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by pharke
1557 days ago
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I take issue with this, I don't see any discontinuous advances happening every year. I see incremental advances or the results of miniaturization and mass production making things small or cheap enough to reach mass market. Those are examples of progress but not of genius. Where are the revolutions? Why does it seem like physics has stalled, stuck on the same questions we've had for over half a century? We are making slow progress against universal scourges like cancer and Alzheimer's but there are no major breakthroughs that shake the foundations of biology and medicine. Psychology is still groping in the dark, unable to do much for the suffering millions endure. Where are the architectural advances beyond steel and concrete? The best we can do is 3D print odd looking homes. Why did it take almost 50 years to get ambitious space programs re-started? Even on the artistic front we are awash in a sea of nostalgia. I don't think genius is common at all and I agree with the article that we probably now produce them at a much lower rate. |
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Second, even genius's don't bring frequent revolutions. Special and general relativity made very little impact on people's lives for decades. It took the Manhattan project, one of the largest industrial project of all times involving tens of thousands of people, to kickstart the nuclear age. And that involved a lot of things besides just relativity.
Third, we live in a world of revolutions that are so common people don't even grasp them. Ten years ago, Go was almost impossible for computers to play with any proficiency. Protein folding was still incredibly difficult and people were building dedicated super computers like Anton to try and make things faster. Now both of those effectively solved problems. Drone's have revolutionized battle fields in ways that are having very significant geopolitcal ramifications that effect hundreds of millions of lives. The raptor engines represent an incredible leap forward in the material sciences that will allow humanity to reach space more cheaply than ever before.
If there are no genius's today because cancer and Alzheimer's are still around, then Einstein wasn't a genius because he didn't solve those problems either.