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.
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.