| I know it's really bad form to quote the first sentence of an article and say you stopped reading there but... > entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age Assumes facts not in evidence! I think that we are so inundated in amazing things and have so much access to amazing things that instead we're just forgetting how to be amazed! The metrics given in the article aren't convincing. So the number of "geniuses" per capata is down. So? The absolute numbers of people are way up! And what it takes to be "accomplished" has accordingly increased. I'm just a random guy and tooting around with recreational mathematics I've from time to time made a discovery I found that I thought was really interesting only to find on further research it WAS an interesting discovery ... in the 1940s by some big name (or in the 1800s by Gauss). This is only possible-- for me-- because I'm standing on the shoulders of many greats and I have tremendous tools available to me that didn't exist even decades ago. To me that sounds like the renaissance the that the author presumes doesn't exist! Now this stuff isn't usually resulting in published work-- but that's because it's already published (and well enough available that I know it's published). The bar is higher now. So it's a darn good thing that we have all these advances because they're whats needed to continue making progress and accelerating, even if it doesn't look that impressive when divided by our exponential population growth. With so much amazing happening people are off doing stuff that isn't captured by the metrics. Some of that stuff could be amazing in it's own light too, but in ways our historical perspective doesn't capture and appreciate. As far as singular genius goes: As we all become better, due to better tools and better access to knowledge, it makes sense that our accomplishments will become more compressed against the ceiling of what's possible given our current technology. Moreover, we work on more things today that are of a scope greater than any single human-- and this work depends on the collective effort of large teams. These change likely decrease the importance and visibility of singular genius. Even if we accept that it's less common now, due to rarity singular genius is difficult to rigorously study and probably impossible study so ethically: Maybe it's down because incest is less common or because child abuse is less common! There are a lot of things which have changed in recent errors which we would not reverse for the sake of more outstanding geniuses. Instead of looking back and lamenting the that the concentration of singular genius seems to have decreased there is probably so much more to gain from growing into all the new possibilities that have opened to us recently, many of which we've only barely begun to comprehend. (and, if it isn't clear-- I didn't actually stop reading at the beginning ;) ) |
Other assumed facts:
1) we ever started "making Einsteins" in the first place
2) Assuming (1), we actually stopped
Lots of other things are possible:
- there are people of incredible genius out there making profound discoveries the author is unaware of
- there are people of incredible genius out there making profound discoveries the impact of which has yet to be generally felt or appreciated
- So much is being published now and some fields are so niche and complex that it takes time for the community to process and undestand work that is done
- People are empowered by better tools etc to tackle bigger things which take longer and require more collaboration (eg the langlands project)
- geniuses aren't made at all, but instead just come along every now and again at random. You can't extrapolate from a stochastic process involving very rare events and make any kind of determination whatsoever about trends without having that determination basically just reflect your assumptions.