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.)
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.