[scotty79]

If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.

[BobaFloutist]

It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans follow a normal distribution (or really any random distribution), then the fact that so many people in the world live in situations where any genius will simply never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on the vast majority of them.