convert to it later on but I haven't seen many. I could believe that too much early math study might not help the understanding much, while encouraging stillness and bafflement in counterproductive ways. Early childhood ed folks talk about the age at which children become capable of abstract thought, and I have doubts about that too, it may hit much earlier for some than for others.
Being an instrumentalist, a player that people want to listen to, is another thing though.
I think you're correct in pointing out that early maths "education" is so radically divergent from what makes a mathematician as to potentially be actively counterproductive.
Re maths vs computer science, I was under the impression that *computer science* was very mathematical, though *software engineering* requires a totally distinct mindset
Alas, there's not a consistent distinction made between computer science and software engineering education. And it often produces developers who are neither particularly mathematically inclined nor familiar with engineering principles.
I agree with the takedown but disagree that the point was ever interesting enough to warrant attention in the first place. It's the slightly more literate version of "in my day we had the Beatles and they were geniuses and you kids today with your Carly Rae Jepsens and your Duas Lipa...BAH!"
To be more charitable and dovetail with the point: OBVIOUSLY genius requires some degree of hindsight to recognize. The closer you get to the present, the less hindsight you have, by definition. So you'd expect the number of geniuses to trail off as you reach the present. The interesting point, if there is one (I doubt it) might be just how MUCH hindsight is required.
"It's the slightly more literate version of "in my day we had the Beatles and they were geniuses and you kids today with your Carly Rae Jepsens and your Duas Lipa...BAH!""
Let's all recognise that this is simply snark. It's not even a token attempt at an argument. You're basically just saying "it's dumb".
I think that it sevrs a similar purpose to things like the anti reactionary FAQ. It's important sometimes to demonstrate that actually the things that are obviously good really are good in spite
I think this is true for art - you can't tell if someone famous is just a one-hit wonder or someone who will influence the field for decades to come - but not true for science, where people can test and see if you're on to something interesting. Einstein was recognized as a brilliant physicist within a few years of him starting to publish physics papers.
Speaking from a perspective of a physics crackpot who is reasonably certain he's onto the next big thing - I think education style has basically nothing to do with it, and it is entirely barriers to entry, many of which exist largely to exclude crackpots.
The lone genius who defines the field doesn't just define the field, but also creates fertile soil for the imaginations of crackpots; I could do that. So each new genius who helps define an entire field makes it harder for the next genius to do exactly that; the field is increasingly engineered to keep out exactly those people, who outnumber actual geniuses a thousand to one, and who rapidly exhaust everybody's tolerance / enthusiasm for ideas that would radically restructure the field.
And, speaking personally, ultimately I'm never going to put in the energy; maybe I'm genuinely onto the new big idea, maybe I'm just another crackpot in the field of thousands. I know what I think, but I'm also aware of the odds. I can be quietly satisfied that I understand the universe better than anybody else alive - and maybe in a century I'll be proven right, and people will wonder at this crazy guy. Or most likely I'll be forgotten. But either way at that point I'll be dead, and I can enjoy my supposed understanding of the universe right now, right or wrong.
Because - and here's the big thing - like, the only reason I bother, once every year or two, to try to convince people - is mostly out of a sense of obligation. My "genius-level" smarts tell me to stay the hell away from the kind of recognition that being proven right would result in.
The mass-energy distribution in general relativity is defined by an equation similar to sin(ln(r))/r (although not exactly this equation; this is the clean version). Necessarily some of the mass-energy distribution, and the associated curvature, is negative.
There are a few ways of expressing the same idea; it's probably isomorphic to a fractal, which isn't an accident, as I think it should be isomorphic to a negative-dimensional logarithmic spiral. It can also be described as an infinite series of alternating attractive and repulsive forces with a particular relationship between the initial amplitude and the rate of decay, although the forces should be regarded as arising from curvature. There are other, weirder ways of describing the idea; I've gone through a lot of abstractions trying to find something that other people can easily understand, without much success in any of them.
Edit: You can also think about what happens if "curvature" represents an actual curve, and what happens if that curve is also curved by curvature, to get a glimpse of the basics of the idea. It gets weird when you approach it from this direction, though, because it may add a lot of singularities, depending on your choice of coordinate system; every complete revolution of the spiral involves at least two.
Very cool, and seems like it's on the right track!
Mine can basically be summed up in a few basic points, no math necessary:
1. Spatial extension can be mapped equally well to extension into the past (1 light-second away is 1 second ago, etc)
2. Space and time are unified (uncontroversial); to be more precise, space and the past are unified, and the future has no spatial extension at all (extremely controversial)
3. The passage of time means nothing more and nothing less than an increase in the quantity of past time (today is the same as yesterday except with another day added to the tally)
4. Therefore, we should expect that, as a matter of definition, as time passes, there should be more space.
This actually manages to predict the Hubble expansion, which relativity permits but doesn't actually require, and actually makes perfect sense of dark energy to boot.
1, yes. 2, yes, except possibly about the future (my thoughts on this are complicated). 3 I'm not sure about, tying into the complications from 2.
Observing that a point particle's past extends in "all" directions outward, we may notice that there is an "inward" which is left unaddressed. But let's look at our dimensions.
From the point particle's perspective, using a particular choice of coordinates, we have "outward", then two closed dimensions (observe that at a given distance, you have two axes of rotations, with a finite size). The future, therefore, is inward; toward the particle. However, from the particle's perspective, there is no such thing - maybe. There's an interesting question: Take a given point, some distance away from the particle. What is the distance from the point particle, to that point? Is the distance finite? Suppose our particle is a singularity.
But - it's interesting that we have two closed dimensions of finite extent for any given point as defined along our third dimension. The only real infinity there is distance. Consider the past / out - is it infinite? Does the past extent forever? If it is finite - what would that mean?
So basically, the inward is the domain of the quantum, where all kinds of weird stuff starts happening. At least, it SEEMS weird, because we imagine that quantum-scale things should behave like large-scale things but they absolutely do not. Quantum mechanics only gives us probabilities, and it's been a rather big mystery as to why that is.
But if the outward domain is the domain of the past, the finished, the definite, the Einsteinian "event", then the inward is the domain of the future, the non-spatial, the probabilistic. It's a different phase of reality, and the wave-function "collapse" is the plane along which the phase transition happens and the merely probable becomes the actual.
Utter crackpottery of course. But Freeman Dyson, no crackpot, was not far off the scent:
"I deduce two general conclusions from these thought-experiments. First, statements about the past cannot in general be made in quantum-mechanical language. We can describe a uranium nucleus by a wave-function including an outgoing alpha particle wave which determines the probability that the nucleus will decay tomorrow. But we cannot describe by means of a wave-function the statement, “This nucleus decayed yesterday at 9 a.m. Greenwich time”. As a general rule, knowledge about the past can only be expressed in classical terms. My second general conclusion is that the “role of the observer” in quantum mechanics is solely to make the distinction between past and future. The role of the observer is not to cause an abrupt “reduction of the wave-packet”, with the state of the system jumping discontinuously at the instant when it is observed. This picture of the observer interrupting the course of natural events is unnecessary and misleading. What really happens is that the quantum mechanical description of an event ceases to be meaningful as the observer changes the point of reference from before the event to after it. We do not need a human observer to make quantum mechanics work. All we need is a point of reference, to separate past from future, to separate what has happened from what may happen, to separate facts from probabilities."
So if you model the past as a spherical shell expanding outward at the speed of light, the rate of change of the surface area should be, what, 8*pi*r. Assuming some kind of component is distributed over the surface area, the rate of change of density should be the inverse, or 1/(8*pi*r).
If you measure the density at a given point, you get the inverse square law. But it's the rate of change of density of the past which is personally interesting. Put a good spin on the past in an imaginary direction, interpret an object's history as its mass-energy distribution (which is to say, Earth's gravity is literally Earth's history, radiating outward), and you're halfway to my nonsense, and all the way there to an entirely weird way of interpreting standard general relativity.
You can have this metaphysical crackpot theory: There is no Hard Problem of Consciousness or, at least, the Hard Problem is the same for everything.
To be specific, the Hard Problem is a 'how' question (how does consciousness appear from a non-conscious physical substrate?), but physics can never give us 'how' answers, it can only provide mathematical models of physical observations. Those observations are accompanied by a 'just so' story which provides the mathematical inspiration but of which we have no way of telling if they are really true or not.
The Hard Problem just stands out because consciousness is the only physical phenomenon of which we have unmediated awareness, but the problem is really universal.
"How" questions tend to be areas where we have what I would call a verbal understanding of a thing - we have names for it and a shared social awareness that the thing exists, but we lack substantive clarification of what the thing it is we refer to is.
Suppose we're actually P-zombies, and we just happen to be running a simulation of ourselves that we confuse for consciousness; indeed, we can observe that our simulation includes the mental states of other people around us, albeit with less fidelity, in something the same fashion that we think of ourselves as conscious. Does it change anything if we call that experience "consciousness"? Does it mean anything if the other people we simulate in our own heads are also "conscious"? We don't actually know what we're calling consciousness.
Maybe it had something to do with elite competition. IE, perhaps it wasn't so much the aristocratic tutoring, but the high stakes social striving among members of the aristocracy? After all, that graph you posted also tracks the decline of aristocratic privilege, overall. Granted, correlation and causation do not always walk arm in arm.
You are short-selling Archimedes. The bathtub story concerning him is by a later Roman writer. What we have by Archimedes on the matter is a lucid and extremely concise treatise structured in an axiomatic way that would be uncommon (but perhaps not non-existent) in physics nowadays. His main insight was not "I can measure how much I splash" but "I am buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid I displace". If the story on the crown is true, his solution was probably not the one you most likely learned in high school, but rather a more elegant one, requiring no precise measurements of volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_principle#Eureka
He's just a famous person associated with greater acceptance of the dignity and rights of gay people who did important work to that end. "Genius" here means something more like, "the person we remember and shorthand for an area of discussion."
Edison's primary skill was owning a successful tech business, and he often gets shorthanded as the person responsible for all the inventions inventors invented for him.
I’m not sure about that. I thought Scott was trying to identify people who really made a mark as individuals, and in every other case I was familiar with what they had written (or invented or discovered, which are also things that get written up). Did Milk ever write anything important?
EAII said that the work was "to that end," i.e., the end they identified: gay rights/acceptance. A person can be outsranding in his field regardless of whether he is or is not a good person. Newton, apparently, was rather a prick.
I would imagine that the more interlocked the media caste is, the fewer "acclaimed" anything that there will be, and the less that acclaim actually means anything. A couple hundred years from now, would a similar study determine that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was our generation's preeminent scientist and Fauci more of a genius than Pasteur?
As an undergrad, I had a conversation with a bunch of artists, who were supposed to be making art "for the workers". (This also shows how old I am.)
They commented that, not only would a "worker" use their installation not as a think piece, but as a spitoon, but that no art that they did or would or could ever do would compare with, say Ancient Greek sculpture. And that Ancient Greece was a total slave society.
At the same time, Abraham Lincoln was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker or lawyer, and he had no more than about six weeks of schooling in his life.
Is it too obvious/too vague to bring up Ross Douthat's ideas about decadence when talking about the (alleged) decline of geniuses? As an explanation it doesn't have the advantage of being simple and compact, but it does link society-wide intellectual, artistic, and moral decline in a way that appeals to me and strikes me as true.
Otto Rank says the cult of genius that developed with the Renaissance is the result of a strong collective ideology that the creative personality both uses and reacts against in order to express their individuality. This is why the great works of art both capture the collective soul belief and compel the recognition of their individual expression. While this explains the genius in art and artist, Rank didn't investigate how the relation might apply in the sciences. It could be argued that Einstein was reacting against the Newtonian ideal as he himself says that his work was inspired by principle when reading Mach and not the Michelson Morley experiments.
Were that true, then I would expect to see remarkable gains in students from schools that adopt the workshop model, which is currently en vogue in primary education. The workshop model means direct instruction for a small group, while the rest of the students rotate to an activity at a "station".
My understanding is that performance under this model is actually substantially worse than whole class direct instruction, but workshops make tracking less visible and allow for more pretence at differentiation. Though these reasons are possibly beside the point - simply being the hot new thing is enough to make schools adopt it.
As it is, homeschooling is probably closest to the individual tutoring model, and while homeschoolers probably do better -- possibly especially better for prodigies -- homeschooling an average child doesn't shift him two standard deviations. If it did, the difference between homeschooled children and conventionally educated children would be blindingly obvious in terms of performance and not something subtle that needs to be teased out of the data.
I think that the answer is even more boring and it centers on the issue that what Hoel is measuring as genius e.g. "acclaimed scientists" is not the number of people above some absolute ceiling of "quality" but a relative metric of status or capability versus their peers.
If there are 1000 people in some domain, then one of them is a 0.1% outlier and will be acclaimed, but so will be 5-10 others who are worse but still really good and at the top of the field and they will naturally be celebrated, and so perhaps 1% of that domain would be considered "acclaimed geniuses". If some centuries later there are 1000000 equally well tutored people in the same domain, then for the thousand people who are in the top 0.1% that's not sufficient to be acclaimed anymore simply because there's not enough "fame budget" to ever consider 1000 people from a single domain at once as outstanding geniuses, instead those 1000 people (each of whom is objectively as amazing as that genius from centuries ago) become the "benchmark peers" relative to whom we judge whether someone is a genius or merely good.
The writer Samuel R. Delany wrote an essay, in the 1970s I think, discussing this question using poetry as his topic, on the grounds that he was well-acquainted with contemporary English-language poetry.
He picked the early 19C Romantic era in England as his test area for past standards, and calculated the number of 'great' and 'significant' poets of that time versus the size of the literate population. Then he extrapolated that to the contemporary USA and figured out the number of 'great' or 'significant' poets there ought to be if the incidence was the same rate.
And his answer? This will surprise you. He said that was about right. Delany found himself impressed by the amount of great, and generally good, poetry going on, and didn't think there was a decline in genius at all.
I don't recall that he addressed the question of, so why do we think there is a decline? A number of reasons, but one is that 200 years of renown does wonders for your reputation.
Also, people have a great person mental budget and as it gets filled up with historical examples, it starts to crowd out new entries into the canon. So much literature gets written that is competent to great compared to, say, the 19th century due to population increases, access to prior innovation, developments in technical understanding of the form, and more access to education, but people do not have seem to have the space to expand their mental list similarly. You see this same process play out with newer forms like film.
I have to wonder how much our easier modern lives contribute to this. Potential geniuses can live very comfortable happy lives without struggling to push the boundaries of human knowledge or whatever. Sure, some geniuses are completely internally driven but not all of them all the time. Maybe lots of genius goes the easier happier route.
I’m Gen X and grew up in comfortable upper middle class surroundings. I went to an elite public high school and had several really brilliant friends and acquaintances. Maybe none of us were quite genius level but I’m not sure I’d know if we were because we basically had it so easy. Most of those friends are now extremely successful professionals but none needed to do genius stuff.
With the internet, you can get your own aristocratic tutoring at home. You only really need libgen and sci-hub and you're good to go, good enough to get your foot in the door if you want to do research.
The benefit of tutoring isn't just access to knowledge and a search function, or you'd be able to replace it with a good librarian.
Look up the 2 sigma problem. A tutor will learn his pupil and what he knows, will identify gaps in the students learning, and be able to guide them to plug them before the pupil is even aware of them. The pupil can go in depth or breadth much more easily and dynamically than with books, the friction in switching contexts is lower and the tutor can correct the misconception as they occur.
The best combination would be to use both the books and the tutor - but libgen and sci-hub kinda solved the former part. After reading a book, or a chapter, you could tell the tutor a summary plus your thoughts on the topic, and get useful feedback.
> there are a couple of individuals who have developed entire new paradigms, who are widely acknowledged as way above the rest of the field, and who everyone expects the next interesting result to come from.
As an AI person who doesn't follow safety research, who are these people?
I am (mildly!) disappointed in your epistemics in this post. (Unless this is a move of misdirection in a strategic game you're playing against... opponents; in which case, I'll keep my mouth shut.)
Newton and Darwin are anti-examples, and evidence for the opposite of your claim.
First, the prior on the explosive returns to tutoring is high: you are doubtless aware of Bloom's 2-sigma result.
Secondly, Newton's tutor was Barrow, himself academic nobility of impeccable pedigree and inheritor of academic lineages now passed into legend — Marin Mersenne (of the primes, among other things), Galileo (the big one), Torricelli, and that whole cluster. Barrow himself had exposure to brilliant teachers from a young age, at the schools he attended.
Most importantly, Oxford and Cambridge are *known* for their primary method of education being... tutoring. And I don't mean one-on-many, I mean 1:1 to 1:3 ratios at most. That's literally what they're famous for. That's what's produced the strings of geniuses we see, including even modern eminences such as Dawkins (Dawkins' tutor was Niko Tinbergen, founder of ethology and later Nobelist; the description Dawkins gives of what that was like is astounding, and makes for a stunning and depressing contrast with the meatgrinder/factory model that's the default otherwise — you realise the later may not in fact deserve at all the name 'education').
So *all* the statements of the kind 'and then he went to Oxbridge, which is a totally normal education' are a major category error. That's not how they do things there; over there, they actually bother to press the 'Win' button occasionally.
(For more information on this, I'd suggest the book 'The Oxford Tutorial', by Palfreyman. Dawkins renders his own opinion about the tutorial in a contributed chapter! )
That's an excellent question, I don't have an answer, and debugging this problem is actually a massively high-value thing to do for anyone in the right place to do it, IMO. It's literally a civilisation-level 'Win' button that you can press with a few million to few tens of million dollars — a cryptechbro with good taste could single-handedly press it multiple times, in multiple places/campuses, if he were so inclined!
FWIW, until the last generation, these places certainly did produce these kinds of people.
In the field of the history and philosophy of classical Shaiva Tantra (something of interest to me), where the literature is vast, fragmentary, and often unpublished, there is no figure remotely comparable to Alexis Sanderson — and he's a Balliol man, now an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls. He deserves the title of 'genius'. He has single-handedly synthesised the entire thing and his synthesis that is now orthodoxy; he stands at the foundation of all that shall come after. Not only that, I've heard how other *very* eminent people speak to him (and of him) with what can only be described as somewhat fearful awe.
(Beyond just their contributions, there's a 'thereness' to people like Sanderson and Dawkins that shines through when you see them or meet them.)
One possibility: the structure of the classical college, which was inherited/copied by the Euros from the Muslims (survives only in Oxbridge now, so far as I can tell!), who themselves got it from the Central Asian Buddhists, has eroded away to the point where it doesn't function that well any more. Bringing that back would be another massive win. (For more, check out Warriors of the Cloister; excellent book about the origin and transmission of this most powerful of institutional technologies.)
> This result is almost assuredly a vast overestimation of the general improvement possible
I suspect that the existing school system sucks so much that vast improvements are possible by merely doing the common-sense things.
If you have fewer kids to teach, and you are not a part of a giant bureaucratic system, then you have much more freedom to actually follow your common sense. Also, some kids don't care, some kids actively disrupt lessons; you can get further improvement by ignoring them and only focusing on the rest.
100% agree on your points - If you wanted to be Newton in the 1600s you could just learn all the math and physics we knew to that point and then notice that two things were similar (to be apocryphal, an apple falling out of a tree towards a planet and the planets being pulled towards one another). This was hard, but not impossible.
A Newton today would spend the same amount of time learning one subset of calculus. As a result, he'd be likely to publish results that are incredibly groundbreaking and exciting for the six dozen people who know what he's talking about. Then 30 years later someone would build a quantum computer using methods he pioneered and pop-sci articles would screw up discussing how it worked.
But that line of thought makes me wonder if there's another issue here. I've been thinking a lot about the focus on happiness and harm avoidance in modern society lately. I'm wondering if maybe some of the restlessness we feel as a culture is because we do not set other, larger collective goals than just making as many people comfortable as possible.
I suspect that a "well-rounded" and standardized education is good from a limited utilitarian point of view (though I've seen plenty of arguments that it's not). Its goal, at least, is to protect from favorite-playing and children getting left behind by the system. It may raise general standards of living. But if Newton had to do analogy practice to get his SAT scores up so he could get into Cambridge, and had to be in a marching band because he was required to take one non-academic elective each year, would the world be a better place or a worse one, especially taking into account that it now takes longer to get up to speed on a given subject? Wouldn't it be better for *some* children if they were allowed to start that journey, uninterrupted by the need to be well-rounded or whatever, as early as possible?
Do we have less geniuses, or does it feel like we have less geniuses?
“Look at this 300 year time gap, we had so many geniuses, but if you look at the present moment we have so little”
Also, to use society’s capacity for recognizing geniuses, especially as our society fragments, seems like a recipe for generating the antidotal feeling of society currently having less geniuses
It may be a mistake to post a reaction that I can’t rigorously support, but I do think something has been lost in our culture beyond the boring explanations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it relates to the phenomenon under consideration. If you read the real intellects of the nineteenth century—not just Darwin or the other huge names, but really good academics who never became household names—it’s just obvious to me that we aren’t producing people of the same deep knowledge capable of synthesizing broad and diverse strands of thought, using sound judgment and care in avoiding over-extrapolation, to form good, reliable, new ideas. There are lots of explanations, of course, like the vastly increased literature in every field precluding mastery of any broad subject area. But I’m quite convinced it isn’t just the absence of low-hanging fruit and whatnot. I just can’t find contemporary writers who exhibit the same kind of mastery as their forebears in those areas I’m competent to understand.
I think part of the problem in science is publishing and modern academia. The need to publish frequently makes it harder to put only your good, deep ideas out there. Thus, there is a lot more dross, the signal-to-noise ratio is worse. Furthermore, the stylistic constraints of current academic writing can make all but the most naturally skilled writers sound stilted, dense, and dry. We also don't teach prospective academics anything about teaching and we don't teach them much about writing well, so they don't often develop the skills needed to explain things clearly, accurately, and engagingly.
All of that makes reading widely and deeply more difficult, on top of the difficulty of mastering fields that go deeper and deeper every year.
1) Many former examples of genius only get recognized widely after many years and some reasonable teaching about them. We know about the genius of Einstein because *everybody* hears about Einstein all the time. I would strongly argue that on-par would be people like Shannon or Djikstra or other pioneers of information theory and computation, but they don't get taught in the standard US high school curriculum. Same thing with Henry Ford and Carl Johansson -- Ford gets all the credit for assembly line manufacturing, but much of that would be impossible to scale without the gauge blocks Johansson invented, but the former is a household name while the latter is not.
2) Many examples can be pointed to of contemporary genius/fundamental direction shift type technology invention. The invention of CRISPR is clearly a game changer, similarly the invention of mRNA delivery systems, but I can't tell you who invented those off the top of my head. On the other hand, in hobbies of mine that I'm more in tune with, I would argue that many advancements in 3D printing or machining are coming at an insane rate, but often without an individual who can be pointed to as a foundational genius.
3) Many fields experience delayed fundamental shifts due to ossification where peer reviewers stick to their pet theories and direct the field to make slow, incremental progress, which is then shifted significantly as they lose influence and move on. I can't point to a good source on this off the top of my head, but I've read more than one article making this point, typically citing the behavior of paleontologists regarding fundamental theories about extinction event causes.
1. Erik Hoel points out in his article that Tolstoy was thought of as a genius, in the ranks of Newton and da Vinci, four years after his death. Also, no way is Shannon's work as paradigm-changing as Einstein's, although it can be thought of as comparably influential.
2. CRISPR hasn't answered its promise yet. It just might. But it hasn't yet.
3. This was probably true before as well. People didn't want to believe that the Earth went around the sun because of the ossification of the "earth center of the universe" theory.
I think you have to separate scientific genius from artistic genius.
It's plausible to say that the low hanging fruit has been plucked when it comes to science or philosophy, but it seems much less plausible to say that all the "easy" combinations of musical notes have been taken.
On the creative/artistic side of things, I imagine an important part of the explanation is critical disdain for popular works. Without pointing to the subjective aesthetic judgments of a small group of critics, how would one justify the claim that Mozart is a "genius" and Max Martin is not? That Dickens is a "genius" and JK Rowling is not?
But the critics, who get to label someone a genius, have an instinctive loathing for anything with mass popularity. And the most talented people nowadays are not doing the things the critics want. So it's hardly surprising that classical music isn't producing more Mozarts. The best musicians are writing music for bigger audiences and much bigger paydays. Even in classical music, I'd class John Williams as a "genius" by any objective metric but the fact that he writes for the public rules him out for that tiny critical class.
There are lots of important scientific questions that aren’t close to being answered. What is dark energy? Dark matter? How did life start? What is sentience?plenty of opportunities for geniuses.
The first is the market cap problem; as a company grows large it becomes less and less likely that it will keep growing at the same rate.
If genius is one in 1000 (arbitrarily) then, if the population of the earth is 1 million there are 1000 geniuses.
If the population is 8 billion then there are 8 million geniuses. And we kind of have to assume that all these seeds will not fall in fertile soil.
Then, as some others have mentioned here, there is the low hanging fruit issue. As things become more complex it seems less likely that anyone person would make some staggering advance.
Also, just as an example, there were no geniuses of cinema until about 100 years ago.
I’m sure there are other disciplines that could be thought of that are equally as recent. All in all I think the idea of aristocratic tutoring is not very compelling
Then there’s the hindsight 2020 issue. Not all geniuses are celebrated in their time and there is no reason to think that this time is any different.
Mozart didn’t really end up looking much like a genius at the end of his life.
Let me address some of these points, since I think, in many cases, they are dealt with appropriately in the original essay.
First, to one of the main points you make: is aristocratic tutoring still alive and well? If it were, then I agree the thesis would be bunk. And it is alive and well in very particular fields, like Chess and music (and sports, in many cases). There, it is obviously successful and helpful—your brother being such a case. But is it practiced beyond games, in academic/intellectual fields? No. Not at all. And that was my point. For example, a private tutor of the elites reached out to me, and this is what they had to say:
"Wish more of our clients asked for what you propose in your (wonderful) essay. Over 15 years working with elites around the world, I'm afraid I can only think of 2 or 3 who have sought what you suggest. The rest - test-prep."
So, no, aristocratic tutoring is not still practiced for intellectual subjects, even among elites, tutoring is reserved for test prep.
Then to your other main point: I do not say that the decline of genius is mono-causal. I explicitly give credence to the “ideas are getting harder to find” thesis and say I agree with it. I just say I don’t think it explains 100% of the effect, since it implies some ridiculous things, like that (a) science and arts are “mineable” in exactly the same way since the decline seems similar in both, and (b) that ideas got harder to find in such a way it counterbalanced the explosion of free information to everyone on Earth in a period of under 20 years. Are ideas really that much harder to find in 2015 compared to 1995? Really? That much harder? That giving every human being infinite free information did *nothing*?
And finally, the tertiary point: yes, you can find historical figures that weren’t tutored, as I, again, say in the essay. But I find it odd that, of your the list of six geniuses who weren’t supposedly tutored, two of them were. First, Wolfgang Motzart was tutored by his father, as you point out, but I’m not sure why that doesn’t count. There’s a whole section on how family members can act as aristocratic tutors. Second, I'm pretty sure Darwin was indeed tutored as a youth. His house had a massive servant’s quarter, and he had governesses (who I believe taught him languages). If you look at reports of his own household when he was an adult, all his children had tutors and governesses as well. They were an aristocratic family and that’s just what aristocrats did. I literally give him as an example in the essay of how casual they took tutoring, for Darwin, at 16, independently hires tutors just to teach him outside skills, on his own, like it's totally natural.
I think you’d have to work very hard to find a host of intellectuals who weren’t aristocrats past a certain time in history, so this contra game is limited. Lastly, governesses are usually not counted as "tutors" but acted as such.
I’m a little confused by the idea that there are less geniuses in the arts. Sure, Mozart is great, but it’s not like people don’t love Ed Sheeran. If you say he doesn’t do anything original, then look at the Beatles. I don’t know much about music, but I’m sure Skrillex has some claim to genius (if you don’t like his music, consider that Arnold Schoenberg is considered a genius in music, and his stuff is also often hard to listen to, or listen to the song “it’s gone rain” with split earphones, which again was made by a pioneer and potential genius). I can’t tell if Mozart was actually so amazing, or if people just dismiss the Beatles as “popular” and therefor not geniuses, leaving it at that. (I feel like this probably applies to visual arts, acting, directing, writing, etc).
Is there a reason that is founded on something other than classical music snobbery? Again, I don’t know loads about music, but I get the feeling that classic music lovers can be snobby about it, and I’d love to be corrected
But Mozart's impact can probably be understood by studying what music sounded like before he exploded into the scene, and how he changed it within his lifetime. In other words, we probably need context to understand his contribution.
That seems fair, but also the Beatles seem to have made huge changes to music that is apparently still ongoing. Did Mozart just get those big wins because people hadn’t thought of gradually changing volume yet instead of changing quickly because big complicated instruments were only recently being used? Was he the transition from baroque to classical music? Were the beatles the transition from frank Sinatra to Pop? What’s the important difference?
I mean, child prodigies aren’t uncommon nowadays. Srinivasa Ramanujan was apparently a complete prodigy in maths without tutoring, and the guy who came up with predictive coding is maybe a genius and was smart from a young age.
Also, this will be subjective, but my brother studied music and listened to Mozart’s early stuff, and said it was fine but not great and there are lots of adult music students who very much aren’t geniuses who could make something better. Basically all of Mozart’s famous “genius-defining” stuff comes from his adulthood as far as I remember (though feel free to correct me). I’m also sure that many other geniuses didn’t produce anything of particular value until adulthood (did einstein do any important physics as a kid? Did Charles Dickens write any important stories as a kid?).
I wrote a book length story as an 11 year old, and if I became a famous writer I’m sure people would say I wrote books even as a child and make a story out of it. As it happens, I don’t write anymore and probably never will, and then it just turns into a pile of nothing which nobody cares about
Yeah, but please remember Mozart's "early stuff" includes a short symphony written when he was eight. An adult who could produce something better than an eight year old? Sure! But did that adult write a complete symphony when *they* were eight? Of comparable quality?
I'm the first to say "a decline of genius" is pretty subjective. At Cold Takes they had a good thought experiment, which was something like "people will sometimes say there has been no decline of genius, but if you ask them what books they would take to a desert island they name things like The Complete Works of Shakespeare and not The Da Vinci Code" and I think that's capturing something that may at first seem shallow but it's actually quite deep.
I think it depends a lot on who you’re asking. I know plenty of people who might pick Harry Potter. I would probably take a children’s book that I had as a kid. If I couldn’t choose that, I’m not going to exclude Shakespeare, but I also might consider a song of ice and fire (if it were finished), or Never Let Me Go but Ishiguro.
Obviously this is assuming I can’t take a raft building book
"At Cold Takes they had a good thought experiment, which was something like 'people will sometimes say there has been no decline of genius, but if you ask them what books they would take to a desert island they name things like The Complete Works of Shakespeare and not The Da Vinci Code'"
I think you're confusing the status-signals of a specific community for the opinions of "people" generally. I'm pretty sure most people I know would pick Harry Potter or The Hunger Games before anything classic.
That's not a fair comparison. In Shakespeare's day there were the equivalents of "The Da Vinci Code" (hugely popular blood-and-thunder revenge tragedies that moulder in dust today) and in our day there are much better works of literary fiction than Brown's potboiler best-seller.
Brown has already fallen off his peak of popularity. Time is what winnows out the chaff and leaves "Shakespeare is better than Dan Brown", and you have to give time to winnow out the chaff of today's works.
As other people have pointed out, I think that in reality, most people would name something populist but page-hefty like Harry Potter, Song of Ice & Fire, or Stephen King's collected works, before they say Shakespeare.
In fact, there is even a British radio show with exactly this premise for music, called Desert Island Discs. I wonder what the book choices would be for a book equivalent if you asked lots of famous people like they do in the show
How do you classify Mozart as a genius? Musically? Absolutely, and yet there are those who don't find Mozart's work interesting or engaging. Genius in the popular sense, which tends to hover around "boffin or egg-head making big scientific discoveries"? No, not in the same ball park as Newton or Einstein.
So a genius in the arts is someone who will still be acclaimed one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now - and going off moderns is very hard to predict who is going to last that long. Current popularity and even critical acclaim is no measure. Shakespeare languished in obscurity after his hey-day until an 18th century revival. Same with many others in the arts who are nowadays acclaimed as geniuses.
Regarding Darwin's education, I don't know. The online bios claim that he went off to the local Anglican day school at the age of eight after his mother's death, along with his brother. There probably were governesses who taught his three elder sisters and may well have taught the young Darwin as well, but he was formally educated in schools (even though he hated the local school and his father thought he was an idler so packed him off to study medicine aged 16 to Edinburgh, where he dawdled another two years until his father then sent him to Cambridge for a BA and in theory ending up in holy orders as an Anglican parson, a socialy respectable position for a free-thinking naturalist where he probably would have been the 'more interested in scholarship than preaching' type if he had ever made it that far).
I would also imagine the tutoring of his own children at home had at least as much to do with him hating his own time in school as anything else, and although his surviving children went on to have careers of their own, none of them reached the same heights as their father (something along the same line as the Bachs, where although the prolific offspring did have successful musical careers of their own, when you mention "Bach" or "Darwin" there really is only one person you mean and everyone knows him).
What is your source for Shakespeare "languishing in obscurity" before the 18th century? My understanding was that he was always held in high regard, but the 18th-century was when he started to overshadow other similarly well-regarded contemporary writers.
I’m surprised the internet hasn’t produced more geniuses. As a 7 year old I soon hit the limits of questions that could be answered. The town library certainly had its limits. But to have a device in your pocket that contains essentially the sum total of all human knowledge? Why haven’t 99.9999 percentile humans, orders of magnitude smarter than I am, been able to do more with that advantage?
One possibility - my 8 year old nephew tested off the charts. His parents are very anti-screen. Is that holding him back? The modern parents most likely to have genius children are also the lost likely to be anti-scree…?
The internet is good for producing knowledgeable people, which is not the same thing as genius. Arguably they are anticorrelated, in that "I really want to know this thing but, aargh, I can't just look it up, I'm going to have to *figure it out*" is good exercise for the genius-muscle even as it results in you knowing less stuff than someone who just looked up every answer.
Maybe in a age in which aristocratic tutoring was more widely acknowledged as an ingredient of genius (i’m speculating here), some parents or acquaintances might have attempted to model their help to gifted children on the basis of their impressions of what aristocratic tutoring might be like. Think of the difference in subject exploration style you might get from a bright parent digging into a subject and trying to work on it collaboratively with their bright child, as opposed to merely helping a child answer pre-assigned homework prompts made to fit all 20 children in class. If something like this happened in the case of the others, would it necessarily be noteworthy enough for us to know about it 100 years in advance or so?
There is the case of Robert Browning, whose father was a clerk in the Bank of England and who seems to have acted in that way as a tutor for his son:
"Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge—knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world."
There's also the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father seems to have set out to deliberately create a genius and thus crammed him full of education:
"ohn Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.[16]
Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.
At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe."
It probably helped that his father was friends with the likes of Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, who used to drop round and chat with young John.
I was wondering when someone would bring up Feynman! I think he's a great case study in modern celebrity-genius. He attributed a great deal of his success to parents that made him wonder about the world and encouraged him to tinker with his surroundings incessantly. Later in life, he was odd, imaginative, and curious in that familiar Einstein/von Neumann way, learning to juggle, pick locks, speak Portuguese, and play bongos. I came away from his biography thinking that the best intellectual gift I could give to my children would be to foster their eccentricities.
i thought it was a cool article , but the genius angle was a red herring
Its interesting enough to just say aristocratic tutoring was a better system and we should go back to it where we have the means. It produces better educated and more interesting people. What that does to 'genius' production is tough to say.
When you read Tolstoy's accounts of his education you find elementary age kids in Aristocratic Russia learning multiple languages fluently, playing advanced classical music on multiple instruments, reading tough works and advanced math. Nothing like the results you would see at even the best private schools in my city. Theres definitely something there
There are a few great comment threads on PhD education below, and my comment didn't seem like quite a reply to any specific thought, so I am posting a standalone comment.
I think one factor in PhD students getting trapped into their advisors pet projects and ways of thinking is the sheer cost of doing much modern science.
As a personal example, my work is both pretty interesting and (I think!) a bit impactful. Not change-the-world impactful, but generating data all the experts agree is needed impactful. However, to do this work, I basically need $2million worth of equipment to myself. My advisor secured the labspace and funds to get this equipment, which is something he can only do because of his position as a Professor. I could never get this sort of funding myself, and am not the level of genius that could convince the NSF or a wealthy patron to give me the resources personally. And then I get tied in to my advisor's way of thinking because I manage his lab in exchange for all these resources!
This ties in neatly with Scott's comments on smart people only being able to make small contributions to big fields - the resources needed to make even small improvements are huge.
Nothing too original in this rambling comment (sorry for the lack of a direct point!) - just wanted to point out that many of the disheartening aspects of getting a PhD are a little less tragic when zoomed out, though still hard to deal with on the everyday personal level. Other than maybe my professor, nobody in my group is world-class-genius. But! We are mostly high-school-valedictorian level smart. So, for us smart people who aren't geniuses, a lot of the bureaucratic downsides of grad school seem like just a natural consequence of wanting to research cool and interesting topics that only an academic will pay for. This also means that we need to learn a lot about project management and other organizational skills rather than just thinking about electrons all day.
I do wonder about classic geniuses like Mathematicians and Theoretical Physicists. Can they get a little more leeway in the course of their academic career because the physical cost of running experiments is lower? Someone below mentioned famous tech entrepreneurs getting their starts as kids because of the relatively lower barriers to entry; a similar idea might still apply to math?
If you're doing computational work you have much more flexibility. People are usually working on multiple projects at once, and you can easily explore ideas with minimal costs. The only annoying thing is that you're still stuck with administrative structures mostly set up for experimental work.
Sorry just a random commenter who can't stop thinking about AI alignment.
Is there anything that would stop us from 'cheating' on the alignment problem and adding a 'maximum power constraint' to its utility function?
"At no point should you be using, directly or indirectly, more than 100 MW of power. Modeling power usage of any amount counts as using power. You should attempt to model the power usage of everything in your map of reality."
I'm guessing that "or indirectly" does a lot of the work here. It seems to put .... weird limits on the AI (it's not allowed to simulate, say a dyson sphere). But a lot of the difficulty of the alignment thesis seems to stem from saying "i want to point the universe in some direction, take an arbitrarily large step, and have it not kill all of us", and what we've been trying to do is formulate constraints on the direction, rather than find a way to limit the step size.
Newton said he saw further because he was standing "on the shoulders of giants." But now, the accumulated global knowledge of all prior "giants" is like the Himalayas. You can spend your whole life climbing to the top by understanding what is already known. And even if you succeed, you will only be seeing .0001% further than the current peak.
His comment was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was hunchbacked. Greg Cochran's spin is "If I have seen further than others, it is only because I'm knee-deep in the dwarves".
> 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).
That sounds like a weird way to measure the number of genuises to me. From what I understand, genuises are defined by being above their peers. I would expect to have a relatively "fixed" number of genuises at any point, rather than a number proportional to the population. Considering the "total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields", it sounds normal that the ratio of genuises to "regular people" decreased.
I also wonder if the whole thing was explained well enough by Stephen Jay Gould back in the 1960's, as to why there are no more 400 hitters in baseball (or why the number of basefall triple crown winners has plummeted). The proferred answer was that the pool of talent has become so much larger, from the pitching as well as the hitting, that it's proportionaly harder to stand out (or perhaps, given the dominance of pitching, harder than ever to stand out as a batter).
For this reason Miquel Cabrera should be added to our list of geniuses. I don't know if he was tutored.
The theory is that the variability between MBL players declined _because_ the pool has gotten larger. From your own link:
"In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent [...] should decrease."
I just reread Gould's original discussion (on pp 215 et seq of The Flamingo's Smile), and he does not refer to an increase in the talent pool as the cause of the decline in variation, but rather to the maturation and standardization of the system in which players operate. In order to determine the ultimate cause of the decline in variation, he says, "[w]e should concentrate on the increasing precision, regulation and standardization of play" (at p. 225)
From the article: "With these examples in mind, it’s likely that at [sic] a significant contributing factor for the phenomenon of genius running in families is that genius family members act as aristocratic tutors, encouraging learning, the life of the mind, and inculcating the pursuit of the higher mysteries in the young."
My reading of this is that the author DOES count tutoring by parents as tutoring.
I'm surprised that no one has made this counter-point yet: we have plenty of geniuses. They work in tech.
If you are a brilliant, independent and unorthodox thinker today, where do you go? Paris? Vienna? London? No, you go to Silicon Valley. Do you pursue music, art, or science? No, you found or join a tech company, or maybe or a hedge fund.
Elon Musk is a genius. His undergrad was in physics and he considered pursuing a PhD in Physics at Stanford. I expect he could have made interesting contributions to some subfield. But instead he went into business and became the wealthiest man alive.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are geniuses. While PhD students at Stanford they figured out how to organize the world's knowledge. Instead of building on that idea academically, they founded a spectacular business on top of it.
Hal Varian is a genius. He is a microeconomist with a set of theorems named after him. What does he do? Design auctions for Google. Even people with long careers and scientific achievements are drawn in.
Michael Burry is a genius. He could have been a very successful medical researcher. Instead, he started a hedge fund, developed a novel understanding of the mortgage market, invented the Big Short and made millions.
Steve Jobs, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen... we could spend a long time arguing for our favorites. The point is that constraining "genius" narrowly to art and basic research creates a selection bias. These people are still around--they're just pursuing other fields.
I absolutely would. I'll focus on Page and Brin. They completely changed the way we think about trust, factual reliability, and information management. They encoded that understanding into an elegant computer algorithm. They applied that algorithm to make the Internet navigable. And they distributed that algorithm worldwide. The last person to have as much impact on society as they did was probably Gutenberg. I don't know if Hinton will be in the history books for his intellectual accomplishments 100 years from now, but I'm very confident they will.
Thanks for the factual correction on Elon. I've updated my point to accord with the events described here:
To add to this point, when we talk about geniuses, we tend to conflate 4 distinct types of people:
Genius: Someone who radically alters our collective understanding of a field
Master: Someone with a comprehensive contemporary understanding of a field
Prodigy: someone with an unusual and seemingly innate talent for a specific field
Celebrity: someone widely recognized and praised for their accomplishments
The geniuses cited here are, in fact, genius-celebrities. It follows that there are many geniuses who receive little or no public attention for their work. We should expect that much more when the nature of celebrity has changed from aristocratic to populist.
In my view, Hoel's point pertains mainly to prodigies, not geniuses. A private tutor is far better than a schoolteacher at detecting and developing a specific aptitude. Aristocratic tutoring is a system for turning prodigies into masters, but no tutor can turn a prodigy into a genius.
Well, if we're gone downhill with the decline of 'aristocratic tutoring', then it happened from the 15th century onwards.
Thomas More - went to a local school in London:
"Not far away from Milk Street, is Threadneedle Street. Today, it is home to the Bank of England, but in the 1480s it was the location of St Anthony’s School, where More went when he was around seven years old. The distance from his house was no more than a few hundred yards – down Milk Street, along Cheapside, and into Threadneedle Street. As the schoolboys walked along Cheapside, they probably had no idea that they were walking over the heart of Roman Londinium.
St Anthony’s school was founded in 1440, attached to the Church of St Benet (Benedict) Fink, which was originally founded by one Robert Fink, presumably a wealthy Londoner. St Anthony’s itself, like all of the grammar schools of the period, was attached to a monastic community. It was here that More would have taken his first steps in the oratory for which he was renowned."
Thomas Wolsey - likewise educated in a local school
"The oldest record that may refer to the school in Ipswich goes back to 1399, in a legal dispute over unpaid fees. The first recorded mention of a grammar school in Ipswich is 1416. The school was most likely set up by the Merchant Guild of Ipswich, which became the Guild of Corpus Christi. The sons of the ruling burgesses were educated for a fee, and the sons of nobility and gentry could attend at higher fees.
From 1483 the school moved to a house bequeathed by ex-pupil Richard Felaw, a merchant and politician. His will also provided rental income for the school and stated that, for Ipswich children, only those parents with income over a certain amount should pay fees.
In 1528, building work began on an ambitious project for a 'college' school in Ipswich to rival the likes of Eton College. Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England, funded his 'College of St Mary' by ''suppressing' local religious houses such as Rumburgh Priory.[4] Ipswich school was incorporated into the college. Wolsey, who was from Ipswich and may have attended Ipswich school, intended the new institution to be a feeder to his recently built 'Cardinal's College' of Oxford University, which is now known as Christ Church. However, Wolsey fell out of favour with King Henry VIII and the college in Ipswich was demolished in 1530 while still half-built. The school pupils returned to Felaw's house."
There may be something (*may* be) to the idea that what was taught in Times Past was very different to what is taught in schools today, but if we're wondering why there are no more Albert Einsteins, well - where did Einstein go to school?
"Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, from the age of five, for three years. At the age of eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium (now known as the Albert Einstein Gymnasium), where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left the German Empire seven years later."
Einstein's tutor? There certainly was someone involved, but it's hard to know if he was formally employed by Einstein's parents as a tutor or if it was a mix of extending charity to a poor co-religionist and permitting him to lend books to the kid and talk to him about such subjects:
"Talmey was 21 when he first met Albert Einstein who was ten years old and who was on a third year of Luitpold Gymnasium. Talmey was then attending Medical School in Munich, Germany. For five years, from 1889 to 1894, Talmey was a weekly lunch guest of Einstein's family, as was Jewish custom. They used to discuss themes of interest to Albert Einstein, and Talmey lent him a number of books about science, including works on general science like multi-volume Popular Book on Natural Science by Aaron Bernstein, works on physics like Force and Matter by Ludwig Buchner, mathematcs, and philosophy, like The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant; according to Talmey, "Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear" for young Einstein. Many of those books were considered leading sources on their subjects, and at each meeting Einstein showed his mentor some of the problems he had solved that week. As Talmey recalled, teenage Einstein soon surpassed his mentor in mathematics and physics, and their discussions moved to philosophy."
So I think perhaps there might be an argument about the *content* but certainly not about the *model*. And I think the general idea that the low-hanging fruit has been picked and it's not so easy to produce Staggering Geniuses is correct.
I'd add two possible reasons you don't notice as many geniuses today:
1. If Einstein were alive today, there's a pretty good chance he'd have been recruited out of school by some financial firm to work on advanced trading algorithms, or by an intelligence agency to work on cryptography. There are traps that suck up the most talented people in the world to do things that are not beneficial/noticeable to the rest of society.
2. A genius is someone who stand head and shoulders above their peers. Bring enough of their peers up to their level and it looks like there are no geniuses anymore. Maybe modern education is so good that lots of people are at ceiling for ability, and a lot of what we take for granted as 'normal' is actually at genius level.
Compare the complexity of any random song on the top 40 today to medeival bardic music, for instance. It may feel counter-intuitive to call Taylor Swift a musical genius, but how sure are you that her talent isn't on that level compared to the *average* 13th-century composer?
(and by 'her' talent, I mean whoever writes her music iff it's not her)
Ironically, there are a bunch of rumors that the reason Charles Babbage never produced much solid re the computer is because he had to spend a ton of his time and resources on black-budget cryptography work for HIM.
well, Newton spent most of his time studying alchemy and astrology, didn't prevent him from doing fine on science side. Also lets remember Einstein had a day job in the patent office.
Newton only really got into alchemy and prophecies after he had already made most of his great discoveries during his early to mid 20s. He had some subsequent bursts of activity when he got around to publishing the Principia and the Optics later in life, but the core of those works had mostly been achieved in his early years of complete freedom as a fellow at Trinity.
I'm surprised more people haven't pointed this out. The geniuses of the past would be unremarkable today. This is no slight to them, they performed incredible feats given the state of knowledge they had, but for example Yang-Mills theory would make Newton's head spin. Newton might still be a good physicist today if he got a modern education but nowhere near the top. The problems tackled by geniuses today are way harder than those in the past.
And I agree with respect to music, however, I would have chosen Max Martin rather than Taylor Swift. Some people point to the harmonic simplicity of modern music compared with classical music to suggest that the classical composers were greater. But where modern music does lack in harmonic complexity, it more than makes up in textural and what I would term vertical complexity. Modern songs often have dozens or over a hundred separate parts or "tracks" layered together.
Here's a model that explains that graph: genius emerges regardless of education, so as we educate more people, genius seems rarer. I hope that this has been controlled for.
I also wonder why aristocratic tutoring began to decline in the 1500s. That seems early to me.
Off the top of my head, many more schools (today they're called public schools in England but are now private, fee-paying institutions) were founded by both clergy and rich laymen to promote education, including their own kids.
So instead of having to employ a tutor at home, you could send the young sprig of the nobility to a school with other young sprigs (and some clever commoners) to get the benefit of all the up-to-date learning imported from the Continent. The New Learning (Renaissance Humanism) began to take off in the 15th century, so keeping up with the Joneses educationally was important as well.
Also, the Protestant Reformation meant an explosion in literacy, because If you wanted the laity to be able to read the Bible in the vernacular, first they had to be able to read. This meant schools of some kind, and if there was a State church, it took great interest in making sure the children were learning the proper doctrines about the place of church and state, the role of the monarch, and none of the bad old Papist doctrine still hanging around.
There is also the suggestion of the effects of the Industrial Revolution - now that parents were working in factories, what did you do with the kids? Dame schools were one answer:
And a follow up - women geniuses? Not because "omg u don't acknowledge smart womyn" but...women who are brilliant at solving social/relationship issues, how are they noticed? Are we looking under the right street lamps for our truly, six sigma, brilliant people? Or only in the places where we have looked in the past?
Come to think of it, one would assume that the enormous growth of formal education for women would drastically increase the number of famous woman geniuses in all scientific fields, but if women's one-on-one tutoring never increased then under Mr Hoel's thesis the rate of genius woman scientists would stay the same; is this the case?
Far more likely that the problem is that kids today are primarily being taught how to fit into their socio-economic class as opposed to learning anything.
Is it possible we have *so many geniuses* now that it's extremely difficult to stand out?
I suppose this is where classicists and modernists would clash. Is Beethoven that special in the modern world, or was he special because the competition was so low that someone exceptional truly stood out and left a permanent mark on the society? Do you reject the idea that there may be dozens of Beethoven level musical geniuses producing music today? I can't say that I do.
Einstein is a tougher one, and I don't know that my suggestion or Scott's really address why there hasn't been another Einstein. It also hasn't been that long. Long tail events, such as the production of someone of Einstein's genius, really are long tail and the lack of them in a 70 year period doesn't imply a fundamental change in the conditions that "produced" them.
> "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)."
Two potential confounders for this graph spring immediately to mind:
1) In the past, people would mostly acclaim locals, since they mostly only heard about locals. With improvements in communication, people here about successful people all over the world, causing everyone to acclaim the world's best, instead of acclaiming the local best. The world's total acclaim is concentrated into fewer individuals, reducing the number of distinct acclaimed people, even if actual accomplishment remains constant.
2) In the past, fewer people had the education to potentially succeed in these fields. If we were previously educating geniuses preferentially (either because teachers sought out gifted students, or because geniuses were more motivated to seek out education--both of which sound plausible), then we would expect broader education to reduce geniuses as a percentage, even if the absolute number of geniuses were constant or slightly increasing.
I haven't done the research to verify whether these things happen or how big the effect size is, but I find it pretty hard to take the graph seriously without it being accompanied by some discussion of these possibilities (if only to explain why you think they're small).
(Scott also makes good points, but these two possibilities leapt off the page at me.)
Does this mean we are approaching a 'soft wall' in technology, where diminishing returns eventually make further advancement unprofitable? I wonder what happens when AI solves *basically all* problems, with nothing left to do but make more of the same... That'll entrench a few interests.
Partly it must be that in many fields it's just much harder to make a genius level contribution. Edward Witten, the physicist, has made contributions to both mathematics and string theory that are astonishing to those in the fields. But he doesn't have the 'genius' celebrity of Einstein even though the problems Witten has solved are by many accounts harder than the ones Einstein or Newton did. The advancement of knowledge is much more incremental today. In music, the audience is vastly more fragmented than it was in Mozart's day which means there is no consensus on what is 'best.'
There is a theory that the mean of biological intelligence has been reduced by roughly one standard deviation since the Victorian era. This old blog has a number of interesting and scholarly references to research into it by using the search term 'dysgenic':
I'm a parent of three adult children so i'm thinking about this question from a modern parent's view. At a very young age, maybe five, one of my children exhibited a precocity for chess. But after a month or so of sessions with a chess tutor, he got bored. There were other activities he wanted to do, so we had no motivation or desire to force chess on him. I'm certainly not saying that he'd have turned into a chess prodigy of the first order. I am wondering, however, whether the fact that good modern parenting calls for letting your children have agency in choosing their interests has something to do with the decline of genius.
I think the biggest factor is that genius is becoming more niche. Seldom are geniuses as widely celebrated as they used to be, in part because to understand what they are talking about you would need a degree in the field. I'd say everyone who won a fields medal is a certified genius, but I probably couldn't tell you what they did.
Well, and at the time Dickens was on the same level as Dan Brown - immensely popular and churning out bestsellers, but not getting so much critical acclaim. It's only in the decades since that he has become 'literature'. He started out as a journalist, then wrote serials for magazines, became editor and publisher of journals, and often had his novels published as one complete volume after they finished running as magazine serials. Indeed, it seems critics liked him as a writer of lightweight subjects but thought he was too preachy with more serious, 'literary' works:
"His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House ‘a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary.The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as "this dreary framework"; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit "decidedly the worst of his novels". All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful."
So who knows what popular writer of today will be the genius of a century hence?
Personal anecdote: my family was rural. Farmers, ranchers (and the specialized jobs that served them) had very limited resources, no television, limited radio, so their entertainment tradition was reading, music, and games. They all had the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare, and because that was almost all they had, they knew them cover to cover. Everyone could play a musical instrument, whether violin, guitar, accordion or keyboard. They could do the probabilities of cards and the math of dominoes. They'd probably seem like savants to people today. Heck, my techs think I'm some sort of genius since I actually can remember a handful of constants without needing to google them.
"The answer is: they were, we just need to look further back. The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s. The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s. The titan of gay rights is Harvey Milk - now we’re up to the 70s. Ask someone who isn’t an expert on feminism to name famous feminists, and you’ll probably get people like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin - 70s again. I’m not sure any modern black, gay, or feminist activists measure up to these people in terms of influence, which is fine: the modern paradigm of minority rights began around the 60s and 70s, the first few people to operate within it got outsized acclaim, and there’s no easy way to equal them now."
I think social justice activism is a highly atypical case that has virtually zero relevance for any of the other things being discussed.
Standing up for minority rights in the 1960s was an enormously important, but difficult and dangerous task. Note how many of the names on your list were jailed and/or killed for their activist work. To become a prominent anti-racist activist in that kind of environment, you *had* to have an exceptional mind. Nowadays, the urgency of the task is much less than it used to be, but the risk has been reduced to effectively nothing, so there's no longer a filter keeping morons and mediocrities from dominating the field. I don't know of any equivalent phenomenon in science, music or literature.
There are still many geniuses in Pure Mathematics. Like Terrence Tao, Andrew Wiles, Grigori Perelman, or Peter Scholze, but the list could go on and on.
And the key point is that these geniuses, despite unquestionably meriting the label based on their extraordinary achievements, are nevertheless barely known outside their field. That's a strong indicator that the label "genius" as commonly used--that is, "people widely enough known as geniuses for Scott to be able to cite them off the top of his head when composing a Substack post"--is generally applied based on social criteria, not intellectual ones. So rather than ask, "why aren't we producing as many geniuses as we used to?", we should be asking, "why aren't we recognizing as many geniuses as we used to?".
Another thing is I think there are geniuses in the arts - it's just the snobbery/small-c conservatism of the people who are worried about a lack of genius in the arts excludes these people. Two people who come to mind for different reasons is Eminem and Kevin Feige.
Eminem's wordplay is monumentally good even in his middling songs, and has such a presence in his industry as a master of it, that in a very machismo-based one in some ways, basically nobody attempts to attack him.
For Feige, and maybe you can say this is organization genius, but he managed to plot basically the mythology of our century (comic books) into film in an organized populist way that appeals to billions around the world. More importantly, the failure of basically any other IP to come close to Marvel's success in the past 15 years and the spectacular failings of other attempts show just how good Feige is at his job.
Now, I realize there will be those that claim the above isn't real genius. Shrug.
I think that many art forms at this point have bifurcated into "high" and "low" varieties. This includes film, music, painting, and literature. Architecture too. Maybe everything.
The "low" form attracts most eyeballs, dollars, and creative energy. The best practitioners are very talented and successful and make things that a lot of people enjoy. Still, arbiters of taste are reluctant to call them "geniuses" because they're just doing a simple thing well.
The "high" form is attractive only to experts and insiders, is usually deliberately repulsive to mainstream audiences. It's often obsessed with "originality" -- you can't just go round composing a Beethoven-style symphony and expect prizes, you have to do something in a totally new and unique style, which is tricky because most of the styles that humans actually like are now "old". So it's incredibly difficult to do work that is actually _good_ while still satisfying all the narrow constraints required to be considered a practitioner of the "high" form.
So neither the high nor the low form is capable of producing anyone that can be considered on par with the past masters.
It feels like a big problem that we're conflating two meanings of "genius" here -- a person with extremely high mental capabilities, and a person who does extremely important work. Many extremely capable people never do extremely important work for one reason or another, and sometimes you see extremely important work done by people who just happen to be in the right place (or rather the right sub-field) at the right time.
Einstein is both, while someone like Darwin is probably in the latter category, and the former category is filled with people that you might know personally but don't read about in the newspapers.
Hoel's argument was not even internally consistent. He claims that geniuses (i.e. outliers) were caused by aristocratic tutoring, and then later says that tutoring was universal among the wealthy. "All the geniuses were tutored" followed by "everybody was tutored" is not exactly making the case for tutoring being causal.
If it doesn't take as much genius to discover displacement as it does Special Relativity, that suggests that our metric for measuring past genius is skewed toward overestimating past genius. Say we didn't know about water displacement but we still had today's level of research training; how many of today's researchers would find it? I don't think we'd have to wait for a once-a-generation genius to come along and discover it. I think multiple people would co-discover it pretty quickly. Yet back in 300BC they had this one guy who figured it out.
And how many Pasteurs would have been able to invent something like Bitcoin? As we build the intellectual structure higher, maybe we're capitalizing on what would have once been called 'genius' every day, but we're using them for things like discovering in-app payments and opt-out behavioral nudging.
I'm not saying we didn't have true geniuses in the past, just when you're playing on easy mode it's easy to call someone a genius who by today's standards would be just considered pretty smart. Instead of innovations that go down in textbooks, they'd end up inventing autonomous ocean-cleaning robots instead. Still important, but not genius level from today's standards.
This is subtly different from saying "we've collected the low-hanging fruit". Here, I'm saying we're over-estimating past genius by calling things amazing discoveries that weren't that amazing in retrospect.
(Although quaternions have to be genius-level, right? Pretty sure you have to wait for a genius to come along to invent those.)
> Say we didn't know about water displacement but we still had today's level of research training; how many of today's researchers would find it? I don't think we'd have to wait for a once-a-generation genius to come along and discover it.
I guess the hard part of what Archimedes did was not so much in formulating the law of displacement, but in realising that physical laws were actually a thing -- that some parts of the apparent complexity of nature can be reduced to simple, consistent patterns that can be expressed mathematically.
I think we should cleanly distinguish the two thesis:
1) Focused tutoring is a very good method of education;
2) The decline of focused tutoring is the cause of the decline in the number of geniuses.
I believe 1 is true, and very much so. I think Scott's reasons for doubting 2 are persuasive. The weakness of Eric's essay is in leaning on 2, when I think he could simply have written fruitfully about 1.
Contra Scott, in the essay I never said that the decline of genius is due fully and completely to a lack of tutoring. Personally, I do think that “ideas are getting harder to find.” Indeed, good evidence for this hypothesis is linked in the original essay! I just don’t think it explains the full decline, and aristocratic tutoring is the missing puzzle piece. Therefore, we should expect to find many examples of historical geniuses without aristocratic tutors, and we should also expect to still find geniuses after aristocratic tutoring ended, just at a reduced rate (which is indeed what is observed). Making most of Scott’s points moot here.
Also, one reason to look for a missing puzzle piece to the “ideas are getting harder to find” thesis, as I pointed out, implies two questionable assumptions: (a) science and arts are “mineable” or “exhaustible” in exactly the same way since the decline seems similar in both, and (b) that ideas got harder to find in such a way it counterbalanced the explosion of free information to everyone on Earth in a period of under 20 years due to the internet.
"Therefore, we should expect to find many examples of historical geniuses without aristocratic tutors, and we should also expect to still find geniuses after aristocratic tutoring ended, just at a reduced rate (which is indeed what is observed)."
You leave out the third case: many examples of aristocratic tutoring who did not go on to become historical geniuses but simply gentlemen and noblemen of their time.
Aristocratic tutoring may be the 'secret sauce' but you can't produce a hamburger merely by pouring the sauce onto a piece of cardboard. The gifts and talents of the tutored person are the important ground, and indeed we might flip things around - it was not that aristocratic tutoring produced geniuses, it was that geniuses required aristocratic tutoring because conventional schooling was not sufficient for their needs (see Chesterton on Browning: "In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity.")
I think it's just outright false that there are fewer musical geniuses around today. Offhand, I would hold up Jake Heggie, John Adams, and Philip Glass as belonging to the Pantheon, along with Beethoven and Mozart and the rest.
I think also that there are a few composers who are primarily known for their "commercial" music aimed at movie and game soundtracks who have the talent and creativity to have worked at that level, but the strictures of those markets have made it harder for them to show off their full range. Again, just offhand: Nobuo Uematsu, Kow Otani, and Austin Wintory spring to mind as being brilliant classical composers. If opera and symphonies were still artforms where more people could make a living focusing on them, I expect they would've.
Also, when you look into the accounts of what tutoring was like at the time it was generally in the realm of "memorize Latin all day and get a beating if you fidget" not in depth tailored learning. So unless teenagers knowing how to read the Bible and Iliad in the original has some magic stimulating effect I'd be surprised if it's that u
This is a pretty disappointing essay, not up to your usual standard I think. It looks to me like you're not even trying very hard to defend the conclusion you clearly had in mind from the beginning -- that clever ideas are harder to find. I mean, obviously you will be aware that citing six (6) individuals from the past 400 years who were *not* tutored is no serious evidence at all for the proposition that "Probably well below half of [past genius] were [tutored]." Not unless it's also your assertion that 6 represents a good representative sample of all the geniuses in the past 400 years.
The hypothesis is pretty unlikely on its face anyway. It requires one of two strange coincidences: that we are at this exact moment in history bumping up against the natural limits of human intelligence, after 2 million years, or have discovered nearly all there is to discover, or created all there is to create, in multiple scientific and artistic fields. That seems...highly coincidental.
A much more plausible hypothesis draws its inspiration from the fact that multiple periods in history saw similar declines in productivity, and were preceded and followed by substantial bursts in scientific advance and artistic creativity. They weren't called "Dark Ages" just because of the Inquisition, after all. The path of human advance has *never* been smoothly monotonic, so it would seem dubious to infer that a downward trend over the past 200 years must arise from some exogenous cause, as opposed to just yet another fluctuation.
It may very well be a fluctuation that lasts longer than any of our lifetimes, of course. That has also happened. You could be born in 1090 and die in 1155 and in many places observe essentially no technological advance at all -- farmers would be using the exact same tools and methods in your old age as they did when you were born.
Of the 6 people Scott named, the majority of them debatably count as being aristocratically tutored, and I only say "debatable" because the historical details are fuzzy. For instance:
Motzart was tutored 1-on-1 heavily by his father (a musician and, perhaps more importantly, a music teacher) as his primary education—Scott admits this but seems to think it doesn’t count, for a reason I can’t discern.
Charles Darwin grew up in a household with governesses and, as far as I can tell, likely did have tutors (despite this not being mentioned by wikipedia)—certainly his own children grew up in such a household, they write about their tutors in their letters, and it’s hard to believe that their situation, a rich aristocratic family in a huge manor house with a servant’s quarters, was any different for Charles himself. In fact, in the essay I give an example of Darwin hiring a freedman tutor when he was merely 16 to point out the casualness and ubiquity of tutoring as an educational supplement.
Thomas Edison was homeschooled and tutored by his mother, who used to be a schoolteacher. (again, not sure why this doesn't count)
Charles Dickens was homeschooled and tutored by his mother (who knew Latin and, as a Barrow, was better educated than the family she married into). Indeed, that’s where he got his love of literature from. According to Charles Dickens: A Life, her tutoring in literature and reading
". . . makes Elizabeth Dickens sound like a mother who cherished her son through careful teaching which sparked his imagination, and from then on words were associated with pleasure and he was set on his path."
Newton? Well, as far as I can tell, Newton indeed wasn’t aristocratically tutored. But it’s also worth pointing out that education itself was quite different then. Here’s a comment by Aneesh Mulye that says the same:
"Newton and Darwin are anti-examples, and evidence for the opposite of your claim. . . Oxford and Cambridge are *known* for their primary method of education being... tutoring. And I don't mean one-on-many, I mean 1:1 to 1:3 ratios at most. That's literally what they're famous for. That's what's produced the strings of geniuses we see, including even modern eminences such as Dawkins (Dawkins' tutor was Niko Tinbergen, founder of ethology and later Nobelist; the description Dawkins gives of what that was like is astounding, and makes for a stunning and depressing contrast with the meatgrinder/factory model that's the default otherwise — you realise the later may not in fact deserve at all the name 'education').
So *all* the statements of the kind 'and then he went to Oxbridge, which is a totally normal education' are a major category error. That's not how they do things there; over there, they actually bother to press the 'Win' button occasionally."
Louis Pasteur is in the same boat as Newton—I would say not aristocratically tutored, but again, the style of education (“he went to Oxbrige”) were very different then—indeed, Louis Pasteur was later appointed as a tutor!
So of the six examples Scott Alexander sets out of supposed non-tutored geniuses, at least four were debatably tutored. I only say “debatably” because it is hard to tell, without being a historical expert, to what degree the tutoring went on. Did Edison’s mother drill him every day? Or not? But these examples really don’t show what Scott seems to think they do. My read on this is how difficult it is to not accidentally dig up a genius who had a former-schoolteacher for a mother/father who 1-on-1 tutored them in their early years (several of the above).
Regarding Mozart, he wasn't the only child that Leopold Mozart tutored. Mozart's older sister Maria-Anna was also taught to play at an early age by her father, and he toured both of them round Europe as child musical talents.
Why don't we have two Mozart geniuses? You can put part of it down to the social views of the time, which pushed her to marriage and giving up a performing career, but part of it is innate talent; she was a gifted performer, but there's nothing about her composing any pieces.
So simply "aristocratic tutoring" *on its own* is not enough to produce a prodigy or a genius, despite the Polgar sisters.
I do not believe that Newton had a personal tutor at Cambridge of the kind you describe. Richard Westfall covers this quite extensively in his biography of Newton. At that time, only some fellows of the college took on students to tutor, and those that did charged fees to each student (to the degree that they were known as 'pupilmongers'). Newton, being poor, had no money to pay the fees. Newton was on a scholarship which required him to serve his aristocratic classmates at mealtimes and to do janitorial work around the college.
He did eventually forge a strong relationship with Isaac Barrow, who functioned as a kind of mentor, but Newton did not benefit from the traditional Cambridge tutoring system as you describe.
He had a Tutor named Pulleyn. Never at Rest, a biography of Newton, says:
The system of tutors within the colleges [of Cambridge], which had largely replaced university lectures, had followed its own peculiar development. . . Newton’s tutor, Benjamin Pulleyn, was the champion pupil monger of Trinity during the period Newton was an undergraduate. . . [Newton’s] tutor Pulleyan may have recognized his pupil’s brilliance and tried to help him by enlisting Isaac Barrow, the one man in Trinity fit to judge his competence in the unorthodox studies he had undertaken.
It seems I misremembered. My apologies. Though I think the fact he had his first tutor at such a late age, and one who was primarily a tutor in the humanities rather than mathematics or natural sciences, is not exactly strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis.
The system of supervisions, which is what tutorials are called in Cambridge, didn't appear until the 19th century. "Tutor" refers today to a pastoral role and I suspect it was the same then. I doubt that Newton received anything like the modern notion of tutoring at Cambridge and there doesn't seem to be anything in Westfall's book to say that he did
There is a common tendency to associate the "Dark Ages" with all of medieval Europe, to ignore good things that happened then, and to think that more bad things happened then. The Dark Ages lasted from about 500-1000 and should not include the High Middle Ages. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The period of 1090-1155 was a period of rapid technological change in Europe: the renaissance of the 12th century. Your farmer saw the widespread adoption of horseshoes, collar harnesses, and three field crop rotation, which increased the productivity of agriculture by about 50%.
The Inquisition was not part of the Dark Ages. The Spanish Inquisition started in 1478 and the Roman Inquisition (which tried Galileo) started in 1542. These are post-Renaissance and 500 years after the Dark Ages. There were some medieval Inquisitions which started in 1184 (still not Dark Ages), but they were not nearly as vigorous until the Reconquista and Protestant Reformation.
"They weren't called "Dark Ages" just because of the Inquisition, after all."
*sighs* *puts on History Nitpicking Hat*
(1) What do you mean when you say "The Dark Ages"? The entire Mediaeval Period? The 16th century? All human history up until we hit the magic date of the Enlightenment?
It's a terrible term that has mostly been used in polemics not history, but if we're going to put a time range on it, then about the end of the Western Roman Empire up until the Early Middle Ages so something in the period 5th-12th centuries. And that only holds for Europe, and not even all of Europe; some countries had 'Golden Ages' between 8th-10th centuries, for instance, including the Carolingian Renaissance.
(2) What do you mean when you say "The Inquisition"? There were more than one, and if you mean the famous one which is the boogeyman of the popular imagination and which writers of fiction found as fertile inspiration (see Poe and his story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum), then we're talking about the Spanish (as distinct from the Roman, Portuguese, and Venetian) Inquisition.
Which was set up by Isabella and Ferdinand in the wake of their victories in the Reconquista and ruling over what would become a united Spain, so it was as much political as religous. Avoiding getting bogged down in detail, it ran from the late 15th to early 19th century,
So does this mean we should include the 18th century, the century of The Enlightenment, in the Dark Ages? Plainly not. What is being expressed here is the well-worn idea of 'the suppression of science by the Church', couched in the pop-culture terms of the Dark Ages and Inquisition.
The larger point here is that of cyclic phases in discovery/productivity due to natural flow of "a lot to discover - those who first work on it get the most credit - the field gets ploughed thoroughly - nothing much but small increments of progress - a new field opens up - a lot to discover etc.", so that we cannot and should not put down 'Dark Ages' to the nefarious deliberate actions of an 'Inquistion' but I do wish some other simile had been used since the pop culture notions are pretty much mistaken.
1) To the extent that genius is defined as "the best in the world in a topic area", the fraction of people that are geniuses must decrease when the world population increases. One out of every 2 billion people could win the Nobel Prize in Literature each year in 1900, now it is only one out of every 8 billion people. If you compare "upper-class white men in 1800" to "everyone in 2020", the math is even starker.
2) The "tall poppy" syndrome is very real. I have met quite a few people who I would describe as "genius" who have made it clear that they don't want to be publicized in that way.
3) There is a tendency to exaggerate the genius of historical figures. How many of the "Old Masters" are described as geniuses? And of those, how many were truly genius, and how many were simply good craftsmen with a posthumous fan club?
I don't know - I think in my field, at least (mathematics) geniuses are alive and well. In the last thirty years some of the huge problems in the history of mathematics - some of which were open for hundreds of years - have fallen. Fermat's Theorem, the Poincare Conjecture, the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, just off the top of my head. Wouldn't surprise me if the twin prime conjecture was coming soon. Fermat was proven by a borderline stereotypical "genius" (British guy from Oxford I think, holed up in his attic or whatever for years) and Poincare by a perfectly stereotypical genius (crazy eccentric Russian guy). CFSG was proven by a team of super smart folks, I think it's safe to say John Thompson was (well, still is - apparently the Riemann conjecture is his retirement hobby, and I don't think anybody would be shocked if he pulled it off) an absolute genius by any measure. They don't get the mainstream publicity that a Degrasse Tyson does (FLT is somewhat explainable to a layman, the CFSG is certainly not) for obvious reasons, but I feel pretty comfortable categorizing them as geniuses. Couldn't speculate as to their "tutoring" background, but, in math at least, I would say geniuses are alive and well, just not historically sexy as a Gauss (or with a cool story like Galois).
Part of it of course is the low hanging fruit aspect of it. Gauss was brilliant, but most, if not all, of his work would be easily comprehensible to a typical math grad student these days. Nowadays we're all standing on the shoulders of really freakin' tall giants, which makes us hard to see from the ground where everyone else is. (I'm basically little Ant-Man standing on top of Giant Ant-Man in my field, for instance).
I know this has been argued by multiple commenters (certainly don't have the patience to find how many) and by Scott in the post himself, but I'm going to add my voice to them here from my own angle: I can't get very far in engaging with Hoel's thesis because of how strongly I disagree in the first place with the premise that there are hardly any geniuses anymore. As a research mathematician, I feel like I frequently encounter people in my professional life (big-name speakers at conferences, occasionally even colleagues) who are easily as rich in raw intelligence and capacity for out-of-the-box brilliant insights as Einstein was -- yet, they are not living in the right place and at the right time to change the world with a massive breakthrough that establishes them as the general public's conception of "genius". (Indeed this has made me annoyed for years at how "Einstein" is treated as synonymous with "most intelligent human being ever" in popular culture, as brilliant as Einstein obviously was.) In terms of the types of accomplishments for humanity that put someone on the map as a genius, I suspect that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
If we read Hoel's post in light of Considerations on Cost Disease, we reach a surprising conclusion: aristocratic tutoring for everyone is possible today.
A typical Victorian aristocrat would have one full time tutor hired to live with their family and would have 5-6 children.* Today in the US, we spend about $12,000 per student per year, and the average teacher salary is $64,000. So 5-6 children could support one of their teachers full time. If there's little overhead & building & etc cost for tutoring, we could have as much tutoring as Victorian aristocrats for the same cost as our school system.
* I'm not an expert here, so if this is not typical, please let me know. I'm not sure if the average family size was significantly different for the aristocracy or if hiring multiple full time tutors was common.
“ If they’re still working on alignment (which would be profoundly weird for many reasons) I expect them to talk about Bostrom and various other people I won’t name because some of them read this blog and don’t need bigger egos.”
And with a self-assured nod to themselves, hundreds of AI bloggers now believe Scott thinks they’re geniuses.
Scott has created hundreds instead of just a few by not naming them!
I'd argue that the communal mind can only hold a certain number of celebrities, and with improved communications, everyone knows about the same bunch of heroes. If the population increases, then obviously the ratio of famous to not famous is going to go down. Also, being famous entails putting up with a lot more bullshit, and not every genius is willing to do that so they rest in obscurity.
I'm brilliant. Let's get that out of the way. Not because I claim it myself, but because I've been called that by multiple parties. It was easy to do big things when personal computers were expensive and only institutions had them. I wrote a text formatter for PDP-10 BASIC so I could submit a formatted paper for Social Studies. Okay, it was more fun to write the program than the paper, but still. I wrote a text editor 40 years ago that is still being used. I wrote a graphics editor much like MacPaint (I even called it MockPaint, that is, until I tried to sell it to Zenith Data Systems. They didn't want to be sued, especially since I copied EVERYTHING, including the icons). I wrote a set of Ethernet drivers that for a time, were necessary to get your PC on the Internet.
Now that everybody and their brother and their brother-in-law and their sister and their grandparents have a computer, it's a lot harder to stand out no matter how brilliant you are.
The trope of the "ancients" being better educated, smarter, etc. etc. than the "moderns" is as old as culture itself, and very similar cross culture, at least, to my limited knowledge. Ascribing it to an decline of the education system, that would probably mean that education has been going downhill for several millennia.
With aristocratic tutoring, in my view you have to ask, what about the much more numerous examples of such tutoring creating idiots and villains? Virtually all the nobility in history was educated using this method. If you compare humanity's progress when it depended on aristocratic tutoring to more modern systems based on meritocracy and mass education, well, yeah, you can see very substantial progress when aristocratic systems are dumped, including aristocratic styles of education.
You can always find examples of individuals schooled in one way or other who became great geniuses. I really doubt anyone can demonstrate that aristocratic tutoring was a necessary cause of it, much less a more effective way to inspire genius than other approaches to education.
The low-hanging fruit explanation works for science, but does it work for music? I'm no musician, but it doesn't seem like symphonies would get exhausted the way theories do.
Absolutely. If someone produced a Symphony indistinguishable from a Mozart symphony, it wouldn’t get much recognition. Every great composer was hailed because they produced something new, they changed the musical landscape in some way be it harmonic, structural, technical, textural etc.
i do think it applies to art as options to continue to innovate while still appealing to basic human senses is not infinite. One reason why 20th century music like schoenberg, boulez etc. are objectively much less accessible than mozart and vivaldi because they had to go further out on the spectrum to do things that haven't done before. Or look at modern art - definitely harder to relate to than just the reality-replicating stuff of 200 years ago that has been rendered obsolete by photography.
I don't think every great composer was innovative; e.g. Brahms didn't push the envelope, he just did great work within the style that was popular at the time.
But "popular at the time" is the key word here. There are many great symphonies still to be written in an early-Romantic style, but that's no longer a style that is fashionable among the (now rare) sorts of people who commission symphonies. If it's 2022 and you're still writing tonal music that proceeds through conventional chord progressions then you're not a serious composer; at best you're writing music for video games.
I think sometimes in an art form there's a "golden age" where a new field of abundant possibilities has opened up and the obvious things haven't all been done yet. Mozart and Beethoven lived in a (particularly long) golden age, and so did the Beatles.
What about the possibility of more potential geniuses going into business rather than research or the arts? Certainly much respect, fame, and money is given to the business or finance "genius" these days, but I don't think anyone really thinks of these people as being in the same category as Einstein or Darwin. But perhaps some might have been if their talents had been directed elsewhere?
2. It's too easy for really smart people to make a lot of money today than pre-integrated circuits/VCs/financialized capitalism. That diverts them away from "genius" paths.
So, definitely not a new debate! The framing in these articles from 2011 might offer some useful perspective.
(Hopefully this comment isn't too low quality to deserve placement here! Apologies, if just a couple links without my own addition to the conversation doesn't really cut it.)
I largely agree with your hypothesis. However there is also another possible explanation - maybe the important part in aristocratic tutoring isn't the tutoring part but the aristocratic part, as in the emergence of geniuses may be substantially helped by having an entire class of people with financial resources to not have to pursue a line of work and too much leisure time on their hands. In his book "At Home" Bill Bryson talks at one point about the amazing list of famous artists, scientists, authors etc. that came out of families of clergymen in 17th/18th century England, and his argument was that it was because these guys were guaranteed a very comfortable income but the job only required minimal time on their part, so they had tons of time for outside interests. This doesn't work anymore nowadays because a) most people are not men/women of leisure - working is now fashionable and b) for the rich kids who still are, modern entertainment options (travelling, clubbing, drugs, restaurants, video games, etc.) provide way to many ways for quick boredom relief for anyone to take up harder innovative interests.
That's an excellent point. An explanation about the possible decline of amount of geniuses that I find the most convincing, because of introspection (I can feel the effect).... Maybe your choice of modern entertainment options is a little bit biased to the less appreciated one, but having almost infinite and ultra-cheap access to literature and movies will have the same effect. Maybe even access to science content: sure it could help producing new stuff, but it also consume time (spent as a content consumer). Which is likely counter=productive, at least for stuff that would be considered genius achievement....
I'm surprised that the ubiquity of television hasn't come up more often in this discussion. Consuming video inhibits the capacity for deep focus & concentration (precisely the opposite effect of reading on the mind) that's necessary when trying to articulate a concept for which there's no existing intellectual tooling. Feynman described it well in _The Pleasure of Finding Things Out_:
To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you’re putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it’s very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don’t know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you’re interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together—your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea—the main point is, you put the stuff together, it’s quite a tower and it’s easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration—that is, solid time to think—and if you’ve got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don’t have the solid time.
I don't think the graph is very strong evidence for the thesis of declining genius. Acclaim as a genius is always going to go to the top handful at most. That number is fixed. As the population increases, the ratio will go down. I do think the other evidence out there about progress per (say) dollar spent is somewhat convincing that there is a thing to explain, but I think Scott's boring explanations are better.
Add Einstein to your list. His background was middle class. He attended a catholic elementary school and gymnasium (German academic secondary school). He quit at 15 and enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The rest is history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Speaking of aristocratic tutors, the foremost literary examples are Thomas Square and Rev. Roger Thwackum in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Square is a buffoon whom Tom finds in bed with Tom's lover Molly Seagrim, and Thwackum is a sadist who conspires to have Squire Allworthy disinherit Tom. How anybody took tutors seriously after that is hard to say.
Scott's arguments are unassailable, yet it is interesting to speculate about how much aristocratic tutors helped the brilliant minds they did.
I'll never stop being blown away that Alexander the Great's tutor was Aristotle. My best guess is that what Aristotle instilled most in Alexander was confidence. Or maybe a thirst for conquest. If not for conquest of knowledge, maybe something else.
I feel like there are loads of geniuses now, and the problem is that Hoel (and you) are being unfair about what constitutes a 'genius'. Like -- the requirements to make this analysis are a) be a genius b) have something really ripe to work on c) figure it out d) get famous for it and e) be remembered. But only (a) makes a genius. There are lots of people out there who are _absurdly_ smart, definitely geniuses by any measure (except for the above!) and their genius-level efforts are being channeled into more mundane results. Like... hedge fund finance. Or building software. Mastering all the works of Beethoven. Speedrunning video games. Writing incredibly complex and esoteric papers (Terry Tao is definitely a genius, if you want another good example, by the way. And Ed Witten.).
So what you're really talking about is "creative, paradigm-shifting geniuses". To that, I think most of the discussion here applies. There is probably less genius-level work to do in fields that are mostly 'figured out', although it's hard to be sure. I mean -- maybe there's another special relativity to think up, or maybe not, but if we knew of it then there wouldn't be one to think up! And our society / education system really doesn't emphasize _trying_ to shift paradigms, in my opinion: it emphasizes .. busywork, publish-or-perish, incremental progress, staying in your lane.
As evidence for the idea that genius is not rarer, just more diffuse, I present the microprocessor.
I suggest that there's at least a hundred different brilliant genius-level insights that went into making a modern CPU possible, along with thousands of other very clever ones, over the course of fifty years. I'm not a chip design expert, but I've moved adjacent to that field, and the number of bizarre and counterintuitive steps involved in modern microprocessor design is incredible, and each one of these techniques was invented by somebody brilliant. These geniuses will never be celebrated -- there's too many of them, they were all big company employees who are discouraged from having a public profile, and the context and meaning of their work is hard to explain to someone not already immersed in that world. But that doesn't mean they're not there.
As for the lack of intellectual progress, it depends on what fields you are talking about.
The physical sciences seem to have reached a stopping point because of the maturity of theories developed in the first half of Century XX. There are unresolved contradictions between existing theories and no real good ideas for their resolution. But, it was 14 centuries from Ptolemy to Copernicus and 4 more centuries from Copernicus to Einstein. Progress can be very slow.
The biological sciences had a spectacular efflorescence in the last 75 years. And are still producing spectacular new technologies like the mRNA vaccines. But one of the things they have discovered is that the mechanisms of life are insanely complicated. I just did a google search to find out how many genes there are in the human genome, because I recalled that the human genome project of 20 years ago was surprised to find out how few there were. I found that the answer is it depends and we aren't quite sure yet. "Open questions: How many genes do we have?" by Steven L. Salzberg 2018 Aug 20. doi: 10.1186/s12915-018-0564-x The recent plague reminds us that the human immune system is still poorly understood.
The arts and humanities suffer from self-inflicted political wounds. The communities that produced art found that commercial republics dominated by the bourgeoisie were repellent to their still aristocratic tastes. They adopted anti-liberal politics largely centered around Marxism. The chaos and bloodbaths of the 20th Century epitomized by the Holocaust culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More sober minds might have taken the opportunity to repent and reflect. But the arts and and humanities communities have doubled down into ever more obscure and self destructive politics like racialism, genderism, and climatism.
My theory is that they will spend six generations in the wilderness before new arts and humanities can be born. Why six. I was born right after the end of the Holocaust. I am a boomer, the first generation. My children are millennials. Their children are babies. The babies grand children will still be plagued with our memories. The grandchildren of those grandchildren, the seventh generation can be free. Two hundred years after the Holocaust, Century XXII.
I don't know about the arts and humanities. Since WWII, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Arendt, Rawls, Sen, Beckett, Mondrian, Banksy, H. G Simon, Coase, and Ostrom--just off the top of my head--have all "fundamentally changed our understanding" of aspects of the world. There are many more such.
I certainly agree that that point about the arts is some spectacularly narrow-minded reactionary tosh. Even leaving that aside, two of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century are direct reflections on the Holocaust: Levi's If This Is A Man and, especially, Grossman's Life and Fate.
Reactionary, c'est moi. Levi was a saint. And Grossman belongs to a different tradition. "Putin’s Russia vs. Pushkin’s Russia" by Gary Saul Morson 19 Mar 2022
There have always been periods of great cultural productivity. Classical Athens, Augustan Rome. Renaissance Florence. They have always been brief in the long sweep of history. They always come to an end. Why are we any different? Perhaps explaining quiescence is not the problem. It is the normal state of humanity. The real problem is how do explain outbursts of creativity.
Reminds me of Orson Wells in the film version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man and Harry Lime’s great line:
"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed … but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? ... The cuckoo clock."
I'd fully agree on this point and would lay the blame at the foot of shifting cultural ideas around genius even more so than at the altar of increasingly difficult tasks. Though it may be semantics to even try to split those ideas.
I would ask the simple question 'what would someone have to do in order to be called a genius today?' It is seemingly a question with few answers. And having done such a thing, thought such a thing, or led such a movement to success....would the world of today even deign to recognise such efforts as genius?
Do we have a lagging factor where genius can only be seen from history. Many probably thought of Darwin or Einstein to be very intelligent, near the top of their field, etc. during their lives. But perhaps the mystique of the genius title was granted posthumously decades later when the genius of discovery has met with the reality of actually effecting people's lives.
When terrible weapons of war, new medical treatments given to tens of millions, and as yet unrealised impacts on our energy system stem from the genius insights of Marie Curie and Einstein...only then many decades or even a century later through the continued use and impact of their genius level contribution can the clever, novel, and nascent moment of creation in their minds lead to the social title of genius being applied to them.
I would ask the same in the specific subset of spiritual and religious life. Would a new prophet be recognised or understood today? If a new Jesus like figure appeared, would we have the capacity to recognise it? Might such a person's influence only be understood hundreds or thousands of years after their death?
Outside of a few upset typesetters on the East Coast of the US and the people along the Moron's journey to Utah...were there more than a few thousand or tens of thousands of people who ever knew or cared about John Smith? If the Mormons had died out or never grew beyond their early numbers to remain a small curious sect of quasi-christianity in some rural area...then the title of prophet or genius or whatever would be impossible to attain.
The importance of an idea, the attribution, and its sustained impact lead towards the canonisation of a person into such a class. Certainly one can look back for evidence and for nearly every genius you'll find people during their lives praising them...but looking more broadly many people are praised by their peers today and exceptionally few of them will go on to be called a genius.
Perhaps Elon Musk will be forgotten and become akin to Howard Hughes...an eccentric and very talented person who made many contributions, but is ultimately a person who was both skilled and ahead of the curve. Airplanes were coming and with or without Hughes they would develop and become popular. The same might be said for the electric car or corporate space flight or whatever for Musk.
It goes back to the classic wisdom which puts all of this so succinctly and lets us know how few new ideas there are under the sun. Where some phenomenon we think is new is actually a well considered idea with thousands of years of thought behind it. Where the concentration of 'great people' comes in incredible waves where somehow history itself pivots on the century of their lives and seems to stagnant for hundreds of years in between or the geniuses of those eras are perhaps simply forgotten and their contributions lost to us. Such as the incredible astronomy of the ancient south and central americans which was hundreds or thousands of years ahead of Europe for long stretch of time, but was lost knowledge which did not have continuity into our present era.
"You have to be the right person, at the right time, at the right place."
And you can't really control any of those factors other than improving yourself and your own impact and perhaps relocating if possible to a place of power in your era. Be that silicon valley or london in the industrial revolution or ancient Rome to seek power not available elsewhere or perhaps simply on a battlefield so big and so bloody that Alexander or Genghis who could somewhat create their own 'right place'.
"The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s."
With all due respect, Caesar Chavez was a straight-up racist, albeit a very particular kind. He was a Union organizer, and once his Union (United Farm Workers) achieved legal monopoly power in California, he proudly employed the Hispanic union rank-and-file to turn in and deport "wetbacks", a tactic he loudly and proudly boasted of.
Chavez was no Progressive, just an anti-immigrant exploitave protectionist thug. The fact he is lauded as some kind of Brown savior disgusts me. Beware any populist leader who claims to speak for "his/her" ethnic group and gets a halo of anti-racism about them, while pursuing only Stalin-ist power to direct the "movement".
As other people pointed out, Mozart should not be in this list. Not only he was indeed tutored by his father, a great musician on his own, and an aristocratic figure, but almost all his education came from him, at an extremely young age. No time wasted in school. That's exactly the tutoring Hoel was talking about.
Another point about the lack of geniuses in music. You point out that nowadays it's common to get tutoring in music. That's true, but almost only for playing/performing, not for composing, and you can make a point that the level of eg classical piano performance nowadays is astoundingly high. Yes, there were many great pianists in the past (they were also almost always privately tutored) but there are many, amazing pianists today too (most people in the field would probanly agree) , and the art in this sense hasn't declined one bit and has probably increased. The art has indeed declined on the compositional side, and in fact private tutoring on composing is basically non existent (it wad common in the past). In my career as a classical musician I have only heard of private tutoring for composing as a crutch when stuff weren't going well during the normal, boring and uninspiring teaching hours in the music school. Similar to normal school.
There are many other reasons why there aren't geniuses in music nowadays, but I wanted to point out that music performers still get tutored nowadays and their level is great; music creation does not, and the level indeed sucks.
Didn't the use of "genius" to mean "great man (or person) of superhuman intelligence (or insight)" become common only in the 19th century? I got the feeling that it first became popular in the Anglosphere, and was considered vulgar in German-speaking circles. Originally - as in, for the Romans - a genius was a person's tutelar deity (perhaps related but not identical to what Socrates had in mind - after all, Socrates's belief was personal, considered suspicious, and close to what we would call a "conscience"), born with the person itself. (If Agamben characterizes it well, then it covers some of the same ground as the Freudian notion of "the unconscious".) When, in the 19th century (or even later), someone spoke of Goethe's genius, what was meant was an intuition that drove him beyond what he or his fellows understood, conceived as a daemon that nagged and affected him, and perhaps afflicted him.
Indeed, one of the meanings of "SubGenius" is "under your own genius" in this sense.
"A major secret that "Bob" learned from the Conspiracy is that deep down inside, everyone, even the SubGenius, craves authority. It's from having Parents. But a SubGenius shortcircuits this urge. He appoints himself Pope or Raja or something, and he believes it. But it's easy to fake that belief, even to yourself.
Therefore, in his Church our "Bob" has included many built-in Alienation Devices to prevent false Pink interpretation while encouraging the real, down home SubGenii to start their own damn religions."
I disagree with Scott, and with Hoel - I think we have had more geniuses in the last 50 years than in any other 50 year period. This is a strong claim, but I feel I can support it. I have some hypotheses on why as well, which I may get into later or in the replies. Also, I am writing on my phone and it is late, this will be poorly sourced - all info is from biographies and books I've read, with tidbits here and there from wikipedia and articles I've read. Sorry for spelling and grammar mistakes, I turn off all spell check and grammer check stuff on my phone in an insane and futile effort to fight google's telemetry.
My main argument is going to be just naming people I think are geniuses off the top of my head and why I think they have earned that status.
John Carmack - incredible innovator in game engine design, pushing the envelope for years, starting with smooth scrolling on PCs with commander keen (never done before on PCs before he figured out a clever solution that large teams worked on and never could figure out - a common theme through the 90s and early aughts). He followed this with the first 3D game engine, then first fully 3D game, then first game to require a standalone GPU and creating the concept of using one for games, and on and on. The book Masters of doom does a good job demonstrating why Carmack deserves genius status. He also collaborated with Luckey Palmer in pushing VR tech from dead end hobby to viable and incredible. John is currently working on general AI, which scares me a lot. This guy has a flawless track record of attacking and solving impossible technical problems that large teams have failed at. AI alignment needs to poach him, it may literally save the world.
Lucky Palmer - founder of Oculus - probably is also a genius, but I don't know as much about him from first hand sources. It speaks volumes that Gabe Newall (creator of Valve and Steam) - correctly - predicted Lucky would bring VR to the mainstream, and that he got John Carmack so excited about the space that he left ID software to be Oculus' CTO - being second in command to CEO Lucky, a guy under 30 who was at the time a nobody.
Tim Sweeney - similar to Carmack, but for the Unreal engine, which by all measures has overtaken Carmack's achievements in engine design. Worth reading about his process. He has had bigger teams over time but much of the work is just him.
Elon Musk - Made electric cars viable (many will doubt and point out he wasn't one of the original founders - but he led the battery innovations that made it viable, starting with stacking laptop batteries in a configuration that didn't explode when impacted, an oft forgotten technical obstacle that Musk cleared that paved the way to viability). Also, first (maybe only still) billionaire to create not just a successful space company, but the definitively best space company the world has ever seen by an order of magnitude. Literally, Boeing and Lockheed martin sued SpaceX early on, because the launch cost savings for using SpaceX instead of Boeing or Martin was enough to pay for the payload at times. Invented re usable rockets. Caveat - of course he had help - but it is clear he paved the way. If his top people in each respective company actually deserved top status and as much kudos as Musk, I would expect at least one or two being disgruntled and coming forward taking credit - I am unaware of any instances of this.
Ed Catmull - Inventor of 3D computer imaging as we know it today. Invented Z masking. Founded Pixar. Reformed Disney animation culture out of their late 90s bust period. (book -creativity Inc.)
Additional people who most are familiar with their accomplishments:
Steve Jobs
Steve Wozniak
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerburg
Murray Gellman (Yes, the Gell man amnesia guy... Dude discovered quarks and the internet regurgitates the gell man amnesia idea as if thats all he did)
Richard Hamilton (Ricci Flow)
Grigori Perelman (Poincare conjecture)
More flimsy contenders, which I would need to fight hard to defend as genius but I feel they are:
Paul Graham
Gabe Newall
Peter Thiel
Satashi Nakamoto
Segey Brin
Larry Page
Warren Buffet and his partner Charles
Steve Wolfram
Most controversial genius commendation (at the end, as the bias against him and misunderstanding of him will lead to many completely writing me off for suggesting it):
Joe Rogan - just genius podcaster and interviewer. Joe can keep a conversation flowing, live for 3 hours, with literally anyone on the planet. I have a podcast, and have done 14 episodes so far only - doing what Joe does is not possible for me or anyone I know. I think his comedy blows. I skip his MMA episodes (yawn). He's dumb as rocks when it comes to medicine, or Trump, or whatever - but he doesn't claim to be an expert in those areas. He is an entertainment interviewerer, and no one on the planet does it better.
This just covers mostly tech - which in our time has the most low hanging fruit by far, as the transistor and modern computer architecture (Von Neumann architecture as it happens, John essentially invented the computer as we know it today to make the Ulum.-teller thermonuclear bomb design happen) has just completely changed the ceiling on human productivity.
Also, you may think, hey this guy is just naming famous billionaires! Well, yes - but that is kind of expected no? Our age is one of the few where you can turn Genius to riches. I don't think Vanderbilt, Rothchild, Carnegie, Ford, or even Edison were geniuses to be honest. Shrewd business men, yes - but not really impressive technically.
This is all from memory - list would become vastly longer if I began going through reference material.
music, art, etc. have many names I could offer as geniuses. This is getting too long, may add later.
Again, many will say these guys just led large teams, or didn't actually contribute that much, or whatever they need to tell themselves that these guys don't deserve to be billionaires. I am lazy and haven't cited anything, but the books I've read present very convincing evidence that these are all truly geniuses in the league as all the well knowns like Einstein.
True, many will disagree that all (or any) of the above are geniuses on the same level as Gauss, or Feynman, or Fermi, or Maxwell - but I feel they are having at least equal impact, their productions have been at least as novel, and many are at similar intelligences. Would have to argue case by case which just isn't tenable.
I guess there is no formal way to definitively say geniuses are more or less common than in the past - my post is to offer my strong gut intuition, poorly backed up by logic though it may be - that we are swimming in genius like never before. And I have some gears level formulations on why I think that is, and why I think tomorrow will have more geniuses than ever before, and this will continue until we reach a population plateau.
To be clear, I do understand and agree with the points many in the comments here have established - i.e, low hanging fruit is taken, specialization is increasing to the point where it is harder to identify genius, and often the largest breakthroughs such as the Webb telescope, the falcon 9 rocket, the apple M1, etc require teams of hundreds to thousands and the leading contributors are more likely to give credit to the team and for good reason. However, I believe we have more geniuses doing as many important notable things as the old ones, despite these additional obstacles to attaining genius status.
I also think if you put a blank slate elon musk into Newtons era, Musk would likely be remembered today as a genius. Same for Wolfram. Same for Luckey Palmer. And Carmack. And many, many, many more.
This is interesting - the puzzle for me is: why does it feel intuitively like Newton is a genius in a way that, say, Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren't? It seems like Newton discovered something truly ground breaking, while Page and Brin merely made a very large but still incremental development in an already existing field. Yet, the impact of google on the world is undeniable.
I think its a curious sort of selection effect. In the past, the economy was much less dynamic, and there was really no way to make a huge impact on the world through a business venture. Personally I can't think of anyone who is known primarily for building a non-state sponsored business prior to Carnegie. So, the only way for a genius to become historically significant in the world prior to 1870 or so was via inventions, discoveries, works of art, or statecraft / war.
Today, by far the easiest way to become historically significant is via some form of economic wealth creation, which usually takes the form of innovation rather than pure invention. Pure invention / discovery has a much more limited impact on the world today than it did in the past. Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA would place them solidly among Hoel's or Scott's list of geniuses in terms of pure intellectual value (possibly below Newton, certainly above Pasteur), yet Scott and Hoel evidently (by omitting them) don't regard them as having genius-level impact. Meanwhile those who create new forms of economic wealth (e.g. most of those you list) have immense impact on the world, but their intellectual contribution seems less significant. But this is ultimately a parochial viewpoint.
Granted that ideas are harder to find now, I still believe that if someone made a truly fundamental discovery such as a working theory of quantum gravity or a proof that P != NP, future generations wouldn't remember that person the same way we remember Newton or Darwin. Purely intellectual discoveries can no longer have an outsized impact on the world the way they did on the past, so present day geniuses operate in the realm of wealth creation via innovation. The apparent fact that there are no geniuses anymore is an illusion caused by a failure to understand that how the world has changed.
Another possible explanation is the there is limited room for "geniuses" as the kind of geniuses you describe are relative ones. Mozart was not the only gifted composer of his time, but he was the most gifted. Darwin was intelligent, but most importantly he was the first to widely publish about a new field. There can only be a limited cadre of groundbreaking geniuses. There can only be 10 people in a top 10 list. As the population grows our ability to notice geniuses stays the same, so memorable geniuses become a smaller share of the population.
Now may I get genius status for stating this maxim with respect to dismissing the aristocratic tutoring decline hypothesis.
I think I would make a rum genius about toon!
My hypothesis is that genius defies the normal curve and is the only thing that defies the normal curve, apart from my luck on horse betting of course.
On top of the list of boring reasons Scott gives, there's also the (boring) fact that being a genius in the sense of Hoel depends on "acclaim", i.e. public perception (even if a subset of the public). Clearly a Totally Objective Metric. In turn that depends enormously on communication capabilities.
Two centuries ago, you became a really good musician in (say) Brussels, and people would be queuing to hear you play, because that what's their immediate environment offered them. Sure, some of the simultaneously most intellectual and affluent people also knew about the very good musicians in Paris and London, and may have even traveled there to enjoy their performance. But you got an environment with relatively restricted competition to cement your fame, and get the status of "genius" among enough of a population that it became a meme. Finally you got written into some history book as "definitely a genius". Debates about whether you merited more or less the genius title than the geniuses from Paris and London and Wien and New York get left as an exercise for academics and fanboys.
Skip to today, and whatever you do, you are competing against the whole world. Anyone can know what the intellectual scene in any place is up to, anyone can easily read books from authors who wrote in a tongue they don't understand, and anyone can easily listen to music written by a weird indie band from Small Town, population 300. Yet while both population and "connectivity" increase exponentially, the mind-space each human has for "list of geniuses" remains the same. Instead of having localized lists of different geniuses that are coalesced into a large ensemble when written down in the history books, we have a sort of common globalized perspective that can be quickly updated mostly everywhere at mostly the same time.
This was true of early 20th century with respect to the 17th, it is true now with respect to the 20th, and it will be trivial commentary if we hit the singularity and the overmind knows exactly which is that one brain that is Objectively Best for writing jazz music.
Well, in every field with measurable achievments from sprinting (time) to chess (elo) elite performance has steadily increased over time. I think that this is a strong indication that the supposed decline of genius in less measurable fields is bogus and the idea mostly comes from the lessening of the big fish in a small pond effect that Scott mentions. Does anyone know of a counterexample in a measurable field?
Aristocratic tutoring tends to come with a confounder: Aristocratic tutoring => aristocratic breeding => aristocratic inbreeding => flatter, broader bell curve.
How do the decreasing numbers of geniuses compare with the numbers of imbeciles (from comparable househoulds, to exclude causes like lifestyle and nourishment) ? Do the latter decrease also, to a similar extent?
Publish or Perish makes it very difficult to be a genius in academia. You have to do high probability research and crank out lots of mediocre papers to stay in the game. There is no time to step back and truly challenge paradigms.
Aren't your conclusions in part IV very similar to Holden Karnofsky’s in the series you reference? I think your first two bullets are covered by "ideas as mining". The third cultural point I don't remember, but I read it a while ago: https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/
To summarize (but this is just a summary, details in the piece): Contra Scott, professional tutors say aristocratic tutoring is now dead, the historical figures Scott chose were indeed tutored once you investigate, and most importantly overall, the hypothesis doesn't contradict "ideas are getting harder to find," rather, it supplements it, while explaining a number of further observations (like the lack of a genius boom following internet saturation).
Is it just a signal-to-noise problem? As the total population has increased, as the number of people engaged in creativity or science has increased, have we simply drowned out the voices of the 'geniuses' because of the amount of creative/science speech by the non-genius?
I imagine an Einstein, in a community of dozens or hundreds, could be seen and heard. An Einstein in a community of thousands and tens of thousands... perhaps not so much. As a result, are interesting ideas and takes simply not propagating?
Add to that the defensive measures taken to ensure 'your' voice *is* propagated and others are not: the very screening and censoring machines we build for modern digital media applied to scientific discourse gets really scary.
I think that it's not even that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, it's just that even understanding the questions that the low-hanging fruit are answers to can take a lot of work, and thus many geniuses are only visible to specialists.
I am a mathematician, and off the top of my head, I could name plenty of mathematicians in the last 50 years who I would consider to be Einstein's equal, and who have made contributions that I think are fundamental to the field of mathematics. And it's not even like their contribution are so much harder to understand than general relativity, it's just that people don't have the right background to appreciate them, and the popular press doesn't single them out because they aren't actually that rare.
I am not as familiar with other subjects; perhaps physics and chemistry are truly stagnant? But I would guess that all the brilliant discoveries in those areas just aren't dispersed into the public consciousness, and there are plenty of geniuses in those fields too.
Speaking of [Constant returns to exponential inputs being the null hypothesis](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/), I'm surprised that this doesn't make you more skeptical of the silly AI hard takeoff scenarios where "AI" is a magic word that lets us magically ignore everything we've ever seen about the world and the nature of technological progress.
For me public school K-6 was both a horrible prison and a complete waste of time that I could have spent actually learning something somewhere else. Almost all chess grandmasters started very young and spent a lot of time specifically studying chess while they were young. Jamming people into a one size fits all curriculum designed for average kids wastes the valuable youth of talented people and reduces the likelihood that they put enough time into becoming a prodigy at anything.
But "aristocratic tutoring" is a very narrow subset of the many alternatives to standard horrible boring public schools, and it's unclear why we should single that one out for consideration.
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To explain a decline in genius, "low hanging fruit" seems like the biggest factor, but post-industrial-revolution dysgenic patterns (after we went from ~33% child mortality to ~0%, and meanwhile hugely expanded higher education which delayed=reduced childbearing by more intelligent people of both genders but especially women because they go infertile sooner) probably played a role in reducing genius despite the Flynn effect. Imagine it like this: In order to be a world-historic genius, you have to high roll everything. Far more people high roll environment now than 200 years ago, but far fewer people have the extreme high end of the bell curve in genetics, because a small decrease in the mean can cause a large decrease in the area under the tail of the curve.
There's also a question of institutions becoming more bureaucratic and restrictive. In the early 20th century, the hospital where I work had a famous doctor who in his 35 years here invented dozens of medical instruments, taught hundreds of students and performed an estimated 200,000 surgeries. If he wanted a tool, he’d draw a diagram, call a metallurgist and have one made up. And then he could stick it in someone’s body an hour after it arrived.
Now, I’m not sure this was an optimal situation- we probably *should* have intensive review for medical devices, and surgeries have gotten more sophisticated in a good way in the days since that doctor could rack up 100 operations per day. Even though he seemed to have had excellent success rates, I would still rather have a modern doctor operate on me than Famous 1920s Doctor. But he got to be a genius and a titan of medicine in large part because he had the *freedom to do that.*
I bet there were plenty of casualties of the other *non-geniuses* who tried to be like him, and that’s how we got here. But that restrictiveness affects everyone in an institution and ultimately the entire field. I’ve spent eight months and collected six signatures from various departments in my hospital in order to purchase a bookcase. I’m not sure how a genius would handle this situation. Maybe they quit working in any other field and go do AI, where there nobody scrutinizes your purchase orders for furniture in this way yet?
I'm looking at the graph and reading "divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)" and wonder whether it can be explained by this hypothesis: back in the day, most of the population spent their time digging fields and illiterate, so the "effective population" would have been a much smaller percentage of the overall population. If access to education goes up and the rate of geniuses stays at the same tiny number, wouldn't that alone push the graph downwards?
Paul Graham in Beyond Smart (http://paulgraham.com/smart.html), which of course also mentions Einstein, has some interesting lines. One of them is "For example, having new ideas is generally associated with youth. But perhaps it's not youth per se that yields new ideas, but specific things that come with youth, like good health and lack of responsibilities." It doesn't take a degree in social justice to spot that access to good health and lack of responsibilities in youth is a bit, um, unevenly distributed in the population?
PG of course does mention earlier in the same para that "And of course there are a lot of fairly mundane ingredients in discovering new ideas, like working hard, getting enough sleep, avoiding certain kinds of stress, having the right colleagues, and finding tricks for working on what you want even when it's not what you're supposed to be working on." I'm going to read "poverty" into the "certain kinds of stress" here.
This supports both the hypothesis that it's not aristocratic tutoring per se but being in the kind of low-responsibility low-certain-kinds-of-stress high-access-to-networks (including of tutors) environment that a young aristocrat might have found themselves in that tends to nurture geniuses, and my guess that the graph is showing an expanding "effective population" denominator with access to some education but not an environment with enough slack (in the sense of LW "studies on slack") to make great discoveries.
I said "nurture" not "produce" because I read Freddie deBoer, among other things.
Consequently plenty of people who could have been amazing scholars probably end up coding at FAANG or something, while professorships are increasingly taken by non-geniuses. It's probably the same in music too with publishing companies or whoever makes classical these days. The genius phenotype is actively despised by the powers that be now -- it's too introverted, disagreeable, not diverse enough, etc.
I partially agree with your point, but it'd read as more trustworthy if your blog wasn't filled with high octane turboracism. Like, /pol/ with less frogs.
It doesn't take a genius to see Scott's right about this! Newtonian physics isn't too hard to get your head round. Einstein's beyond me. Quantum mechanics....
Did you really read Hoel's examples and think "these are cherry-picked, I can find counterexamples," and not "this definition of tutoring is ridiculously broad"? Did you really think he would agree with your characterization of your examples?
I don't believe it. I think you cowardly avoided the confrontation of contradicting his examples. There may be some rhetorical value to avoiding confrontation, but it has destroyed all communicative value in this post.
His wikipedia article asserts this, but doesn't give a single example of him fighting racism. I searched for "civil rights" and every usage was examples of labor tactics that he learned from other civil rights activists. Yes, he was a leftist, tied in with other leftist movements, but that doesn't mean it's useful to describe him as a member of all those movements. A cursory google search does give a few examples, but I am unconvinced.
Of course it is salient that he had a racialized union. I don't think he appealed to rights, but to market power. Of course, the Montgomery bus boycott did, too, but it also appealed to rights. There is room for an argument. But I don't think anyone calls him a civil rights or anti-racism activist because they've thought about the topic, but for the sole reason that new left has defeated the old left and it is erasing history.
The other problem with the argument is that tutoring isn't blind. Many people who were tutored didn't succeed, but if you can only afford to educate one of your kids you'll send your smartest kid. And Hoel is very flexible on what constitutes tutoring; if your uncle likes playing math games with you, it's likely that over time at least part of the explanation is that *you're good at playing math games*.
Maybe tutoring doesn't have any more influence on genius than general education, it just gets to be choosier about its denominator. I don't believe that either, but it does follow from the evidence Hoel presented just as much as his own thesis.
Chess is a rare situation where we can objectively measure performance over time and the current chess players are the strongest who have ever lived. But most of the really memorable chess geniuses that are household names in one way or another (e.g.: Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Jose Raul Capablanca) are historical. So maybe it's genius-mythos-formation that's stuck in the past, and it's confused to equivocate genius-mythos-formation with the number of actual geniuses on the ground (which I strongly suspect is higher than ever, at least in any field that hasn't precipitously declined in importance). Also, if these are genius myths, what if genius myths bottleneck due to a fixed zero-sum capacity for stories to become popular mainstream memes so you only get a few Great People for a given field every generation (this is also consistent with modern genius myths as I would say we actually do have a share of them, e.g. Garry Kasparov, Terry Tao, etc. etc.)
>"Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population [pic: graph of both decreasing]"
To some degree this could also just be that "acclaim" is a winners-take-all thing: maybe reserved for the top N people in a field, and N doesn't grow with population. Listicles of the world's "top 10 most famous living scientists" aren't going to become top 11 lists just for population growth.
(Maybe coupled with inertia [plus low-hanging fruit in terms of influence?], for "of all time" lists: even if the 10 "objectively" best scientists of all time were alive right now, top-10-of-all-time lists would still want to include Newton and Darwin and Einstein.)
I think there oughtta be two different categories for geniuses, the first being what Hoel talks about (think of the long line of western tradition starting with Aristotle and Alexander), and second the counter-examples which Scott brings up. The difference between the two is determining how exactly each genius realizes their genius. With the former, geniuses are made with brute force ('cause with the resources of the king, no matter how incompetent the prince is, his behaviour will become the standard by which the rest of the populace governs themselves, cause parents will all want to raise their sons and daughters to be royalty) whereas in the latter, it's brute force by sheer numbers (not implying that one out of every X people have to be a genius, but rather that the number of geniuses scale with population size, and once a minority population becomes big enough, their status as a whole increases, and it becomes less acceptable to deny the existence of the bright members of a minority, so the first ones accepted would be whoever of the smart ones is the smartest of the smart ones (see also: minority revolutionary leaders during the American civil rights movement, and also Ramanujan from British India.)
This generation of sigma 6 geniuses were born from last generation's sigma 3 geniuses.
I think of the the last 100 years the world has become much more blended. If you were a Hungarian Asheknazi Jew in the 1901 you probably married a Ashkenazi Jew who lived in Hungary and most likely of the same economic class. This meant people were much more likely to marry people similar to them, making it much more likely for a sigma 3 person to marry a sigma 3 person.
Smart people are more likely to have fewer kids. I assume this trend started in the 50's with the invention of birth control. This would have small effect on average intelligence due to the rarity of sigma 3er's, but could have a very large effect on how many sigma 6 geniuses you get.
"Genius" is partly a matter of perception and social construction. There are way more candidates who deserve consideration in our era than can possibly be noticed, deliberated, and agreed upon by the diverse audience of "genius makers." There's no way to even get at the underlying issue -- "Are there fewer or more?" -- because of the noisy process.
Maybe we haven't "stopped making Einsteins", but rather we've reached the limits of what our Einsteins can deduce about the fundamental laws of the universe. I fall into the “ideas are getting harder to find” camp. There may be hundreds and even thousands of Einstein equivalents out there right now wasting their time on GUTs which will fail as theories, because the universe is beyond their comprehension—because, even though the 1.4x10^26 atoms in their little brains are hosting thoughts in complex electro-chemical patterns, those thoughts exist in a finite computing space—and those thoughts are unable to comprehend an observable universe that's 10^26 larger than their brains and that's been evolving 1.8^10 times longer than their lifespans—and whose underlying laws were crystalized outside (and before) the observable universe.
21st Century civilization is running on the fumes of basic discoveries made 60+ years ago. It was once assumed that we could go on into the infinite future making profound discoveries about the universe. But this hasn't happened. And I would argue we have more brilliant minds now working on these problems than we did through most of the 20th Century. With the help of search engines, the average graduate student today has access to more basic knowledge and research than anyone had in the 20th Century. So don't tell me it's an epistemic question of the what or how much to know (i.e. "education"). It might be a question of semantic conception—i.e. how we organize our knowledge and belief—but if that's the case, then we're still not much beyond the ancient Greek philosophers or the 2nd Century Indian philosophers in the how of knowing.
Also, Hoel fails to define genius. Without a concise definition, all the arguments about genius become vague generalities.
Maybe we're in a Kuhnian lull before the next scientific revolution. If so, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it in my few remaining years.
It's difficult for me to imagine anyone passing this without private tutoring. Setting aside the questions on Latin and Greek (which people don't care about nearly as much in the modern day), even the geography and math questions seem quite challenging. I'd certainly be impressed if a student at a modern day public high school could answer them well.
Interesting, I look at that and am struck by how familiar a lot of it looks to the sort of math I was doing in high school. The history and geography questions do look bizarrely factoid-based to the modern eye. However, you also have to bear in mind that the questions on an exam paper are far less important the the method of grading the answers. I was recently reading a bunch of articles on grade inflation in UK schools and downloaded a bunch of sample papers to see if exams really have got easier since I was at high school 25 years ago. From looking at the papers, I would conclude that they have not. What has changed is the way they are graded, with the grading rubrics making it much easier to achieve higher grades with lower performance.
I would expect that most students from the advanced (AP) math track at my high school (a good public school in Massachusetts) could do most of the geometry questions (although understanding the questions is a bit of a challenge compared to how I would prefer they were phrased).
Perhaps the "ordinary education" that Newton/Mozart/Darwin/Pasteur/Dickens/Edison received resembles aristocratic tutoring more than the ordinary education of today.
I'm most familiar with England. If you go back far enough, lots of famous people are said to have been "privately educated" (i.e., had tutors rather than going to school). But, my impression is, over time that declined and more and more of the elite attended boarding schools like Eton and Harrow and then on to Oxford or Cambridge. The social advantages of being part of the Eton or Harrow old boys network grew big enough that even aristocrats less and less passed them them up.
You're ignoring a relatively mundane, but likely extremely important effect: the opportunities for people of genius level ability to exploit it for personal gain likely look very different to the past. When you combine that with the fact that people of genius level ability in anything are rarely just good at one thing, it's quite possible that we're still getting just as many geniuses as we used to, but most of them retired as millionaires at age 35 and have been sipping cocktails on a beach in St Tropez since then. Back in Beethoven's day, there probably weren't too many gigs around for a musical genius other than finding wealthy benefactors to pay you to write symphonies. These days, Goldman Sachs will decide that musical ability is an important indicator skill and pay you a huge salary to lay off workers from their investments in developing countries.
Modern geniuses just have better things to do than spend all day demonstrating their genius to you.
At the cost of producing individual hyperintelligent geniuses, there is a surplus of experts who are adept at their specific niche interests but on the whole too atomized to interact with another in a really accessible way, bar some exceptions, which we might call geniuses. Obviously this reliance on experts has accelerated tech advancement, but the atomization factor still weighs in on this.
"easy to stand out in when you’re small and new, harder when you’re big and old"
I think this is key. As a specific anecdote: I had the privilege of meeting Dijkstra in his later years - he was at the university where I was doing my PhD. My impression of him was...underwhelming. He stood out, because he was one of the pioneers. In his heyday, he was one of relatively few people researching CS, and the easy problems hadn't yet been solved.
Today, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as many researchers in the field, and many of them are of Dijkstra's caliber. However, today's research problems are much more specialized and complex. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and so have the next several layers up.
I haven't read all of your essay, but I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.
I think the problem is the nature of knowledge. Consider Newton.
>>Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosopher") widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time and among the most influential scientists.<<
Now let's say a very smart kid of 16 or 18 comes along. Genius material. He decides that he is going to make fundamental contributions in the fields of:
Mathmatics
Mechanics
Optics
Astronomy
Chemistry
Theology
Philosophy
What is going to happen to our eager protogenius?
Well, first he going to have to learn all the important stuff in all these different fields of knowledge. One can't very well be offering up fundamental observations that.have been known for centuries!
Now by the time he is up to speed in each of these seven fields, he will be 54 years old and beyond the age that really incisive thinking occurs.
Just identfying important things that are not already known in one of these fields will take some dedication. Making significant contributions will probably require working with a team.
Perhaps you see my point. Newton could take a walk around his block and encounter novel and challenging problems.
We have so many geniuses these days that we don't even consider them to be geniuses, they're just normal.
There are tiny teams of people making animation on YouTube now.
Every "good" artist today is so good at art that Leonardo Da Vinci would be considered merely okay. Stuff on Artstation, Furaffinity, and Deviantart is so consistently amazing that it is normal.
We have such an excess of musical geniuses that there are people making genius music about random niche nerdy stuff.
We have solo geniuses or tiny teams making extremely awesome video games, and geniuses working on AAA games that create these ridiculously elaborate things that are now normal. Creating a virtual world with a hundred square miles of land area? 6/10, yawn, we've seen it before, do better.
We don't see "geniuses" because that's "normal" at the top of the field now.
I think the pervasive poison of jealousy is the problem. Too many people now don't want to recognize greatness because of their own bitterness. I say let greatness flourish, and remove the barriers. Enough of all this jealousy and pride. We all know that our current society is broken, and we keep tiptoeing around the issues to pacify these broken souls consumed by envy. I encourage the truly brave to take more chances, break more barriers, and disregard the ravings of simpletons.
I am not sure I buy the premise, but let's assume it is true. One possible contributing factor that I did not see mentioned, but that was maybe hinted at in the discussion of writers and MFAs, is that people are too connected. In my opinion best sci-fi writer was Lem, yet he basically started writing completely cut off from western sci-fi or any kind of sci-fi, except maybe Wells and Verne. So maybe there are social forces that, when people know each other's work too well, cause too much monocultural creation and the new and interesting paths are overlooked. Not sure if it really has some merit, but I found it an interesting thought. Though, if it is part of the explanation, it is probably more so in art than in science.
Adding to that, there is the mass education which made not-so-basic knowledge basic. Most people nowadays agree that the earth is round, turning around the sun, clouds are evaporated water, etc... The level of abstraction understanding needed to realize the scientific breakthroughs of today are so high. Terence Tao is a genius of mathematics by example, maybe one of the greatest, but who understands what he does, apart from his early age accomplishments (winning Olympiads as kid). It's just harder to be impressed because the concepts are way harder to understand and apply to real life than, let's say evolution theory, gravity or antibiotics. Nowadays geniuses lie in politics, storytelling, businesses and going against the herd, because it's seen as easier to understand and more practical. Of course there is AI, but we see more AI as the genius rather than individuals working on AI. Basically Terminator and Matrix had such a cultural impact on the collective psyche warning us of the risks that AI could kill us all.
I think it's extremely uncharitable to re-frame Hoel's position as "There are virtually no geniuses today, while there were plenty before, and a lack of aristocratic tutoring fully explains this phenomenon."
On the other hand, I disagree with his assessment and more-or-less agree with yours. Honestly, I just think there are a shitton of geniuses nowadays, but most of them are highly specialized. The number of renaissance men, polymathic geniuses might've declined, but it's hard to quantify. In general, people have become more educated, which makes it more difficult to be an interdisciplinary genius. Also, specialist geniuses are now so ludicrously good that only specialist non-geniuses can accurately identify them. To everyone else they just look like another specialist.
As an artist, I can point to contemporary illustrators whose work is possessed of such skill that it should make you weep on sight, but laypeople have no idea how to distinguish between Bayard Wu's skill level and Michelangelo's, or Vallejo's. Our specialists are achieving new heights all the time and it's totally inscrutable to pretty much everyone.
Wait, if many people figured it out independently, wouldn't that be evidence that it *is* low-hanging fruit? Since multiple people were smart enough to do it without help?
Like, the population in the Neolithic was a few million people. If pottery required more than "one in a million" smarts, it shouldn't have been invented more than once or twice. Something only one in a million people can invent isn't "easy", sure, but Einstein was one in almost two billion, so the definition of "low-hanging fruit" is actually pretty high-hanging!
(It's also possible that pottery has intermediate steps to its discovery - *good* pottery requires multiple steps, but maybe shitty bone-dry clay that's really brittle and can't hold liquids is still enough to let you realize there's something useful to discover there.)
You're not taking into account how *long* the Mesolithic/Paleolithic was. Sure, there were only a few million alive at any one time, but multiply that figure by a thousand generations or more.
Indeed. The Eureka example of Scott quite nails it: the earlier you go, the more the inventions/accomplishment feel like Eureka moment: something hard to think of initially, but once you get the idea, it's kind of obvious for your clever (non-geniuses) fellow humans. The typical "Why didn't I think of it first". Even many Newton accomplishments fall in this category: I would not have been able to come with any of his ideas idea, but I am able to understand them very well and use them, since end of high school and during my engineering studies. Some of them even came naturally after the eureka moment: Calculus for example, build on limits itself build on some series arithmetic. Not rigorous of course, but I think it was not so rigorous when first set up by Newton either.
Go back in time, if you are a little bit technically minded, get exposed to inventions like a wheel, a bow, a blowpipe just once, and you immediately understand it and can even replicate it (a functional if not great version). I know, I did excatly that end of my childhood, usually just after national geographics documentaries ;-). Boomerang also, even if full understanding is less immediate (you need to understand wing profiles and precession)
But the more you advance in time, the more the theories and inventions feels harder to grasp, or replicate, even when fully explained....That's exactly the low hanging fruits effect: you need to be of much higher than average intelligence not only to come up with the idea, but just to understand it.
Vulgarisation is the attempt to bridge this gap, but I feel it tends to become less successful, loosing so much in the simplification process that the layman version of the theory becomes unusable or worse: misleading. It's a vulgarisation failure, almost a parody of it imho....A common pattern with post-newtonian physics, again consistent with the low-hanging fruit idea...
That still seems like low-hanging fruit to me. Inventing pottery is non-trivial, but it's easier than inventing bronze, which is easier than inventing bakelite, which is easier than inventing Yttrium-Barium-Copper Oxide.
The hardest part about inventing pottery is in realising that inventing new materials with useful properties is actually a thing you can do.
Mozart: I think that you can't get his type of tutoring. the kids is forced to spend much of his time at school and doing homework.
a single minded quality focus is no longer allowed at young age.
Edison and Newton too, MIGHT have been banned, or conditioned against their self taught experimenting. definitely would've been limited in time and options.....
Homeschooling requirements are really lax, especially up through middle school. A relatively bright kid could definitely spend a couple hours a week on traditional education and the rest on their specialty.
They _could_, but do they? The kind of upper-middle-class parents who are going to hire a full-time musical tutor for their kid are going to want to hedge their bets, give their kid a reasonably broad education in case the professional-musician thing doesn't work out. Things were different in 18th century Austria where there were more professional musicians and fewer alternative employment opportunities.
Yes, they do. Homeschoolers are (were) only 1% of students, but they would walk away with half the ribbons at State Fair. E.g. http://russnelson.com/rebeccanelson/quilt/index.html
Homeschooling requirements in the US are lax.
I wonder how many geniuses video games and other forms of entertainment takes from us? You homeschool a kid like that and now instead of wanting to learn math or the Violin they might play COD all day, talent notwithstanding. If that goes on for their whole life their potential is never released.
Is grinding CoD / WoW / whatever really that much more fun and addictive than playing stickball or reading adventure novels?
Yes, as indicated that it wins with reading adventure novels and stickball.
We did home unschooling. No time spent on traditional education, just encouraging kids to pursue whatever they were interested in and helping them do it.
That was in California where home schooling is, I think by accident, essentially unregulated.
Unschooling is entirely the opposite of tutoring.
Not entirely, since an unschooled kid may end up taking harp lessons, as our daughter did, or apprenticing in a computer repair shop, or doing something else that involves learning from a skilled adult.
Most of the people I know who were homeschooled are quite accomplished despite being kinda "weird".
A single-minded focus (or something really close) is allowed for child actors and certain sports (gymnasts, ice skaters, etc).
Both Mozart and Edison were homeschooled and tutored by their former-teacher parents. So I'm not sure why Scott picked these examples.
Because those kinds of examples are still around.
Mozart's father has been described as "obsessive" in his tutoring of Mozart, and only in music, music, music. Teaching your child to do compositions at the age of 5 and taking them on tours of European courts seems rare now-a-days.
Was probably rare back then as well?
I don't know about the tours, but I wouldn't be surprised if we had several kids being intensely tutored like that in my city alone. (Though, disclosure, I live in Singapore.)
I doubt anyone alive is tutored like Mozart; even Edison had a professional schoolteacher for a mother, who homeschooled him. That’s incredibly rare as a matter of effective population, which now huge. I have heard from several tutors and all say that aristocratic tutoring is dead. But I will write an official response to this as part of a follow-up anyways.
What about the Polgar sisters? Judit polgar was intensely tutored in chess from a young age, and is considered the strongest female chess player of all time.
David Friedman is a (now retired) Law/Economics Professor who has talked here about homeschooling his children. Similarly, Bryan Caplan is an Econ professor who talks on his blog about homeschooling his children. That's only two examples, but it suggests that some level of homeschooling by skilled professional educator parents is still going on.
IIRC, most research also shows that schooling type (private, elite private, public, whatever) has no impact on future life outcomes when controlling for IQ and parental income. Which aligns with your conclusion.
Yes and no. On average it doesn't, but if you look at where US presidents went to school, for instance, it seems like it does. In my opinion, research on educational and life outcomes is still pretty muddled, just because it's so complex.
I could be wrong, but if we're controlling for parental income isn't that just a proxy for parental status? And there could be more accurate (though less elegant) proxies for SES than just income.
But even Bryan Caplan, who wrote a book with that thesis based on that research, homeschooled his kids in part because he thinks at the extremes different education styles can make a difference: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/09/why_im_homescho.html
Much of his reasoning makes sense, but it's also a hilarious case study. "Don't worry about it because you're not an outlier, but I'm not going to follow my own advice because I'm an outlier."
Caplan is objectively an outlier, and his twins are even more so. I’ve met them a few different times and at 12 they made most college freshmen seem shockingly ignorant.
It's interesting how many children of professors seem this way. I don't believe Caplan is a professor, but he is probably unusual in some of the same ways that many professors are, and his kids turn out unusual in some of the same way that professors' kids often do (but definitely don't always do).
Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Bryan Caplan is a professor at GMU. I have spent a fair bit of time with him, and he is unusual in a lot of ways, many of which are very uncommon among professors even :)
Ha, i just looked up Bryan Caplan as name didn't ring a bell, and turns out I read his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids a few years ago and agreed with most of it - somehow his name just never registered. I also heard separately of his book The Case Against Education, haven't read but suspect I'll agree with most of it as well.
Caplan is a professor (and having taken his classes) a heck of a good one at that.
This is debatable.
No it isn't.
Yeah I don't really get it since his book was positioned against Tiger Mom when released, and he seemed happy to engage in that debate saying Tiger Momming is unhelpful. But that blog makes it seem like his book could easily be interpreted as "people need to Tiger Mom even harder."
(I'm sure he's responded to this criticism somewhere since he is happy to hear and rebut critiques, but I'm not a Caplan completist so I don't know where)
That's not his argument.
He argues that if you actually enjoy school, it's fine. It's just that most people don't.
School voucher lottery programs and their failure to meaningfully improve performance casts doubt on the idea that "good schools" are even a thing indpendent of the student population
I doubt the research has been done to properly tease out the details, but there's an alternative hypothesis here. If you take a select group of students and put them in a better educational environment, they may excel above that same group of students in a normal educational environment and above a normal distribution group put into the better education. Intuitively this makes sense to me. For one, teaching higher level materials in a way that engages the students *should* have a positive impact on students learning. Also, they don't have teachers dealing with unruly students, or teaching the same lower level material repeatedly to keep the low performing kids going, etc. It also makes sense to me that if you take an average student and put them into this school, they may or may not perform better. They may feel overwhelmed by the other students and the high level curriculum, realizing that they are not as prepared as the other students. A pure lottery would be worse, as much of the problem with public schools comes from the mixture of unruly and disruptive children. Those students take up a disproportionate level of teacher and administrator time, and can heavily disrupt the learning of the other students by interrupting class, bullying kids, or even just taking more teacher time to keep up on the course requirements.
Yeah, but (1) it's social science research, so requiring a gram or so of NaCl per page, and (2) it draws conclusions about the average effect on the average person. Pretty much by definition it says squat about people way out on the statistical tail -- the would-be geniuses.
For that matter, it would be *extremely* hard to study people who are geniuses, or who have the makings to be, but don't turn out that way. Just the demographics alone are daunting -- how many college student volunteers do we need to solicit to get a few hundred with IQ 160+? -- and then you have the difficult problem of identifying them *before* they demonstrate genius, so you can study the progression free of hindsight-driven rationalization and distortion -- and the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect[1] means it's pretty hard to distinguish a genius in the bud from a lunatic.
--------------
[1] It's hard to understand how smart someone is without being almost as smart yourself.
I mean sure, if I thought there was strong evidence for aristocratic tutoring I'd cheerfully throw those studies away. But the existing evidence for it is just as shaky! Right now my prior is on schooling having little effect *especially* on the high end. No matter how well you're tutored, eventually you start hitting diminishing returns at a point determined by talent. A genius will overtake their peers even if tutoring got some of them to that wall faster.
Look at the literature around Bloom's Two Sigma problem.
I'm familiar. I have no doubt tutoring will convey you to your personal wall much faster, potentially even get you a little further up it, but once you start hitting those diminishing returns it won't matter as much. Besides, study after study suggests that interventions which increase academic achievement tend to have less and less effect the further one gets from school, even on the order of a few years.
>Pretty much by definition it says squat about people way out on the statistical tail -- the would-be geniuses.
I agree with this. It seems intuitive that of course """better skoolz""" isn't gonna make a 100 IQer any smarter than a 100 IQer can be (that's barely passing Algebra and then taking a job that never requires it btw). Meanwhile, trapping a 145+ IQ creative outside the box genius in an average school to do busy work all day can certainly impede their genius.
TIMMS indicate your statement is correct. Btw: TIMMS showed 2/3 of S-Korean 8th graders can do the most basic Algebra task. As can a bit fewer than 1/3 of US-kids. Yeah: school/tutors can make you reach your potential (or not), but there are some who can not do Algebra, and even extreme Korean-Teaching won't change that.
I agree. Hoel doesn't really define what he means by genius, but it's important not to confuse prodigy genius with IQ genius. Hoel's definition seems to boil down to someone who gets a mention in Wikipedia for making an important contribution to our culture, so prodigy geniuses like Mozart get confused with IQ geniuses.
He uses Einstein as the exemplar for genius, but it's difficult to judge which category of genius Einstein falls into. AFAIK Einstein never took an IQ test. People assume he had a super high IQ, but he was challenged by higher maths and he scored poorly on his exams at ETH Zurich. OTOH his ability to work up theory from Gedankenexperimente could be considered a prodigy type of genius. (And it's unclear how much his wife, who he met at ETH, influenced his formulation of Special Relativity.) So, Einstein, despite his achievements, is probably not the best example of genius qua genius. ;-)
The research argues that all the different kinds of "lock 30 kids in a room with one teacher" are pretty similar, but research on 1-on-1 tutoring is very clear that that provides *much* better outcomes - 2 standard deviations is the figure usually quoted - it's just that there's no way anyone's figured out how to make a national school system where every kid has 1-on-1 tuition, it doesn't scale. (Hence Scott's comment about Democratic norms)
Still, if tutoring is all that great then it's surprising how often it doesn't happen, even among parents with plenty of money. Wealthy parents who think nothing of spending $40K a year for private school for their kids would nonetheless balk at the idea of spending $60K a year for a full-time tutor.
Possible explanations:
1. It's clear to you and I that private tutoring is better, but the message hasn't got through to the average rich person yet.
2. Rich people understand that social skills are more important than technical knowledge, and believe that being socialised in a school like everybody else is important for having adequate social skills in later life.
3. Actually a lot of rich people _are_ doing the private tutor thing, we just don't hear about it.
4. Rich people have fond memories of their own school days and would hate to deprive their kids of those opportunities.
5. Individual tutoring is only really effective for kids who are either very smart or pretty dumb. For an ordinary upper middle class kid, they're better off in school.
6. Risk aversion. It's hard to do something unusual to your kid, knowing that you'll feel responsible if they wind up screwed up. Far better to send them to school like everyone else, and if they wind up screwed up it's not your fault.
I've heard that the primary benefit of an Ivy League education is the networking opportunities. Taking a kid out of school to get twice as good an education but no networking could very well result in a worse outcome for that student, if networking makes a big enough difference (which I think it likely does).
Also, lots of parents do hire private tutors - they just do it in addition to more social modes of school rather than instead.
I have an Ivy League education, and my wife does college counseling and has had some clients get into Ivies. It's true today as it was forty years ago that lots of people _say_ that the primary benefit of an Ivy League education is the networking opportunities, including a lot of people who are directly involved (as students and/or faculty) at the Ivy League schools.
That particular cliche is, like many, based on a kernel of truth. I've no doubt that the Ivy League schools generate for their alums _more_ networking opportunities than do most other colleges or universities. But as stated that cliche is a pretty big exaggeration....my own observation, and I think my wife would agree from her perspective, is that if we had to pick just one "primary" advantage of attending that sort of school it is living for a while in a bubble of absurdly bright and/or talented peers. That was pretty stunning (and sometimes overwhelming) back in my era and I gather that it is even moreso nowadays.
Your last statement is part of what people mean when they say it is about networking. Undergrand education at Harvard vs Washu or even like The Ohio State or Mizzou is pretty comparable. It is the other factors that matter.
Eh, I dunno....hard to say directly since I only experienced one version of undergrad education. But from the descriptions by spouses/siblings/friends over the years it has often not sounded like the educational experience at a lot of colleges was "pretty comparable" to what I found myself dropped into. (And in some ways not very well prepared for despite the qualifications that had gotten me admitted.)
Also when people talk about networking they mean something much more overt than simply exposure to the undergrad population.
I'm not rich and no one I'm related to is. But I did go to college with a good number of rich kids, and in recent years my career has brought me into close contact with a fair number of seriously-rich families. I think your list of possible explanations is pretty close to spot on but in the wrong order of priority/likelihood, and also is missing one.
The missing item is (7) peer pressure, not among the kids but among the parents. Both K-12 school choices and college acceptances have become objects of fierce competitive focus among rich parents. This discourages the private-tutor concept in two ways:
(7.a) having a child or two at whatever is the local elite prep school is a bragging right that many are reluctant to give up; and
(7.b) everyone is basically convinced now that the way for the progeny to get into Princeton or Stanford or wherever is with the kind of extra-curricular-rich high school resume that the Dalton Schools of the world help a kid generate and document.
With that addition noted, I'd rank your 6 factors plus my #7 as explanations for the disinterest in the full-time-private-tutor route in about this order:
4 and 6 and 7 each about the same, then
2 and 5 about the same, then
1
3
There is an expensive private school in the Bay Area that, as best I can tell, works by one on one education.
Oxford and Cambridge do a lot of one hour conversation per week with a professor stuff. Paul Johnson has written about what it was like to have C.S. Lewis as his tutor (good).
There is very strong evidence that even 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, as long as none of the students are "disruptive", is also vastly superior to 30. You have diminishing returns shrinking peer group sizes.
Another genius who grew up poor and (as far as I know) exhibited plenty of brilliance without or before tutoring was Carl Friedrich Gauss. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss )
He had a rich patron from a young age, I’m sure he got whatever resources he needed.
It looks like he got enough attention from a patron to get sent to college at age 15, but was already producing remarkably novel work by age 17, and didn't obviously have private tutoring?
C. V. Raman in another....
to stay on the Indian theme, Srinivasa Ramanujan is an even more extreme example of no advantaged tutoring
Immediately checked out "How the MFA swallowed literature", just want to register that the take seems truly insane to me.
The MFA take? I know nothing about MFAs and literature, can you explain?
I just comment in order to get notified about a response. I hope this works!
Responding specifically to: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-literature?s=w
I have a lot of thoughts here, but I think my main takeaway is that he's saying "I (and some cherry picked people like me) don't like the current state of the modern novel, and I blame MFAs." He doesn't really provide any compelling evidence that MFAs are causing the problem--I could write ten equally convincing articles blaming this issue on any number of things. And whether or not this guy likes the modern novel isn't an objective quality problem. It's just no one is writing the kinds of novels he likes. I hate marvel movies, but that doesn't mean cinema is dead.
Thanks for dropping the link! I made the mistake of majoring in Creative Writing, so let me offer my two cents from the inside of the kind of program he's describing.
On the one hand, he isn't providing evidence that people who didn't go through a BA/BFA/MA/MFA for Writing would recognize. On the other, I know exactly what pattern he's pointing to, and I honestly don't know how I'd describe it any better. There is a certain pattern/thought process ingrained when you do a bunch of workshops and read the same (realistic fiction. only realistic fiction. autofiction is king) novels and short stories where your prose really does end up terse, short, unattackable, and LIFELESS. While some of these novels are rather enjoyable (*The Lost Book of Adana Moreau,* say, or maybe *The Boy in the Field*), they really do blend together stylistically in a way that quickly becomes boring.
Personally, I would blame the publishing industry--but *you can't get a job in the publishing industry without a recommendation from your MFA professors anymore.* There really has become a pipeline from college to publishing and if you don't toe the academic line, you're not getting one of the very few jobs available that year. (This would be why I am no longer aiming to go into publishing.)
I'm with you in that this does not mean "the novel is dead," I think Hoel is sounding the alarm much too soon, but also there's a big difference in enjoyment between any of the modern novels and, say, *Brothers Karamazov.*
Thank you for sharing your Institutional experience! Though I may be imagining it, I feel your comment is a great distillation of what I was warned about as I asked my MFA-wielding and published friends to write me letters of recommendation to apply to a program (which I didn't get into).
This all seems to be a special case of Scott's multipolar trap theory, in which iterations of a kind of toothless brand-algorithm have eroded the jagged stones of every hopeful writer of realistic fiction into the same undifferentiated sand. Pretty, in its way, but largely unaffecting precisely because it's been workshopped to death.
A last comment closer to this article's subject: perhaps our gatekept culture is too overfit, broadly, in its fractionalization of demographics to allow a broad-strokes genius to emerge. Someone who has the breadth and the depth to articulate universal truths from their own idiosyncratic viewpoint. For it to happen, there may have to be some minimum of social flexibility (for instance a baseline level of literacy required for a writer to flourish) together with a capacity for generosity that I guess I'd originates from a kind of childlike wonder that it seems few would publicly defend, much less cultivate, any longer.
I agree that it's something like a multipolar trap--do you have a link handy for anyone else stumbling on this thread?
There was a thread similar to your last point elsewhere in the comments, but I think you put it much more kindly. Cynicism has been in fashion for a while, and that makes me sad. The pieces that always got the best responses in workshop were the ones that approached the world with a wide-eyed optimism and love, and yet so few students would take a chance and write something like that! (I, too, was a coward--after all, I was getting graded on said pieces... and that cowardice, like the gunk that builds up in a sink drain, sticks around for a while unless you go get your hands dirty removing it.)
It's all, for whenever is it not, in Meditations On Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
There is a deep disconnect between my understanding of the world and what you guys are talking about. I suspect I'm missing something here.
What novels are you guys reading where you feel like the author isn't articulating deep universal truth? Why are you reading them? Is it really hard to find the specific sort of novels you enjoy? As someone who has never had this problem I'm genuinely flummoxed.
I think the disconnect here is that the premise of the article is talking about an academic setting, and you're literally talking about The Common Man. In the academic setting, *you don't get to choose what you're reading,* beyond which classes you take. And even then it's still pretty limited.
And novels with universal truth =/= enjoyable novels. There are important things in *Absalom, Absalom,* but I will die on the hill that says "Faulkner sucks."
Thought I'd comment on the specific tenor I was bringing.
So, I don’t mean to be rude, but there is a deep distress I feel from this idea. The concept that the contour of a life in art is really a matter of gustation, and the world’s billions of real, living, striving, and struggling minds are so many sommeliers for our assistance at La Grande Bouffe. In fact, in exact specific outline this *is* my argument for why the bleached institutional halls and workshops and programs are so full of a quiet desperation. It’s as though all the world’s most talented writers decided they agreed with the premise (or bent to it for the purposes of professional advancement) that shit was just for them to enjoy, including eschatologically heavy work if only of the personal kind. But in actual fact we all have literal callings, to things that are unknowable to the personally inflected tastes and whims of our circumstance, and after we do or do not achieve them and the hours of our life are past, we are all faced with the actual literal apocalypse, if only of the personal kind.
This substance of work, of turning the attention of the art form called a novel onto such subjects, is a difference not in quality but in kind. This is the meagerness of contemporary MFA work, of pitilessly workshopped material.
I’m happy for you that you can enjoy it. I’m just gesturing toward something else.
That reminds me a bit of academic publishing: because peer reviewers can reject an article for basically any reason whatsoever (and editors virtually never decide to go against a reviewer's recommendation), the best way to get published is to be as cautious and uncontroversial as possible -- or "unattackable and lifeless", as you put it. Virtually none of the great philosophers of the past would be able to get a job in academia nowadays.
Maybe not, but at least we've stopped giving them hemlock.
I have been out of academia for a good while, so I have no idea if university culture is as bad as is claimed, but is there still room for obnoxious or eccentric geniuses?
There are plenty of obnoxious and eccentric people in academia. Whether they count as "geniuses" is a difficult question to answer independent of whether you think there are too many or too few.
"I think Hoel is sounding the alarm much too soon, but also there's a big difference in enjoyment between any of the modern novels and, say, *Brothers Karamazov.*"
What makes you think this, though? If you gave a thousand readers Dostoevsky and also a modern novel, I suspect most of them would prefer the modern novel.
I can see making an argument for "novels are becoming more homogenous," and that's probably something that you could back up. But that just seems like a good thing for people who like that style and a bad thing for everyone else.
This comment can possibly make one feel that you have very different sensibilities than the average reader. Everyone I know would prefer Dostoevsky over almost any modern novel hands down.
Hm, I mean this is a difference of empirical fact, and I'm not sure how to measure it. It seems unlikely to me that the average US reader even has the reading comprehension to get through Dostoevsky. I know the average US reading level is somewhere around 7th grade, but obviously most of those people don't actively read novels. But given the simplicity of truly popular fiction I'd imagine Dostoevsky would be a pretty big leap for most people.
As far as I can figure out, the top selling novel in 2021 was It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover https://www.amazon.com/Ends-Us-Novel-Colleen-Hoover/dp/1501110365/ -- I've never heard of it but it appears to be classified as "Women's Domestic Life Fiction" and appears to involve the ever-popular plot of an undistinguished female protagonist pursued by two super handsome high-status men.
I can't find exact sales figures, but wouldn't be surprised if it sold more copies in 2021 than The Brothers Karamazov has sold in its entire history. Wikipedia notes that it was very popular on TikTok.
Without reading a word of it, I feel like I can predict that this particular novel isn't as good as Dostoevetsky, but that the problems with it are probably completely orthogonal to MFA syndrome. (The author, for what it's worth, graduated Texas A&M with a degree in Social Work, and does not appear to have an MFA).
I think that, depending on what you mean by a "modern novel", you'll get a different answer, but both interpretations show an important difference with past classics.
If you mean "novel" in the sense of "literature as a genre", you run into the MFA circle-jerk stuff others are talking about in their comments; I don't read that genre at all so I can't comment on the accuracy of the discussion.
If you mean "novel" in the sense of "book", then popular modern novels are usually fast food or snack food compared to the classics - chips are easy to eat and pleasurable in the moment, but they aren't fulfilling the way a proper hearty meal is.
Of course, most books a century or two ago were also mostly empty entertainment - cf penny dreadfuls - the argument is that the rare exceptions have become much rarer, which is harder to assay than any argument about the bulk of fiction.
I saw the same thing in philosophy. There's a tendency in the academy to retreat to defending only analytical, unambitious positions which can be defended beyond critique, and it's stifling.
This might be why there has been a huge surge in literary quality in certain bits of genre fiction in the last decade or two.
Writers with literary skill who didn't fit into the litfic paradigm went into genre because the gatekeeping wasn't as harsh.
There was a huge fuss in science fiction a few years ago (look up the sad puppies), which was partly driven by opposition to the arrival of lots of literary writers into sf (there was more going on than that and I don't want to distract from the point).
I don't know what the arguments are in romance or mystery or whatever, as they aren't fields I pay attention to. But perhaps someone else can chime in?
As a sci fi fan, I don't want to say that the new style of writer shouldn't be there, but it does highlight how fuzzy and often useless the definitions of genre boundaries are. "Slice of life in space" is not really the same genre as "detailed narrative of fictional military conflict, with extensive focus on the hardware", or "exploration of how new technology changes the structure of social fabric". The later two aren't really the same genre as each other either, fwiw.
I think the animosity that has been expressed was more centred around various awards than the existence of the new subgenre, in that an award shifting abruptly from one subgenre to another without much overlap in audience is rather antagonistic. (and yes, I know there was a lot of other messy politics too, with awards caring about who the authors were instead of about the contents of the book, but even without that part there was an underlying issue)
I haven't read any of the recent Hugo winners (they depress me, to be honest) but a couple of years back my beef with one winning entry was "This isn't SF. This is a coming-out story for a Chinese-American guy to his traditional parents, with a few SF words slapped over it". It was a good story, but it was a conventional literary magazine piece with just "let me throw in a bit about genetic engineering and magic rain" for the SF requirements.
I don't mind new blood and new concepts, but I do mind "the award for Best Detective Short Story goes to this recipe for chicken casserole". It may be an excellent recipe, and when I want to cook a chicken casserole it may be just the thing, but it's not what is described on the tin.
I think it's fair to say that different parts of the broader sff genre have come into prominence, though I don't think that sff novels are as plotless as so much mainstream fiction (indeed, if they were, I wouldn't read them!). Also, "slice of life in space" has a lot of overlap with "exploration of how new technology changes society", it's just more implicit and less explicit.
And I don't think there is so much real change in the content of plots so much as how they are presented. If you read the synopsis of the Ancillary Justice series on Wikipedia, it reads like a pretty conventional space opera; it's hardly plotless slice of life - you can say similar for the other recent winners (The Three-Body Problem, the Broken Earth series, The Calculating Stars, A Memory Called Empire and Network Effect - I tend to the view that Ancillary Justice winning Best Novel is the point where it changed, no-one would describe Redshirts as literary).
I was going to say that Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was the only plotless novel I can remember even being nominated, but it turns out that it wasn't actually a nominee, unusually for the Vorkosigan series (which has eight nominations and three wins in that category). It came 14th on the nomination ballot, with only six nominees.
Of course, Among Others is pretty close to being plotless, but it's about the love of SF writing and fandom, and reminds me of nothing so much as Fallen Angels (Niven/Pournelle/Flynn).
Short fiction in the Hugos, sure - but that's always been a space for more experimental work.
Interesting! I’m a fanfiction reader, which often runs adjacent to romance as a genre/form, and while I can’t speak to romance in mainstream publishing, I can say there are an abundance of gifted writers telling quintessentially romantic stories with a literary bent in the relative freedom of fandom spaces. Can’t say if that’s a new surge of literary writers (given the form of fanfic is, in its current form, less than 50 years old) or if it’s merely due to how low-stakes/meritocratic fanfic can often be.
"which was partly driven by opposition to the arrival of lots of literary writers into sf"
Let me demur. There has long been "this Big Literary Name wrote SF or Fantasy, but since that's genre fiction not Real Proper Fiction, we don't count them as one of the filthy pulpeteers" tradition in literary criticism. Kipling is one such, but E.M. Forster is another (he wrote ghost/fantasy stories as well and his "The Machine Stops" is a seminal SF story, but good luck seeing him described as such a writer).
In the 70s, when SF was shaken up by the arrival of the New Wave writers (and it needed a shaking-up, no denying that), some of the big names in SF rather lost the run of themselves and started insisting they didn't write "science fiction" (since that was about robots and rocketships), they wrote "speculative fiction" which was ever so artful and high-brow and important social commentary (and also adapting that label had the happy effect of both permitting their publishers to shuffle them nearer to the Proper Literature on the bookstore shelves, while retaining the cash sales from the grubby unlettered fans of science fiction). J.G. Ballard was one of those, Margaret Atwood another (she has wavered, depending on the interview and the year, between "no I don't write SF I write proper fiction" and "yes, I'm totes a yuge SF fan and writer").
So the modern wokies are not the first upspringing of the event of literary writers into genre fiction, their predecessors and precursors in the 60s/70s were (and it also extended into crime/detective fiction, horror, you name all the popular genre fields). What may perhaps be somewhat different this time round is the (failed?) literary types who dress up their 'average literary magazine story' with a very thin veneer of SF language and win the prizes and get gushed over for being *so* ground-breaking and talented etc. etc. etc. But there is still definitely the old strain of "I don't write the rockets-and-robots stuff, I'm *Literary*" out there.
Will N.K, Jemisin make the crossover to Proper Literarture? Will she be regarded in the future as a great writer? Or is she a flash-in-the-pan currently popular for the topics she treats big fish in a small pond, where if she was writing the same stuff but not as SF, she'd just be one more progressive black female voice struggling for a slice of the pie in the Proper Literarture world? I see she has received a 'Genius Grant' so time will tell!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program
SF "outsiders" who write good stories seem to often get around the literary gatekeepers and not need their blessing in order to find audiences. Let the MFA professors toast their magic truth rain authors. Such authors seem unlikely to change the lives of their readers like the Neal Stephensons can. Also, I have a feeling that other countries might not stigmatize rocket-robot stories like the US gatekeepers do. Cixin Liu seems to be getting serious mainstream love in China for some brilliant but so-pure-it-almost-hurts scifi. That's an encouraging sign.
Are you including genre? I think there are modern science fiction and fantasy authors who write very good novels. I don't read litfic, and your comment could be true of it.
Are we talking about Raymond Carver-type short stories, like the play Michael Keaton is trying to put on on Broadway in "Birdman"? Is Raymond Carver still the template for MFA fiction training?
Maybe the problem is that there's virtually no market anymore for short stories, unlike in 1950 when American magazines published dozens of short stories every week. So people only write short stories anymore as career advancement tools to impress other people in the literary fiction industry: publishers, editors, creative writing professors, and other writers. And they've settled upon one fairly standardized style, Raymond Carver's, as a test of skill to determine career potential.
You are right, and so is Grateful College Student. Just different buckets. I felt Hoel could have written his take with "contemp. German literature" in mind, too. The novels that get on the long-list for the "important" Book-awards. If I open one: "Yeah, well written, indeed - Das IST Literatur! - do I want to read it? - Nah." - Hoel is not writing about Jonas Jonasson ;) - that was a fun read, though
Don't know if MFAs hurt writers, but they sure don't seem to help. The question is why do wannabee novelists continue to get MFAs when they obviously don't help? My guess is it's privileged people staying in school in order to delay life.
MFAs create a monoculture that isn't good for independent thinking--the very thing traditional novelists excelled at. Most great novelists were autodidacts. Who was Cervantes' tutor? I forget.
The death of the novel is probably down to commercial and cultural reasons. The greatest novelists alive are Knausgaard and Ferrante (And Kundera is not yet dead)--yet what percentage of readers of this blog--where all the readers are well-read--have read them? In the age of Hemingway the answer would be ~100% whether you liked his books or not.
I think Philip Roth was correct when he said about a decade ago that the death of the novel was nigh. He said that some people would still read novels just as some people still read Latin poetry, but that reading novels as a normal thing for normal people to normally do is beyond its twilight. I don't get the feeling that our erudite host reads many novels, new or old.
As Frank Zappa said at a keynote address to modern classical composers: Why do you continue to compose modern works when you already know that nobody gives a fuck?
"when they obviously don't help" - just because they might not make one a better writer doesn't mean they don't help if eg. they provide plenty of industry contacts. A publisher is more likely to publish a mediocre book from a friend than a good one from a stranger.
In the age of Hemingway, writing short stories was a good way to make money.
That means reading was one of the premiere forms of entertainment.
(They didn't have computer games or Twitter to distract them.)
So you should perhaps compare how many people have consumed the best example of Twitter or mobile phone games today?
I agree that the novel is dead, at least in the USA.
People still read novels just fine. It's just not the default for easy entertainment.
Btw, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesesucht
+1 (Love the Zappa quote btw, although since he got Pierre Boulez to conduct The Perfect Stranger, I don't think he meant it quite as dismissively!)
From having spoken to a few people pursuing MFAs, I think its really a problem downstream of culture; if you want to be a *serious person* today as a rising student, you apply to really intensive, competitive programs that are prestigious - medical school, Investment banking, working as a FAANG developer. If you are an ambitious student who wants to be a writer and all your friends are joining tournament-style competitive programs and somebody puts one in front of you that says "apply here to be a novelist" then your lizard brain sinks its teeth into it before you can even ask "but will this help me write?"
Its the product of a long category mistake that assumes that "great novelist" is just another prestigious job that can be attained by being the best student in your cohort, as opposed to say . . . the special province of some weirdos that relate to the human experience in a particular way. But if a college can market a program that will turn you into Hemmingway-lite (so Norman Mailer I guess?) then they're going to take the money.
This comment is already too long, but one last thought; the prestige TV drama has replaced the novel as the preferred class-signaling mechanism of the bourgeoise. Ironically films are much more like short stories in that they are self contained and intended to be consumed as a single unit; the serialized nature of TV has allowed for additional character development and nuance not available at the cinema. But mediums live and die; I don't think bas-relief has been a vital medium since the middle ages, but we can still appreciate a good frieze.
Another factor to consider is that in 1926 when Hemmingway published the "Sun Also Rises" there were ~16 American novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1926_American_novels) while in 2004 when Knausgaard's "A Time for Everything" came out there were ~300 American novels published (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2004_American_novels). Not to mention other competition for time (music, movies, video games, affordable travel) but it really is no surprise that there is less monolithic culture now compared to the past.
Those numbers look awfully small. I think those are only the novels which have a Wikipedia entry. I can believe that more novels get publishes nowadays than in the 1920s, but we can't tell from those lists. Eg Wikipedia might have a recency bias?
Of course, people don't just read novels from the current year. As time passes, the back catalogue tends to get larger, too.
It's possible but I would definitely expect an increase in the number of novels published. You're also correct about the fact that the back catalogue affects how many novels you can read each year and contributes to the splitting of culture
It's a pretty anodyne essay about the effects of institutionalization on contemporary writing. Even if you disagree with it, to say it is "truly insane" is probably way too far.
I liked the essay.
I think it has more to do with specialization of knowledge, in a few aspects.
First, if you make a great discover in your field, your work is now largely incomprehensible to everyone else on earth. There are maybe thousands who understand your work. Compare that to Darwin, where any educated reader could grasp it. Perhaps less true with Einstein. Something to look at might be the role of popular explainers of scientific achievements. I don’t ever recall seeing such a thing in history, prior to Einstein.
Second, because you have to specialize in a field, you probably can’t excel in multiple fields. So wheee a polymath might rise to high acclaim previously, then might now only have the one or two discoveries in their own field. Again, Einstein feels like a turning point. His annis mirabilis was all in physics. Compare that to Newton -- astronomy, physics, and calculus.
Third, some extreme version of the 80-20 rule applies. The reason that Newton could make big discoveries in multiple fields was that there was a lot to be discovered by the straightforward application of genius. Now we are to the point where you have to learn loads to contribute to the body of knowledge. So much more effort has to go in to move the needle. You said something very like this, but I call it out because it is the driving force behind my prior two points.
Yes, I was going to say this, but you beat me to it and said it well. In the 19th century, my great-great grandfather had a Masters in English Lit from Yale, and wound up as the Kansas State Botanist. I don't see that happening anymore; you have to pick your discipline and "stay in your lane."
I have a doctorate in theoretical physics from Chicago and ended up as an economist teaching in a law school. Still doable.
Surely only in that direction though...
Re: "So much more effort has to go in to move the needle"
Scott spun this into an entertaining short story in ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS, (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/)
Thousands?
Do you think I’m too high or too low? And for what field we’re you thinking?
Dozens or hundreds for many-most topics.
Probably less care...
I saw an answer on the web for how many physicists there are -- 372,000. Of those, there was an estimate with no citation that 8,000 were astrophysicists. That seems like a reasonable data point supporting “thousands.” Yeah, the data might be unreliable.
Those numbers seem reasonable but radio astronomers typically have little contact with xray people with gravitational modelers, etc. Many, many subgroups...
I would have thought that they can still largely follow, read, and absorb the implications of each others’ work. But I don’t personally know any astrophysicists to ask!
Yeah, depends on subfield. In pure math sometimes it's a dozen, give or take. In the social sciences even I can read the papers, and I'm not trained in the social sciences.
You may not be familiar with the practical issues in the field, even when the *words* are comprehensible to the layman. You may not know that you should be suspicious of papers using the Frobinator method because everyone in the field knows that it's all just confounders and anyone who cares about integrity would be using Blorks instead.
Any academic can probably name several people in their field who they'd consider geniuses, but their names would be unknown to the vast majority of people
Indeed, I can list several mathematicians of the 20th century whose work was shatteringly ground breaking, and several of them are still alive. It's just that you can't even understand why their work was so important until you have two years of grad school in pure mathematics under your belt. (Heck, a number theorist and I would likely give overlapping but different lists.)
"If people are still working on AI a hundred years from now, I expect them to talk about Hinton in the same way biologists talk about Darwin now."
This seems (very) wrong. New fields are discovered all the time. People who enter these fields quickly grab all the low hanging fruit. Some of these fields also go on to become important in the future. However, these researchers aren't generally recognized as Einsteins in their own right.
Darwin didn't just create a new field of knowledge. He fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves, religion, pretty much everything. Man was not created in the image of God; he evolved from apes. And so on. Comparing Hinton to Darwin seems ridiculous, although I am sure Hinton is a very fine researcher in his own right, as are the 100-200 researchers alive today who have created their own fields and proved some interesting results.
The assumption here, is that AI will have achieved great things, leading to it becoming a major field of study over the century.
The theory for Universal functional solvers had existed for decades before Hinton. However, they seemed to be useless in practice. Hinton's (and his peers') main contribution was identifying the key bottleneck in their practicality. He showed that arbitrary universal function learners CAN practically be implemented, as long you figure out how to facilitate a 2-way information superhighway between input data and labels. (the 4 big moments= Backprop, Imagenet , Alexnet, and IMO, now Self-attention)
Just like Darwin, Hinton's key observation was a philosophical conception of knowledge, a couple of layers upstream from the domain it influenced. We now see it expressed more concretely in the "Bitter Lesson" : http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
If the AI revolution truly delivers, and we build models that are as effective as humans; then it will fundamentally change how we perceive sentience, intelligence and knowledge. If human intelligence, life and learning are recast in a computational view, then I can see Hinton's (and peers') contribution being considered to be as important a Darwin's.
But was backprop a scientific advance or a technical one? Was it building a cathedral or working out how arches work?
Depends on how you look at it and it is a great question.
It was a scientific advance in the same way that "human crowds operate like fluids" was a scientific advance. It did not introduce new math (so not calculus or complex numbers level), but it was the first and otherwise unintuitive instance of applying a pre-existing mathematical idea to a field.
What makes Hinton's insight special, is that it wasn't a solution to a problem. It was a conception of the problem itself. That is to me, the key distinction between that and Alexnet, self-attention and imagenet. They came out of careful inquiry of a well understood problem. For me, the former is a lot harder.
Note that Darwin didn't do all that - the interpreters of Darwin did. I would not be surprised if, a generation or two from now, people see Turing as the one that did what you are now attributing to Darwin, and which previous generations attributed to Copernicus.
It's hard to distinguish Darwin and the interpreters of Darwin here. There's hardly any extrapolation required between what Darwin said and all of the above. The credit given to interpreters should increase with the extrapolation required, and there is hardly any here
I think you should take another look at "On the Origin of Species". :) All the big stuff is there! I felt like I was rereading Dawkins when I finally read the original.
I think Mr Hoel does count parental tutoring as tutoring, simply because it’s one-on-one; this presumably has less of an effect if the parent isn’t an expert in the field, but would result in, eg, homeschooling producing higher SAT scores that can’t be entirely chalked up to genetics. But I don’t know if that’s actually the case.
Discounting parental tutoring is pretty egregious. So many extremely smart people I have heard of had parents in their field who took a very active interest in their education, and while my parents were in a different field, just doing simple experiments after watching YouTube together and debating problems and answering questions while doing simple things like driving or grocery shopping, were pretty influential for me academically.
If you're claiming we no longer have geniuses because we no longer have tutoring, you can't count parental tutoring as tutoring.
He could argue that the mass replacement of homeschooling with public schooling has caused today's lack of geniuses. (ie, It takes a *lot* of parental tutoring in a specific subject to make someone a genius in that subject.) Dunno if I'd buy that, though.
Umm, only if the rates were somehow identical. . . How many older brothers introduce their younger ones to Euclid's proofs now-a-days? (as Russell's elder brother did)
...unless you think parental tutoring has also declined precipitously. But I agree that it makes the point significantly harder to argue.
You sure can, if you observe that the time children spend with their parents has drastically decreased over the past 200 years. If you were a child in a modest artisanal class family the 1700s, you probably spent near 100% of your day in the immediate company of your family. Your parents would not have dropped you off at daycare or school on the way to work at 8am and picked you back up at 5.30pm.
Right, of the six examples Scott gives for not being tutored, literally three of them were homeschooled and tutored by their mothers or fathers, and two of their mothers/fathers were schoolteachers. So it was direct aristocratic 1-on-1 tutoring in many of these cases.
Yeah I noticed Hoel's post seemed to assume that the only thing required to become a world-famous genius is to be above a certain, fixed, ability threshold. It seems much more likely to me that there's a fixed pool of fame available and today it's divided among many more people, so even if they're as brilliant as past geniuses or more they get much less attention.
In other words it's a pretty straightforward case of Syndrome Syndrome: "When everyone's super, no one will be."
Also Hoel doesn't prove that there are fewer geniuses, just a lower percentage. For things like physics where there is space for only a handful of acclaimed geniuses that will by necessity lower the percentage over time.
Precisely. Genius per capita is not what's being measured, acclaim per capita is, and acclaim feels like the sort of thing that there's a constant amount of no matter how much the population grows, leading to far less per person over time
So who is the modern Beethoven?
What does this question even mean? Who's the artist that will be the most aclaimed in a century? Who has some objective level of talent greater than his peers, as judged centuries later? Who has lived a monomaniacal life and produced art that will endure for centuries?
I mean, the answer is obvioulsy Prince, I just don't know what the question is.
Maybe Billie and Finneas. They’re young enough right now with a body of work that eclipses many veteran composers. Of course the Beatles will be remembered in a century. Are they Beethoven level genius? Maybe.
The first 2 lines are a joke right? Billie hasn't done anything that Lorde or Taylor or Avril or like, Joan Jett, didn't do.
Can’t say I generally listen to any of those, but Billie and Finneas (it’s really a writing duo) have produced some excellent songs already. And they are yet young.
There's hundreds of musicians better than Beethoven today.
Toby Fox makes video games. And also makes really good music. People have done orchestral versions of his music.
He's just one random example. There's literally hundreds of them.
Eminem is a musical genius. Weird Al Yankovich is a musical genius and he sings songs about being the tour guide on the Jungle Cruise.
You don't have one "musical genius" because there's so many.
Lol. Nice troll.
See also: video games. It used to be that a lone genius could crank out a hit game in a week, but now you have thousands of games that noone has ever heard of coming out each year and even the most creative are basically praying for a lucky break to go viral and actually make any money.
One additional aspect for the sciences: even if you have a genius doing genius stuff these days, there will only be a few people who are actually able to understand how genius that work is. Not enough to make anyone famous.
In the arts, on the other hand, I think there's just too many geniuses at work. This diverts the attention of the public and again, prevents any particular genius from actually becoming famous.
I don't know about that last part. I don't feel inundated with genius works of art, more wondering why everything cultural seems terrible these days.
Don't know much of your personal taste and circumstances but I think many people in that situation would benefit from either a) improved filtering that brings them into contact with more of the specific niches that would appeal to them, or b) treatment for depression so they become more capable of enjoying things in general.
I agree on both counts. To the first, it seems that filtering/recommendation systems have improved, but not enough to account for the low quality of newer products. For the second, I tried that, didn't do much. It definitely didn't make me able to enjoy e.g. new movies more than older ones.
I would be open to a 3rd possibility that the producers of popular culture are selecting more for crap than they did before, such that by the time cultural products that require a lot of money get produced you don't get good things getting made anymore. I wouldn't be surprised to find Hollywood is ripe for a big upheaval, or perhaps some way of finding books that get a lot of genius authors found.
Which old movies do you enjoy, and which new movies do you see them as in opposition to? People still make all kinds of new movies, it's not just Marvel cinema. Marvel gets all the headlines and cultural attention, because lots of people watch it and it makes boatloads of money, but if you want other varieties they're certainly out there.
Those are some perhaps unusual preferences, but I see quite a few I enjoyed as well on that list! I really need to rewatch The Thing... I think I saw it when I was like 10 and really wasn't in a position to appreciate it at the time.
I am taken by the fact that only 6 of the latter list are post writers' strike (2008). It seems to me things really went downhill right around then, 2010 or so at least. I also note that Suspiria (2018) is a remake of Suspiria (1977). (Have you seen the original? I have heard good things about both, although that sort of movie isn't really my thing.)
Really, up until maybe Endgame, Marvel was making most of the good modern movies. Not brilliant works of art maybe, but good. Then things took a turn...
Going farther back, Lord of the Rings trilogy was good; the Hobbit trilogy was confusingly awful. You can easily see why: gotta make three movies, cram in lots of excess stuff to get crazy CGI action, shoehorn in characters we know, everyone is a goddamned orc killing super hero, yadda yadda. Less obvious, the screen writers had no idea of what the story was actually about.
Most movies now seem to be remakes/reboots. When was the last really good comedy? I might be a little biased since I have little kids, but for a while and up until a few years back Pixar was about the only studio that seemed capable of making a really moving story, now they are in the hole.
I suppose if one wanted to identify the crash in movie and tv quality you would first look at the writers' strike back when. I don't know that it was the actual driver instead of merely proximate, but things have been sharply downhill for 10-15 years.
Marvel has never made a good movie
Comedies have gone away (or to Netflix/other streaming services) because of the increasing power of foreign box office.
Also, there's so much good TV out there it's impossible to watch it all.
There is since good TV at the moment. Chernobyl is a good example.
"The Hobbit" movies are a good example. The LOTR movies were insanely successful, so naturally the studios wanted to milk the cow some more. The only other finished work, and one that had Bilbo and explained the backstory to how he got the One Ring, was "The Hobbit".
But that was a kid's book and honestly only has the content for one movie. *Maybe* you can stretch it out to two movies, but then you run the risk of "butter over too much bread". But the studios wanted a trilogy because they wanted to repeat the success of the LOTR movies (and more movies = more money). Hence the amount of padding that had to be introduced, including the Kili and Tauriel romance which was just plain nonsensical.
However, while I do complain about the Jackson movies both LOTR and The Hobbit, when they get it right, they really get it right (mostly by stepping back and putting on screen what Tolkien wrote on the page, expanding it sensitively where needed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyy_FIYE7EE
Personally I find that filtering by "Made outside of America" is incredibly effective at improving the average quality of the media. Whatever problems there are with script writers, they've not really hit Europe much yet.
perhaps but some trends are real, let's please allow that to be at least a hypothetical possibility, which in some cases could turn out to be true instead of your other options.
Yeah I was skipping some steps there, but if other people consider there to be a lot of high quality products available that's evidence that the problem is less an overall decline in quality and more you personally having trouble finding or appreciating the good products that do exist.
hmm, maybe I should have added that to make matters worse, genius art is also buried under mass media
That's the surprising part for me: for how much stuff gets made now such a low percentage is seemingly any good. With any kind of constant level of artistic achievement you would think there would be a constant percentage of good stuff, so more good stuff per year than in previous decades. Instead it seems like you are lucky to get even as much as before. Considering how much recent movies and tv have been pulling ideas from other media and older movies and tv, that seems even worse... if everything was new creative stuff, sure, that's going to be harder, but working from pre-established quality and it still gets messed up? (Then again, maybe adaptations are far easier to fail at then people think, and the few good ones buck the trend. I don't know.)
I've said before, for decades, normies were basically subsidizing cinephiles wants and desires, because both filmmakers and the people in charge of Hollywood studios were both fans of cinema, to some extent, so even though it wasn't perfect, there was some space.
But, then, those studios either merged with or got bought by bigger corporations, and people whose job was to make money came in, and realized, "why are we doing all this extra bs in an action movie?" That's how you get series like The Fast & The Furious (which I enjoy) which are basically two to 2 1/2 hour thrill rides, devoid of anything but very base themes, and are insanely wildly popular all around the world. Because that's what people actually want.
People point to the past when even popcorn flicks were supposedly more high minded, and try to blame the audience, but my argument has always been, that same audience would've been fine, and in fact, probably happier with some dumber films. However, if you only give people a choice between a bunch of popcorn flicks made by auteurs, they're going to choose one of them to watch, even if they grumble about the more fancy schmancy parts of the movie as they leave. If anything, and I say this as somebody who loves many of these films, there's lot of movies from the 80's and 90's that could've been even more successful if they were 20% dumber.
back in the 70s, people made porn movies with actual plots and some (aspirational) real acting. Then folks realized customers skipped over these parts and only cared about the money shots, and now the industry mostly just shoots "scenes" without plot. So basically you are saying fast & furious is similarly just distilled action scene porn.
I think the history of movies cuts against your 20% dumber hypothesis. If we look at sequels in the 80's and 90's (in general, really) we typically see a decline in revenue, Back to the Future being a notable exception. Yet we should expect the reverse: you have a known good thing, they are making more of it, the audience knows they are going to like it if they liked the first one... should be easy to make as much money. Unless lots of people saw the first one by mistake and so were warned away from the second, it should be more successful. Yet almost as a rule they were not. The Die Hard movies definitely got dumber with each iteration, and kept shedding fans and making less each go around, despite increasing wealth to spend on seeing movies.
Now, if you were to argue that Die Hardest: Viagra Overdose was WAY more than 20% dumber than the first one, and that most sequels way overshoot 20% dumber, I could totally agree. I just think that we would need a way to dial it in to be sure.
The bottleneck moved.
Previously, timeslots on TV channels and showtimes on big screens were rate-limiting factors, so the industry was structured to make optimal use of those scarce resources, which implied fewer, higher-quality productions.
Over time, those resources became less scarce: cable enabled more channels so there were more timeslots (think about the relative quality of shows on broadcast networks v. those on basic cable channels); VCRs enabled studios to show movies to people other than during a limited run on a finite number of screens (again, think about the relative quality of theater releases v. that of direct-to-video movies).
The trend has only accelerated as more avenues to access audiences open and fewer viewers are only accessible via the traditional mediums. The optimal strategy has shifted toward more, lower-quality productions.
Can you recognise genius art when you see it? I am not sure that I can. I can appreciate technical skill, but "art"?
Well, not reliably in every type and genre, but in principle, yes. I'd even say it's possible to come up with objective-ish criteria. There's art that is deeply impressive, in idea or execution or both, even if it is by no means perfect; and then there's enjoyable highly polished art that is so generic it might as well have been created by an algorithm.
Advancements in technology, marketing, and disposable incomes might make it a little easier to make and sell good art, but much much easier to make and sell bad art, thus diminishing the ratio of good art to bad on the market.
That doesn’t seem obviously true. What’s the argument there?
You don't need to understand a scientist's work to know that they're a genius. Everyone knows that Einstein was a genius, but few can explain what he did.
People still understand that changing how we think about space and time is significant, even if they cant explain what changed. if you look at the list of recent Nobel price winners and things they earned it for, it doesnt feel as significant, but that doesnt mean these people are less genius.
Einstein only became publicly regarded as a genius because of some very unique circumstances around the popularisation of nuclear theory in the early 20th century that made it much more salient to people. There's a dozen equally good physicists from the same period whoost people have never heard of.
I think it's hard to make the case that there are a dozen equally good physicists from the same period. Einstein is one of those rare people like Darwin or Turing where just reading something of theirs that you've never heard of, you realize that it has important insights for another field, and that it eventually got picked up decades later. (Very different from Newton, who produced a lot of duds as well as genius.) Sure, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Planck, Curie did some really important individual things, perhaps in some cases as significant as any individual thing Einstein did. But just seeing the role Einstein played in generating relativity, in generating quantum mechanics, and in confirming the theory of molecules, all in 1905, it's clear he was something special.
I don't agree with that. Einstein is certainly a very smart fellow, and his insight into relativity is unparalleled. But Dirac and Gibbs are at least his equal, in terms of sheer creativity, and could be said to be equally foundational in their fields (relativistic field theory and statistical mechanics, respectively) and I would say are far less well known.
What did Einstein have to do with generating quantum mechanics, by the way? If you're thinking Bose-Einstein statistics, that just takes QM as an input, it is otherwise classical reasoning.
Dirac is one of the few I was thinking of as possibly on his level (though I don't understand what makes the relevant people I know put him there). Gibbs I haven't heard of in this same way, but even so, it's not a dozen.
I'm thinking that the paper on the photoelectric effect is really one of the important instigations of quantum theory - as important as Planck's work on the ultraviolet catastrophe.
Don't see how. Planck invented the photon, Einstein showed how it could explain the PE. Very solid work, don't get me wrong, but not the kind of originality found in relativity -- or by others in QM. (I don't actually include Planck in that, Planck invented the photon as a kludget to get the right answer, and without any genuine insight into what it meant.)
Yeah. Look at Vivzipop or Kurtkezart on youtube.
Here's a more simple reason - it used to be geniuses got a lot of attention because the only people who cared to pay attention was bored rich people without a lot to do, and thus, they became famous. Now, in a world where the normal person has a lot more money and ability to focus on attention on what they want, it turns out the mass want to pay attention to people who are attractive, sing well, and are entertaining.
In 1650, the equivalent of current AI researchers might've been famous, because a few rich lords cared about that issue. Now, they're decently to very well paid people whose names won't be known unless they happen to create a company that gets bought by Google.
I'd argue there are indeed, a lot of very smart people who are doing work close to the geniuses of the past - it's just more esoteric, because all the simple stuff has been found, and so it's more confusing to the laymen and takes more work. Gravity, evolution, etc. is simple enough for even a less intelligent than average person to grasp, even if they disagree. The things we're looking at now, not so much.
Without any explanation of what you are talking about, who can tell if "what we are looking at now" is much more esoteric. What's replaced Darwinism? Of course the general theory and quantum physics are far from being non-esoteric, or easily understood by laymen, or even physicists themselves.
Maybe its string theory but the jury is out on whether that is even useful.
I wonder if it could be that, in a world where economic growth has established unheard of levels of general affluence (in developed countries) that there's less fitness advantage to superior intelligence than there was when material depravation was something like the norm. Like, it's still an advantage to your perceived attractiveness to be smarter now, but a moderately-intelligent partner can provide a level of comfort and security that was once reserved for the truly exceptional, such as the exceptionally intelligent.
Probably not!
You may be on to something. To be a renowned genius in science, art, or much of anything else, requires both superior intelligence and superior diligence. Or ambition, "grit", "hustle", what have you.
In a poor society, intelligence alone is no bar to starving in the gutter if you're lazy. Or maybe you muddle through without starving, but an undateable unhappy loser. So even the smart people, learn to be diligent as a matter of course. In a wealthy society, particularly a meritocratic one organized along our present lines, a smart lazy person will still get straight A's in high school, a decently high SAT score, and from there the obvious path to an upper-middle-class desk job without having to really stretch themselves. So genius is less likely to be accompanied by diligence.
And to tie back to the original thesis, one thing private tutoring might be good for is imposing diligence on lazy clever lordlings, in case their being embedded in a local cushion of prosperity might otherwise have let them slide by. The clever non-rich would have had to learn diligence the hard way, or starve.
I actually think you have this backwards. At least in the US, we switched from assortive mating on objective measures of attractiveness (facial symetry, various hip/stomach/chest ratios, dental quality) to IQ. We used to have more of a fitness advantage to being attractive (for make babies) and physcially fit (to pay for them) to being smart (now good for both making babies and paying for them). The fitness advantage is now about living up to your intelectual potential instead of your physical potential.
How what percent of potentialy world-altering intelects were farm hands, dock workers, or laundresses in 1822 compared to 2022? Hard to stand out when there's a reserve army of intelectuals.
Silicon Valley would like a word.
Actually I think there's an opposite problem - SV (and to a lesser extent finance) brain-drains people from useful fields. Why bother with grants and tenure-hunting if you can just do hilariously easy work, print money then go FIRE and do whatever you want?
I've met a lot of scientists in the last few years, and I've never talked with one that was even remotely motivated by money. Software ate the world and took all the greedy people.
A 4th option related to number 3 might be called "The low ceiling syndrome" wherein the number of obstacles to doing anything mounts up so high that the sorts of things people used to do and be called genius is now very difficult. Just off the top of my head, going to college at 14 is probably nearly impossible now, much less working early, starting a physical business, things like that. It has been pointed out before that much of the rapid breakthroughs in software were done by the young, partially because they didn't have to ask permission, and at most forgiveness. You can't get big innovations in many fields because getting permission is so difficult.
Related perhaps is how one gets recognized as a genius. Academia is almost certainly not a useful way to spend much time if you are a genius, but that's where we put kids when they are smart. How many geniuses spend time writing papers no one will read instead of solving actual problems? How many geniuses spend time in finance making money off trivial things?
I actually know a person who started college shortly before the age of 13, and received her PhD at 19, and while she was certainly highly intelligent, I wouldn't describe her as an extraordinary genius, nor did she make any pretense of being one. The way she explained it, there are only a couple large programs in the United States today which systematically put young gifted students into a university setting, and she was in the larger of those two. When I met her in her late twenties, she was the head of a university writing department where all the professors under here were older than she was. It's exceedingly unlikely anyone else in this discussion has heard of her.
I think answer "there are lots more scientists now" answer is more important than "good ideas are rarer" or "democratic norms". But I also notice that I know more geniuses from among my personal acquaintances than from the newspapers, and that acclaimed scientists today are much less likely to be regarded as being at the top of their field than previously. Famous scientists of the first half of the 20th century were great scientists; famous scientists since 1970 were great communicators, like Carl Sagan or Neil de Grasse Tyson.
I think that social organization has changed so that geniuses are no longer identifiable, so they don't get the support they need, and (more importantly) the share of attention they would need to become *known* geniuses.
One part of this is simply that there are more scientists. But I think there is also a more sinister dynamic at work: our filters are no longer high-bandpass filters, but bandpass filters, which filter out both the lows and the highs. In some cases, notably philosophy and the arts, they've become low-bandpass filters, which are likely to filter out anything reasonable and amplify anything bizarre or insane.
Another important factor is that, after 1970, we began using acceptance into an ivy league as an all-purpose filter for everything. Take a student who wants to become a prominent scientist, and whose SAT scores are in the 99th percentile. The odds multiplier that student gets from attending an ivy-equivalent (top 20) school was about 80 in 1997 (at least in physics, the field I used for my informal study). The odds multiplier for winning a Nobel prize became infinite after 1970--I didn't find a single case of a physicist who attended college after 1970, won a Nobel, and never attended a top-20 school in their subfield. Neither of these were true before 1970. And can you guess what odds ratio multiplier you get now for being on the Supreme Court by attending Harvard? I won't even say; guess, and then check the Wikipedia list of Supreme Court members.
Meanwhile, the ivies eliminated merit-based scholarships in the 1960s, which would have prevented more than half of Nobel-winning physicists who *did* attend the ivies before 1970 from doing so. And they escalated the price exponentially over time, and de-emphasized intelligence and academic work as criteria for admission, while emphasizing race, sex, and community involvement.
They've also been adjusting their practices to game the US News & World Report rankings, which doesn't have any criteria that measure the quality of education, but only the success of students who are admitted. So using their enormous wealth and omnipotent social networks to provide advantages to their graduates is essential to stay in the top 3 spots in the ranking. It's nearly impossible to flunk out of Harvard or Yale now, because having fewer than 99% of students graduate would tank their US News rating. (And I'd guess that 1% who don't graduate is mostly people who quit to start companies.)
I think you have pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Yup, Goodhart's Law strikes again. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The intensity of intellectual monoculture in the US makes pre-1845 Ireland look like the Garden of Eden.
Holy shit, it just clicked where your little icon is from. Or I had a stroke. Either way, well done! I need to look up old episodes of that show for my kids.
_Square One_ was wonderful and the writing on _Mathnet_, in particular, had lots of little touches that I now appreciate as an adult, e.g. George planning a vacation to Nomanisson Island.
Neil de Grasse Tyson might be a great communicator but in looking at his science publications, on Wikipedia,
they don't seem groundbreaking and all of his many awards are for public service and science communication not for science research...
I'm not even sure that he's that great of a science communicator given the pool of talent. Tyson does not appear uniquely gifted here. Rather he's the one plucked and booked to have science communication jobs on because, on some level, it's got to be somebody and media branding is self-reinforcing. Some of the comments in this thread seem to retroactively assign genius to the person who was in a position, by luck or prior social status, to be the influential or remembered one.
He fizzled out on his first doctorate, dicked around for the 80s, and then finally got a PhD in his early 30s. He's never done any real research.
The only real explanation for Tyson's is he's reasonably decent looking, gets to talk about the stars, is a good salesman, and he's black. Felicitous combination of skill and genetic happenstance. But not exceptional brains.
+1 on the great communicators part. Many scientific fields have advanced to the point that they are incomprehensible to the intelligent, educated non-expert. For some fields (high-prestige fields maybe?) we see popularizers like Sagan and Tyson. (I’d have said Jacques Cousteau, as my daily throwback.)
But general relativity and quantum theory are unintelligible to most people, yet we know Einstein and a long list of quantum physicists.
How do we know? Not from reading Einstein’s papers. We know because we saw a PBS documentary or some other popularization of his work.
Einstein was a celebrity during his lifetime, long before TV was really a thing
So how did they know? How many people who admired his work actually read his work?
Einstein had his own personal Carl Sagan, Arthur Eddington:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48369980
Well, in fact Einstein wrote a very nice little semi-popular book (it had equations) called "Relativity", which explains special relativity in-depth. I read it when I was at most 12 (I only know I read it at an Indian Guides camp, and I think 12 is their age limit), and I probably didn't know anything about Einstein then other than that he was famous. I have to say, he was a great communicator--I doubt I've ever seen a difficult idea explained so simply and clearly.
There was this bomb that became quite news item.
Special relativity, though, is remarkably simple, at least mathematically.
Yes, but difficult to grasp conceptually. The math existed before Einstein used it; it just hadn't been looked at the right way.
Or a more niche example popular here: Bret Devereaux
Why would eliminating merit-based scholarships have prevented those past people from attending? Anyone with below-average household income now gets a free ride, and the only merit you need is enough merit to get admitted. It's only the children of the rich that have to pay those sticker prices.
Because there is a finite number of slots, and if merit spots are removed in favor of "whatever else" slots, then if you have merit but not whatever else, which might be money, you are out of luck.
Merit slots haven't been removed. Rich people who earn merit spots are no longer paid for, and poor people who earn those merit spots can now get them if the rich people turn them down because of the price.
I read the biographies of Nobel winners in physics, and many of them were quite poor, and some even wrote that they'd never have been able to go without that scholarship. The more-generous financial aid they have now didn't exist until about 2000. When I was applying to colleges in the 1980s, Harvard's financial aid policy was to assist low-income, low net-worth families, but the value of your house counted, and the ceiling on net wealth was less than the value of a house; and the formula didn't consider how many other kids your parents wanted to send to college. So for 20 or 30 years, nobody who was in-between "poor" and "rich" could go to the Ivies, especially if they had siblings.
The merit-based free rides were quite abundant before the 1960s; I remember that one college--I think it was Columbia--had an entire dormitory just for students on merit scholarships. They were eliminated for football. The Ivy League is a football league, and sometime in the 1960s passed a rule that members couldn't have academic scholarships, because schools were giving them to good football players in order to win games.
It sounds like it has gotten a lot easier for low to middle income people to be able to afford these universities since now *all* of them that are accepted get the full ride instead of having to earn a special “merit fellowship” on top of admission.
They should cut back on sports and eliminate legacies though.
They don't get a free ride. From Harvard's financial aid office: "We base aid awards on need, not on merit... we meet 100 percent of our students' demonstrated financial need."
But the computation of "need" is much more generous than it used to be.
I noticed about 30 years ago that the Ivies seemed to actually be *proud* that they never awarded anything based on merit. I only learned recently that they *are* proud of that fact. Marxists began promoting the idea that merit-based aid in education is evil around 1968.
George Church is certainly a great scientist, appears literally in every worthwhile project everywhere, nobody recognizes him other than people already in bio.
Unless you do Nikola Tesla levels of controversial wizardry you'll be unknown among normies, regardless of your genius.
No arguing with the numbers, but here is how I see the direction of causality: Top universities are pretty good at sniffing out which researchers, law students, etc., are on their way up, and they then vacuum up these people and take credit for their eventual success.
1. As I partly explained, there were decades somewhere between 1970 and 2000 (I don't know just when it began & ended, as historical info on financial aid is very hard to find) when few middle-class white males could afford to go to most of the ivies, as there were no merit scholarships for them, and they were too wealthy to qualify for financial aid, but not wealthy enough to afford those colleges. I know this because I was one of those people. It's implausible that zero of those people could have been top scientists or lawyers.
(There were always some merit scholarships for anyone who wasn't a white male, usually provided not by the college, but by some non-profit or alumni association. There were also sometimes full-tuition merit scholarships not based on sex or race for students entering particular fields, provided again not by the college, but by professional organizations. I had a friend who got a full ride into engineering at Stanford in 1985 that way. And there were always small merit scholarships, like that provided by the NMSE; but they were peanuts compared to tuition after 1980. There was also one special exception: if you were going into astronomy, you could attend the University of Arizona cheaply, which was considered a top school in astronomy because it had great telescopes.)
2. Harvard can't be so good at identifying great law students from their high school transcripts that they vacuum up more than 90% of those with the potential to be Supreme Court judges. And even if Harvard *were* that good at identifying them, wouldn't Yale be just as good at it?
3. These decisions are made about people at age 17. People change. It isn't plausible that decisions made about people when they're 17 have that much predictive accuracy for their performance decades later.
4. The data these college actually have to base their decisions on--test scores, GPA, recommendations, essays--have too great a variance, both in their predictive ability, and (for subjective data) in the accuracy of judging them, to have that much predictive accuracy.
5. People at the ivies are median 98th percentile. Impressive, but not genius level. The objective data these colleges use weren't designed to discriminate between people above the 98th percentile or so; they were designed to work around the median.
6. I have known and worked with many people from Harvard, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, as I lived in Boston for years, working for a company full of Carnegie Mellon grads, and have also worked with Harvard & Stanford grads at the NSA, the NIH, NASA, and at the J Craig Venter Institute. I've also interviewed and sometimes hired people from Harvard and MIT, and dated a girl from Yale. They're smart, but only two of the very smartest people I know attended an ivy (as far as I know, anyway).
7. Scott didn't attend an ivy-level school, or at least didn't mention one when describing his educational background on his website.
Thank you for the clarification. I didn't realize that your numbers were restricted entirely to undergrad programs. Were they? You were talking about how few of the top physicists "never attended a top-20 school in their subfield" - so I assumed that someone who went to Iowa St. for undergrad and Harvard for PhD had attended a top-20 school in their subfield. If you were only counting undergrad institution then I have to seriously re-evaluate some stuff about physics.
That's a good question! Unfortunately, I can't find my data; I think I had to purge it, because back in the 1990s my student account had only a few megabytes of disk space. I began this survey when I was near completing my PhD at a third-tier school, and only then discovered that almost none of the men I was in grad school with were able to find academic jobs. I wanted to know what my own chances were of finding an academic job after my girlfriend, who was also in the department, told me that, as a male graduating from that university, they were essentially zero.
We had, IIRC, 4 female and at least 30 male grad students attending at the same time as me. 3 of the women and 3 of the men got academic positions after graduation. THESE NUMBERS ARE VERY UNRELIABLE as I made them years later from memory plus a little googling. That gives an odds-ratio multiplier of 27 for being female. It would have been infinity, as the one woman who didn't eventually find a position had technically failed out of the program; but her husband was the university's best sysadmin, and would leave if they kicked her out. (That wasn't a threat; it was just a fact--she'd have to go to a different school, and he'd have to go with her.) The 3 men who did find academic jobs all had many publications before graduation; 2 of them had organized and run a conference. The positions they found were at colleges I'd never heard of.
(This great advantage to females wouldn't show up if you did a study of people hired, because the advantage to females is much less or nonexistent among grads of top universities.)
My recollection is that (a) I counted either grad or undergrad as "attended a top-20 school", (b) it was unlikely after 1970 (less than half, maybe less than a third, but I don't remember) for someone who went to an ivy-equivalent grad to have gone to a non-ivy-equivalent undergrad, and (c) after 1970, it was significantly less-common for anyone to go an ivy-equivalent grad school who hadn't gone to at least a second-tier undergrad (say, U of Michigan in engineering).
On the other hand, of the "2 very smartest people" I know who went to an ivy-level school, one of them was Sasha Chislenko, who never went through the admissions process, but just hung out at the MIT AI lab until someone--Minsky, I think--invited him to be his grad student, not knowing he wasn't even a student. So that kind of recruiting can still happen, but it's extremely rare nowadays in academia. (Although it's the norm when it comes to finding good football and basketball players. Universities are MUCH better at seeking athletic talent than at seeking intellectual talent.)
I've been on numerous job search committees, and was always shocked at how automatically people in industry assume that the ivy-league grades are the best candidates. They literally rank all the data on the resume backwards with respect to its reliability: They first sort the pile of resumes by college. Going thru the pile, they would probably check GPA; they might check SAT scores; but I don't think anyone but me ever checked references or read publications.
We always interviewed the ivy-league candidates first. They would be of above-average ability; but if we made them an offer, they'd jerk us around by starting a bidding war with other companies; and if we hired them, half the time they'd quit after a few weeks for a late counter-offer; and the ones who stayed on permanently, weren't worth what we paid for them. Then we'd invite the state university grads, but by then half of them would have found a job. Sometimes we worked our way down the stack all the way to people from obscure colleges, but usually not.
I checked back with my own references after sending out about 500 job applications over a period of more than 20 years, and not one of my references had ever been contacted by anyone, not even by the companies that hired me. Even the Defense Department, when doing background checks on me, never contacted my references, though they did contact my college roommates and next-door neighbors.
I've attended, I think, 7 or 8 colleges myself, ranging from community colleges to Johns Hopkins. The best instructor I ever had, who was ruthless about ensuring his students learned the material or failed the class, was at a community college; the worst was at Johns Hopkins. (The /very/ worst was a professor teaching an online course at Stanford, but I'm not counting online courses.)
There are, though, a lot of geniuses who went to school who performed badly there and hated it, and/or are quoted as being very critical of it.
For example:
"I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of my class"- Thomas Edison
"Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."- Plato
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school" - Margaret Mead
"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." - Beatrix Potter
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."- Thoreau
"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school."- George Bernard Shaw
"How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home." -Winston Churchill
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."--Einstein
On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder about PhD programs: Its hard to get away from what your advisor believes and wants to study. Programs become a way of replicating professor's thoughts and biases. Maybe it was easier for a Mozart, Darwin, or Einstein to be somewhat self-taught, and come to unconventional ways of thinking.
Well, I cannot be the only person to note how few great artists graduated from art school.
"Go to college if you want to get laid.
Go to the library if you want to get an education." - F. Zappa.
Not sure how that works in the sciences, however. It's been some years since we last saw a self-taught scientific prodigy.
The guy making his own integrated circuits from scratch in his garage might qualify for engineering. He doesn't have any formal education in silicon lithography at least and he's making a fair bit of his own equipment.
I think a big part of the difficulty is that you can't get access to the sorts of instruments that you would need to do worthwhile research outside of academia (which has major issues) or industry (where you'll be unknown outside your field unless you happen to co-found a big company). They're just orders of magnitude too costly. How do you self-teach and get to the point where you might be able to contribute meaningfully to most fields? Software is one of the only areas where the barrier is low enough.
And mathematics.
Seems like an obvious case of selection bias. Nobody talks about the people who did well in school because its not worth remarking on
Yeah, nobody makes a motivational poster out of, "yeah, school was cool. It was annoying at times, but I had a good time."
Suppose we extended this argument to a sport with objective measurements like the 100 meter dash. The objective results show a vast improvement. But there would probably be only one or two "geniuses" at any point. This same analysis would seek to explain how the old methods of training were much better because they produced a greater proportion of "geniuses".
I don't think that analogy is apt. With sports you are very limited to how much you can benefit from previous athletes' contributions. If someone runs a 12 second 100m, that tells me 1: it can be done (important!) and 2: if I train more like them I might do better. I don't get to start at their point and work forward; I still have to train to get myself to run a 13 second. In theory, at least, I should be able to stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to art and science and show me genius thusly. Newton didn't have to reinvent math from scratch to come up with calculus, he just had to learn it.
I'm not saying that sports proves anything about genius in science one way or another. I'm saying that the authors way of identifying the decline in genius fails badly for sports.
Well, yes. My point was that we shouldn't expect it to work for sports, whether or not it worked for genius.
12 seconds is pretty slow
Very true :)
I think you're right that the public can take note of only a very few people in any field, and there are many more people now in every scientific field. But the number of recognized geniuses shouldn't go /down/. How many people on the level of Einstein, von Neumann, Turing, and Schrödinger are working today?
The biggest science superstars today that I can think of are Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and George Church. It's hard to say what Church has done, because he's on the boards of 19 different companies, has founded 14 biotech companies, and has his name on a lot of papers which he may or may not have contributed much to. But I doubt any of them would claim to be on a level with von Neumann or Turing.
Marvin Minsky used to be regarded as the smartest person in AI. But his work was a dead-end; and his most-famous book (/Perceptrons/) was a fiasco; it killed neural network research for over a decade because he analyzed only linear neural networks, then declared all neural networks hopeless.
"Church has seven zillion grad students, and is extremely nice, and is bad at saying no to people, and so half the biology startups in the world are advised by him."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants
The number of *geniuses* shouldn't go down, but why does that say anything about the number of *recognized geniuses*? I can think of 2 fellow PhD students in my field in my institute that were studying at the same time as me that were definitely geniuses, even by the lofty standards of particle physics - and if I knew 2 out of a pool of a couple of dozen, even at a top university, then there must be a lot in the world - but even if their research over their careers is as innovative as I expect it to be, I doubt they'll ever be household names.
If the number is limited by the memory capacity of the public, the number shouldn't go down. If you're thinking that fame is distributed evenly among physicists, it isn't. All academic fields that I've seen distributions for that were of any significant size have a power-law distribution of fame, which is scale-invariant: the fame of the nth most-famous, divided by that of the (n+1)th most-famous, is independent of the number of people in the field, for n well beyond the largest n we could call "famous". ("Fame" is usually measured by number of citations, or citations weighted by journal prestige.) That means increasing n should have no effect on how many of them the public can take notice of.
Actually I think that power-law distribution should be up there as cause #1 of the lack of increase in "geniuses". It also accounts for much, maybe most, of the increase in wealth disparity as population rises or as economies grow. This also applies to fame of movie stars and authors, and is why movie producers and book publishers are focused on blockbusters. It does NOT apply to any measure of quality or ability, which don't have a power-law distribution.
The math is pretty simple: If you begin with a power-law distribution of fame, and there is no difference in quality between anyone in the distribution, but only a difference in fame, then the number of fans drawn to the nth-famous person in some interval of time is proportional to 1/n. So that's the derivative of change in fame. Do the math, and you'll see that once a power-law distribution exists, it sustains itself as population increases. Do some trickier math, and you'll find that starting with a normal distribution inevitably leads to a power-law distribution.
Gatekeepers, like news media or book publishers, would make this worse if they skim off just the most-famous people and shut out the long tail. I don't know if they do. Possibly they in fact allocate public attention proportional to fame. But I suspect our current financial incentives favor skimming off the top. To optimally incentivize finding undiscovered talent, you'd probably need to reward the talent scout with a fraction of that person's future life earnings. (I haven't done the math; that's just my gut instinct.)
There's a phrase for this phenomenon, but I always forget what it is. Anyway, this is IMHO the major cause of inequity in societies larger than Dunbar's number. Many social ills would be eliminated if people just had more memory, or more ability to discern quality; or if there were more financial incentives for trawling the long tail to discover talent (e.g., as in professional sports, which probably do a better job than anyone else at rewarding ability).
This implies that the share of "celebrity capacity" allotted to every field stays constant, which is clearly false. Some fields fade from public attention, with brand new ones taking their place. Fundamental physics in particular seems much less relevant these days than in the first half of 20th century. The biggest development since then is the discovery that we know almost nothing about the stuff that 95% of the Universe is apparently made of, hence the embarassing placeholders like "dark matter" and "dark energy". While on the practical side of things, fusion energy continues to be decades away, and the LHC is mostly meme fodder.
Okay, that could explain the decline in the number of famous physicists whom the public is aware of. The power-law distribution within the field still holds, though, with the consequence that the number of geniuses famous to others in that field should remain pretty constant.
And this very well may be true, I wouldn't be surprised that the total number of contemporary celebrities that an educated person today can name would be about the same to that from a century ago. How many of those celebrities would in some sense deserve to be called geniuses though is another matter of course, and the general opinions seem to be that the "true genius" share is on the steady decline.
Agreed with the maximally boring reasons but would add: I sometimes wonder if across the web of society, distributed so it’s not the intent of any single person, we don’t all understand there have to be certain limits on progress in order to maintain stability and set up systems that hinder radical growth. An Einstein every thirty years would produce enormous growth. An Einstein every six months would destroy the world. I can’t quite make it explicit in my own head so I’m suspect of it myself, but I wonder if there’s a sort of selection pressure at work here with large corporate-style structures where it’s more important for paperwork to be filled out and risks insured than for people to take initiative so just as a natural by product genius is down regulated. The sort of tutoring described would be anathema to that and also down regulated. So much is now intellectually uniform and so little bespoke. Very smart people told nurses at the start of the pandemic that they weren’t allowed to get their own masks if supplies had run out, with a whole complicated piece in the middle about insurance and liability, and it to my mind it was because for their entire lives their minds had been turned toward optimally completing paperwork. Those might be totally unrelated and I’m not sure there not but there’s a ladle there I can’t quite make come out of the drawer.
I think that maze of bureaucracy exists but I strenuously disagree that it's good. Radical growth upsets the status of the people currently in charge, so they don't like it, but were it to happen it would be a tremendous boon for humanity as a whole
Good only in the context we have a relatively low appetite for radical change.
I don't think it's conceptually possible to have an Einstein every six months. Einstein's ensteinness depends essentially on his having arrived at a field at the end of its normal science, but with lots of hints about how the revolution will go (Planck, Lorentz, precession of Mercury, etc.). Einstein became great because he digested all that stuff, added some mind-blowing insights, and gave everyone else time to digest those insights. That cycle cannot happen arbitrarily fast, and I would argue that as a discipline generates more research volume, the disciplinary digestion cycle actually slows down. It's easy for me to picture 2022 Einstein being received like this: "Yeah, he got some really impressive results and the work is definitely rigorous and promising, but I also think that there is hope in [some other parallel] approach B. So I'm just gonna chip away on B and hope for the best, because that's my lane, and my advisor's."
I believe I agree with the point you’re making about needing a certain amount of existing data to work with before you can have a revolution. That’s a definite rate limiter and I think it would probably even apply to a super AI. But then I think about other fields, with existing knowledge, and return to the original thought. I sort of see human scientific progress as this big circle of light floating in the dark. The surface area of that sphere is bigger than it was in Einstein’s day. So if you make an equally large contribution it doesn’t proportionally grow as much. Shouldn’t we have Einstein’s littered across several fields? Maybe an individual field only gets a revolution every thirty to fifty years but with so many different domains you’d think you’d see it more often. I do worry that im indulging in a Golden Age fallacy when im having these thoughts, but I keep coming back to the size of London when it was spitting out the first members of the Royal Society. It seems it might have been more productive creatively when science was a bunch of people sending letters back and forth about things they noticed instead of professors trying to navigate a bureaucracy.
I think a large part of the decline is forcing every child even if they are relatively rich and smart, to care about school and grades, the overwhelming complexity of life and the constant tax by technology on attention.
This HN comment on the article exactly pinpoints the feeling:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30700929
Would Darwin be considered a genius? I thought the thing with him was not super high intellect but that he was very cautious, rigorous, and Bayesian. Agree with the overall point, though.
When it comes to certain topics, some people are maybe more relentlessly honest with themselves than others.
Maybe that's what you meant by Bayesian.
I read Julia Galef's book Scout Mindset, and she had some biographical details about CD. He was very evidence-driven and acutely sensitive to feedback and criticism. Was constantly checking over his work, updating and making sure everything was right.
Some have claimed Darwin was a 'fact-collector' most of all. (I am a fan, though, to be clear).
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/183/3/773/6063127
+1 Good read.
On a rationalist-adjacent forum, I recently brought up the fact that Richard Feynman claimed to have tested at 125 IQ. A few posters went ballistic, denying the possibility. Some begging-the-question was involved ("he couldn't have that IQ and produce that kind of work, because that kind of work would necessarily demand a higher IQ").
As I pointed out, it may be that not all qualities that go into producing big ideas are g-loaded. That article does a good job of examining some.
I can believe that Darwin might not have been exceptionally high g, but I can't believe that of Feynman.
Just being able to understand quantum electrodynamics (let alone invent it) requires a high level of the sort of conceptual-symbolic manipulation intelligence that IQ tests tend to measure.
Of course an IQ test can only measure how good you are at answering a particular batch of questions on a particular two-hour period of a particular day, so the results of any particular IQ test shouldn't be taken too seriously.
"Of course an IQ test can only measure how good you are at answering a particular batch of questions on a particular two-hour period of a particular day, so the results of any particular IQ test shouldn't be taken too seriously."
i can see that being the case if someone merely memorized the set of questions and answers. otherwise, i have to ask: what caused someone's answers on an IQ test? compare to math tests: you learn some general skills, which can be applied to an infinite set of possible questions. you don't have to memorize every individual question-answer pair.
I was thinking more of the ease of getting a particularly bad result than a good one; that can be done if you're distracted, sick, having a really bad day, or just don't particularly give enough of a crap to apply full mental effort to the set of problems that has been placed in front of you. Did one of those happen to Feynman? Sure, maybe, who knows?
The opposite problem of getting a particularly high result is less easy for obvious reasons, but I do believe that IQ tests can be gamed to some extent since there's only a finite number of classes of problem that get asked in IQ tests (complete this pattern, rotate this shape, name the next number in this sequence) and if you've seen a lot of problems like that before then you're more likely to have a good strategy.
In my countries there's definitely an industry of teaching (largely Asian) kids how to improve their IQ test results in the hopes of getting into selective high schools.
"Genius" is a very complicated word for precisely this reason. Darwin is one of those people who produced a huge amount of very good work, in addition to some marquee achievements that get him fame. He's certainly a more significant intellectual than someone like Richard Feynman, who more clearly fits the "genius" label.
I think that (2) might have as much to do with how we remember history as it does with actual change over time.
Darwin was obviously building on other people's ideas, but those people are no longer around to demand partial credit. And sifting through nineteenth century priority disputes is really boring and irrelevant to most of our purposes in remembering Darwin. We are free, in our telling of history, to let Darwin stand in for an entire intellectual scene. But, if you try to do that about a contemporary intellectual scene, the second and third and eighty-fifth most important members will get mad at you (both self-interest and (3) come in, here).
I have taught at different universities, including Oxford/Cambridge and their tutoring system in which 1 PhD tutors 1-3 undergradute students is incomparable to traditional large classes/limited interactions in terms of allowing students to progress. Sure Oxford gets to pick the best students, but it can also take them much further. The fact that Oxford/Cambridge disproportionately produces elite scientists (including Hinton) might support Hoel's point.
"The fact that Oxford/Cambridge disproportionately produces elite scientists."
Hasn't that trend reversed substantially in the last 50 years?
Also, aren't all PhD studies essentially tutoring systems between an advisor and one or more students?
I think he means 1 PhD tutors 1-3 undergraduates. I know when I was in school, both teaching and as a student, the most effective time learning was in 1:1 or small group discussions after class, during office hours, whatever.
Sure, I just meant that PhD programs should then have produced a high number of geniuses as well (which they haven't), unless you mean one-on-one tutoring is effective only at an earlier academic stage.
I see. I don't know how PhD programs work in general; I know the program I was in was unusual talking to grad students from other schools. Many PhDs seem to spend a lot of time isolated and working on some project for their advisor that they are not interested in, then getting trapped doing that work instead of what they want to do until their career takes off. I don't know about that personally, but there is a REALLY shockingly high level of mental problems like depression among grad students. Possibly the filter is based more around resilience to misery instead of genius?
As a current grad student, I can confirm that that is an accurate take.
Godspeed. My heart goes out to you.
Yes I edited sorry for the confusion. I would argue undergratuate training is the crucial step in future science success since it will provide strong bases and enable you to join elite labs for PhD Training. "Aristocratic" style tutoring also gives confidence and this ties in with idea of the "Hero license" previously discussed in Secrets of the Great Families.
I did both my undergraduate and PhD (or rather DPhil) at Oxford and the experience of being tutored felt extremely different from the experience of being supervised. As an undergraduate, my tutor had an agenda as to what he was going to teach that week whereas PhD supervisions felt more like a weekly discussion, not quite between peers obviously, but more like that.
Fighting words, but...
Do Oxford and Camridge produce students that are that much better or do their oxbridge pedigrees get them more prestige, better positions and thus better research students and financial support and thus more output. I certainly haven't noticed oxbridge graduates to be any brighter than those of other decent schools... Their marginal value doesn't seem that high in terms of brilliance...
> it can also take them much further
I'm actually curious as to
a) whether this is the case (i.e. comparing similarly talented students who've gotten Oxbridge treatment vs more traditional schooling in longitudinal studies)
b) how to isolate the effect of this Oxbridge tutoring from, say, having the Oxbridge brand name on one's CV, or having access to the Oxbridge network, etc
I personally love tutoring and being tutored, so this is really me trying to examine my bias for it a little more closely.
I can't emphasize how unnatural it is to read that current work in AI safety is comparable to Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
In some sense, AI safety is a field whose time has come. AI is getting better. We've had sci-fi suggesting a robot takeover for very many decades now. It is not difficult to speculate that we'll build a machine that is smarter than us, and will hence take over the world. Had Yudkowsky not created it, someone else might have.
Darwin's theory of evolution was not "in the air". If Darwin hadn't obsessively studied skeletons and beaks on his now-legendary voyage, probably no one else would have for hundreds of years. There were no scientific trends that Darwin was extrapolating. He created a mind-bending theory out of nowhere. Even Einstein's theory of relativity had more precedence than Darwin's theory, because it came out of the Morley-Michelsen experiment's inability to detect the ether.
Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly not as "in the air" as AI safety is now, but didn't Alfred Russel Wallace have basically the same idea around basically the same time? It was shocking to the general public, including readers of scientific texts, but I can't believe that it would've waited for hundreds of years. Its time had come.
(A similar case with Newton and Leibniz independently discovering calculus at roughly the same time. Newton and Darwin did it better, realizing more of the consequences, but Leibniz and Wallace did it too.)
Thanks, I just read up on Wallace. It seems to me that Wallace and Darwin were in constant communication, supportive of each other's hypotheses, and in fact also published many findings on the transmutation of species together.
The definitive evidence of an idea being "up in the air" is that multiple people or groups discover the same idea **independently**, and at around the same idea. This clearly did not happen here. Perhaps the strongest argument one can make is that Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of evolution together.
Yep, Darwin only published when he heard Russel was about to...
Also, didn't Darwin's grandfather do some research that helped lead him in the direction of evolution?
I think Darwin is a good example of technology enabling theoretical progress - long sea voyages to remote islands were simply much more feasible than they had ever been before, and though the Galapagos finches might not have been strictly necessary in hindsight, seeing such similar yet distinct species in such close proximity might well have inspired whichever naturalist saw them, in a counterfactual where a different naturalist was chosen for the voyage of the Beagle.
This is interesting, although I am not sure about the point of sea voyages having suddenly become easier/more common. Ships had been the primary mode of transportation for centuries by this time. I do agree that Galapagos was a great place to have discovered evolution though
Transportation over any distance had been a thing most people did zero or one times per lifetime for centuries by that time, with "zero" being far more common. I'm not sure about it becoming significantly less rare in Darwin's time, but it is plausible.
Yes, regardless of whether transportation by sea was common, if the number of people travelling by sea didnt change significantly during Darwin's time, this point is moot
It may not have been "in the air" but Robert Bakewell had been systematically studying artificial selection (and documenting it) since before Darwin was born.
The wikipedia article on Bakewell suggests that he practiced selective breeding of cattle, and this was used by Darwin as evidence for theory of evolution, like you mention. Hence, the lead from selective breeding to evolution is a big one, and we have to give Darwin most of the credit for that intellectual leap.
The idea that animals evolve into other animals was already out there, thanks to Lamarck. I wouldn't say Darwin's theory came completely from nowhere.
Yes, I feel that my argument should be weaker than I claim, although stronger than you claim. Evolution was clearly much less "out there" than "AI will become stronger than humans".
Oh, I make no claims about how Darwin compares to anyone in AI, since I don't follow that world. I was responding more to the idea that there were no previous trends Darwin was building on. He was definitely building on both naturalists like Lamarck and deist philosophers who believed the universe is a kind of self-regulating machine. The average person probably hadn't heard of a lot of that stuff before Darwin though, so he seemed more like a bolt from the blue.
Yeah this is emphatically not the case based on my understanding. You have Wallace on the one hand; Jean-Baptiste Lamarack on the other. And who anticipated Lamarack but . . . Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. Meanwhile, Mendel is a contemporary and he develops the math of heredity without even being really plugged into the wider scientific world. I'm not detracting from Darwin's vital work, but the seeds of his discovery are scattered far.
What is a good resource for learning more about this?
I read parts of Russel's Malay Archipelago (https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Archipelago-Alfred-Russel-Wallace/dp/997169820X/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_i=997169820X&psc=1) where he talks about some of his intellectual development, and George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines (https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Among-Machines-Evolution-Intelligence/dp/0201406497/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=darwin+among+the+machines&qid=1648067202&s=books&sprefix=darwin+amon%2Cstripbooks%2C125&sr=1-1) contains a history of the development of the theory of evolution that highlights Erasmus.
For the record - I do think Darwin made an incalculable leap, which was to view evolution as a statistical, rather than deterministic or biological, process. His ability to grok that populations were changing, not individuals, is really an incredibly powerful idea for explaining things.
That chart at the top of the post can be at least partly explained by the principle of "graded on a curve."
There were more "geniuses" relative to the general population because of the wide difference in education from the top to the bottom - how it was delivered matters little. It may be we have fewer "geniuses" now because they don't stand out as much due to the current minimum education standard being much higher than it was 6-700 years ago, and thus more (but not all, of course) people are closer in education to what was considered a genius level in the 1500s.
That doesn't mean there aren't absolute geniuses that "break the curve" - like, say, Leonardo Da Vinci.
I disagree that most AI researchers would consider Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, or Schmidhuber (the big famous names in neural networks) to be geniuses. They are certainly people who were extremely creative and worked very hard, and were right when nearly everyone else was wrong. That's not nothing, they are definitely great scientists.
I don't quite know how to articulate the difference, but I don't think their success came from the near-mystical intellectual insight that I associate with genius. There aren't (yet) any profound, earth-shattering conceptual breakthroughs in neural-network-based AI. Hinton's most famous contribution, when you look at it, amounts to a more efficient way of coding up the chain rule from calculus (edit: and Hinton himself says the idea was in fact discovered earlier by others in various ways).
I'm not trying to put them down, as I think these achievements were obviously era-defining, and other people did not come up with these ideas even though they could have. But it's a different kind of thing from the profound insight Darwin and Einstein had.
AI research just doesn't seem like a field, currently, that rewards genius very much at the margin, compared to other traits such as creativity, persistence, and executive skills. So on the one hand, this adds support to the thesis of your post that geniuses get outsized credit for being early; on the other hand, I do think it's still possible that someone will have some amazing breakthrough that makes deep learning "make sense", and we will actually remember this person as a genius.
We can find geniuses easily when the internet reaches remote areas at a very low price and genius people have time beyond daily survival. As school allows people to specialize sooner and connect with information, people and problems. Changing needs arise with new solutions or develop old ones. As space is accessible, new ideas may come out. As genetic engineering takes off and computers are allowed to be the geniuses or genius's best friend.
I think the nature of the discipline may matter. Chemistry, mine, is a "working class" science where remarkably few faculty come from white collar backgrounds, generally first generation college, or near so (i.e., a high school teacher as a parent). If you peruse the links in the list of chemistry noble laureates, you find few that had elite tutors.... I've known a few of these scientists personally and many by 2 degrees of separation and they are clearly geniuses!
The people considered the fathers of the field, like Lavoisier and Boyle, weren't exactly blue-collar! But largely I agree with your point. It may be easier to get notable results despite your background in chemistry (as I'd argue it's more receptive than other fields to perseverance, and less responsive to theoretical knowledge obtained prior to experimentation; without experimental confirmation, essentially no theory gets off the ground.) But I do wonder if geniuses in chemistry have as wide recognition outside the field as geniuses in physics, mathematics, or music? The only chemists I can think of as having a similar level of public recognition to Einstein and co. are the Curies, Nobel himself, and perhaps Haber and Rutherford. I may be miscalibrated on this, however, but it seems that either chemistry has either a preponderance of extremely impactful results that together appear to be "relatively equal" and not "genius" despite their importance, or it has relatively few results that are understood to have permanently changed our understanding of the world. I lean towards #1, and it also leads me to believe that in general, our current lack of geniuses in many fields comes from, well, having too many of those that would be considered geniuses in the past. Due to the relatively low cost of entry for chemistry and its heavily experimentally-focused beginnings, it may have underwent that transition sooner.
Yeah, just look at the tiny number of chemistry papers in Science or Nature. You have to be deeper into the field to see paper's significance. If you publish a paper on inbreeding in Bolivian green tree frogs and it's effects on jump height at least people can understand what you are talking about and a significant number will be frog fans and think it's cool... It's hard to make chemical results accessible to the literate lay person and many, many such efforts by, university outreach offices, show little relationship to the actual importance of the work....
I do think that the blue collar reputation of the field hurts its prestige. The infous "studies have shown" that the economic payback of chemical R&D is very good (that's why companies do so much) but that it has much less of the superlotto potential of, say, molecular biology or solid state physics. .
If you look at the graphs in the post linked there is no decline in geniuses per capita. Instead there is a decline in the number of geniuses per educated person. But that assumes that education was random! If geniuses were identified among the general public and preferentially exposed to more education that would be enough to explain the supposed decline on its own.
A very important point. I rather suspect you're right. Genius is clearly something on its own, a genetic sport. You have to be *born* a genius, you can't be educated into it, if you don't have the right DNA, any more than a generic couch potato can run the 100m as fast as Usain Bolt if he only gets the right training.
So if loads more people are educated, it's hard not to see how geniuses per educated person declines, even as geniuses per person does not.
This assumes that genius was reliably recognized and selected for education in the past, across the whole of the population or some large segment of it. I'm not sure that's true enough to explain the observed effect.
I think the move to general education is partly to blame. It used to be that you were being educated IN something. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Violin playing. Smithing. Whatever. If you ran ahead of the subject matter you'd just move on to harder lessons.
No one is a genius at "general education" because it's not a subject. You are encouraged not to specialize or go deep but to go wide. And depth is only rewarded to a point through advanced classes (and only in concert with a bunch of other things). No amount of being an amazing math student will get you out of your English classes even once you're past the basic level.
Was Mozart any good at physics? If so we have no evidence for it. If he'd been forced to spend an equal amount of time in math and physics and history as he did on music then he'd be less likely to be a genius in my opinion. And if he was very bad at one or two irrelevant (to music) subjects like history or math then he might have trouble getting into top schools.
The end effect is that we've raised the barrier. You need to be both a genius in music and a passable mathematician. If not then you'll have trouble getting seen by the big institutions that are necessary to back genius. (And were necessary back then too!) It's no surprise less of them manage to make this leap.
Compare how Mozart was invited to play in front of the Emperor to what the Juilliard requires of applicants. And how credentialist biases make things like Juilliard more important. Or compare Edison and his long period of basically solely mechanical education (through self-teaching or apprenticeship) to what your average engineer goes through both in education and hiring today.
Interestingly, any substantial focus on General Education is mostly an American thing. It basically doesn't exist in other countries, especially English speaking ones!
It might have some, limited, value if done as it ideally should be, but, in practice it mostly consists of a bunch of low level survey courses, increasingly taught by adjuncts. That give a veneer of shallow ideas over a lack of depth. Almost all students consider it largely a waste of time that, if pressed for a justification, mostly helps by decreasing their workload and so allows more party time...
The Humanities and Social Sciences that dominate GenEd are no less rigorous than STEM at upper levels but their GenEd offerings have to compete for student customers and this thermodynamic force hurt the course quality...
Agreed. I often point out that many advanced countries have very strong tracking systems where you do exit gen ed by the age of like 12-14. Basically, school from like 5-12 is a combination of daycare and really basic skills. Reading, writing, basic math, language. Then you start to specialize. Humanities college tracks, doctor tracks, trade tracks. Tracks for music or even makeup design. I don't have the numbers. But I strongly suspect this performs better than the American one size fits all approach. It's actually really weird that the vast majority of Americans don't pick a specific course of education until they're in college.
"It's actually really weird that the vast majority of Americans don't pick a specific course of education until they're in college."
And in many cases, only halfway through college.
I agree.
I'd expect this has something to do with the US's obsession with purported freedom of choice, and "forcing a child into a specialization" early is believed to interfere with that choice. Note freedom of choice isn't a bad thing- but in order to have that, impactful choices have to be offered early, instead of preventing people from making any decision at all until you decide they're educated enough!
Also, to be blunt, many left-leaning people, including myself, even if we're OK in theory with a tracking system, believe that a system in America would lead to little Noah and Madison still being put in the "college" track no matter what and Marcus & Maria being pressured to go on the non-college track even if they have the skills and grades.
A lot of countries do it by standardized tests. The ones least likely to use them are arts which are probably not a place to fear a lack of minority representation.
It's also not necessarily a directly hierarchical system. For example, between the person who goes to a school to be an engineer, a humanities professor, and a model, who is higher social status? In many the hierarchy tends to be WITHIN tracks with people being "the best art school" vs "the best engineering school" rather than engineering being clearly superior to arts.
There's also a weird denial of the fact that education is funded for economic reasons. If you were to ask the South Korean or German government what it built its schools do they would tell you to prepare an educated, modern workforce.
Interesting comment. Another aspect of the experience of “general education” is that it changes one’s relationship to the experience of failure. Unless the new Mozart is genius at everything, he is having periods of hesitation, misunderstanding, and struggle which are not then rewarded with insight/achievement. In music, for him, there is a further side to experiences of struggle. Somehow the gears mesh and he continues to envision and create genius work.
But today, there he is in gen ed spending hours a week failing/struggling and not getting over it. I’m arguing that too much grinding academic failure will affect someone’s ability to continue to achieve in what they’re actually good at.
One of the values of 1-1 tutoring is that it means being specifically lifted out of intellectual/emotional/creative pitfalls. If Mozart had to bring home years’ worth of Ds in history (for example) having to struggle on still bad at it, he might emotionally accommodate himself to needing less zing in his success. He wouldn’t be learning history, he’d be learning to fail, and eventually that would have an impact.
Excellent points!
It also affects their experience with success for roughly parallel reasons. And it likely means success can be nurtured and rewarded at a higher level. And is more likely to be regained in a competition with similar people.
Interesting! I would have said precisely the opposite! In the 17th century, someone like Leibniz could make major contributions to philosophy, mathematics, engineering, etc. and Descartes can make major contributions to optics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, etc. By the late 19th century, you can't do all that any more, but someone like Einstein could make major contributions to every area of physics, and someone like Hilbert could make major contributions to every area of mathematics. These days you have to be more specialized to make an impact.
Leibniz studied philosophy and law. His initial learning in mathematics and science came from being a secretary and later legal advisor to a scientific society. He came into contact with other scientists/mathematicians/etc because he was contracted by a prince to help with various legal tasks at court and met them there. He later asked some of them to help him get better and eventually became Leibniz.
Descartes studied to be a lawyer too but started in philosophy and general subjects to get there. (The more things change...) And then he decided to become a soldier. He was actually not that good of a soldier though good enough to have a small political/military career. That taught him some basic geometry, engineering, etc. He claims he wasn't very good at it until he had a spark of divine revelation to apply philosophy to mathematics. After that he sold his family property to retire early to a university where he began to write what we know him for. Starting with his philosophy. But he also asked people to help him with things he'd been thinking of and increased his range.
In both cases they became educated in many things. But they went to school in the sense we think for just one. Two if you count Descartes having some military background and then being trained as a soldier.
Maybe it was easier to learn more back then. But I take men like Leibniz and Descartes as evidence that being educated with one profession in mind doesn't handicap you for life. It actually was probably necessary for Leibniz. If he hadn't been so thoroughly educated in the law from a young age then it's unlikely he would have gotten a position at court so young.
My impression is that as far as the formal education goes, this is exactly the same in contemporary European universities. A friend of mine who went to university for philosophy, and had interests in logic, wasn't allowed to study mathematics, because that would take him outside his course of study. (He was eventually able to make up for this by coming to an American university.)
I can't speak specifically to your friend. But yes, it's much more common in the rest of the world. I once met a South Korean woman who worked for a makeup company. She'd gone to an arts college for modeling, makeup, fashion, etc. And then went on to some kind of college level program. She actually seemed like she'd gotten a pretty broad spread of topics ranging from chemistry to history. But it was all from the lens of arts and, in her case, makeup.
I find it very hard to think she was greatly hampered by her lack of formal logic or calculus. In fact, I think it helped her. She once told me, "National history bored me. Who cares about old wars?" Yet she was actually pretty good at history/geography/etc because she knew the fashions and looks of various times and places.
Yes, and because american bachelor degrees are so crowded by GenEd, a lot of core disciplinary content gets pushed into graduate school. As a consequence. American PhD students spend 2 to 4 times more time doing formal coursework than do those in non-US PhD programs.
> The end effect is that we've raised the barrier. You need to be both a genius in music and a passable mathematician.
This might not be the best example; musical ability and mathematical ability are well known to be closely related.
I've heard this and while it might be somewhat true: Are there any people who were musical and mathematical geniuses? I can think of, for example, people who made great contributions to mathematics and physics.
I don't want to denigrate music at all. But I've always heard this by musicians who want to insist music is valuable beyond its immediate applications. Usually in a bid for arts education. I would fund music more if I could. But that's because I believe in music itself.
I, a chemistry prof., have heard from usually reliable sources that early music training in younger kids helps their later math ability more then intensive math training as young kids...
Interestingly. Being aways along the autistic spectrum seems to be exceptionally common in mathematicians and musicians (and chemists too).
In the 1990s I had a math professor (who finished the PhD sometime late 60s/early 70s, not too far from retirement at that time) who insisted that computer science was ruining the math students. A combination of the comp sci department getting more majors (more fun, more drama, better money) and something about the necessary habits of thought in those two fields being somewhat mutually exclusive.
I think someone sent me an article about the early music lessons helping kids in math, not too long ago. It makes sense to me, to a point. I have a lot of doubts about math teaching in general. As a kid I could tell fairly young who enjoyed abstract thought enough to bother to get better at it, we sortof gathered together. People might convert to it later on but I haven't seen many. I could believe that too much early math study might not help the understanding much, while encouraging stillness and bafflement in counterproductive ways. Early childhood ed folks talk about the age at which children become capable of abstract thought, and I have doubts about that too, it may hit much earlier for some than for others.
Being an instrumentalist, a player that people want to listen to, is another thing though.
I think you're correct in pointing out that early maths "education" is so radically divergent from what makes a mathematician as to potentially be actively counterproductive.
Re maths vs computer science, I was under the impression that *computer science* was very mathematical, though *software engineering* requires a totally distinct mindset
Alas, there's not a consistent distinction made between computer science and software engineering education. And it often produces developers who are neither particularly mathematically inclined nor familiar with engineering principles.
I agree with the takedown but disagree that the point was ever interesting enough to warrant attention in the first place. It's the slightly more literate version of "in my day we had the Beatles and they were geniuses and you kids today with your Carly Rae Jepsens and your Duas Lipa...BAH!"
To be more charitable and dovetail with the point: OBVIOUSLY genius requires some degree of hindsight to recognize. The closer you get to the present, the less hindsight you have, by definition. So you'd expect the number of geniuses to trail off as you reach the present. The interesting point, if there is one (I doubt it) might be just how MUCH hindsight is required.
"It's the slightly more literate version of "in my day we had the Beatles and they were geniuses and you kids today with your Carly Rae Jepsens and your Duas Lipa...BAH!""
Let's all recognise that this is simply snark. It's not even a token attempt at an argument. You're basically just saying "it's dumb".
Hence my second paragraph.
I think that it sevrs a similar purpose to things like the anti reactionary FAQ. It's important sometimes to demonstrate that actually the things that are obviously good really are good in spite
I think this is true for art - you can't tell if someone famous is just a one-hit wonder or someone who will influence the field for decades to come - but not true for science, where people can test and see if you're on to something interesting. Einstein was recognized as a brilliant physicist within a few years of him starting to publish physics papers.
Speaking from a perspective of a physics crackpot who is reasonably certain he's onto the next big thing - I think education style has basically nothing to do with it, and it is entirely barriers to entry, many of which exist largely to exclude crackpots.
The lone genius who defines the field doesn't just define the field, but also creates fertile soil for the imaginations of crackpots; I could do that. So each new genius who helps define an entire field makes it harder for the next genius to do exactly that; the field is increasingly engineered to keep out exactly those people, who outnumber actual geniuses a thousand to one, and who rapidly exhaust everybody's tolerance / enthusiasm for ideas that would radically restructure the field.
And, speaking personally, ultimately I'm never going to put in the energy; maybe I'm genuinely onto the new big idea, maybe I'm just another crackpot in the field of thousands. I know what I think, but I'm also aware of the odds. I can be quietly satisfied that I understand the universe better than anybody else alive - and maybe in a century I'll be proven right, and people will wonder at this crazy guy. Or most likely I'll be forgotten. But either way at that point I'll be dead, and I can enjoy my supposed understanding of the universe right now, right or wrong.
Because - and here's the big thing - like, the only reason I bother, once every year or two, to try to convince people - is mostly out of a sense of obligation. My "genius-level" smarts tell me to stay the hell away from the kind of recognition that being proven right would result in.
To derail the point, I'm a fan of physics crackpots. What's your crackpot theory? Then I'll tell you mine.
The mass-energy distribution in general relativity is defined by an equation similar to sin(ln(r))/r (although not exactly this equation; this is the clean version). Necessarily some of the mass-energy distribution, and the associated curvature, is negative.
There are a few ways of expressing the same idea; it's probably isomorphic to a fractal, which isn't an accident, as I think it should be isomorphic to a negative-dimensional logarithmic spiral. It can also be described as an infinite series of alternating attractive and repulsive forces with a particular relationship between the initial amplitude and the rate of decay, although the forces should be regarded as arising from curvature. There are other, weirder ways of describing the idea; I've gone through a lot of abstractions trying to find something that other people can easily understand, without much success in any of them.
Edit: You can also think about what happens if "curvature" represents an actual curve, and what happens if that curve is also curved by curvature, to get a glimpse of the basics of the idea. It gets weird when you approach it from this direction, though, because it may add a lot of singularities, depending on your choice of coordinate system; every complete revolution of the spiral involves at least two.
Very cool, and seems like it's on the right track!
Mine can basically be summed up in a few basic points, no math necessary:
1. Spatial extension can be mapped equally well to extension into the past (1 light-second away is 1 second ago, etc)
2. Space and time are unified (uncontroversial); to be more precise, space and the past are unified, and the future has no spatial extension at all (extremely controversial)
3. The passage of time means nothing more and nothing less than an increase in the quantity of past time (today is the same as yesterday except with another day added to the tally)
4. Therefore, we should expect that, as a matter of definition, as time passes, there should be more space.
This actually manages to predict the Hubble expansion, which relativity permits but doesn't actually require, and actually makes perfect sense of dark energy to boot.
1, yes. 2, yes, except possibly about the future (my thoughts on this are complicated). 3 I'm not sure about, tying into the complications from 2.
Observing that a point particle's past extends in "all" directions outward, we may notice that there is an "inward" which is left unaddressed. But let's look at our dimensions.
From the point particle's perspective, using a particular choice of coordinates, we have "outward", then two closed dimensions (observe that at a given distance, you have two axes of rotations, with a finite size). The future, therefore, is inward; toward the particle. However, from the particle's perspective, there is no such thing - maybe. There's an interesting question: Take a given point, some distance away from the particle. What is the distance from the point particle, to that point? Is the distance finite? Suppose our particle is a singularity.
But - it's interesting that we have two closed dimensions of finite extent for any given point as defined along our third dimension. The only real infinity there is distance. Consider the past / out - is it infinite? Does the past extent forever? If it is finite - what would that mean?
(Could it be a closed dimension, as well?)
You've immediately grasped the gist.
So basically, the inward is the domain of the quantum, where all kinds of weird stuff starts happening. At least, it SEEMS weird, because we imagine that quantum-scale things should behave like large-scale things but they absolutely do not. Quantum mechanics only gives us probabilities, and it's been a rather big mystery as to why that is.
But if the outward domain is the domain of the past, the finished, the definite, the Einsteinian "event", then the inward is the domain of the future, the non-spatial, the probabilistic. It's a different phase of reality, and the wave-function "collapse" is the plane along which the phase transition happens and the merely probable becomes the actual.
Utter crackpottery of course. But Freeman Dyson, no crackpot, was not far off the scent:
"I deduce two general conclusions from these thought-experiments. First, statements about the past cannot in general be made in quantum-mechanical language. We can describe a uranium nucleus by a wave-function including an outgoing alpha particle wave which determines the probability that the nucleus will decay tomorrow. But we cannot describe by means of a wave-function the statement, “This nucleus decayed yesterday at 9 a.m. Greenwich time”. As a general rule, knowledge about the past can only be expressed in classical terms. My second general conclusion is that the “role of the observer” in quantum mechanics is solely to make the distinction between past and future. The role of the observer is not to cause an abrupt “reduction of the wave-packet”, with the state of the system jumping discontinuously at the instant when it is observed. This picture of the observer interrupting the course of natural events is unnecessary and misleading. What really happens is that the quantum mechanical description of an event ceases to be meaningful as the observer changes the point of reference from before the event to after it. We do not need a human observer to make quantum mechanics work. All we need is a point of reference, to separate past from future, to separate what has happened from what may happen, to separate facts from probabilities."
Yep! I recognize some of this.
So if you model the past as a spherical shell expanding outward at the speed of light, the rate of change of the surface area should be, what, 8*pi*r. Assuming some kind of component is distributed over the surface area, the rate of change of density should be the inverse, or 1/(8*pi*r).
If you measure the density at a given point, you get the inverse square law. But it's the rate of change of density of the past which is personally interesting. Put a good spin on the past in an imaginary direction, interpret an object's history as its mass-energy distribution (which is to say, Earth's gravity is literally Earth's history, radiating outward), and you're halfway to my nonsense, and all the way there to an entirely weird way of interpreting standard general relativity.
I keep coming back to the future thing. That's ... a really neat idea for how time works. My version was incredibly messy.
You can have this metaphysical crackpot theory: There is no Hard Problem of Consciousness or, at least, the Hard Problem is the same for everything.
To be specific, the Hard Problem is a 'how' question (how does consciousness appear from a non-conscious physical substrate?), but physics can never give us 'how' answers, it can only provide mathematical models of physical observations. Those observations are accompanied by a 'just so' story which provides the mathematical inspiration but of which we have no way of telling if they are really true or not.
The Hard Problem just stands out because consciousness is the only physical phenomenon of which we have unmediated awareness, but the problem is really universal.
"How" questions tend to be areas where we have what I would call a verbal understanding of a thing - we have names for it and a shared social awareness that the thing exists, but we lack substantive clarification of what the thing it is we refer to is.
Suppose we're actually P-zombies, and we just happen to be running a simulation of ourselves that we confuse for consciousness; indeed, we can observe that our simulation includes the mental states of other people around us, albeit with less fidelity, in something the same fashion that we think of ourselves as conscious. Does it change anything if we call that experience "consciousness"? Does it mean anything if the other people we simulate in our own heads are also "conscious"? We don't actually know what we're calling consciousness.
Maybe it had something to do with elite competition. IE, perhaps it wasn't so much the aristocratic tutoring, but the high stakes social striving among members of the aristocracy? After all, that graph you posted also tracks the decline of aristocratic privilege, overall. Granted, correlation and causation do not always walk arm in arm.
You are short-selling Archimedes. The bathtub story concerning him is by a later Roman writer. What we have by Archimedes on the matter is a lucid and extremely concise treatise structured in an axiomatic way that would be uncommon (but perhaps not non-existent) in physics nowadays. His main insight was not "I can measure how much I splash" but "I am buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid I displace". If the story on the crown is true, his solution was probably not the one you most likely learned in high school, but rather a more elegant one, requiring no precise measurements of volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_principle#Eureka
Michael Faraday is another genius of lowly background. It helped that he got a job with Humphrey Davy though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#Early_life
Are you sure Harvey Milk is a good example? Everyone else you mention, I’m familiar with their works. What did he write?
He's just a famous person associated with greater acceptance of the dignity and rights of gay people who did important work to that end. "Genius" here means something more like, "the person we remember and shorthand for an area of discussion."
Edison's primary skill was owning a successful tech business, and he often gets shorthanded as the person responsible for all the inventions inventors invented for him.
I’m not sure about that. I thought Scott was trying to identify people who really made a mark as individuals, and in every other case I was familiar with what they had written (or invented or discovered, which are also things that get written up). Did Milk ever write anything important?
"He's just a famous person associated with greater acceptance of the dignity and rights of gay people who did important work to that end."
Important work meaning, what, exactly? Providing drugs to and having sex with underage boys?
EAII said that the work was "to that end," i.e., the end they identified: gay rights/acceptance. A person can be outsranding in his field regardless of whether he is or is not a good person. Newton, apparently, was rather a prick.
Like MLK & Malcolm X, he was also shot to death.
Edison owned a successful tech business because he was a successful inventor.
I would imagine that the more interlocked the media caste is, the fewer "acclaimed" anything that there will be, and the less that acclaim actually means anything. A couple hundred years from now, would a similar study determine that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was our generation's preeminent scientist and Fauci more of a genius than Pasteur?
As an undergrad, I had a conversation with a bunch of artists, who were supposed to be making art "for the workers". (This also shows how old I am.)
They commented that, not only would a "worker" use their installation not as a think piece, but as a spitoon, but that no art that they did or would or could ever do would compare with, say Ancient Greek sculpture. And that Ancient Greece was a total slave society.
At the same time, Abraham Lincoln was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker or lawyer, and he had no more than about six weeks of schooling in his life.
Is it too obvious/too vague to bring up Ross Douthat's ideas about decadence when talking about the (alleged) decline of geniuses? As an explanation it doesn't have the advantage of being simple and compact, but it does link society-wide intellectual, artistic, and moral decline in a way that appeals to me and strikes me as true.
Indeed, Ross's work is linked in the essay, although I wouldn't describe the decline as "decadence" personally
Otto Rank says the cult of genius that developed with the Renaissance is the result of a strong collective ideology that the creative personality both uses and reacts against in order to express their individuality. This is why the great works of art both capture the collective soul belief and compel the recognition of their individual expression. While this explains the genius in art and artist, Rank didn't investigate how the relation might apply in the sciences. It could be argued that Einstein was reacting against the Newtonian ideal as he himself says that his work was inspired by principle when reading Mach and not the Michelson Morley experiments.
Tutoring is the single greatest variable in education.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-greatest-variable-in-education?s=w
Were that true, then I would expect to see remarkable gains in students from schools that adopt the workshop model, which is currently en vogue in primary education. The workshop model means direct instruction for a small group, while the rest of the students rotate to an activity at a "station".
My understanding is that performance under this model is actually substantially worse than whole class direct instruction, but workshops make tracking less visible and allow for more pretence at differentiation. Though these reasons are possibly beside the point - simply being the hot new thing is enough to make schools adopt it.
As it is, homeschooling is probably closest to the individual tutoring model, and while homeschoolers probably do better -- possibly especially better for prodigies -- homeschooling an average child doesn't shift him two standard deviations. If it did, the difference between homeschooled children and conventionally educated children would be blindingly obvious in terms of performance and not something subtle that needs to be teased out of the data.
I think that the answer is even more boring and it centers on the issue that what Hoel is measuring as genius e.g. "acclaimed scientists" is not the number of people above some absolute ceiling of "quality" but a relative metric of status or capability versus their peers.
If there are 1000 people in some domain, then one of them is a 0.1% outlier and will be acclaimed, but so will be 5-10 others who are worse but still really good and at the top of the field and they will naturally be celebrated, and so perhaps 1% of that domain would be considered "acclaimed geniuses". If some centuries later there are 1000000 equally well tutored people in the same domain, then for the thousand people who are in the top 0.1% that's not sufficient to be acclaimed anymore simply because there's not enough "fame budget" to ever consider 1000 people from a single domain at once as outstanding geniuses, instead those 1000 people (each of whom is objectively as amazing as that genius from centuries ago) become the "benchmark peers" relative to whom we judge whether someone is a genius or merely good.
The writer Samuel R. Delany wrote an essay, in the 1970s I think, discussing this question using poetry as his topic, on the grounds that he was well-acquainted with contemporary English-language poetry.
He picked the early 19C Romantic era in England as his test area for past standards, and calculated the number of 'great' and 'significant' poets of that time versus the size of the literate population. Then he extrapolated that to the contemporary USA and figured out the number of 'great' or 'significant' poets there ought to be if the incidence was the same rate.
And his answer? This will surprise you. He said that was about right. Delany found himself impressed by the amount of great, and generally good, poetry going on, and didn't think there was a decline in genius at all.
I don't recall that he addressed the question of, so why do we think there is a decline? A number of reasons, but one is that 200 years of renown does wonders for your reputation.
Also, people have a great person mental budget and as it gets filled up with historical examples, it starts to crowd out new entries into the canon. So much literature gets written that is competent to great compared to, say, the 19th century due to population increases, access to prior innovation, developments in technical understanding of the form, and more access to education, but people do not have seem to have the space to expand their mental list similarly. You see this same process play out with newer forms like film.
I have to wonder how much our easier modern lives contribute to this. Potential geniuses can live very comfortable happy lives without struggling to push the boundaries of human knowledge or whatever. Sure, some geniuses are completely internally driven but not all of them all the time. Maybe lots of genius goes the easier happier route.
I’m Gen X and grew up in comfortable upper middle class surroundings. I went to an elite public high school and had several really brilliant friends and acquaintances. Maybe none of us were quite genius level but I’m not sure I’d know if we were because we basically had it so easy. Most of those friends are now extremely successful professionals but none needed to do genius stuff.
With the internet, you can get your own aristocratic tutoring at home. You only really need libgen and sci-hub and you're good to go, good enough to get your foot in the door if you want to do research.
The benefit of tutoring isn't just access to knowledge and a search function, or you'd be able to replace it with a good librarian.
Look up the 2 sigma problem. A tutor will learn his pupil and what he knows, will identify gaps in the students learning, and be able to guide them to plug them before the pupil is even aware of them. The pupil can go in depth or breadth much more easily and dynamically than with books, the friction in switching contexts is lower and the tutor can correct the misconception as they occur.
The best combination would be to use both the books and the tutor - but libgen and sci-hub kinda solved the former part. After reading a book, or a chapter, you could tell the tutor a summary plus your thoughts on the topic, and get useful feedback.
> there are a couple of individuals who have developed entire new paradigms, who are widely acknowledged as way above the rest of the field, and who everyone expects the next interesting result to come from.
As an AI person who doesn't follow safety research, who are these people?
I am (mildly!) disappointed in your epistemics in this post. (Unless this is a move of misdirection in a strategic game you're playing against... opponents; in which case, I'll keep my mouth shut.)
Newton and Darwin are anti-examples, and evidence for the opposite of your claim.
First, the prior on the explosive returns to tutoring is high: you are doubtless aware of Bloom's 2-sigma result.
Secondly, Newton's tutor was Barrow, himself academic nobility of impeccable pedigree and inheritor of academic lineages now passed into legend — Marin Mersenne (of the primes, among other things), Galileo (the big one), Torricelli, and that whole cluster. Barrow himself had exposure to brilliant teachers from a young age, at the schools he attended.
Most importantly, Oxford and Cambridge are *known* for their primary method of education being... tutoring. And I don't mean one-on-many, I mean 1:1 to 1:3 ratios at most. That's literally what they're famous for. That's what's produced the strings of geniuses we see, including even modern eminences such as Dawkins (Dawkins' tutor was Niko Tinbergen, founder of ethology and later Nobelist; the description Dawkins gives of what that was like is astounding, and makes for a stunning and depressing contrast with the meatgrinder/factory model that's the default otherwise — you realise the later may not in fact deserve at all the name 'education').
So *all* the statements of the kind 'and then he went to Oxbridge, which is a totally normal education' are a major category error. That's not how they do things there; over there, they actually bother to press the 'Win' button occasionally.
(For more information on this, I'd suggest the book 'The Oxford Tutorial', by Palfreyman. Dawkins renders his own opinion about the tutorial in a contributed chapter! )
Why does Oxbridge not produce these geniuses anymore, although it has followed the same tutoring system for hundreds of years?
Does this tutoring necessarily have to be complemented by tutoring before coming to Oxbridge?
That's an excellent question, I don't have an answer, and debugging this problem is actually a massively high-value thing to do for anyone in the right place to do it, IMO. It's literally a civilisation-level 'Win' button that you can press with a few million to few tens of million dollars — a cryptechbro with good taste could single-handedly press it multiple times, in multiple places/campuses, if he were so inclined!
FWIW, until the last generation, these places certainly did produce these kinds of people.
In the field of the history and philosophy of classical Shaiva Tantra (something of interest to me), where the literature is vast, fragmentary, and often unpublished, there is no figure remotely comparable to Alexis Sanderson — and he's a Balliol man, now an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls. He deserves the title of 'genius'. He has single-handedly synthesised the entire thing and his synthesis that is now orthodoxy; he stands at the foundation of all that shall come after. Not only that, I've heard how other *very* eminent people speak to him (and of him) with what can only be described as somewhat fearful awe.
(Beyond just their contributions, there's a 'thereness' to people like Sanderson and Dawkins that shines through when you see them or meet them.)
One possibility: the structure of the classical college, which was inherited/copied by the Euros from the Muslims (survives only in Oxbridge now, so far as I can tell!), who themselves got it from the Central Asian Buddhists, has eroded away to the point where it doesn't function that well any more. Bringing that back would be another massive win. (For more, check out Warriors of the Cloister; excellent book about the origin and transmission of this most powerful of institutional technologies.)
Could you summarize Sanderson's work, or perhaps provide helpful links? The wiki article hasn't been very helpful.
"First, the prior on the explosive returns to tutoring is high: you are doubtless aware of Bloom's 2-sigma result."
This result is almost assuredly a vast overestimation of the general improvement possible
"So *all* the statements of the kind 'and then he went to Oxbridge, which is a totally normal education' are a major category error. "
Sure, and treating oxbridge students as totally normal people is a similarly large error.
> This result is almost assuredly a vast overestimation of the general improvement possible
I suspect that the existing school system sucks so much that vast improvements are possible by merely doing the common-sense things.
If you have fewer kids to teach, and you are not a part of a giant bureaucratic system, then you have much more freedom to actually follow your common sense. Also, some kids don't care, some kids actively disrupt lessons; you can get further improvement by ignoring them and only focusing on the rest.
100% agree on your points - If you wanted to be Newton in the 1600s you could just learn all the math and physics we knew to that point and then notice that two things were similar (to be apocryphal, an apple falling out of a tree towards a planet and the planets being pulled towards one another). This was hard, but not impossible.
A Newton today would spend the same amount of time learning one subset of calculus. As a result, he'd be likely to publish results that are incredibly groundbreaking and exciting for the six dozen people who know what he's talking about. Then 30 years later someone would build a quantum computer using methods he pioneered and pop-sci articles would screw up discussing how it worked.
But that line of thought makes me wonder if there's another issue here. I've been thinking a lot about the focus on happiness and harm avoidance in modern society lately. I'm wondering if maybe some of the restlessness we feel as a culture is because we do not set other, larger collective goals than just making as many people comfortable as possible.
I suspect that a "well-rounded" and standardized education is good from a limited utilitarian point of view (though I've seen plenty of arguments that it's not). Its goal, at least, is to protect from favorite-playing and children getting left behind by the system. It may raise general standards of living. But if Newton had to do analogy practice to get his SAT scores up so he could get into Cambridge, and had to be in a marching band because he was required to take one non-academic elective each year, would the world be a better place or a worse one, especially taking into account that it now takes longer to get up to speed on a given subject? Wouldn't it be better for *some* children if they were allowed to start that journey, uninterrupted by the need to be well-rounded or whatever, as early as possible?
Do we have less geniuses, or does it feel like we have less geniuses?
“Look at this 300 year time gap, we had so many geniuses, but if you look at the present moment we have so little”
Also, to use society’s capacity for recognizing geniuses, especially as our society fragments, seems like a recipe for generating the antidotal feeling of society currently having less geniuses
"Do we have less geniuses, or does it feel like we have less geniuses?"
Did you read the post or are you replying to the post's title?
It may be a mistake to post a reaction that I can’t rigorously support, but I do think something has been lost in our culture beyond the boring explanations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it relates to the phenomenon under consideration. If you read the real intellects of the nineteenth century—not just Darwin or the other huge names, but really good academics who never became household names—it’s just obvious to me that we aren’t producing people of the same deep knowledge capable of synthesizing broad and diverse strands of thought, using sound judgment and care in avoiding over-extrapolation, to form good, reliable, new ideas. There are lots of explanations, of course, like the vastly increased literature in every field precluding mastery of any broad subject area. But I’m quite convinced it isn’t just the absence of low-hanging fruit and whatnot. I just can’t find contemporary writers who exhibit the same kind of mastery as their forebears in those areas I’m competent to understand.
I think part of the problem in science is publishing and modern academia. The need to publish frequently makes it harder to put only your good, deep ideas out there. Thus, there is a lot more dross, the signal-to-noise ratio is worse. Furthermore, the stylistic constraints of current academic writing can make all but the most naturally skilled writers sound stilted, dense, and dry. We also don't teach prospective academics anything about teaching and we don't teach them much about writing well, so they don't often develop the skills needed to explain things clearly, accurately, and engagingly.
All of that makes reading widely and deeply more difficult, on top of the difficulty of mastering fields that go deeper and deeper every year.
Three points on this.
1) Many former examples of genius only get recognized widely after many years and some reasonable teaching about them. We know about the genius of Einstein because *everybody* hears about Einstein all the time. I would strongly argue that on-par would be people like Shannon or Djikstra or other pioneers of information theory and computation, but they don't get taught in the standard US high school curriculum. Same thing with Henry Ford and Carl Johansson -- Ford gets all the credit for assembly line manufacturing, but much of that would be impossible to scale without the gauge blocks Johansson invented, but the former is a household name while the latter is not.
2) Many examples can be pointed to of contemporary genius/fundamental direction shift type technology invention. The invention of CRISPR is clearly a game changer, similarly the invention of mRNA delivery systems, but I can't tell you who invented those off the top of my head. On the other hand, in hobbies of mine that I'm more in tune with, I would argue that many advancements in 3D printing or machining are coming at an insane rate, but often without an individual who can be pointed to as a foundational genius.
3) Many fields experience delayed fundamental shifts due to ossification where peer reviewers stick to their pet theories and direct the field to make slow, incremental progress, which is then shifted significantly as they lose influence and move on. I can't point to a good source on this off the top of my head, but I've read more than one article making this point, typically citing the behavior of paleontologists regarding fundamental theories about extinction event causes.
1. Erik Hoel points out in his article that Tolstoy was thought of as a genius, in the ranks of Newton and da Vinci, four years after his death. Also, no way is Shannon's work as paradigm-changing as Einstein's, although it can be thought of as comparably influential.
2. CRISPR hasn't answered its promise yet. It just might. But it hasn't yet.
3. This was probably true before as well. People didn't want to believe that the Earth went around the sun because of the ossification of the "earth center of the universe" theory.
I think you have to separate scientific genius from artistic genius.
It's plausible to say that the low hanging fruit has been plucked when it comes to science or philosophy, but it seems much less plausible to say that all the "easy" combinations of musical notes have been taken.
On the creative/artistic side of things, I imagine an important part of the explanation is critical disdain for popular works. Without pointing to the subjective aesthetic judgments of a small group of critics, how would one justify the claim that Mozart is a "genius" and Max Martin is not? That Dickens is a "genius" and JK Rowling is not?
But the critics, who get to label someone a genius, have an instinctive loathing for anything with mass popularity. And the most talented people nowadays are not doing the things the critics want. So it's hardly surprising that classical music isn't producing more Mozarts. The best musicians are writing music for bigger audiences and much bigger paydays. Even in classical music, I'd class John Williams as a "genius" by any objective metric but the fact that he writes for the public rules him out for that tiny critical class.
There are lots of important scientific questions that aren’t close to being answered. What is dark energy? Dark matter? How did life start? What is sentience?plenty of opportunities for geniuses.
I think there’s a couple of things going on here.
The first is the market cap problem; as a company grows large it becomes less and less likely that it will keep growing at the same rate.
If genius is one in 1000 (arbitrarily) then, if the population of the earth is 1 million there are 1000 geniuses.
If the population is 8 billion then there are 8 million geniuses. And we kind of have to assume that all these seeds will not fall in fertile soil.
Then, as some others have mentioned here, there is the low hanging fruit issue. As things become more complex it seems less likely that anyone person would make some staggering advance.
Also, just as an example, there were no geniuses of cinema until about 100 years ago.
I’m sure there are other disciplines that could be thought of that are equally as recent. All in all I think the idea of aristocratic tutoring is not very compelling
Then there’s the hindsight 2020 issue. Not all geniuses are celebrated in their time and there is no reason to think that this time is any different.
Mozart didn’t really end up looking much like a genius at the end of his life.
Let me address some of these points, since I think, in many cases, they are dealt with appropriately in the original essay.
First, to one of the main points you make: is aristocratic tutoring still alive and well? If it were, then I agree the thesis would be bunk. And it is alive and well in very particular fields, like Chess and music (and sports, in many cases). There, it is obviously successful and helpful—your brother being such a case. But is it practiced beyond games, in academic/intellectual fields? No. Not at all. And that was my point. For example, a private tutor of the elites reached out to me, and this is what they had to say:
"Wish more of our clients asked for what you propose in your (wonderful) essay. Over 15 years working with elites around the world, I'm afraid I can only think of 2 or 3 who have sought what you suggest. The rest - test-prep."
So, no, aristocratic tutoring is not still practiced for intellectual subjects, even among elites, tutoring is reserved for test prep.
Then to your other main point: I do not say that the decline of genius is mono-causal. I explicitly give credence to the “ideas are getting harder to find” thesis and say I agree with it. I just say I don’t think it explains 100% of the effect, since it implies some ridiculous things, like that (a) science and arts are “mineable” in exactly the same way since the decline seems similar in both, and (b) that ideas got harder to find in such a way it counterbalanced the explosion of free information to everyone on Earth in a period of under 20 years. Are ideas really that much harder to find in 2015 compared to 1995? Really? That much harder? That giving every human being infinite free information did *nothing*?
And finally, the tertiary point: yes, you can find historical figures that weren’t tutored, as I, again, say in the essay. But I find it odd that, of your the list of six geniuses who weren’t supposedly tutored, two of them were. First, Wolfgang Motzart was tutored by his father, as you point out, but I’m not sure why that doesn’t count. There’s a whole section on how family members can act as aristocratic tutors. Second, I'm pretty sure Darwin was indeed tutored as a youth. His house had a massive servant’s quarter, and he had governesses (who I believe taught him languages). If you look at reports of his own household when he was an adult, all his children had tutors and governesses as well. They were an aristocratic family and that’s just what aristocrats did. I literally give him as an example in the essay of how casual they took tutoring, for Darwin, at 16, independently hires tutors just to teach him outside skills, on his own, like it's totally natural.
I think you’d have to work very hard to find a host of intellectuals who weren’t aristocrats past a certain time in history, so this contra game is limited. Lastly, governesses are usually not counted as "tutors" but acted as such.
Yeah it's weird that Scott doesn't count tutoring from parents(!) and governesses.
In many cases, tutors and governesses were *so* common that they aren't even mentioned, especially not in places like wikipedia.
I’m a little confused by the idea that there are less geniuses in the arts. Sure, Mozart is great, but it’s not like people don’t love Ed Sheeran. If you say he doesn’t do anything original, then look at the Beatles. I don’t know much about music, but I’m sure Skrillex has some claim to genius (if you don’t like his music, consider that Arnold Schoenberg is considered a genius in music, and his stuff is also often hard to listen to, or listen to the song “it’s gone rain” with split earphones, which again was made by a pioneer and potential genius). I can’t tell if Mozart was actually so amazing, or if people just dismiss the Beatles as “popular” and therefor not geniuses, leaving it at that. (I feel like this probably applies to visual arts, acting, directing, writing, etc).
1. People do think of Sheeran as a great musician, but probably not a genius.
2. People do think of the Beatles as geniuses.
3. People think of Mozart as a (much) bigger genius than the Beatles.
Is there a reason that is founded on something other than classical music snobbery? Again, I don’t know loads about music, but I get the feeling that classic music lovers can be snobby about it, and I’d love to be corrected
I'm not a classical music snob either.
But Mozart's impact can probably be understood by studying what music sounded like before he exploded into the scene, and how he changed it within his lifetime. In other words, we probably need context to understand his contribution.
That seems fair, but also the Beatles seem to have made huge changes to music that is apparently still ongoing. Did Mozart just get those big wins because people hadn’t thought of gradually changing volume yet instead of changing quickly because big complicated instruments were only recently being used? Was he the transition from baroque to classical music? Were the beatles the transition from frank Sinatra to Pop? What’s the important difference?
Mozart was extremely prolific and was producing music of astounding beauty and complexity from an extremely young age. Few compare in this regard.
I mean, child prodigies aren’t uncommon nowadays. Srinivasa Ramanujan was apparently a complete prodigy in maths without tutoring, and the guy who came up with predictive coding is maybe a genius and was smart from a young age.
Also, this will be subjective, but my brother studied music and listened to Mozart’s early stuff, and said it was fine but not great and there are lots of adult music students who very much aren’t geniuses who could make something better. Basically all of Mozart’s famous “genius-defining” stuff comes from his adulthood as far as I remember (though feel free to correct me). I’m also sure that many other geniuses didn’t produce anything of particular value until adulthood (did einstein do any important physics as a kid? Did Charles Dickens write any important stories as a kid?).
I wrote a book length story as an 11 year old, and if I became a famous writer I’m sure people would say I wrote books even as a child and make a story out of it. As it happens, I don’t write anymore and probably never will, and then it just turns into a pile of nothing which nobody cares about
Yeah, but please remember Mozart's "early stuff" includes a short symphony written when he was eight. An adult who could produce something better than an eight year old? Sure! But did that adult write a complete symphony when *they* were eight? Of comparable quality?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4IXXpTHjok
I'm the first to say "a decline of genius" is pretty subjective. At Cold Takes they had a good thought experiment, which was something like "people will sometimes say there has been no decline of genius, but if you ask them what books they would take to a desert island they name things like The Complete Works of Shakespeare and not The Da Vinci Code" and I think that's capturing something that may at first seem shallow but it's actually quite deep.
I think it depends a lot on who you’re asking. I know plenty of people who might pick Harry Potter. I would probably take a children’s book that I had as a kid. If I couldn’t choose that, I’m not going to exclude Shakespeare, but I also might consider a song of ice and fire (if it were finished), or Never Let Me Go but Ishiguro.
Obviously this is assuming I can’t take a raft building book
Harry Potter appeals to children because they don't know any better.
"At Cold Takes they had a good thought experiment, which was something like 'people will sometimes say there has been no decline of genius, but if you ask them what books they would take to a desert island they name things like The Complete Works of Shakespeare and not The Da Vinci Code'"
I think you're confusing the status-signals of a specific community for the opinions of "people" generally. I'm pretty sure most people I know would pick Harry Potter or The Hunger Games before anything classic.
That's not a fair comparison. In Shakespeare's day there were the equivalents of "The Da Vinci Code" (hugely popular blood-and-thunder revenge tragedies that moulder in dust today) and in our day there are much better works of literary fiction than Brown's potboiler best-seller.
Brown has already fallen off his peak of popularity. Time is what winnows out the chaff and leaves "Shakespeare is better than Dan Brown", and you have to give time to winnow out the chaff of today's works.
As other people have pointed out, I think that in reality, most people would name something populist but page-hefty like Harry Potter, Song of Ice & Fire, or Stephen King's collected works, before they say Shakespeare.
In fact, there is even a British radio show with exactly this premise for music, called Desert Island Discs. I wonder what the book choices would be for a book equivalent if you asked lots of famous people like they do in the show
How do you classify Mozart as a genius? Musically? Absolutely, and yet there are those who don't find Mozart's work interesting or engaging. Genius in the popular sense, which tends to hover around "boffin or egg-head making big scientific discoveries"? No, not in the same ball park as Newton or Einstein.
So a genius in the arts is someone who will still be acclaimed one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now - and going off moderns is very hard to predict who is going to last that long. Current popularity and even critical acclaim is no measure. Shakespeare languished in obscurity after his hey-day until an 18th century revival. Same with many others in the arts who are nowadays acclaimed as geniuses.
Regarding Darwin's education, I don't know. The online bios claim that he went off to the local Anglican day school at the age of eight after his mother's death, along with his brother. There probably were governesses who taught his three elder sisters and may well have taught the young Darwin as well, but he was formally educated in schools (even though he hated the local school and his father thought he was an idler so packed him off to study medicine aged 16 to Edinburgh, where he dawdled another two years until his father then sent him to Cambridge for a BA and in theory ending up in holy orders as an Anglican parson, a socialy respectable position for a free-thinking naturalist where he probably would have been the 'more interested in scholarship than preaching' type if he had ever made it that far).
I would also imagine the tutoring of his own children at home had at least as much to do with him hating his own time in school as anything else, and although his surviving children went on to have careers of their own, none of them reached the same heights as their father (something along the same line as the Bachs, where although the prolific offspring did have successful musical careers of their own, when you mention "Bach" or "Darwin" there really is only one person you mean and everyone knows him).
What is your source for Shakespeare "languishing in obscurity" before the 18th century? My understanding was that he was always held in high regard, but the 18th-century was when he started to overshadow other similarly well-regarded contemporary writers.
I’m surprised the internet hasn’t produced more geniuses. As a 7 year old I soon hit the limits of questions that could be answered. The town library certainly had its limits. But to have a device in your pocket that contains essentially the sum total of all human knowledge? Why haven’t 99.9999 percentile humans, orders of magnitude smarter than I am, been able to do more with that advantage?
One possibility - my 8 year old nephew tested off the charts. His parents are very anti-screen. Is that holding him back? The modern parents most likely to have genius children are also the lost likely to be anti-scree…?
The internet is good for producing knowledgeable people, which is not the same thing as genius. Arguably they are anticorrelated, in that "I really want to know this thing but, aargh, I can't just look it up, I'm going to have to *figure it out*" is good exercise for the genius-muscle even as it results in you knowing less stuff than someone who just looked up every answer.
Maybe in a age in which aristocratic tutoring was more widely acknowledged as an ingredient of genius (i’m speculating here), some parents or acquaintances might have attempted to model their help to gifted children on the basis of their impressions of what aristocratic tutoring might be like. Think of the difference in subject exploration style you might get from a bright parent digging into a subject and trying to work on it collaboratively with their bright child, as opposed to merely helping a child answer pre-assigned homework prompts made to fit all 20 children in class. If something like this happened in the case of the others, would it necessarily be noteworthy enough for us to know about it 100 years in advance or so?
There is the case of Robert Browning, whose father was a clerk in the Bank of England and who seems to have acted in that way as a tutor for his son:
"Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge—knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world."
There's also the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father seems to have set out to deliberately create a genius and thus crammed him full of education:
"ohn Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.[16]
Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.
At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe."
It probably helped that his father was friends with the likes of Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, who used to drop round and chat with young John.
Richard Fineman went to Far Rockaway High School in Queens. Very much a GATE school, but he certainly far from being tutored.
I was wondering when someone would bring up Feynman! I think he's a great case study in modern celebrity-genius. He attributed a great deal of his success to parents that made him wonder about the world and encouraged him to tinker with his surroundings incessantly. Later in life, he was odd, imaginative, and curious in that familiar Einstein/von Neumann way, learning to juggle, pick locks, speak Portuguese, and play bongos. I came away from his biography thinking that the best intellectual gift I could give to my children would be to foster their eccentricities.
i thought it was a cool article , but the genius angle was a red herring
Its interesting enough to just say aristocratic tutoring was a better system and we should go back to it where we have the means. It produces better educated and more interesting people. What that does to 'genius' production is tough to say.
When you read Tolstoy's accounts of his education you find elementary age kids in Aristocratic Russia learning multiple languages fluently, playing advanced classical music on multiple instruments, reading tough works and advanced math. Nothing like the results you would see at even the best private schools in my city. Theres definitely something there
Hey ACX Readers! More great comments as always.
There are a few great comment threads on PhD education below, and my comment didn't seem like quite a reply to any specific thought, so I am posting a standalone comment.
I think one factor in PhD students getting trapped into their advisors pet projects and ways of thinking is the sheer cost of doing much modern science.
As a personal example, my work is both pretty interesting and (I think!) a bit impactful. Not change-the-world impactful, but generating data all the experts agree is needed impactful. However, to do this work, I basically need $2million worth of equipment to myself. My advisor secured the labspace and funds to get this equipment, which is something he can only do because of his position as a Professor. I could never get this sort of funding myself, and am not the level of genius that could convince the NSF or a wealthy patron to give me the resources personally. And then I get tied in to my advisor's way of thinking because I manage his lab in exchange for all these resources!
This ties in neatly with Scott's comments on smart people only being able to make small contributions to big fields - the resources needed to make even small improvements are huge.
Nothing too original in this rambling comment (sorry for the lack of a direct point!) - just wanted to point out that many of the disheartening aspects of getting a PhD are a little less tragic when zoomed out, though still hard to deal with on the everyday personal level. Other than maybe my professor, nobody in my group is world-class-genius. But! We are mostly high-school-valedictorian level smart. So, for us smart people who aren't geniuses, a lot of the bureaucratic downsides of grad school seem like just a natural consequence of wanting to research cool and interesting topics that only an academic will pay for. This also means that we need to learn a lot about project management and other organizational skills rather than just thinking about electrons all day.
I do wonder about classic geniuses like Mathematicians and Theoretical Physicists. Can they get a little more leeway in the course of their academic career because the physical cost of running experiments is lower? Someone below mentioned famous tech entrepreneurs getting their starts as kids because of the relatively lower barriers to entry; a similar idea might still apply to math?
If you're doing computational work you have much more flexibility. People are usually working on multiple projects at once, and you can easily explore ideas with minimal costs. The only annoying thing is that you're still stuck with administrative structures mostly set up for experimental work.
Thanks for the reply! Most of the computational folk I know work heavily with experimental people, and are stuck dealing with our slow timeframes :p
Sorry just a random commenter who can't stop thinking about AI alignment.
Is there anything that would stop us from 'cheating' on the alignment problem and adding a 'maximum power constraint' to its utility function?
"At no point should you be using, directly or indirectly, more than 100 MW of power. Modeling power usage of any amount counts as using power. You should attempt to model the power usage of everything in your map of reality."
I'm guessing that "or indirectly" does a lot of the work here. It seems to put .... weird limits on the AI (it's not allowed to simulate, say a dyson sphere). But a lot of the difficulty of the alignment thesis seems to stem from saying "i want to point the universe in some direction, take an arbitrarily large step, and have it not kill all of us", and what we've been trying to do is formulate constraints on the direction, rather than find a way to limit the step size.
Newton said he saw further because he was standing "on the shoulders of giants." But now, the accumulated global knowledge of all prior "giants" is like the Himalayas. You can spend your whole life climbing to the top by understanding what is already known. And even if you succeed, you will only be seeing .0001% further than the current peak.
His comment was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was hunchbacked. Greg Cochran's spin is "If I have seen further than others, it is only because I'm knee-deep in the dwarves".
> 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).
That sounds like a weird way to measure the number of genuises to me. From what I understand, genuises are defined by being above their peers. I would expect to have a relatively "fixed" number of genuises at any point, rather than a number proportional to the population. Considering the "total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields", it sounds normal that the ratio of genuises to "regular people" decreased.
I also wonder if the whole thing was explained well enough by Stephen Jay Gould back in the 1960's, as to why there are no more 400 hitters in baseball (or why the number of basefall triple crown winners has plummeted). The proferred answer was that the pool of talent has become so much larger, from the pitching as well as the hitting, that it's proportionaly harder to stand out (or perhaps, given the dominance of pitching, harder than ever to stand out as a batter).
For this reason Miquel Cabrera should be added to our list of geniuses. I don't know if he was tutored.
Gould's theory was re less variability of MLB talent, not that the pool has gotten larger. https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theory-explain-why-there-were-no-batting-triple-crowns-in-mlb-for-45-years/
The theory is that the variability between MBL players declined _because_ the pool has gotten larger. From your own link:
"In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent [...] should decrease."
I just reread Gould's original discussion (on pp 215 et seq of The Flamingo's Smile), and he does not refer to an increase in the talent pool as the cause of the decline in variation, but rather to the maturation and standardization of the system in which players operate. In order to determine the ultimate cause of the decline in variation, he says, "[w]e should concentrate on the increasing precision, regulation and standardization of play" (at p. 225)
From the article: "With these examples in mind, it’s likely that at [sic] a significant contributing factor for the phenomenon of genius running in families is that genius family members act as aristocratic tutors, encouraging learning, the life of the mind, and inculcating the pursuit of the higher mysteries in the young."
My reading of this is that the author DOES count tutoring by parents as tutoring.
I'm surprised that no one has made this counter-point yet: we have plenty of geniuses. They work in tech.
If you are a brilliant, independent and unorthodox thinker today, where do you go? Paris? Vienna? London? No, you go to Silicon Valley. Do you pursue music, art, or science? No, you found or join a tech company, or maybe or a hedge fund.
Elon Musk is a genius. His undergrad was in physics and he considered pursuing a PhD in Physics at Stanford. I expect he could have made interesting contributions to some subfield. But instead he went into business and became the wealthiest man alive.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are geniuses. While PhD students at Stanford they figured out how to organize the world's knowledge. Instead of building on that idea academically, they founded a spectacular business on top of it.
Hal Varian is a genius. He is a microeconomist with a set of theorems named after him. What does he do? Design auctions for Google. Even people with long careers and scientific achievements are drawn in.
Michael Burry is a genius. He could have been a very successful medical researcher. Instead, he started a hedge fund, developed a novel understanding of the mortgage market, invented the Big Short and made millions.
Steve Jobs, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen... we could spend a long time arguing for our favorites. The point is that constraining "genius" narrowly to art and basic research creates a selection bias. These people are still around--they're just pursuing other fields.
Would you put any of them in the ranks of Darwin, Tolstoy, Newton, da Vinci, Einstein?
Side note: The story about Elon going to Stanford is probably wrong (going by what I read in his biography).
I absolutely would. I'll focus on Page and Brin. They completely changed the way we think about trust, factual reliability, and information management. They encoded that understanding into an elegant computer algorithm. They applied that algorithm to make the Internet navigable. And they distributed that algorithm worldwide. The last person to have as much impact on society as they did was probably Gutenberg. I don't know if Hinton will be in the history books for his intellectual accomplishments 100 years from now, but I'm very confident they will.
Thanks for the factual correction on Elon. I've updated my point to accord with the events described here:
https://www.quora.com/How-could-Elon-Musk-have-been-admitted-for-a-PhD-at-Stanford-without-Research-paper-publication
To add to this point, when we talk about geniuses, we tend to conflate 4 distinct types of people:
Genius: Someone who radically alters our collective understanding of a field
Master: Someone with a comprehensive contemporary understanding of a field
Prodigy: someone with an unusual and seemingly innate talent for a specific field
Celebrity: someone widely recognized and praised for their accomplishments
The geniuses cited here are, in fact, genius-celebrities. It follows that there are many geniuses who receive little or no public attention for their work. We should expect that much more when the nature of celebrity has changed from aristocratic to populist.
In my view, Hoel's point pertains mainly to prodigies, not geniuses. A private tutor is far better than a schoolteacher at detecting and developing a specific aptitude. Aristocratic tutoring is a system for turning prodigies into masters, but no tutor can turn a prodigy into a genius.
Jeff Bezos was smarter than basically everyone at Amazon, but not smart enough to do quantum physics. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/10/bezos-quotes.html
Well, if we're gone downhill with the decline of 'aristocratic tutoring', then it happened from the 15th century onwards.
Thomas More - went to a local school in London:
"Not far away from Milk Street, is Threadneedle Street. Today, it is home to the Bank of England, but in the 1480s it was the location of St Anthony’s School, where More went when he was around seven years old. The distance from his house was no more than a few hundred yards – down Milk Street, along Cheapside, and into Threadneedle Street. As the schoolboys walked along Cheapside, they probably had no idea that they were walking over the heart of Roman Londinium.
St Anthony’s school was founded in 1440, attached to the Church of St Benet (Benedict) Fink, which was originally founded by one Robert Fink, presumably a wealthy Londoner. St Anthony’s itself, like all of the grammar schools of the period, was attached to a monastic community. It was here that More would have taken his first steps in the oratory for which he was renowned."
Thomas Wolsey - likewise educated in a local school
"The oldest record that may refer to the school in Ipswich goes back to 1399, in a legal dispute over unpaid fees. The first recorded mention of a grammar school in Ipswich is 1416. The school was most likely set up by the Merchant Guild of Ipswich, which became the Guild of Corpus Christi. The sons of the ruling burgesses were educated for a fee, and the sons of nobility and gentry could attend at higher fees.
From 1483 the school moved to a house bequeathed by ex-pupil Richard Felaw, a merchant and politician. His will also provided rental income for the school and stated that, for Ipswich children, only those parents with income over a certain amount should pay fees.
In 1528, building work began on an ambitious project for a 'college' school in Ipswich to rival the likes of Eton College. Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England, funded his 'College of St Mary' by ''suppressing' local religious houses such as Rumburgh Priory.[4] Ipswich school was incorporated into the college. Wolsey, who was from Ipswich and may have attended Ipswich school, intended the new institution to be a feeder to his recently built 'Cardinal's College' of Oxford University, which is now known as Christ Church. However, Wolsey fell out of favour with King Henry VIII and the college in Ipswich was demolished in 1530 while still half-built. The school pupils returned to Felaw's house."
There may be something (*may* be) to the idea that what was taught in Times Past was very different to what is taught in schools today, but if we're wondering why there are no more Albert Einsteins, well - where did Einstein go to school?
"Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, from the age of five, for three years. At the age of eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium (now known as the Albert Einstein Gymnasium), where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left the German Empire seven years later."
Einstein's tutor? There certainly was someone involved, but it's hard to know if he was formally employed by Einstein's parents as a tutor or if it was a mix of extending charity to a poor co-religionist and permitting him to lend books to the kid and talk to him about such subjects:
"Talmey was 21 when he first met Albert Einstein who was ten years old and who was on a third year of Luitpold Gymnasium. Talmey was then attending Medical School in Munich, Germany. For five years, from 1889 to 1894, Talmey was a weekly lunch guest of Einstein's family, as was Jewish custom. They used to discuss themes of interest to Albert Einstein, and Talmey lent him a number of books about science, including works on general science like multi-volume Popular Book on Natural Science by Aaron Bernstein, works on physics like Force and Matter by Ludwig Buchner, mathematcs, and philosophy, like The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant; according to Talmey, "Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear" for young Einstein. Many of those books were considered leading sources on their subjects, and at each meeting Einstein showed his mentor some of the problems he had solved that week. As Talmey recalled, teenage Einstein soon surpassed his mentor in mathematics and physics, and their discussions moved to philosophy."
So I think perhaps there might be an argument about the *content* but certainly not about the *model*. And I think the general idea that the low-hanging fruit has been picked and it's not so easy to produce Staggering Geniuses is correct.
I'd add two possible reasons you don't notice as many geniuses today:
1. If Einstein were alive today, there's a pretty good chance he'd have been recruited out of school by some financial firm to work on advanced trading algorithms, or by an intelligence agency to work on cryptography. There are traps that suck up the most talented people in the world to do things that are not beneficial/noticeable to the rest of society.
2. A genius is someone who stand head and shoulders above their peers. Bring enough of their peers up to their level and it looks like there are no geniuses anymore. Maybe modern education is so good that lots of people are at ceiling for ability, and a lot of what we take for granted as 'normal' is actually at genius level.
Compare the complexity of any random song on the top 40 today to medeival bardic music, for instance. It may feel counter-intuitive to call Taylor Swift a musical genius, but how sure are you that her talent isn't on that level compared to the *average* 13th-century composer?
(and by 'her' talent, I mean whoever writes her music iff it's not her)
Ironically, there are a bunch of rumors that the reason Charles Babbage never produced much solid re the computer is because he had to spend a ton of his time and resources on black-budget cryptography work for HIM.
well, Newton spent most of his time studying alchemy and astrology, didn't prevent him from doing fine on science side. Also lets remember Einstein had a day job in the patent office.
Newton only really got into alchemy and prophecies after he had already made most of his great discoveries during his early to mid 20s. He had some subsequent bursts of activity when he got around to publishing the Principia and the Optics later in life, but the core of those works had mostly been achieved in his early years of complete freedom as a fellow at Trinity.
I'm surprised more people haven't pointed this out. The geniuses of the past would be unremarkable today. This is no slight to them, they performed incredible feats given the state of knowledge they had, but for example Yang-Mills theory would make Newton's head spin. Newton might still be a good physicist today if he got a modern education but nowhere near the top. The problems tackled by geniuses today are way harder than those in the past.
And I agree with respect to music, however, I would have chosen Max Martin rather than Taylor Swift. Some people point to the harmonic simplicity of modern music compared with classical music to suggest that the classical composers were greater. But where modern music does lack in harmonic complexity, it more than makes up in textural and what I would term vertical complexity. Modern songs often have dozens or over a hundred separate parts or "tracks" layered together.
Here's a model that explains that graph: genius emerges regardless of education, so as we educate more people, genius seems rarer. I hope that this has been controlled for.
I also wonder why aristocratic tutoring began to decline in the 1500s. That seems early to me.
Off the top of my head, many more schools (today they're called public schools in England but are now private, fee-paying institutions) were founded by both clergy and rich laymen to promote education, including their own kids.
So instead of having to employ a tutor at home, you could send the young sprig of the nobility to a school with other young sprigs (and some clever commoners) to get the benefit of all the up-to-date learning imported from the Continent. The New Learning (Renaissance Humanism) began to take off in the 15th century, so keeping up with the Joneses educationally was important as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_England#Early_modern_period
Also, the Protestant Reformation meant an explosion in literacy, because If you wanted the laity to be able to read the Bible in the vernacular, first they had to be able to read. This meant schools of some kind, and if there was a State church, it took great interest in making sure the children were learning the proper doctrines about the place of church and state, the role of the monarch, and none of the bad old Papist doctrine still hanging around.
https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-protestant-education-in-the-xvith-century/
There is also the suggestion of the effects of the Industrial Revolution - now that parents were working in factories, what did you do with the kids? Dame schools were one answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dame_school
Hmmm. I can't think of as many modern brilliant military field commanders, either. Yamato, Rommel, Patton...any more recent?
(Half serious, half jesting in service of a different question: is music and science where our genius people are working now?)
I hear good things about Vo Nguyen Giap, but don't know much about him.
And a follow up - women geniuses? Not because "omg u don't acknowledge smart womyn" but...women who are brilliant at solving social/relationship issues, how are they noticed? Are we looking under the right street lamps for our truly, six sigma, brilliant people? Or only in the places where we have looked in the past?
Come to think of it, one would assume that the enormous growth of formal education for women would drastically increase the number of famous woman geniuses in all scientific fields, but if women's one-on-one tutoring never increased then under Mr Hoel's thesis the rate of genius woman scientists would stay the same; is this the case?
Far more likely that the problem is that kids today are primarily being taught how to fit into their socio-economic class as opposed to learning anything.
Is it possible we have *so many geniuses* now that it's extremely difficult to stand out?
I suppose this is where classicists and modernists would clash. Is Beethoven that special in the modern world, or was he special because the competition was so low that someone exceptional truly stood out and left a permanent mark on the society? Do you reject the idea that there may be dozens of Beethoven level musical geniuses producing music today? I can't say that I do.
Einstein is a tougher one, and I don't know that my suggestion or Scott's really address why there hasn't been another Einstein. It also hasn't been that long. Long tail events, such as the production of someone of Einstein's genius, really are long tail and the lack of them in a 70 year period doesn't imply a fundamental change in the conditions that "produced" them.
> "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)."
Two potential confounders for this graph spring immediately to mind:
1) In the past, people would mostly acclaim locals, since they mostly only heard about locals. With improvements in communication, people here about successful people all over the world, causing everyone to acclaim the world's best, instead of acclaiming the local best. The world's total acclaim is concentrated into fewer individuals, reducing the number of distinct acclaimed people, even if actual accomplishment remains constant.
2) In the past, fewer people had the education to potentially succeed in these fields. If we were previously educating geniuses preferentially (either because teachers sought out gifted students, or because geniuses were more motivated to seek out education--both of which sound plausible), then we would expect broader education to reduce geniuses as a percentage, even if the absolute number of geniuses were constant or slightly increasing.
I haven't done the research to verify whether these things happen or how big the effect size is, but I find it pretty hard to take the graph seriously without it being accompanied by some discussion of these possibilities (if only to explain why you think they're small).
(Scott also makes good points, but these two possibilities leapt off the page at me.)
The NEXT Question, regardless of WHY:
Does this mean we are approaching a 'soft wall' in technology, where diminishing returns eventually make further advancement unprofitable? I wonder what happens when AI solves *basically all* problems, with nothing left to do but make more of the same... That'll entrench a few interests.
Partly it must be that in many fields it's just much harder to make a genius level contribution. Edward Witten, the physicist, has made contributions to both mathematics and string theory that are astonishing to those in the fields. But he doesn't have the 'genius' celebrity of Einstein even though the problems Witten has solved are by many accounts harder than the ones Einstein or Newton did. The advancement of knowledge is much more incremental today. In music, the audience is vastly more fragmented than it was in Mozart's day which means there is no consensus on what is 'best.'
There is a theory that the mean of biological intelligence has been reduced by roughly one standard deviation since the Victorian era. This old blog has a number of interesting and scholarly references to research into it by using the search term 'dysgenic':
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=dysgenic
If you think there are no musical geniuses right now you are clearly not paying attention to music
I'm a parent of three adult children so i'm thinking about this question from a modern parent's view. At a very young age, maybe five, one of my children exhibited a precocity for chess. But after a month or so of sessions with a chess tutor, he got bored. There were other activities he wanted to do, so we had no motivation or desire to force chess on him. I'm certainly not saying that he'd have turned into a chess prodigy of the first order. I am wondering, however, whether the fact that good modern parenting calls for letting your children have agency in choosing their interests has something to do with the decline of genius.
I think the biggest factor is that genius is becoming more niche. Seldom are geniuses as widely celebrated as they used to be, in part because to understand what they are talking about you would need a degree in the field. I'd say everyone who won a fields medal is a certified genius, but I probably couldn't tell you what they did.
Maybe the simpler solution is that we are getting stupider. The people reading Dickens back in the 19C were mostly educated to primary school level.
Well, and at the time Dickens was on the same level as Dan Brown - immensely popular and churning out bestsellers, but not getting so much critical acclaim. It's only in the decades since that he has become 'literature'. He started out as a journalist, then wrote serials for magazines, became editor and publisher of journals, and often had his novels published as one complete volume after they finished running as magazine serials. Indeed, it seems critics liked him as a writer of lightweight subjects but thought he was too preachy with more serious, 'literary' works:
"His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House ‘a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary.The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as "this dreary framework"; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit "decidedly the worst of his novels". All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful."
So who knows what popular writer of today will be the genius of a century hence?
The point is that dickens is considered complicated now but was read by everybody then.
Personal anecdote: my family was rural. Farmers, ranchers (and the specialized jobs that served them) had very limited resources, no television, limited radio, so their entertainment tradition was reading, music, and games. They all had the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare, and because that was almost all they had, they knew them cover to cover. Everyone could play a musical instrument, whether violin, guitar, accordion or keyboard. They could do the probabilities of cards and the math of dominoes. They'd probably seem like savants to people today. Heck, my techs think I'm some sort of genius since I actually can remember a handful of constants without needing to google them.
"The answer is: they were, we just need to look further back. The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s. The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s. The titan of gay rights is Harvey Milk - now we’re up to the 70s. Ask someone who isn’t an expert on feminism to name famous feminists, and you’ll probably get people like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin - 70s again. I’m not sure any modern black, gay, or feminist activists measure up to these people in terms of influence, which is fine: the modern paradigm of minority rights began around the 60s and 70s, the first few people to operate within it got outsized acclaim, and there’s no easy way to equal them now."
I think social justice activism is a highly atypical case that has virtually zero relevance for any of the other things being discussed.
Standing up for minority rights in the 1960s was an enormously important, but difficult and dangerous task. Note how many of the names on your list were jailed and/or killed for their activist work. To become a prominent anti-racist activist in that kind of environment, you *had* to have an exceptional mind. Nowadays, the urgency of the task is much less than it used to be, but the risk has been reduced to effectively nothing, so there's no longer a filter keeping morons and mediocrities from dominating the field. I don't know of any equivalent phenomenon in science, music or literature.
There are still many geniuses in Pure Mathematics. Like Terrence Tao, Andrew Wiles, Grigori Perelman, or Peter Scholze, but the list could go on and on.
And the key point is that these geniuses, despite unquestionably meriting the label based on their extraordinary achievements, are nevertheless barely known outside their field. That's a strong indicator that the label "genius" as commonly used--that is, "people widely enough known as geniuses for Scott to be able to cite them off the top of his head when composing a Substack post"--is generally applied based on social criteria, not intellectual ones. So rather than ask, "why aren't we producing as many geniuses as we used to?", we should be asking, "why aren't we recognizing as many geniuses as we used to?".
+1.
Another thing is I think there are geniuses in the arts - it's just the snobbery/small-c conservatism of the people who are worried about a lack of genius in the arts excludes these people. Two people who come to mind for different reasons is Eminem and Kevin Feige.
Eminem's wordplay is monumentally good even in his middling songs, and has such a presence in his industry as a master of it, that in a very machismo-based one in some ways, basically nobody attempts to attack him.
For Feige, and maybe you can say this is organization genius, but he managed to plot basically the mythology of our century (comic books) into film in an organized populist way that appeals to billions around the world. More importantly, the failure of basically any other IP to come close to Marvel's success in the past 15 years and the spectacular failings of other attempts show just how good Feige is at his job.
Now, I realize there will be those that claim the above isn't real genius. Shrug.
I think that many art forms at this point have bifurcated into "high" and "low" varieties. This includes film, music, painting, and literature. Architecture too. Maybe everything.
The "low" form attracts most eyeballs, dollars, and creative energy. The best practitioners are very talented and successful and make things that a lot of people enjoy. Still, arbiters of taste are reluctant to call them "geniuses" because they're just doing a simple thing well.
The "high" form is attractive only to experts and insiders, is usually deliberately repulsive to mainstream audiences. It's often obsessed with "originality" -- you can't just go round composing a Beethoven-style symphony and expect prizes, you have to do something in a totally new and unique style, which is tricky because most of the styles that humans actually like are now "old". So it's incredibly difficult to do work that is actually _good_ while still satisfying all the narrow constraints required to be considered a practitioner of the "high" form.
So neither the high nor the low form is capable of producing anyone that can be considered on par with the past masters.
It feels like a big problem that we're conflating two meanings of "genius" here -- a person with extremely high mental capabilities, and a person who does extremely important work. Many extremely capable people never do extremely important work for one reason or another, and sometimes you see extremely important work done by people who just happen to be in the right place (or rather the right sub-field) at the right time.
Einstein is both, while someone like Darwin is probably in the latter category, and the former category is filled with people that you might know personally but don't read about in the newspapers.
Perhaps it's easier to monetize IQ today by being a programmer.
Also "IQ Shredders" https://web.archive.org/web/20200810024409/http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/
Hoel's argument was not even internally consistent. He claims that geniuses (i.e. outliers) were caused by aristocratic tutoring, and then later says that tutoring was universal among the wealthy. "All the geniuses were tutored" followed by "everybody was tutored" is not exactly making the case for tutoring being causal.
If it doesn't take as much genius to discover displacement as it does Special Relativity, that suggests that our metric for measuring past genius is skewed toward overestimating past genius. Say we didn't know about water displacement but we still had today's level of research training; how many of today's researchers would find it? I don't think we'd have to wait for a once-a-generation genius to come along and discover it. I think multiple people would co-discover it pretty quickly. Yet back in 300BC they had this one guy who figured it out.
And how many Pasteurs would have been able to invent something like Bitcoin? As we build the intellectual structure higher, maybe we're capitalizing on what would have once been called 'genius' every day, but we're using them for things like discovering in-app payments and opt-out behavioral nudging.
I'm not saying we didn't have true geniuses in the past, just when you're playing on easy mode it's easy to call someone a genius who by today's standards would be just considered pretty smart. Instead of innovations that go down in textbooks, they'd end up inventing autonomous ocean-cleaning robots instead. Still important, but not genius level from today's standards.
This is subtly different from saying "we've collected the low-hanging fruit". Here, I'm saying we're over-estimating past genius by calling things amazing discoveries that weren't that amazing in retrospect.
(Although quaternions have to be genius-level, right? Pretty sure you have to wait for a genius to come along to invent those.)
> Say we didn't know about water displacement but we still had today's level of research training; how many of today's researchers would find it? I don't think we'd have to wait for a once-a-generation genius to come along and discover it.
I guess the hard part of what Archimedes did was not so much in formulating the law of displacement, but in realising that physical laws were actually a thing -- that some parts of the apparent complexity of nature can be reduced to simple, consistent patterns that can be expressed mathematically.
I think we should cleanly distinguish the two thesis:
1) Focused tutoring is a very good method of education;
2) The decline of focused tutoring is the cause of the decline in the number of geniuses.
I believe 1 is true, and very much so. I think Scott's reasons for doubting 2 are persuasive. The weakness of Eric's essay is in leaning on 2, when I think he could simply have written fruitfully about 1.
Contra Scott, in the essay I never said that the decline of genius is due fully and completely to a lack of tutoring. Personally, I do think that “ideas are getting harder to find.” Indeed, good evidence for this hypothesis is linked in the original essay! I just don’t think it explains the full decline, and aristocratic tutoring is the missing puzzle piece. Therefore, we should expect to find many examples of historical geniuses without aristocratic tutors, and we should also expect to still find geniuses after aristocratic tutoring ended, just at a reduced rate (which is indeed what is observed). Making most of Scott’s points moot here.
Also, one reason to look for a missing puzzle piece to the “ideas are getting harder to find” thesis, as I pointed out, implies two questionable assumptions: (a) science and arts are “mineable” or “exhaustible” in exactly the same way since the decline seems similar in both, and (b) that ideas got harder to find in such a way it counterbalanced the explosion of free information to everyone on Earth in a period of under 20 years due to the internet.
Ah, good clarification! Thank you.
"Therefore, we should expect to find many examples of historical geniuses without aristocratic tutors, and we should also expect to still find geniuses after aristocratic tutoring ended, just at a reduced rate (which is indeed what is observed)."
You leave out the third case: many examples of aristocratic tutoring who did not go on to become historical geniuses but simply gentlemen and noblemen of their time.
Aristocratic tutoring may be the 'secret sauce' but you can't produce a hamburger merely by pouring the sauce onto a piece of cardboard. The gifts and talents of the tutored person are the important ground, and indeed we might flip things around - it was not that aristocratic tutoring produced geniuses, it was that geniuses required aristocratic tutoring because conventional schooling was not sufficient for their needs (see Chesterton on Browning: "In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity.")
I think it's just outright false that there are fewer musical geniuses around today. Offhand, I would hold up Jake Heggie, John Adams, and Philip Glass as belonging to the Pantheon, along with Beethoven and Mozart and the rest.
I think also that there are a few composers who are primarily known for their "commercial" music aimed at movie and game soundtracks who have the talent and creativity to have worked at that level, but the strictures of those markets have made it harder for them to show off their full range. Again, just offhand: Nobuo Uematsu, Kow Otani, and Austin Wintory spring to mind as being brilliant classical composers. If opera and symphonies were still artforms where more people could make a living focusing on them, I expect they would've.
Also, when you look into the accounts of what tutoring was like at the time it was generally in the realm of "memorize Latin all day and get a beating if you fidget" not in depth tailored learning. So unless teenagers knowing how to read the Bible and Iliad in the original has some magic stimulating effect I'd be surprised if it's that u
This is a pretty disappointing essay, not up to your usual standard I think. It looks to me like you're not even trying very hard to defend the conclusion you clearly had in mind from the beginning -- that clever ideas are harder to find. I mean, obviously you will be aware that citing six (6) individuals from the past 400 years who were *not* tutored is no serious evidence at all for the proposition that "Probably well below half of [past genius] were [tutored]." Not unless it's also your assertion that 6 represents a good representative sample of all the geniuses in the past 400 years.
The hypothesis is pretty unlikely on its face anyway. It requires one of two strange coincidences: that we are at this exact moment in history bumping up against the natural limits of human intelligence, after 2 million years, or have discovered nearly all there is to discover, or created all there is to create, in multiple scientific and artistic fields. That seems...highly coincidental.
A much more plausible hypothesis draws its inspiration from the fact that multiple periods in history saw similar declines in productivity, and were preceded and followed by substantial bursts in scientific advance and artistic creativity. They weren't called "Dark Ages" just because of the Inquisition, after all. The path of human advance has *never* been smoothly monotonic, so it would seem dubious to infer that a downward trend over the past 200 years must arise from some exogenous cause, as opposed to just yet another fluctuation.
It may very well be a fluctuation that lasts longer than any of our lifetimes, of course. That has also happened. You could be born in 1090 and die in 1155 and in many places observe essentially no technological advance at all -- farmers would be using the exact same tools and methods in your old age as they did when you were born.
Of the 6 people Scott named, the majority of them debatably count as being aristocratically tutored, and I only say "debatable" because the historical details are fuzzy. For instance:
Motzart was tutored 1-on-1 heavily by his father (a musician and, perhaps more importantly, a music teacher) as his primary education—Scott admits this but seems to think it doesn’t count, for a reason I can’t discern.
Charles Darwin grew up in a household with governesses and, as far as I can tell, likely did have tutors (despite this not being mentioned by wikipedia)—certainly his own children grew up in such a household, they write about their tutors in their letters, and it’s hard to believe that their situation, a rich aristocratic family in a huge manor house with a servant’s quarters, was any different for Charles himself. In fact, in the essay I give an example of Darwin hiring a freedman tutor when he was merely 16 to point out the casualness and ubiquity of tutoring as an educational supplement.
Thomas Edison was homeschooled and tutored by his mother, who used to be a schoolteacher. (again, not sure why this doesn't count)
Charles Dickens was homeschooled and tutored by his mother (who knew Latin and, as a Barrow, was better educated than the family she married into). Indeed, that’s where he got his love of literature from. According to Charles Dickens: A Life, her tutoring in literature and reading
". . . makes Elizabeth Dickens sound like a mother who cherished her son through careful teaching which sparked his imagination, and from then on words were associated with pleasure and he was set on his path."
Newton? Well, as far as I can tell, Newton indeed wasn’t aristocratically tutored. But it’s also worth pointing out that education itself was quite different then. Here’s a comment by Aneesh Mulye that says the same:
"Newton and Darwin are anti-examples, and evidence for the opposite of your claim. . . Oxford and Cambridge are *known* for their primary method of education being... tutoring. And I don't mean one-on-many, I mean 1:1 to 1:3 ratios at most. That's literally what they're famous for. That's what's produced the strings of geniuses we see, including even modern eminences such as Dawkins (Dawkins' tutor was Niko Tinbergen, founder of ethology and later Nobelist; the description Dawkins gives of what that was like is astounding, and makes for a stunning and depressing contrast with the meatgrinder/factory model that's the default otherwise — you realise the later may not in fact deserve at all the name 'education').
So *all* the statements of the kind 'and then he went to Oxbridge, which is a totally normal education' are a major category error. That's not how they do things there; over there, they actually bother to press the 'Win' button occasionally."
Louis Pasteur is in the same boat as Newton—I would say not aristocratically tutored, but again, the style of education (“he went to Oxbrige”) were very different then—indeed, Louis Pasteur was later appointed as a tutor!
So of the six examples Scott Alexander sets out of supposed non-tutored geniuses, at least four were debatably tutored. I only say “debatably” because it is hard to tell, without being a historical expert, to what degree the tutoring went on. Did Edison’s mother drill him every day? Or not? But these examples really don’t show what Scott seems to think they do. My read on this is how difficult it is to not accidentally dig up a genius who had a former-schoolteacher for a mother/father who 1-on-1 tutored them in their early years (several of the above).
Regarding Mozart, he wasn't the only child that Leopold Mozart tutored. Mozart's older sister Maria-Anna was also taught to play at an early age by her father, and he toured both of them round Europe as child musical talents.
Why don't we have two Mozart geniuses? You can put part of it down to the social views of the time, which pushed her to marriage and giving up a performing career, but part of it is innate talent; she was a gifted performer, but there's nothing about her composing any pieces.
So simply "aristocratic tutoring" *on its own* is not enough to produce a prodigy or a genius, despite the Polgar sisters.
I do not believe that Newton had a personal tutor at Cambridge of the kind you describe. Richard Westfall covers this quite extensively in his biography of Newton. At that time, only some fellows of the college took on students to tutor, and those that did charged fees to each student (to the degree that they were known as 'pupilmongers'). Newton, being poor, had no money to pay the fees. Newton was on a scholarship which required him to serve his aristocratic classmates at mealtimes and to do janitorial work around the college.
He did eventually forge a strong relationship with Isaac Barrow, who functioned as a kind of mentor, but Newton did not benefit from the traditional Cambridge tutoring system as you describe.
He had a Tutor named Pulleyn. Never at Rest, a biography of Newton, says:
The system of tutors within the colleges [of Cambridge], which had largely replaced university lectures, had followed its own peculiar development. . . Newton’s tutor, Benjamin Pulleyn, was the champion pupil monger of Trinity during the period Newton was an undergraduate. . . [Newton’s] tutor Pulleyan may have recognized his pupil’s brilliance and tried to help him by enlisting Isaac Barrow, the one man in Trinity fit to judge his competence in the unorthodox studies he had undertaken.
It seems I misremembered. My apologies. Though I think the fact he had his first tutor at such a late age, and one who was primarily a tutor in the humanities rather than mathematics or natural sciences, is not exactly strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis.
The system of supervisions, which is what tutorials are called in Cambridge, didn't appear until the 19th century. "Tutor" refers today to a pastoral role and I suspect it was the same then. I doubt that Newton received anything like the modern notion of tutoring at Cambridge and there doesn't seem to be anything in Westfall's book to say that he did
There is a common tendency to associate the "Dark Ages" with all of medieval Europe, to ignore good things that happened then, and to think that more bad things happened then. The Dark Ages lasted from about 500-1000 and should not include the High Middle Ages. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The period of 1090-1155 was a period of rapid technological change in Europe: the renaissance of the 12th century. Your farmer saw the widespread adoption of horseshoes, collar harnesses, and three field crop rotation, which increased the productivity of agriculture by about 50%.
The Inquisition was not part of the Dark Ages. The Spanish Inquisition started in 1478 and the Roman Inquisition (which tried Galileo) started in 1542. These are post-Renaissance and 500 years after the Dark Ages. There were some medieval Inquisitions which started in 1184 (still not Dark Ages), but they were not nearly as vigorous until the Reconquista and Protestant Reformation.
Thank you for posting this!
"They weren't called "Dark Ages" just because of the Inquisition, after all."
*sighs* *puts on History Nitpicking Hat*
(1) What do you mean when you say "The Dark Ages"? The entire Mediaeval Period? The 16th century? All human history up until we hit the magic date of the Enlightenment?
It's a terrible term that has mostly been used in polemics not history, but if we're going to put a time range on it, then about the end of the Western Roman Empire up until the Early Middle Ages so something in the period 5th-12th centuries. And that only holds for Europe, and not even all of Europe; some countries had 'Golden Ages' between 8th-10th centuries, for instance, including the Carolingian Renaissance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance
(2) What do you mean when you say "The Inquisition"? There were more than one, and if you mean the famous one which is the boogeyman of the popular imagination and which writers of fiction found as fertile inspiration (see Poe and his story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum), then we're talking about the Spanish (as distinct from the Roman, Portuguese, and Venetian) Inquisition.
Which was set up by Isabella and Ferdinand in the wake of their victories in the Reconquista and ruling over what would become a united Spain, so it was as much political as religous. Avoiding getting bogged down in detail, it ran from the late 15th to early 19th century,
So does this mean we should include the 18th century, the century of The Enlightenment, in the Dark Ages? Plainly not. What is being expressed here is the well-worn idea of 'the suppression of science by the Church', couched in the pop-culture terms of the Dark Ages and Inquisition.
The larger point here is that of cyclic phases in discovery/productivity due to natural flow of "a lot to discover - those who first work on it get the most credit - the field gets ploughed thoroughly - nothing much but small increments of progress - a new field opens up - a lot to discover etc.", so that we cannot and should not put down 'Dark Ages' to the nefarious deliberate actions of an 'Inquistion' but I do wish some other simile had been used since the pop culture notions are pretty much mistaken.
Three points:
1) To the extent that genius is defined as "the best in the world in a topic area", the fraction of people that are geniuses must decrease when the world population increases. One out of every 2 billion people could win the Nobel Prize in Literature each year in 1900, now it is only one out of every 8 billion people. If you compare "upper-class white men in 1800" to "everyone in 2020", the math is even starker.
2) The "tall poppy" syndrome is very real. I have met quite a few people who I would describe as "genius" who have made it clear that they don't want to be publicized in that way.
3) There is a tendency to exaggerate the genius of historical figures. How many of the "Old Masters" are described as geniuses? And of those, how many were truly genius, and how many were simply good craftsmen with a posthumous fan club?
I don't know - I think in my field, at least (mathematics) geniuses are alive and well. In the last thirty years some of the huge problems in the history of mathematics - some of which were open for hundreds of years - have fallen. Fermat's Theorem, the Poincare Conjecture, the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, just off the top of my head. Wouldn't surprise me if the twin prime conjecture was coming soon. Fermat was proven by a borderline stereotypical "genius" (British guy from Oxford I think, holed up in his attic or whatever for years) and Poincare by a perfectly stereotypical genius (crazy eccentric Russian guy). CFSG was proven by a team of super smart folks, I think it's safe to say John Thompson was (well, still is - apparently the Riemann conjecture is his retirement hobby, and I don't think anybody would be shocked if he pulled it off) an absolute genius by any measure. They don't get the mainstream publicity that a Degrasse Tyson does (FLT is somewhat explainable to a layman, the CFSG is certainly not) for obvious reasons, but I feel pretty comfortable categorizing them as geniuses. Couldn't speculate as to their "tutoring" background, but, in math at least, I would say geniuses are alive and well, just not historically sexy as a Gauss (or with a cool story like Galois).
Part of it of course is the low hanging fruit aspect of it. Gauss was brilliant, but most, if not all, of his work would be easily comprehensible to a typical math grad student these days. Nowadays we're all standing on the shoulders of really freakin' tall giants, which makes us hard to see from the ground where everyone else is. (I'm basically little Ant-Man standing on top of Giant Ant-Man in my field, for instance).
Re: music, the aristocratic tutoring model is alive and well for performance, but for composition? Not so clear.
Genius decline probably has something to do with our decline in polygenic scores for intelligence, and probably also testosterone levels. This is a popular book arguing this thesis, the first one. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40224881 This post reviews the evidence of this dysgenics. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/recent-evidence-on-dysgenic-trends-february-2021
I know this has been argued by multiple commenters (certainly don't have the patience to find how many) and by Scott in the post himself, but I'm going to add my voice to them here from my own angle: I can't get very far in engaging with Hoel's thesis because of how strongly I disagree in the first place with the premise that there are hardly any geniuses anymore. As a research mathematician, I feel like I frequently encounter people in my professional life (big-name speakers at conferences, occasionally even colleagues) who are easily as rich in raw intelligence and capacity for out-of-the-box brilliant insights as Einstein was -- yet, they are not living in the right place and at the right time to change the world with a massive breakthrough that establishes them as the general public's conception of "genius". (Indeed this has made me annoyed for years at how "Einstein" is treated as synonymous with "most intelligent human being ever" in popular culture, as brilliant as Einstein obviously was.) In terms of the types of accomplishments for humanity that put someone on the map as a genius, I suspect that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
I fully in agreement with this.
I think if we poke this bear any longer we’re going to have to come up with a much more precise definition of genius
If we read Hoel's post in light of Considerations on Cost Disease, we reach a surprising conclusion: aristocratic tutoring for everyone is possible today.
A typical Victorian aristocrat would have one full time tutor hired to live with their family and would have 5-6 children.* Today in the US, we spend about $12,000 per student per year, and the average teacher salary is $64,000. So 5-6 children could support one of their teachers full time. If there's little overhead & building & etc cost for tutoring, we could have as much tutoring as Victorian aristocrats for the same cost as our school system.
* I'm not an expert here, so if this is not typical, please let me know. I'm not sure if the average family size was significantly different for the aristocracy or if hiring multiple full time tutors was common.
“ If they’re still working on alignment (which would be profoundly weird for many reasons) I expect them to talk about Bostrom and various other people I won’t name because some of them read this blog and don’t need bigger egos.”
And with a self-assured nod to themselves, hundreds of AI bloggers now believe Scott thinks they’re geniuses.
Scott has created hundreds instead of just a few by not naming them!
I'd argue that the communal mind can only hold a certain number of celebrities, and with improved communications, everyone knows about the same bunch of heroes. If the population increases, then obviously the ratio of famous to not famous is going to go down. Also, being famous entails putting up with a lot more bullshit, and not every genius is willing to do that so they rest in obscurity.
I'm brilliant. Let's get that out of the way. Not because I claim it myself, but because I've been called that by multiple parties. It was easy to do big things when personal computers were expensive and only institutions had them. I wrote a text formatter for PDP-10 BASIC so I could submit a formatted paper for Social Studies. Okay, it was more fun to write the program than the paper, but still. I wrote a text editor 40 years ago that is still being used. I wrote a graphics editor much like MacPaint (I even called it MockPaint, that is, until I tried to sell it to Zenith Data Systems. They didn't want to be sued, especially since I copied EVERYTHING, including the icons). I wrote a set of Ethernet drivers that for a time, were necessary to get your PC on the Internet.
Now that everybody and their brother and their brother-in-law and their sister and their grandparents have a computer, it's a lot harder to stand out no matter how brilliant you are.
The trope of the "ancients" being better educated, smarter, etc. etc. than the "moderns" is as old as culture itself, and very similar cross culture, at least, to my limited knowledge. Ascribing it to an decline of the education system, that would probably mean that education has been going downhill for several millennia.
With aristocratic tutoring, in my view you have to ask, what about the much more numerous examples of such tutoring creating idiots and villains? Virtually all the nobility in history was educated using this method. If you compare humanity's progress when it depended on aristocratic tutoring to more modern systems based on meritocracy and mass education, well, yeah, you can see very substantial progress when aristocratic systems are dumped, including aristocratic styles of education.
You can always find examples of individuals schooled in one way or other who became great geniuses. I really doubt anyone can demonstrate that aristocratic tutoring was a necessary cause of it, much less a more effective way to inspire genius than other approaches to education.
The low-hanging fruit explanation works for science, but does it work for music? I'm no musician, but it doesn't seem like symphonies would get exhausted the way theories do.
Absolutely. If someone produced a Symphony indistinguishable from a Mozart symphony, it wouldn’t get much recognition. Every great composer was hailed because they produced something new, they changed the musical landscape in some way be it harmonic, structural, technical, textural etc.
i do think it applies to art as options to continue to innovate while still appealing to basic human senses is not infinite. One reason why 20th century music like schoenberg, boulez etc. are objectively much less accessible than mozart and vivaldi because they had to go further out on the spectrum to do things that haven't done before. Or look at modern art - definitely harder to relate to than just the reality-replicating stuff of 200 years ago that has been rendered obsolete by photography.
I don't think every great composer was innovative; e.g. Brahms didn't push the envelope, he just did great work within the style that was popular at the time.
But "popular at the time" is the key word here. There are many great symphonies still to be written in an early-Romantic style, but that's no longer a style that is fashionable among the (now rare) sorts of people who commission symphonies. If it's 2022 and you're still writing tonal music that proceeds through conventional chord progressions then you're not a serious composer; at best you're writing music for video games.
I think sometimes in an art form there's a "golden age" where a new field of abundant possibilities has opened up and the obvious things haven't all been done yet. Mozart and Beethoven lived in a (particularly long) golden age, and so did the Beatles.
more like music for movies rather than videogames. I do think John Williams is kind of a genius tho.
What about the possibility of more potential geniuses going into business rather than research or the arts? Certainly much respect, fame, and money is given to the business or finance "genius" these days, but I don't think anyone really thinks of these people as being in the same category as Einstein or Darwin. But perhaps some might have been if their talents had been directed elsewhere?
1. Literally, there is more to know, now.
2. It's too easy for really smart people to make a lot of money today than pre-integrated circuits/VCs/financialized capitalism. That diverts them away from "genius" paths.
"Isaac Newton went to a local school at at 12"
Maybe "at age 12"?
There was some debate online about a decade ago about the lack of a "Shakespeare in Topeka."
Here is Bill James (sabermetrics guy) in Slate, about why American society is better at cultivating its athletic geniuses than its literary ones: https://slate.com/culture/2011/03/bill-james-solid-fool-s-gold-why-can-we-develop-athletes-and-not-writers.html
There was push-back. Here is a New York Times blog containing some and linking to more views on the topic, and what causes Shakespeares to develop anyway: https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/shakespeare-in-left-field/
So, definitely not a new debate! The framing in these articles from 2011 might offer some useful perspective.
(Hopefully this comment isn't too low quality to deserve placement here! Apologies, if just a couple links without my own addition to the conversation doesn't really cut it.)
I largely agree with your hypothesis. However there is also another possible explanation - maybe the important part in aristocratic tutoring isn't the tutoring part but the aristocratic part, as in the emergence of geniuses may be substantially helped by having an entire class of people with financial resources to not have to pursue a line of work and too much leisure time on their hands. In his book "At Home" Bill Bryson talks at one point about the amazing list of famous artists, scientists, authors etc. that came out of families of clergymen in 17th/18th century England, and his argument was that it was because these guys were guaranteed a very comfortable income but the job only required minimal time on their part, so they had tons of time for outside interests. This doesn't work anymore nowadays because a) most people are not men/women of leisure - working is now fashionable and b) for the rich kids who still are, modern entertainment options (travelling, clubbing, drugs, restaurants, video games, etc.) provide way to many ways for quick boredom relief for anyone to take up harder innovative interests.
That's an excellent point. An explanation about the possible decline of amount of geniuses that I find the most convincing, because of introspection (I can feel the effect).... Maybe your choice of modern entertainment options is a little bit biased to the less appreciated one, but having almost infinite and ultra-cheap access to literature and movies will have the same effect. Maybe even access to science content: sure it could help producing new stuff, but it also consume time (spent as a content consumer). Which is likely counter=productive, at least for stuff that would be considered genius achievement....
I'm surprised that the ubiquity of television hasn't come up more often in this discussion. Consuming video inhibits the capacity for deep focus & concentration (precisely the opposite effect of reading on the mind) that's necessary when trying to articulate a concept for which there's no existing intellectual tooling. Feynman described it well in _The Pleasure of Finding Things Out_:
To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you’re putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it’s very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don’t know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you’re interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together—your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea—the main point is, you put the stuff together, it’s quite a tower and it’s easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration—that is, solid time to think—and if you’ve got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don’t have the solid time.
https://elmerehbi.com/2014/04/21/rpfeynman-doing-physics/
I don't think the graph is very strong evidence for the thesis of declining genius. Acclaim as a genius is always going to go to the top handful at most. That number is fixed. As the population increases, the ratio will go down. I do think the other evidence out there about progress per (say) dollar spent is somewhat convincing that there is a thing to explain, but I think Scott's boring explanations are better.
I agree: the graph is evidence for the limitations of human memory and a telescopic compression of history more than anything else.
Add Einstein to your list. His background was middle class. He attended a catholic elementary school and gymnasium (German academic secondary school). He quit at 15 and enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The rest is history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Speaking of aristocratic tutors, the foremost literary examples are Thomas Square and Rev. Roger Thwackum in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Square is a buffoon whom Tom finds in bed with Tom's lover Molly Seagrim, and Thwackum is a sadist who conspires to have Squire Allworthy disinherit Tom. How anybody took tutors seriously after that is hard to say.
Voltaire also took a memorable whack at the profession with Pangloss in _Candide_.
Good catch. Candide was ten years after Tom Jones. Voltaire knew English. I wonder if had read it.
Scott's arguments are unassailable, yet it is interesting to speculate about how much aristocratic tutors helped the brilliant minds they did.
I'll never stop being blown away that Alexander the Great's tutor was Aristotle. My best guess is that what Aristotle instilled most in Alexander was confidence. Or maybe a thirst for conquest. If not for conquest of knowledge, maybe something else.
It's even more amazing than that. Alexander the Great's Great-Tutor was Plato, and his Great-Great-Tutor was Socrates. What are the odds of that?!
I feel like there are loads of geniuses now, and the problem is that Hoel (and you) are being unfair about what constitutes a 'genius'. Like -- the requirements to make this analysis are a) be a genius b) have something really ripe to work on c) figure it out d) get famous for it and e) be remembered. But only (a) makes a genius. There are lots of people out there who are _absurdly_ smart, definitely geniuses by any measure (except for the above!) and their genius-level efforts are being channeled into more mundane results. Like... hedge fund finance. Or building software. Mastering all the works of Beethoven. Speedrunning video games. Writing incredibly complex and esoteric papers (Terry Tao is definitely a genius, if you want another good example, by the way. And Ed Witten.).
So what you're really talking about is "creative, paradigm-shifting geniuses". To that, I think most of the discussion here applies. There is probably less genius-level work to do in fields that are mostly 'figured out', although it's hard to be sure. I mean -- maybe there's another special relativity to think up, or maybe not, but if we knew of it then there wouldn't be one to think up! And our society / education system really doesn't emphasize _trying_ to shift paradigms, in my opinion: it emphasizes .. busywork, publish-or-perish, incremental progress, staying in your lane.
As evidence for the idea that genius is not rarer, just more diffuse, I present the microprocessor.
I suggest that there's at least a hundred different brilliant genius-level insights that went into making a modern CPU possible, along with thousands of other very clever ones, over the course of fifty years. I'm not a chip design expert, but I've moved adjacent to that field, and the number of bizarre and counterintuitive steps involved in modern microprocessor design is incredible, and each one of these techniques was invented by somebody brilliant. These geniuses will never be celebrated -- there's too many of them, they were all big company employees who are discouraged from having a public profile, and the context and meaning of their work is hard to explain to someone not already immersed in that world. But that doesn't mean they're not there.
As for the lack of intellectual progress, it depends on what fields you are talking about.
The physical sciences seem to have reached a stopping point because of the maturity of theories developed in the first half of Century XX. There are unresolved contradictions between existing theories and no real good ideas for their resolution. But, it was 14 centuries from Ptolemy to Copernicus and 4 more centuries from Copernicus to Einstein. Progress can be very slow.
The biological sciences had a spectacular efflorescence in the last 75 years. And are still producing spectacular new technologies like the mRNA vaccines. But one of the things they have discovered is that the mechanisms of life are insanely complicated. I just did a google search to find out how many genes there are in the human genome, because I recalled that the human genome project of 20 years ago was surprised to find out how few there were. I found that the answer is it depends and we aren't quite sure yet. "Open questions: How many genes do we have?" by Steven L. Salzberg 2018 Aug 20. doi: 10.1186/s12915-018-0564-x The recent plague reminds us that the human immune system is still poorly understood.
The arts and humanities suffer from self-inflicted political wounds. The communities that produced art found that commercial republics dominated by the bourgeoisie were repellent to their still aristocratic tastes. They adopted anti-liberal politics largely centered around Marxism. The chaos and bloodbaths of the 20th Century epitomized by the Holocaust culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More sober minds might have taken the opportunity to repent and reflect. But the arts and and humanities communities have doubled down into ever more obscure and self destructive politics like racialism, genderism, and climatism.
My theory is that they will spend six generations in the wilderness before new arts and humanities can be born. Why six. I was born right after the end of the Holocaust. I am a boomer, the first generation. My children are millennials. Their children are babies. The babies grand children will still be plagued with our memories. The grandchildren of those grandchildren, the seventh generation can be free. Two hundred years after the Holocaust, Century XXII.
I don't know about the arts and humanities. Since WWII, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Arendt, Rawls, Sen, Beckett, Mondrian, Banksy, H. G Simon, Coase, and Ostrom--just off the top of my head--have all "fundamentally changed our understanding" of aspects of the world. There are many more such.
I certainly agree that that point about the arts is some spectacularly narrow-minded reactionary tosh. Even leaving that aside, two of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century are direct reflections on the Holocaust: Levi's If This Is A Man and, especially, Grossman's Life and Fate.
Reactionary, c'est moi. Levi was a saint. And Grossman belongs to a different tradition. "Putin’s Russia vs. Pushkin’s Russia" by Gary Saul Morson 19 Mar 2022
https://quillette.com/2022/03/19/putins-russian-and-pushkins-russia/
A list of the failures of the arts world. Coates and Ostrom don't belong, but don't confuse them with Smith, Ricardo, and Mill
Would Scott/others here consider the following views of David Chapman relevant to the question:
https://twitter.com/meaningness/status/1485615334602121216
https://meaningness.com/collapse-of-rational-certainty
There have always been periods of great cultural productivity. Classical Athens, Augustan Rome. Renaissance Florence. They have always been brief in the long sweep of history. They always come to an end. Why are we any different? Perhaps explaining quiescence is not the problem. It is the normal state of humanity. The real problem is how do explain outbursts of creativity.
Reminds me of Orson Wells in the film version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man and Harry Lime’s great line:
"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed … but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? ... The cuckoo clock."
I'd fully agree on this point and would lay the blame at the foot of shifting cultural ideas around genius even more so than at the altar of increasingly difficult tasks. Though it may be semantics to even try to split those ideas.
I would ask the simple question 'what would someone have to do in order to be called a genius today?' It is seemingly a question with few answers. And having done such a thing, thought such a thing, or led such a movement to success....would the world of today even deign to recognise such efforts as genius?
Do we have a lagging factor where genius can only be seen from history. Many probably thought of Darwin or Einstein to be very intelligent, near the top of their field, etc. during their lives. But perhaps the mystique of the genius title was granted posthumously decades later when the genius of discovery has met with the reality of actually effecting people's lives.
When terrible weapons of war, new medical treatments given to tens of millions, and as yet unrealised impacts on our energy system stem from the genius insights of Marie Curie and Einstein...only then many decades or even a century later through the continued use and impact of their genius level contribution can the clever, novel, and nascent moment of creation in their minds lead to the social title of genius being applied to them.
I would ask the same in the specific subset of spiritual and religious life. Would a new prophet be recognised or understood today? If a new Jesus like figure appeared, would we have the capacity to recognise it? Might such a person's influence only be understood hundreds or thousands of years after their death?
Outside of a few upset typesetters on the East Coast of the US and the people along the Moron's journey to Utah...were there more than a few thousand or tens of thousands of people who ever knew or cared about John Smith? If the Mormons had died out or never grew beyond their early numbers to remain a small curious sect of quasi-christianity in some rural area...then the title of prophet or genius or whatever would be impossible to attain.
The importance of an idea, the attribution, and its sustained impact lead towards the canonisation of a person into such a class. Certainly one can look back for evidence and for nearly every genius you'll find people during their lives praising them...but looking more broadly many people are praised by their peers today and exceptionally few of them will go on to be called a genius.
Perhaps Elon Musk will be forgotten and become akin to Howard Hughes...an eccentric and very talented person who made many contributions, but is ultimately a person who was both skilled and ahead of the curve. Airplanes were coming and with or without Hughes they would develop and become popular. The same might be said for the electric car or corporate space flight or whatever for Musk.
It goes back to the classic wisdom which puts all of this so succinctly and lets us know how few new ideas there are under the sun. Where some phenomenon we think is new is actually a well considered idea with thousands of years of thought behind it. Where the concentration of 'great people' comes in incredible waves where somehow history itself pivots on the century of their lives and seems to stagnant for hundreds of years in between or the geniuses of those eras are perhaps simply forgotten and their contributions lost to us. Such as the incredible astronomy of the ancient south and central americans which was hundreds or thousands of years ahead of Europe for long stretch of time, but was lost knowledge which did not have continuity into our present era.
"You have to be the right person, at the right time, at the right place."
And you can't really control any of those factors other than improving yourself and your own impact and perhaps relocating if possible to a place of power in your era. Be that silicon valley or london in the industrial revolution or ancient Rome to seek power not available elsewhere or perhaps simply on a battlefield so big and so bloody that Alexander or Genghis who could somewhat create their own 'right place'.
"The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s."
With all due respect, Caesar Chavez was a straight-up racist, albeit a very particular kind. He was a Union organizer, and once his Union (United Farm Workers) achieved legal monopoly power in California, he proudly employed the Hispanic union rank-and-file to turn in and deport "wetbacks", a tactic he loudly and proudly boasted of.
Chavez was no Progressive, just an anti-immigrant exploitave protectionist thug. The fact he is lauded as some kind of Brown savior disgusts me. Beware any populist leader who claims to speak for "his/her" ethnic group and gets a halo of anti-racism about them, while pursuing only Stalin-ist power to direct the "movement".
As other people pointed out, Mozart should not be in this list. Not only he was indeed tutored by his father, a great musician on his own, and an aristocratic figure, but almost all his education came from him, at an extremely young age. No time wasted in school. That's exactly the tutoring Hoel was talking about.
Another point about the lack of geniuses in music. You point out that nowadays it's common to get tutoring in music. That's true, but almost only for playing/performing, not for composing, and you can make a point that the level of eg classical piano performance nowadays is astoundingly high. Yes, there were many great pianists in the past (they were also almost always privately tutored) but there are many, amazing pianists today too (most people in the field would probanly agree) , and the art in this sense hasn't declined one bit and has probably increased. The art has indeed declined on the compositional side, and in fact private tutoring on composing is basically non existent (it wad common in the past). In my career as a classical musician I have only heard of private tutoring for composing as a crutch when stuff weren't going well during the normal, boring and uninspiring teaching hours in the music school. Similar to normal school.
There are many other reasons why there aren't geniuses in music nowadays, but I wanted to point out that music performers still get tutored nowadays and their level is great; music creation does not, and the level indeed sucks.
Didn't the use of "genius" to mean "great man (or person) of superhuman intelligence (or insight)" become common only in the 19th century? I got the feeling that it first became popular in the Anglosphere, and was considered vulgar in German-speaking circles. Originally - as in, for the Romans - a genius was a person's tutelar deity (perhaps related but not identical to what Socrates had in mind - after all, Socrates's belief was personal, considered suspicious, and close to what we would call a "conscience"), born with the person itself. (If Agamben characterizes it well, then it covers some of the same ground as the Freudian notion of "the unconscious".) When, in the 19th century (or even later), someone spoke of Goethe's genius, what was meant was an intuition that drove him beyond what he or his fellows understood, conceived as a daemon that nagged and affected him, and perhaps afflicted him.
Indeed, one of the meanings of "SubGenius" is "under your own genius" in this sense.
"A major secret that "Bob" learned from the Conspiracy is that deep down inside, everyone, even the SubGenius, craves authority. It's from having Parents. But a SubGenius shortcircuits this urge. He appoints himself Pope or Raja or something, and he believes it. But it's easy to fake that belief, even to yourself.
Therefore, in his Church our "Bob" has included many built-in Alienation Devices to prevent false Pink interpretation while encouraging the real, down home SubGenii to start their own damn religions."
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/classic/classics/X0003_botsg-intro.html
I disagree with Scott, and with Hoel - I think we have had more geniuses in the last 50 years than in any other 50 year period. This is a strong claim, but I feel I can support it. I have some hypotheses on why as well, which I may get into later or in the replies. Also, I am writing on my phone and it is late, this will be poorly sourced - all info is from biographies and books I've read, with tidbits here and there from wikipedia and articles I've read. Sorry for spelling and grammar mistakes, I turn off all spell check and grammer check stuff on my phone in an insane and futile effort to fight google's telemetry.
My main argument is going to be just naming people I think are geniuses off the top of my head and why I think they have earned that status.
John Carmack - incredible innovator in game engine design, pushing the envelope for years, starting with smooth scrolling on PCs with commander keen (never done before on PCs before he figured out a clever solution that large teams worked on and never could figure out - a common theme through the 90s and early aughts). He followed this with the first 3D game engine, then first fully 3D game, then first game to require a standalone GPU and creating the concept of using one for games, and on and on. The book Masters of doom does a good job demonstrating why Carmack deserves genius status. He also collaborated with Luckey Palmer in pushing VR tech from dead end hobby to viable and incredible. John is currently working on general AI, which scares me a lot. This guy has a flawless track record of attacking and solving impossible technical problems that large teams have failed at. AI alignment needs to poach him, it may literally save the world.
Lucky Palmer - founder of Oculus - probably is also a genius, but I don't know as much about him from first hand sources. It speaks volumes that Gabe Newall (creator of Valve and Steam) - correctly - predicted Lucky would bring VR to the mainstream, and that he got John Carmack so excited about the space that he left ID software to be Oculus' CTO - being second in command to CEO Lucky, a guy under 30 who was at the time a nobody.
Tim Sweeney - similar to Carmack, but for the Unreal engine, which by all measures has overtaken Carmack's achievements in engine design. Worth reading about his process. He has had bigger teams over time but much of the work is just him.
Elon Musk - Made electric cars viable (many will doubt and point out he wasn't one of the original founders - but he led the battery innovations that made it viable, starting with stacking laptop batteries in a configuration that didn't explode when impacted, an oft forgotten technical obstacle that Musk cleared that paved the way to viability). Also, first (maybe only still) billionaire to create not just a successful space company, but the definitively best space company the world has ever seen by an order of magnitude. Literally, Boeing and Lockheed martin sued SpaceX early on, because the launch cost savings for using SpaceX instead of Boeing or Martin was enough to pay for the payload at times. Invented re usable rockets. Caveat - of course he had help - but it is clear he paved the way. If his top people in each respective company actually deserved top status and as much kudos as Musk, I would expect at least one or two being disgruntled and coming forward taking credit - I am unaware of any instances of this.
Ed Catmull - Inventor of 3D computer imaging as we know it today. Invented Z masking. Founded Pixar. Reformed Disney animation culture out of their late 90s bust period. (book -creativity Inc.)
Additional people who most are familiar with their accomplishments:
Steve Jobs
Steve Wozniak
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerburg
Murray Gellman (Yes, the Gell man amnesia guy... Dude discovered quarks and the internet regurgitates the gell man amnesia idea as if thats all he did)
Richard Hamilton (Ricci Flow)
Grigori Perelman (Poincare conjecture)
More flimsy contenders, which I would need to fight hard to defend as genius but I feel they are:
Paul Graham
Gabe Newall
Peter Thiel
Satashi Nakamoto
Segey Brin
Larry Page
Warren Buffet and his partner Charles
Steve Wolfram
Most controversial genius commendation (at the end, as the bias against him and misunderstanding of him will lead to many completely writing me off for suggesting it):
Joe Rogan - just genius podcaster and interviewer. Joe can keep a conversation flowing, live for 3 hours, with literally anyone on the planet. I have a podcast, and have done 14 episodes so far only - doing what Joe does is not possible for me or anyone I know. I think his comedy blows. I skip his MMA episodes (yawn). He's dumb as rocks when it comes to medicine, or Trump, or whatever - but he doesn't claim to be an expert in those areas. He is an entertainment interviewerer, and no one on the planet does it better.
This just covers mostly tech - which in our time has the most low hanging fruit by far, as the transistor and modern computer architecture (Von Neumann architecture as it happens, John essentially invented the computer as we know it today to make the Ulum.-teller thermonuclear bomb design happen) has just completely changed the ceiling on human productivity.
Also, you may think, hey this guy is just naming famous billionaires! Well, yes - but that is kind of expected no? Our age is one of the few where you can turn Genius to riches. I don't think Vanderbilt, Rothchild, Carnegie, Ford, or even Edison were geniuses to be honest. Shrewd business men, yes - but not really impressive technically.
This is all from memory - list would become vastly longer if I began going through reference material.
music, art, etc. have many names I could offer as geniuses. This is getting too long, may add later.
Again, many will say these guys just led large teams, or didn't actually contribute that much, or whatever they need to tell themselves that these guys don't deserve to be billionaires. I am lazy and haven't cited anything, but the books I've read present very convincing evidence that these are all truly geniuses in the league as all the well knowns like Einstein.
True, many will disagree that all (or any) of the above are geniuses on the same level as Gauss, or Feynman, or Fermi, or Maxwell - but I feel they are having at least equal impact, their productions have been at least as novel, and many are at similar intelligences. Would have to argue case by case which just isn't tenable.
I guess there is no formal way to definitively say geniuses are more or less common than in the past - my post is to offer my strong gut intuition, poorly backed up by logic though it may be - that we are swimming in genius like never before. And I have some gears level formulations on why I think that is, and why I think tomorrow will have more geniuses than ever before, and this will continue until we reach a population plateau.
To be clear, I do understand and agree with the points many in the comments here have established - i.e, low hanging fruit is taken, specialization is increasing to the point where it is harder to identify genius, and often the largest breakthroughs such as the Webb telescope, the falcon 9 rocket, the apple M1, etc require teams of hundreds to thousands and the leading contributors are more likely to give credit to the team and for good reason. However, I believe we have more geniuses doing as many important notable things as the old ones, despite these additional obstacles to attaining genius status.
I also think if you put a blank slate elon musk into Newtons era, Musk would likely be remembered today as a genius. Same for Wolfram. Same for Luckey Palmer. And Carmack. And many, many, many more.
This is interesting - the puzzle for me is: why does it feel intuitively like Newton is a genius in a way that, say, Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren't? It seems like Newton discovered something truly ground breaking, while Page and Brin merely made a very large but still incremental development in an already existing field. Yet, the impact of google on the world is undeniable.
I think its a curious sort of selection effect. In the past, the economy was much less dynamic, and there was really no way to make a huge impact on the world through a business venture. Personally I can't think of anyone who is known primarily for building a non-state sponsored business prior to Carnegie. So, the only way for a genius to become historically significant in the world prior to 1870 or so was via inventions, discoveries, works of art, or statecraft / war.
Today, by far the easiest way to become historically significant is via some form of economic wealth creation, which usually takes the form of innovation rather than pure invention. Pure invention / discovery has a much more limited impact on the world today than it did in the past. Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA would place them solidly among Hoel's or Scott's list of geniuses in terms of pure intellectual value (possibly below Newton, certainly above Pasteur), yet Scott and Hoel evidently (by omitting them) don't regard them as having genius-level impact. Meanwhile those who create new forms of economic wealth (e.g. most of those you list) have immense impact on the world, but their intellectual contribution seems less significant. But this is ultimately a parochial viewpoint.
Granted that ideas are harder to find now, I still believe that if someone made a truly fundamental discovery such as a working theory of quantum gravity or a proof that P != NP, future generations wouldn't remember that person the same way we remember Newton or Darwin. Purely intellectual discoveries can no longer have an outsized impact on the world the way they did on the past, so present day geniuses operate in the realm of wealth creation via innovation. The apparent fact that there are no geniuses anymore is an illusion caused by a failure to understand that how the world has changed.
Another possible explanation is the there is limited room for "geniuses" as the kind of geniuses you describe are relative ones. Mozart was not the only gifted composer of his time, but he was the most gifted. Darwin was intelligent, but most importantly he was the first to widely publish about a new field. There can only be a limited cadre of groundbreaking geniuses. There can only be 10 people in a top 10 list. As the population grows our ability to notice geniuses stays the same, so memorable geniuses become a smaller share of the population.
Sociology is a pretty inexact and feeble science.
Now may I get genius status for stating this maxim with respect to dismissing the aristocratic tutoring decline hypothesis.
I think I would make a rum genius about toon!
My hypothesis is that genius defies the normal curve and is the only thing that defies the normal curve, apart from my luck on horse betting of course.
On top of the list of boring reasons Scott gives, there's also the (boring) fact that being a genius in the sense of Hoel depends on "acclaim", i.e. public perception (even if a subset of the public). Clearly a Totally Objective Metric. In turn that depends enormously on communication capabilities.
Two centuries ago, you became a really good musician in (say) Brussels, and people would be queuing to hear you play, because that what's their immediate environment offered them. Sure, some of the simultaneously most intellectual and affluent people also knew about the very good musicians in Paris and London, and may have even traveled there to enjoy their performance. But you got an environment with relatively restricted competition to cement your fame, and get the status of "genius" among enough of a population that it became a meme. Finally you got written into some history book as "definitely a genius". Debates about whether you merited more or less the genius title than the geniuses from Paris and London and Wien and New York get left as an exercise for academics and fanboys.
Skip to today, and whatever you do, you are competing against the whole world. Anyone can know what the intellectual scene in any place is up to, anyone can easily read books from authors who wrote in a tongue they don't understand, and anyone can easily listen to music written by a weird indie band from Small Town, population 300. Yet while both population and "connectivity" increase exponentially, the mind-space each human has for "list of geniuses" remains the same. Instead of having localized lists of different geniuses that are coalesced into a large ensemble when written down in the history books, we have a sort of common globalized perspective that can be quickly updated mostly everywhere at mostly the same time.
This was true of early 20th century with respect to the 17th, it is true now with respect to the 20th, and it will be trivial commentary if we hit the singularity and the overmind knows exactly which is that one brain that is Objectively Best for writing jazz music.
Well, in every field with measurable achievments from sprinting (time) to chess (elo) elite performance has steadily increased over time. I think that this is a strong indication that the supposed decline of genius in less measurable fields is bogus and the idea mostly comes from the lessening of the big fish in a small pond effect that Scott mentions. Does anyone know of a counterexample in a measurable field?
Aristocratic tutoring tends to come with a confounder: Aristocratic tutoring => aristocratic breeding => aristocratic inbreeding => flatter, broader bell curve.
How do the decreasing numbers of geniuses compare with the numbers of imbeciles (from comparable househoulds, to exclude causes like lifestyle and nourishment) ? Do the latter decrease also, to a similar extent?
Publish or Perish makes it very difficult to be a genius in academia. You have to do high probability research and crank out lots of mediocre papers to stay in the game. There is no time to step back and truly challenge paradigms.
Aren't your conclusions in part IV very similar to Holden Karnofsky’s in the series you reference? I think your first two bullets are covered by "ideas as mining". The third cultural point I don't remember, but I read it a while ago: https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/
For those interested, my reply to some of Scott's thoughts are here: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/follow-up-why-we-stopped-making-einsteins?s=w
To summarize (but this is just a summary, details in the piece): Contra Scott, professional tutors say aristocratic tutoring is now dead, the historical figures Scott chose were indeed tutored once you investigate, and most importantly overall, the hypothesis doesn't contradict "ideas are getting harder to find," rather, it supplements it, while explaining a number of further observations (like the lack of a genius boom following internet saturation).
Is it just a signal-to-noise problem? As the total population has increased, as the number of people engaged in creativity or science has increased, have we simply drowned out the voices of the 'geniuses' because of the amount of creative/science speech by the non-genius?
I imagine an Einstein, in a community of dozens or hundreds, could be seen and heard. An Einstein in a community of thousands and tens of thousands... perhaps not so much. As a result, are interesting ideas and takes simply not propagating?
Add to that the defensive measures taken to ensure 'your' voice *is* propagated and others are not: the very screening and censoring machines we build for modern digital media applied to scientific discourse gets really scary.
I think that it's not even that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, it's just that even understanding the questions that the low-hanging fruit are answers to can take a lot of work, and thus many geniuses are only visible to specialists.
I am a mathematician, and off the top of my head, I could name plenty of mathematicians in the last 50 years who I would consider to be Einstein's equal, and who have made contributions that I think are fundamental to the field of mathematics. And it's not even like their contribution are so much harder to understand than general relativity, it's just that people don't have the right background to appreciate them, and the popular press doesn't single them out because they aren't actually that rare.
I am not as familiar with other subjects; perhaps physics and chemistry are truly stagnant? But I would guess that all the brilliant discoveries in those areas just aren't dispersed into the public consciousness, and there are plenty of geniuses in those fields too.
+1
Speaking of [Constant returns to exponential inputs being the null hypothesis](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/), I'm surprised that this doesn't make you more skeptical of the silly AI hard takeoff scenarios where "AI" is a magic word that lets us magically ignore everything we've ever seen about the world and the nature of technological progress.
For me public school K-6 was both a horrible prison and a complete waste of time that I could have spent actually learning something somewhere else. Almost all chess grandmasters started very young and spent a lot of time specifically studying chess while they were young. Jamming people into a one size fits all curriculum designed for average kids wastes the valuable youth of talented people and reduces the likelihood that they put enough time into becoming a prodigy at anything.
But "aristocratic tutoring" is a very narrow subset of the many alternatives to standard horrible boring public schools, and it's unclear why we should single that one out for consideration.
--------
To explain a decline in genius, "low hanging fruit" seems like the biggest factor, but post-industrial-revolution dysgenic patterns (after we went from ~33% child mortality to ~0%, and meanwhile hugely expanded higher education which delayed=reduced childbearing by more intelligent people of both genders but especially women because they go infertile sooner) probably played a role in reducing genius despite the Flynn effect. Imagine it like this: In order to be a world-historic genius, you have to high roll everything. Far more people high roll environment now than 200 years ago, but far fewer people have the extreme high end of the bell curve in genetics, because a small decrease in the mean can cause a large decrease in the area under the tail of the curve.
There's also a question of institutions becoming more bureaucratic and restrictive. In the early 20th century, the hospital where I work had a famous doctor who in his 35 years here invented dozens of medical instruments, taught hundreds of students and performed an estimated 200,000 surgeries. If he wanted a tool, he’d draw a diagram, call a metallurgist and have one made up. And then he could stick it in someone’s body an hour after it arrived.
Now, I’m not sure this was an optimal situation- we probably *should* have intensive review for medical devices, and surgeries have gotten more sophisticated in a good way in the days since that doctor could rack up 100 operations per day. Even though he seemed to have had excellent success rates, I would still rather have a modern doctor operate on me than Famous 1920s Doctor. But he got to be a genius and a titan of medicine in large part because he had the *freedom to do that.*
I bet there were plenty of casualties of the other *non-geniuses* who tried to be like him, and that’s how we got here. But that restrictiveness affects everyone in an institution and ultimately the entire field. I’ve spent eight months and collected six signatures from various departments in my hospital in order to purchase a bookcase. I’m not sure how a genius would handle this situation. Maybe they quit working in any other field and go do AI, where there nobody scrutinizes your purchase orders for furniture in this way yet?
I'm looking at the graph and reading "divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)" and wonder whether it can be explained by this hypothesis: back in the day, most of the population spent their time digging fields and illiterate, so the "effective population" would have been a much smaller percentage of the overall population. If access to education goes up and the rate of geniuses stays at the same tiny number, wouldn't that alone push the graph downwards?
Paul Graham in Beyond Smart (http://paulgraham.com/smart.html), which of course also mentions Einstein, has some interesting lines. One of them is "For example, having new ideas is generally associated with youth. But perhaps it's not youth per se that yields new ideas, but specific things that come with youth, like good health and lack of responsibilities." It doesn't take a degree in social justice to spot that access to good health and lack of responsibilities in youth is a bit, um, unevenly distributed in the population?
PG of course does mention earlier in the same para that "And of course there are a lot of fairly mundane ingredients in discovering new ideas, like working hard, getting enough sleep, avoiding certain kinds of stress, having the right colleagues, and finding tricks for working on what you want even when it's not what you're supposed to be working on." I'm going to read "poverty" into the "certain kinds of stress" here.
This supports both the hypothesis that it's not aristocratic tutoring per se but being in the kind of low-responsibility low-certain-kinds-of-stress high-access-to-networks (including of tutors) environment that a young aristocrat might have found themselves in that tends to nurture geniuses, and my guess that the graph is showing an expanding "effective population" denominator with access to some education but not an environment with enough slack (in the sense of LW "studies on slack") to make great discoveries.
I said "nurture" not "produce" because I read Freddie deBoer, among other things.
One thing I think you missed is that academia actually discriminates heavily against potential geniuses these days: https://juliusbranson.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/does-academia-discriminate-against-geniuses-and-could-this-explain-the-decline-of-science/
Consequently plenty of people who could have been amazing scholars probably end up coding at FAANG or something, while professorships are increasingly taken by non-geniuses. It's probably the same in music too with publishing companies or whoever makes classical these days. The genius phenotype is actively despised by the powers that be now -- it's too introverted, disagreeable, not diverse enough, etc.
I partially agree with your point, but it'd read as more trustworthy if your blog wasn't filled with high octane turboracism. Like, /pol/ with less frogs.
It doesn't take a genius to see Scott's right about this! Newtonian physics isn't too hard to get your head round. Einstein's beyond me. Quantum mechanics....
I enjoyed this greatly and wrote up a long response! https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-geniuses-gone?s=w
Scott,
Did you really read Hoel's examples and think "these are cherry-picked, I can find counterexamples," and not "this definition of tutoring is ridiculously broad"? Did you really think he would agree with your characterization of your examples?
I don't believe it. I think you cowardly avoided the confrontation of contradicting his examples. There may be some rhetorical value to avoiding confrontation, but it has destroyed all communicative value in this post.
Was Cesar Chavez a civil rights activist?
His wikipedia article asserts this, but doesn't give a single example of him fighting racism. I searched for "civil rights" and every usage was examples of labor tactics that he learned from other civil rights activists. Yes, he was a leftist, tied in with other leftist movements, but that doesn't mean it's useful to describe him as a member of all those movements. A cursory google search does give a few examples, but I am unconvinced.
Of course it is salient that he had a racialized union. I don't think he appealed to rights, but to market power. Of course, the Montgomery bus boycott did, too, but it also appealed to rights. There is room for an argument. But I don't think anyone calls him a civil rights or anti-racism activist because they've thought about the topic, but for the sole reason that new left has defeated the old left and it is erasing history.
The other problem with the argument is that tutoring isn't blind. Many people who were tutored didn't succeed, but if you can only afford to educate one of your kids you'll send your smartest kid. And Hoel is very flexible on what constitutes tutoring; if your uncle likes playing math games with you, it's likely that over time at least part of the explanation is that *you're good at playing math games*.
Maybe tutoring doesn't have any more influence on genius than general education, it just gets to be choosier about its denominator. I don't believe that either, but it does follow from the evidence Hoel presented just as much as his own thesis.
Chess is a rare situation where we can objectively measure performance over time and the current chess players are the strongest who have ever lived. But most of the really memorable chess geniuses that are household names in one way or another (e.g.: Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Jose Raul Capablanca) are historical. So maybe it's genius-mythos-formation that's stuck in the past, and it's confused to equivocate genius-mythos-formation with the number of actual geniuses on the ground (which I strongly suspect is higher than ever, at least in any field that hasn't precipitously declined in importance). Also, if these are genius myths, what if genius myths bottleneck due to a fixed zero-sum capacity for stories to become popular mainstream memes so you only get a few Great People for a given field every generation (this is also consistent with modern genius myths as I would say we actually do have a share of them, e.g. Garry Kasparov, Terry Tao, etc. etc.)
>"Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population [pic: graph of both decreasing]"
To some degree this could also just be that "acclaim" is a winners-take-all thing: maybe reserved for the top N people in a field, and N doesn't grow with population. Listicles of the world's "top 10 most famous living scientists" aren't going to become top 11 lists just for population growth.
(Maybe coupled with inertia [plus low-hanging fruit in terms of influence?], for "of all time" lists: even if the 10 "objectively" best scientists of all time were alive right now, top-10-of-all-time lists would still want to include Newton and Darwin and Einstein.)
Recorded music being a winners-take-all thing is also why famous artists are famous and so rich. Singers used to only have to compete for audiences with their town's other singers; now they have to compete with Rihanna [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/music-economics-alan-krueger.html].
"Now it’s considered kind of cringe to believe in geniuses"
Cmon, you're a better writer than this. Cringe is a noun. Cringey is the word you're looking for.
I think there oughtta be two different categories for geniuses, the first being what Hoel talks about (think of the long line of western tradition starting with Aristotle and Alexander), and second the counter-examples which Scott brings up. The difference between the two is determining how exactly each genius realizes their genius. With the former, geniuses are made with brute force ('cause with the resources of the king, no matter how incompetent the prince is, his behaviour will become the standard by which the rest of the populace governs themselves, cause parents will all want to raise their sons and daughters to be royalty) whereas in the latter, it's brute force by sheer numbers (not implying that one out of every X people have to be a genius, but rather that the number of geniuses scale with population size, and once a minority population becomes big enough, their status as a whole increases, and it becomes less acceptable to deny the existence of the bright members of a minority, so the first ones accepted would be whoever of the smart ones is the smartest of the smart ones (see also: minority revolutionary leaders during the American civil rights movement, and also Ramanujan from British India.)
Could genetics play a roll?
This generation of sigma 6 geniuses were born from last generation's sigma 3 geniuses.
I think of the the last 100 years the world has become much more blended. If you were a Hungarian Asheknazi Jew in the 1901 you probably married a Ashkenazi Jew who lived in Hungary and most likely of the same economic class. This meant people were much more likely to marry people similar to them, making it much more likely for a sigma 3 person to marry a sigma 3 person.
Smart people are more likely to have fewer kids. I assume this trend started in the 50's with the invention of birth control. This would have small effect on average intelligence due to the rarity of sigma 3er's, but could have a very large effect on how many sigma 6 geniuses you get.
"Genius" is partly a matter of perception and social construction. There are way more candidates who deserve consideration in our era than can possibly be noticed, deliberated, and agreed upon by the diverse audience of "genius makers." There's no way to even get at the underlying issue -- "Are there fewer or more?" -- because of the noisy process.
Maybe we haven't "stopped making Einsteins", but rather we've reached the limits of what our Einsteins can deduce about the fundamental laws of the universe. I fall into the “ideas are getting harder to find” camp. There may be hundreds and even thousands of Einstein equivalents out there right now wasting their time on GUTs which will fail as theories, because the universe is beyond their comprehension—because, even though the 1.4x10^26 atoms in their little brains are hosting thoughts in complex electro-chemical patterns, those thoughts exist in a finite computing space—and those thoughts are unable to comprehend an observable universe that's 10^26 larger than their brains and that's been evolving 1.8^10 times longer than their lifespans—and whose underlying laws were crystalized outside (and before) the observable universe.
21st Century civilization is running on the fumes of basic discoveries made 60+ years ago. It was once assumed that we could go on into the infinite future making profound discoveries about the universe. But this hasn't happened. And I would argue we have more brilliant minds now working on these problems than we did through most of the 20th Century. With the help of search engines, the average graduate student today has access to more basic knowledge and research than anyone had in the 20th Century. So don't tell me it's an epistemic question of the what or how much to know (i.e. "education"). It might be a question of semantic conception—i.e. how we organize our knowledge and belief—but if that's the case, then we're still not much beyond the ancient Greek philosophers or the 2nd Century Indian philosophers in the how of knowing.
Also, Hoel fails to define genius. Without a concise definition, all the arguments about genius become vague generalities.
Maybe we're in a Kuhnian lull before the next scientific revolution. If so, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it in my few remaining years.
Tangentially related: consider this late 1800s Harvard Entrance Exam:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf
It's difficult for me to imagine anyone passing this without private tutoring. Setting aside the questions on Latin and Greek (which people don't care about nearly as much in the modern day), even the geography and math questions seem quite challenging. I'd certainly be impressed if a student at a modern day public high school could answer them well.
Interesting, I look at that and am struck by how familiar a lot of it looks to the sort of math I was doing in high school. The history and geography questions do look bizarrely factoid-based to the modern eye. However, you also have to bear in mind that the questions on an exam paper are far less important the the method of grading the answers. I was recently reading a bunch of articles on grade inflation in UK schools and downloaded a bunch of sample papers to see if exams really have got easier since I was at high school 25 years ago. From looking at the papers, I would conclude that they have not. What has changed is the way they are graded, with the grading rubrics making it much easier to achieve higher grades with lower performance.
I would expect that most students from the advanced (AP) math track at my high school (a good public school in Massachusetts) could do most of the geometry questions (although understanding the questions is a bit of a challenge compared to how I would prefer they were phrased).
Perhaps the "ordinary education" that Newton/Mozart/Darwin/Pasteur/Dickens/Edison received resembles aristocratic tutoring more than the ordinary education of today.
Don't we have a lot of chess geniuses these days? Magnus for instance. The Polgars peaked in the early 90s as far as famous female chess players.
Hm Newton and Darwin fundamentally altered their fields. Which makes them founding fathers in a sense
I'm most familiar with England. If you go back far enough, lots of famous people are said to have been "privately educated" (i.e., had tutors rather than going to school). But, my impression is, over time that declined and more and more of the elite attended boarding schools like Eton and Harrow and then on to Oxford or Cambridge. The social advantages of being part of the Eton or Harrow old boys network grew big enough that even aristocrats less and less passed them them up.
i agree, we do have geniuses (tao, lagnan, etc.) but they are off doing their own shit. nothing big is left to discover.
You're ignoring a relatively mundane, but likely extremely important effect: the opportunities for people of genius level ability to exploit it for personal gain likely look very different to the past. When you combine that with the fact that people of genius level ability in anything are rarely just good at one thing, it's quite possible that we're still getting just as many geniuses as we used to, but most of them retired as millionaires at age 35 and have been sipping cocktails on a beach in St Tropez since then. Back in Beethoven's day, there probably weren't too many gigs around for a musical genius other than finding wealthy benefactors to pay you to write symphonies. These days, Goldman Sachs will decide that musical ability is an important indicator skill and pay you a huge salary to lay off workers from their investments in developing countries.
Modern geniuses just have better things to do than spend all day demonstrating their genius to you.
At the cost of producing individual hyperintelligent geniuses, there is a surplus of experts who are adept at their specific niche interests but on the whole too atomized to interact with another in a really accessible way, bar some exceptions, which we might call geniuses. Obviously this reliance on experts has accelerated tech advancement, but the atomization factor still weighs in on this.
"easy to stand out in when you’re small and new, harder when you’re big and old"
I think this is key. As a specific anecdote: I had the privilege of meeting Dijkstra in his later years - he was at the university where I was doing my PhD. My impression of him was...underwhelming. He stood out, because he was one of the pioneers. In his heyday, he was one of relatively few people researching CS, and the easy problems hadn't yet been solved.
Today, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as many researchers in the field, and many of them are of Dijkstra's caliber. However, today's research problems are much more specialized and complex. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and so have the next several layers up.
You and I are making a similar point.
I haven't read all of your essay, but I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.
I think the problem is the nature of knowledge. Consider Newton.
>>Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosopher") widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time and among the most influential scientists.<<
Now let's say a very smart kid of 16 or 18 comes along. Genius material. He decides that he is going to make fundamental contributions in the fields of:
Mathmatics
Mechanics
Optics
Astronomy
Chemistry
Theology
Philosophy
What is going to happen to our eager protogenius?
Well, first he going to have to learn all the important stuff in all these different fields of knowledge. One can't very well be offering up fundamental observations that.have been known for centuries!
Now by the time he is up to speed in each of these seven fields, he will be 54 years old and beyond the age that really incisive thinking occurs.
Just identfying important things that are not already known in one of these fields will take some dedication. Making significant contributions will probably require working with a team.
Perhaps you see my point. Newton could take a walk around his block and encounter novel and challenging problems.
.
We have so many geniuses these days that we don't even consider them to be geniuses, they're just normal.
There are tiny teams of people making animation on YouTube now.
Every "good" artist today is so good at art that Leonardo Da Vinci would be considered merely okay. Stuff on Artstation, Furaffinity, and Deviantart is so consistently amazing that it is normal.
We have such an excess of musical geniuses that there are people making genius music about random niche nerdy stuff.
We have solo geniuses or tiny teams making extremely awesome video games, and geniuses working on AAA games that create these ridiculously elaborate things that are now normal. Creating a virtual world with a hundred square miles of land area? 6/10, yawn, we've seen it before, do better.
We don't see "geniuses" because that's "normal" at the top of the field now.
I think the pervasive poison of jealousy is the problem. Too many people now don't want to recognize greatness because of their own bitterness. I say let greatness flourish, and remove the barriers. Enough of all this jealousy and pride. We all know that our current society is broken, and we keep tiptoeing around the issues to pacify these broken souls consumed by envy. I encourage the truly brave to take more chances, break more barriers, and disregard the ravings of simpletons.
I am not sure I buy the premise, but let's assume it is true. One possible contributing factor that I did not see mentioned, but that was maybe hinted at in the discussion of writers and MFAs, is that people are too connected. In my opinion best sci-fi writer was Lem, yet he basically started writing completely cut off from western sci-fi or any kind of sci-fi, except maybe Wells and Verne. So maybe there are social forces that, when people know each other's work too well, cause too much monocultural creation and the new and interesting paths are overlooked. Not sure if it really has some merit, but I found it an interesting thought. Though, if it is part of the explanation, it is probably more so in art than in science.
Adding to that, there is the mass education which made not-so-basic knowledge basic. Most people nowadays agree that the earth is round, turning around the sun, clouds are evaporated water, etc... The level of abstraction understanding needed to realize the scientific breakthroughs of today are so high. Terence Tao is a genius of mathematics by example, maybe one of the greatest, but who understands what he does, apart from his early age accomplishments (winning Olympiads as kid). It's just harder to be impressed because the concepts are way harder to understand and apply to real life than, let's say evolution theory, gravity or antibiotics. Nowadays geniuses lie in politics, storytelling, businesses and going against the herd, because it's seen as easier to understand and more practical. Of course there is AI, but we see more AI as the genius rather than individuals working on AI. Basically Terminator and Matrix had such a cultural impact on the collective psyche warning us of the risks that AI could kill us all.
An interesting anecdote I just came across: https://danielkarim.com/how-to-become-a-genius-the-polgar-experiment/
I think it's extremely uncharitable to re-frame Hoel's position as "There are virtually no geniuses today, while there were plenty before, and a lack of aristocratic tutoring fully explains this phenomenon."
On the other hand, I disagree with his assessment and more-or-less agree with yours. Honestly, I just think there are a shitton of geniuses nowadays, but most of them are highly specialized. The number of renaissance men, polymathic geniuses might've declined, but it's hard to quantify. In general, people have become more educated, which makes it more difficult to be an interdisciplinary genius. Also, specialist geniuses are now so ludicrously good that only specialist non-geniuses can accurately identify them. To everyone else they just look like another specialist.
As an artist, I can point to contemporary illustrators whose work is possessed of such skill that it should make you weep on sight, but laypeople have no idea how to distinguish between Bayard Wu's skill level and Michelangelo's, or Vallejo's. Our specialists are achieving new heights all the time and it's totally inscrutable to pretty much everyone.