I see how "aristocratic tutoring" brings up people at the wrong end of the curve (like G. W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind") but I don't see it creating genius.
This one one of those granular issues where there is no single right answer. Given the forum, the best answer would be why has our given technology been shaped to act as aristocratic tutors to us all?
Further, is there enough room for any given Einstein in this dogmatic landscape?
It maybe less about dogma and more about the size of the remaining problems. A single Einstein can't go find the Higgs boson; you need a multi-national consortium willing to build a city-sized machine for it.
You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single contributor is capable of.
There is public fascination with Steven Hawking, but Hawking's work has been confined to questions where the answers are unobservable (what's inside a black hole? what do you see in 10⁶⁴ years when stellar origin black holes start to pop?)
This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is).
Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care how minuscule the odds are that ONE coder changes the world. The numbers make it impossible for us to lose on all the fronts. Tech is basically matured to the point where all the questions of the 90s are now solved. Ad tech? Check. Search? Check. Mobile hq video and photo beyond the 90s imagination? Check. The list goes on. Computers ALREADY BEAT HUMANS AT GO, let that sink in.
I don’t even care how pessimistic you are - if you fail to see how we are a) blooming right now and b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future, the wording is exactly right: YOU fail to see it.
It’s there. It’s everywhere. The fact that you can read this message, that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing. If you lost that sense of wonder, maybe it’s time to reconsider your models.
Yeah, I knew this article wasn't for me when I read the first sentence.
Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.
The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses.
Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress.
This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.
> The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses.
Crisis (recently lead to the general availability of mRNA treatments) and war (starlink recently showed how easy it is to reconnect a country during wartime)
A clear vision of a target. That worked for the removal of lead, for the combat of acid rain and for the ban of CFC gases, and right now many European cities are piloting the vision of a "car free city" with astonishing results.
Keep in mind some of the best and brightest minds in the past, some cutting edge medical experts, were highly paid to perform lobotomies. And that is just one example. I was reading recently about cutting edge "medicine" back in the day, that was literally just radioactive water made from radium. Killed lots of rich people because of how expensive it was as a treatment.
...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme.
If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought.
>We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars
this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!
"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?
Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?
The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.
Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.
The private sector taking the lead in space exploration is healthy. The government should be involved when it needs to be. That was the case in the past but isn't any longer.
Government research is for breaking ground that is too costly for the private sector or doesn't have a financial pay off. After the private sector steps in government should move on to new frontiers.
Taxing billionaires will not solve anything. It is just a shoe in the door for more taxes for you. No matter what the government gets in taxes it will never be enough to satiate the desire to spend other people's money. Just remember, anything that is applied to billionaires also will be applied to you. After all, we are all equals.
You're absolutely right, although on a completely different topic: I'd argue that most of the things you mentioned might not be good for society, especially when combined with the view that most technological development takes place in publicly traded companies whose primary obligation is to maximize quarterly profits. I guess it is innovation when a personalized recommender system is able to pick exactly the right conspiracy video to HD stream to someone's phone that will get them to keep watching videos on an ad-supported platform. But not exactly society "blooming" in my view.
Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference
fwiw, that's a very time-local judgement of the progress we made. Objectively, as a species, we solved inter-connectivity, high quality media, etc. - the fact that we currently live in a culture where these means are distributed in the name of wealth will simply be meaningless a couple hundred years down the line.
Because the feedback-loops that allow for notions as isolated material wealth will lose traction (or at least that's what I estimate will happen). Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point?
After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs, how will this change the perspective on work/wealth/etc as a whole? Now add another five generations after we reached that point, just to get rid of some friction of people holding on the the past.
The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect any continuous level of progress in our problem-domains (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, there is an active demand for inequality. People want to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will continue to change in our favor - maybe forever.
I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.
>Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs
It will lead to physical elimination of that 50%, and probably more.
>I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.
Monkeys, from which we split off millions of years ago, have very strong hierarchies. It's great to believe we can fix everything with culture, but biology exists.
>The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources.
Resources will always be limited. Our wants, collectively, are infinite.
Just think about "thought influencers". It's nothing but status games, and that will not go away even if every single physical need has been taken care of. Why? Because the top influencer can program brains of millions, and some - even of BILLIONS of other humans.
How do you fix that with more resources, the competition over who gets to influence and brainwash everyone else?
> Objectively, as a species, we solved inter-connectivity, high quality media, etc.
I do not think that is an objective statement at all. I think one could just as readily make a highly data-supported argument that never in history have we been more factionalized or inundated with low-quality media than in the current moment.
Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.
We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.
We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.
> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.
That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur?
Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth.
Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.
> What huge societal improvements do holograms permit?
Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they?
> Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army?
> Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.
We could almost certainly get to human cloning very fast; the technology isn't really the botttleneck. It's just that no one does it and for very good reasons. The only way human cloning could be useful and help "solve" any problem would also involve going back to chatel slavery. Why would any research go towards that?
It's not like star wars, human clones would still be human.
Also ignores things like electric vehicles at scale (battery and charging tech), mRNA vaccines, blockchain, OCD treatment, DNNs, cable television (I think some of the best works of art are TV series now).
> We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people. We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.
All of these statements apply to Einstein's era as well.
We do, however, as of the past ten years or so have reuseable rockets (non trivial), inexpensive virtual reality goggles, mRNA vaccines, bioreactor grown meat, on demand access to an enormous quantity of humanity's artistic creations at any time, nearly-out-of uncanny valley digital human replicas, self driving cars with a low probability of killing you getting from point A to point B, and, yes, some really cool video games.
some cancers are curable with 95% success rate, but then again cancer is really more of an umbrella term, not a specific disease.
we do have physics of warp-drives somewhat figured out, but engineering remains a challenge. there are some warp fields experiments going on. if were to apply your metric, GPS was invented in 1915, by Einstein.
> We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.
Damn.. I'm not sure what more you are wanting given the amount of time that has passed? You wanted humanity to go from its first flight and engine-powered vehicle to warp drives, cured cancer and Moon colonies in less than 200 years?
We aren't innovating like we use to and it isn't even close. We are just such a histrionically ignorant society that has lowered the bar on innovation so we can pretend that we are a society innovating at lighting speed.
The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was yesterday.
1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity..
We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are clueless.
The smart phone doesn't even belong in the same category as the others you listed. The digital computer certainly does but it's been 80 years since that occurred. The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap. Practically everything people are listing here falls in the category of refinement of existing technology rather than a completely novel form of technology. That is the scary and correct assertion of the article, we've almost completely stopped discovering or inventing novel technology or at least the rate of discovery has slowed to the point where 100 years of our present progress is equal to 10 years of the previous.
> The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap.
There's very little that isn't.
Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of throwing things.
Any definition of innovation that doesn't include smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear they were novel and massively impactful on society.
This argument is being framed incorrectly. It's the fundamental discovery that counts, not the implementations. The discovery of steam power is more important than Hero's Engine because discovering that you can do useful work with steam allows you to build all kinds of things that didn't exist before. Having a whirligig that runs on steam gives you nothing more than a few minutes enjoyment. Guns are definitely not a refinement of throwing things, someone who only knows how to throw something cannot build a gun. Guns are a refinement of the invention of gunpowder and good enough metallurgy to produce the gun itself. Similarly, rocketry is a refinement of gunpowder and the discovery that pressurized gasses escaping from a hole or nozzle can propel something. A smartphone itself is not a truly novel discovery, it's essentially a handheld portable computer. All the same technology exists or could exist in other form factors. If we compare it to something simple like a hammer, it is just a small hammer good for doing certain tasks and not others. It doesn't compare to the discovery that if you attach a weight to a handle you can hammer things. There are other specialized forms of hammer that are better for other tasks. i.e. a smartphone is just a specialized form of computer.
That's ridiculous, the smartphone has changed society far more than desktop's or really any form of computer that exists. Vast numbers of people only access the internet via a smart phone. Doctor's visits across the globe, remote working from wherever you are, hand held GPS and maps, access to countless hours of entertainment, etc....
None of that is possible without digital computers and those generalize to a much larger domain of devices and technologies that have revolutionized the world in thousands of ways. So no, the smartphone has not had a larger impact on the world than the invention of the digital computer. As for the other examples, GPS is not possible without the Theory of Relativity, video calls are not possible without motion pictures, the integrated circuits that make up the smartphone are not possible without plastics, and I doubt we would have many close connections with the rest of the world without air travel. Besides that, remote working and doctor's visits are possible without a smartphone, same thing with GPS which predates smartphones by quite a bit, same with access to entertainment. None of those things are really very revolutionary. GPS is the closest since it does provide a novel and superior way of navigating but you'd be hard pressed to make a case for entertainment or remote working being on par with manned flight or plastics.
In the last 15 years we got reusable rockets, mRNA vaccines, Crispr, workable quantum computers, AI capable of beating us at Go, and many other numerous breakthroughs. Sure 1900-1910 meaningfully changed the world but the bar form the 1800's was dramatically lower than the 2000-2010 bar from the 1900's. Ironic that such a ignorant comment laments societies ignorance.
The ability for mitumba in a village outside of Nairobi to whip out a little device in his pocket and learn anything his mind can conjure up a desire to learn and speak with any human being on the earth they'd like is not a small development compared to air conditioning, airplanes and plastics. And it's not an abstract academic example, a few weeks ago I video chatted with a real Masai warrior who I've never met, because my friend was casually catching up with family overseas.
And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 years between first powered flight and men stepping on the moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds information are going to do things with their minds that you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in novel ways and nobody can stop them.
Agreed, this article's premise is nonsense, while well written with some interesting history. The geniuses are making things that are now so common place that we've lost our wonder. Nanometer computer chips? That sounds like genius to me. Editing the human genome with CRISPR (et.al.)? That sounds like genius to me. It is true that some of our smartest minds are now focused on ads and exploiting complex derivatives but we also rolled out a vaccine to a world of billions in 9 months. There is plenty of genius, but the bar is higher and the easy things are done. This author seems to miss the genius required to let me watch live streamed video from the other side of the world on a watch as I "drive" 70 mph down the highway while the car keeps me in my lane if I stop paying attention.
One really major innovation is that we have developed the capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and are just - with the big data revolution - developing the capability to understand these data volumes and translate them into findings.
Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.
And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet.
What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.
> Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.
And the median value of that reasearch is zero.
There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are a fair number of results that are not useful along with some which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the species.
You're mistaken, I think, because one of your assumptions is not necessarily true - that wrong/useless results are a bad thing and slowing us down.
First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to remember that literally the best results science have to offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in the past. What science produces are models of reality, and while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead of going down this path, we can instead be content that some research is wrong, because the scientific process is one of continually refining those results. Also, we note that despite everything literally being wrong, society, technology, and engineering still make progress. Being wrong does not mean being useless.
Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is useful in one era is completely useless in another. For example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was brand new. Should that research not have been done until it was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then it wouldn't be research, would it?
So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of research with the intent that it would increase the sum total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you:
1) identify the bottom half of research before it's conducted
2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, and how do you intended to squelch useless research while allowing useful research to persist unimpeded
3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" research
4) fund useful research while passing over useless research
I think the answer to those questions would basically involve re-inventing the scientific process.
I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn out to be useless at least has the positive value of showing how something isn't to be done. This has the positive result of allowing someone else to try a different method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the latter without the former.
I understand what you're trying to say -- yes Newton was wrong and now we have refined Newton with Einstein. But Ptolemy was wrong, and we have not refined Ptolemy with Gallileo, we threw Ptolemy out.
As an example, the original power pose study has never been replicated. The idea that posing in a specific way led to a neuro-endocrine response was simply wrong. And yet it got cited many times. One of the the original authors disavowed it, the other continued promoting it, but now with a much weaker claim. Is it science? Or is it a waste of resources?
I think much of the research I'm deriding is actually pretty good thinking. Published as essays or thought experiments I think a lot of it would have value. But because of a perverse demand for publications, any good idea has to have prior work, p-values and if you can get a grant and fMRI slapped onto it.
There is def an element of this. Replicability, perverse incentives, bad scientific cultures in specific fields, and all sorts of problems mean a lot of bad or pointless research is done.
It is very hard to say with basic research, what is pointless. For instance, there is little application for bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So hard to value.
But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only becomes valuable once we can do that.
Is the blooming you refer to helping humans and making them healthier and happier though? Or smarter? For the average person in the USA that I encounter it seems like the answer to smarter is a resounding no. And this seems to correspond with the rise of social media in the timeline in my head. Human intelligence doesn’t evolve lower in such a short time period, but the knowledge in that head varies greatly with what you put in it.
I think we're seeing _many_ people's health be raised in the past ~30yrs. Maybe not Americans/Western Europeans but I would venture to guess that _most_ people are now living _healthier_ lives than they were 30 years ago _globally_.
For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so!
Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.
> b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future
I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.
The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have tons of spare intellectual resources. I can't imagine a world where millions of people live in rich countries, who can code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops progressing. Of course the system we've built is constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not everything just gets better and better.
But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.
Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress.
Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan.
Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
>Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard.
I think of it differently: it already did. The old world is already dead. It will just take a couple of generations until that realization kicks in, or until the consequences of that realization are implemented in our cultures and systems. The political incentives in western democracies are not aligned with the interests of the following generations. The opposite is the case, current politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I think exactly that's what is conductive for progress.
Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction is essentially the product of people who hold on to concepts of the world that have already lost their meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost exclusively people born before 1990. The number is arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point.
I just want to say it's incredibly refreshing to read comments from someone looking at the big picture and providing thoughtful optimism about where things are headed.
The geopolitical situation in the 1800s and even the first half of the 1900s was much more volatile than today. Yet, industrialization caused massive changes. In fact that was a big part of the feedbackloop for the political instability. Neverless it certainly wasn't an impediment to innovation and sometime even spurred it (via war funding). I just don't buy that peace and social stability enables progress, I'd argue the very opposite.
The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large.
If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past.
Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us?
The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality?
Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest?
Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end?
We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish).
It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.
>This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is).
Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".
Not to get political but people don't care when they can't afford a house, and their kids' future doesn't appear to be brighter as their town is shrinking + all future jobs will be low paying service/technician jobs unless you are working on building these new technologies.
So, I basically agree with you that there's lots of progress to be amazed by. I also think that the "genius" model is fundamentally flawed, at least in today's age -- there's something to be said for the possibility that education and support systems have improved to the point where maybe geniuses are everywhere. If anything I think we have too much of a genius mythology, and maybe this paper is sort of inadvertently pointing out that the Einsteins of the past were more about the social structures they found themselves than their "genius" per se.
There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to.
That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that?
I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level.
Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then.
Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.
That's a good way to look at it, I think. It is fair to the article's intent. But there are two counterpoints to this line of thought:
1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work.
2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.
People keep saying how fast flight evolved, such that a person was alive both for Wright brothers and landing on the Moon.
We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
> We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing.
A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is.
We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon.
We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now?
"VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?
I don't wholly disagree with your overall point, but I'm not entirely onboard, either. I feel like, as someone else mentioned, you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much. I also think that you're too narrowly focused on innovations within tech, while genius can occur in countless other fields and the article itself doesn't even keep it's focus on "genius" so narrow.
>... all the questions of the 90s are now solved.
This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.
>Ad tech? Check.
Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.
>you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much
you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...].
Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated.
>This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.
Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording.
>Ah, yes! Advertising technology!
Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
>Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
One of the most significant applications of Einstein's work was to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
Where is my Flying Car, Where is my Space Tourism, Where is my Space Colony, Where is my Underwater Colony, Where is my Cheap Plentiful Environmentally friendly Energy Generation / Storage
it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design..
We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old
Prior to the invention of telegraph and rail Thomas Jefferson lamented the fact that transport and communication were so slow. Modes of transportation and communication hadn't changed in centuries. Technological progress had seemed to slow to a crawl. Shortly after his death, telegraph and rail were invented and technological progress boomed. Technology is constantly refined slowly for long periods of time. Then there is a new discovery and everything changes rapidly. I believe we are on the precipice of such a boom. ReBCO high temperature super conductors were invented in the 80s and reached manufacturable maturity in 2010. Anything that uses powerful electro magnets is just starting the process of being made more powerful and cheaper. This invention is why there is a sudden interest in commercial fusion. I have seen recent papers calculating upgrades to MRI that will make them more powerful, cheaper to build and run. I already feel the future of my childhood has arrived. I am very excided for the technology we will see in the next couple decades.
PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations of slow progress.
PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient and lighter machines that were not possible before.
People who think there are no new great minds are looking for society to hand them socially approved "great minds." The thing about great minds is that your mind has to be at least not entirely eclipsed by them to recognize their greatness.
Why so cynical about it? That's just what the situation was. The topology of our species' communication changed entirely within a single biological generation, from centralized orgs that delay and transform the signal, to the point where one node streams natively to any channel of their choosing, no transformations applied. How is that not worth mentioning in this thread, and how is it justifying cynic remarks?
I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. With the benefit of hindsight, we only remember the greats (and the very worst villains) from past eras. While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books, just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics."
Edit: And yes, the internet has brought about immense and immeasurable benefits to science and innovation. It can both be true that most people on Facebook are dunces and getting dumber because of Facebook, and that there has been massive developments in research and development that would not have happened without the internet.
I agree. It's just that there is so much innovation everywhere, that those geniuses of old are not THAT outstanding. There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap. The same with music. You just need to search more. Youtube and spotify made this easier, I discover totally new astounding music authors and songs almost every month. Yeah, not everyone likes my music taste, but I see that many people also find new music they love. We just have so much variety now, that there is no single commonly recognisable genius.
> There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Because we now have access to an instant world-wide exchange of ideas scientists work more closely together on developing their respective fields than ever before. By the time a major breakthrough happens most experts in the field will have already seen it coming.
Breakthroughs consist of many smaller leaps in knowledge and we are now hyper-aware of each small development, thus it doesn't seem like we're making big leaps anymore. Rather than creating new geniuses the Internet eliminated the need for the classic "genius" to make a breakthrough in a scientific field.
> I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue.
Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enough singer that one can record an impeccable vocal in one take apparently not a prerequisite for a recording contract?
Edit: To bring this back around to the topic of the article, I think the discussion of autotuned vocals might hint at an answer to the question about individual geniuses: it's not as important for individuals to have extraordinary abilities when technology can help us all do so much. I admit I was being a curmudgeon above; I know that autotune can be used to subtly improve mediocre vocals, in addition to enabling the obviously artificial sound that many of us consider crap.
My take on it is that because there are so many good singers out there, people generally don't really care about that aspect of music as much (anymore?).
With so much technology available to basically anyone who cares enough to learn how to use it, it's becoming much more important to use that technology creatively than to have some natural talent for singing.
Autotune is a tool like any other. Generally those who consumed media before that tool was invented will be skeptical of it because “things I like didn’t need it.” Those who begin consuming media after the tool was invented don’t have the same biases.
A 50-years ago version of that would be microphones on broadway. It used to be a point of pride to fill a theater without amplification. Now we don’t really care.
I am unsure if it tells more about any general attitude about "tools" or more about Broadway. Microphones are still not used in opera or classical music.
There is no single thing that makes a song interesting or memorable, but technical proficiency is one of factors. Of course, I don't think that being "at the top" in technical proficiency makes a song any better than being just among a broader set of "best performers", but autotune makes people sound flat, generic, robotic, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum. That it doesn't contribute positively to a song is an understatement.
Does a trumpet with a straight mute contribute positively to a song? Compared to an unmuted trumpet it has reduced dynamic control and a flattened, generic timbre. But using them is common, and the distinctive sound is a key part of many well-known musical passages.
The technical proficiency of a trumpeter is completely orthogonal to whether they use a mute on a particular piece, since it is just a simple hardware technique. And the same thing with autotune. Incredible singers can and do use it for its technical effect, because they think that effect contributes to the song.
As a listener you can disagree, just as I find the heavy strings vibrato of classic pop a distraction. But you can't assess how good a song is by categorizing techniques used in it. Claims that new techniques rob music of something ineffable, or just sound bad, are ubiquitous for new musical techniques and are as old as instruments at least.
If you think autotune is the First Bad One when people said the same things about piano pedals, metal violin strings, geared tuning pegs, electric amplification, I just want you to consider the company you're in here.
You can not like it but stop claiming it's objectively bad when it is not.
You make it sound as if pop singers used autotune selectively, judging when it's better than natural technique. I wrote my comment in the context of large swaths of pop singers who use autotune indiscriminately in all their songs, throughout. (At least that's my impression from songs recommended to me by YouTube in incognito mode.) Now show me an acclaimed pianist who keeps their foot down on a single pedal throughout all their performances. I'd be surprised if the most common motivation for using autotune wasn't being unable to hit the right notes.
You're making assumptions about the motivations and goals of the people making the music. It's likely they do think it adds something to every song they use it on. The same way almost all contemporary musicians use amplification and digital mastering "indiscriminately." Not using those techniques is a specific, intentional part of the "sound" of some genres, and outside of that they are ubiquitous.
I'm not saying autotune is this good. I'm saying that if nearly everyone is using it and continues to use it after, at this point, decades, they must be getting something out of it. Masterful singers also use it, some quite a lot, so it can't be as simple as covering up limited skill or range.
Pop music is about so much more than being a good singer. The hook is key, as is the content, the brand (artist), and how it's marketed. It takes a village to manufacture successful pop music. Being able to sing super well isn't required anymore, but having an army of people to assist making it popular most certainly is. The rare artist that goes viral on a shoestring quickly accumulates all the same help that other pop artists have to ensure future releases are also hits.
Pop performers are optimizing for something outside what hits a recording -- that is to say, in the same way that opera singers have to have some theatrical ability in addition to singing the music, pop performance these days involves a huge amount of choreographed dance. A pop singer I'll not name performed on a late night show and was a target of internet ribbing for having brought only some semi-awkward samba-like side-stepping -- though it's more than I or the karaoke singers could do! Once you start looking at the best singer-dancers rather than the best singers, you'll get closer to the real prerequisites for that genre.
(And of course, "the obviously artificial sound" can be an aesthetic choice made by vocalists fully capable of recording impeccable vocals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc)
> A pop singer I'll not name performed on a late night show and was a target of internet ribbing for having brought only some semi-awkward samba-like side-stepping
For anyone wondering, I believe this is referring to Lana Del Rey. Not sure what the purpose of redacting the name was...
Maybe that's not who you were referring to though? Iirc, the criticisms weren't just about her swaying, but singing that was described as "mumbling". That latter criticism is explicitly the opposite of what we're discussing.
It was not referring to Lana del Rey, that criticism would be the opposite of what we're discussing, and thus it's sort of funny you'd assumed that's whom I'd meant... The purpose of redacting the name is that I like the singer, her music is great, and I don't think there's a point to invoking her as "a bad dancer" in a discussion on HN of all places.
> The purpose of redacting the name is that I like the singer, her music is great, and I don't think there's a point to invoking her as "a bad dancer" in a discussion on HN of all places
It's kind of funny that you'd think this invocation would be harmful, given that the very premise is that how she chooses to move onstage is irrelevant to her musicianship.
Most superstar pop singers have fantastic singing voices and great pitch control. Autotune shows up because of some mix of 1) the modern pop aesthetic demands superhuman tuning, 2) some degree of autotune artifacts are expected as part of the modern sound, and 3) it can intentionally be used as an effect (T-Pain).
To give some more detail about both 1 and 2 -
Pitch control is more than just hitting the note; its about how well you can onset at the right pitch, how well you can hold the pitch once hit, how well you can jump each pitch interval and land on the right pitch, how well you can pitch through different articulations, different vocal ranges, etc. The modern pop sound has accepted that superhuman levels of pitch control that lock the vocal into tune with the perfectly tuned synthesizers/samplers are more important than a natural sound.
Also, since we've been using autotune for so long, it has almost become natural. We expect to hear it to some degree on every track, especially in more difficult vocal areas. If it wasn't present, one might feel the song sounds "indie" or worse, dated.
Lastly, one thing that fascinates me about the autotune complaints are that it's just one stage of a very long vocal processing chain. To my ears, the tweaks provided by dynamics processors are much more dramatic than autotune when applied to a reasonably proficient singer. Autotune is just one step of a processing chain that can easily run through 10+ processors to end up at the right sound.
>I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music
I'm going to stop you right there and point out that there is an absolutely massive space outside of Top 40. If you're willing to actually expend some effort to go looking, there's undoubtedly music out there for you. And this is nothing to do with age. I'm 40 and there's more new music coming out that I like than I can keep up with. I was recently talking to my almost 60 year old uncle and he finds the same to be true.
I can't believe they autotune so much kids' media these days. Daniel Tiger will teach your kid that their amazing singing voice sounds wrong, because all the singing on DT is auto-tuned like crazy and doesn't sound like actual human singing. WTF.
Been reading Chuck Klosterman's book, But What If We're Wrong?. Which is partly that thought. The things that get remembered in the global consciousness are not always the people or things we'd expect. It's possible that we have a "genius" right now that will be remembered in 100 years. But due to all the local noise it's hard to see through that and remain objective.
Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.
This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are much less stable than people think.
Even when it comes to philosophy I think it holds true. Up into the 1930s Bergson was regarded as one of the most important philosophers in Europe while Wittgenstein was barely mentioned outside a few, select circles, even he had already published his Tractatus. Nowadays Bergson returns blank stares when you mention his name to an Anglo audience while Wittgenstein is seen as one of the most important philosophers of the last few hundred years.
Which is profoundly sad since Wittgenstein is only saved by his prophetic beliefs about language - despite writing like a post-modernist while somehow being considered part of the "analytic tradition"...
Funny, I thought his musics about "language games" was the part of his output more amenable to fashionable nonsense. I have met very few students who attempt to say anything about Tractatus, but quite many who espouse deep-sounding platitudes about "language is a game".
Have you read the Tractatus? After Frege, and Russell, it's difficult to think of a philosopher who contributed more to the analytic style of exposition.
There is some irony in dismissing him as "nonsensical", because he himself suggested the Tractatus was "nonsense". The point of writing it was to demonstrate that philosophy in his time (e.g. the logical atomism of Russell) had gone astray.
Art's a little weird, because the price of a lot of million-dollar art pieces is driven in large part by the need for an appreciating-on-paper vehicle for tax evasion. (That you can lend out to art galleries.)
And the last thing these schemes need is a living artist who can - upon his work reaching stardom - simply make more of it.
In this respect, dead poets are much safer to bet the farm on.
A good example of this is the Author of the famously "bad line", "It was a dark and stormy night" was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was perhaps one of the most famous authors of his time, who also coined many very common expressions we use today.
I would argue that is actually the norm. The more I dig deeper into the history of any field the more I realize how many publicly unknown geniuses there are. Mostly only recognized and praised as such by the connoisseurs of the respective field.
And it makes sense, especially in our times, sophisticated PR (and Einstein enjoyed that, too, in addition in being a genius) just trumps any recognition one might get in a life time, in the short term that is.
If you are not seeking some grandiose recognition (like Newton or Edison, famously) you are potentially a better explorer of the yet Unknown not bothering wasting any energy and being less corruptable by discoveries, you are happy to share with others and helping to bring about.
Off the top of my head: Three examples of rather unknown "geniuses" in physics in no particular order:
Chien-Shiung Wu, Oliver Heaviside, John Michell
One could also argue, as I sometimes do, too, that a genius is just a convenient narrative device in order to highlight and illustrate some important turning point with the historical person serving as some responsible "actor" in bridging over an otherwise complex and often self-contradictory development into a tangible coherent state.
I think there isn't enough distinction in the term "genius". How do you even compare their contributions? It is easy when you have someone like Euclid or Newton, who's work is taught in pre-college grades. Who is the last person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi? It's been centuries. Then you look at someone like Einstein who was discussed in every major magazine and newspaper at the time his general theory was articulated. I think Hawking got the similar treatment, but has he impacted what is taught in 4-year college the way Einstein did? I think Hawking's genius is too esoteric.
There needs to be a new term. "Genius" is too limp to describe individuals who radically alter the curriculum taught to undergraduate students.
> Who is the last person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi?
Shrodinger, maybe? He is a really large part of the reason people study matrices before college, and then go and complain because nobody can show them a use for the thing.
Yes, matrices got everywhere in the 20th century. There is basically no field that doesn't use them nowadays.
But any demonstration requires modern knowledge, and matrices are one of the very few modern thing students see. If you want to show them 3D graphics, you will need to teach programing first. Yeah, some will know it by them, but schools also can't rely on that.
(As an aside, chemistry also has some weirdly modern knowledge on its curriculum. Also out of context, just thrown in there because it's important.)
The nearest application I can think of is for modeling stochastic processes, but students see so little statistics that I imagine that will only change the object on the "why am I even studying X?" complaint.
You don't have to teach programming to teach computer graphics at the level of pedagogical example. The programming is bookkeeping for assets and occasionally a clever optimization(e.g. a Bresenham line rasterization, instead of one done by linear interpolation); the algorithms that are most critical to understanding graphics are often one-liners and analytic in nature, and so can directly reflect the underlying mathematics.
The kind of example you would get for matrix math would be something like: "Here is a triangle described by these points, here is a matrix that projects them in a 3D camera. In such-and-such 3D library, points are projected with the matrix by doing these steps. Compute and plot the result of applying the matrix to each point." And then in successive examples you can add some details about how you go about building up the matrix by computing the camera, translating the poly and so forth, and make comparisons to how it can be done in some scenarios using only trigonometry, and further comparisons to camera lenses and artist's 3D projection with horizon and vanishing points. If you put all those connections there in one place, you have the starting point, and then it can be elaborated on into both the pure math topics(why does this mathematical representation work) and the computing topics(how do I automate the process of plotting points).
What tends to happen is that the text doesn't allow enough of a detour to make all of those connections, so you instead get an extraordinarily brief allusion to application in a single word problem, after a completely abstract introduction.
This is addressed early on in the article. Maybe one of the problems with lack of genius is that we don't actually read anymore.
Ponder that! Spengler began writing Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years deceased. But Spengler could state, with the full expectation that his audience would not question him, that these men belonged in global pantheon of humanity’s greatest figures.
I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, but the quantity of books sold says little about their quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make make profit rather than spreading good literature, and this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of unread books on my shelf, buying a book doesn't mean reading it. There is an aesthetic appeal to books, and though I want to read all I own, there will inevitably be books printed and sold but unread.
There are high literacy rates, but this says little about whether material has been grasped and digested. References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is surprising.
purely anecdotally to my own experience, but I firmly believe that not only social media, but the screen size of phones themselves incentivize fast context switching shallow low quality reading, which has detrimental effects on cognition. Sure everyone has the worlds knowledge in their pocket, but all incentives are to only consume the lowest quality of knowledge
If I don't make it a daily habit, it becomes difficult to read a novel, I am unable to maintain the attention required, which phone scrolling im sure has exacerbated.
I don't believe it's addressed well. Many from different intellectual lineages were then hailed whom we'd not recognize today. Many of the pseudo-quantitative takes pointed to are pretty ... flimsy. ("I couldn't find a list with both Kanye and Beethoven on it, so I made up my own!")
I think that's part of it, but I also think there's some merit to our intuition as well; sometimes you can viscerally feel if you're in a boom or bust cycle. During the reality TV phase I remember thinking "this is all garbage", and then shows like The Sopranos and The West Wing kicked off an era that had me thinking "I literally can't keep up with all the good shows; there's too much good TV to watch." I think this was a pretty common feeling, and not in hindsight but during the era. In gaming I remember marvelling at a PC boom in 98-99, and then hating the "xbox-ification" of PC games for a few years after that.
Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me like when they found their "reality game show" formula that was then replicated off of those base archetypes into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does feel about right for when the explosion happened.
The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.
Unscripted television had been bubbling beneath the surface for a good long while (game shows have existed since basically forever), but the 2007 writer's strikes was the catalyst that caused MTV-style trashier reality TV to take over.
> While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books
I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or other means, then you fade into the background.
Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at social interaction and can't be a 'Youtuber' or 'influencer' so easily.
It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the scale of the planet.
Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All these channels were very limited, so just by getting there one could ensure they had a position among the officially recognised elite.
Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels, from all over the planet, unloading talent in any discipline 24/7. You can market the hell out of yourself and the world can still decide they are too busy caring about Korean singers and African memes.
Which really is the beef I have with this article: genius is not recognised anymore because now we are a global village of billions, rather than an elite of a few hundreds of thousands, and we consume all sorts of radically different media rather than a handful of shared sources. So we simply don't agree on what is "genius" anymore, at a societal level; geniuses do their work in smaller groups, where they get some recognition, and that's it.
> Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels
I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong.
The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?
For all practical purposes, it is literally infinite. You won't be able to go through the entirety of YouTube in a single lifetime, and that's just one channel of distributed knowledge. And new channels appear every day, somewhere on the global network. The firehose will never stop, the network is effectively an infinite source of content.
> what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors
I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to resources, networking chances, free time etc etc, the aristocrats of the past would have been effectively unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose opinion determined everybody else's view of them, effectively unchallenged.
> While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books
because it's simply extremely cheap to create stuff. so we have a glut of stuff.
because nowadays everyone can buy an instrument and take a few classes, and put it on youtube. and since there's enormous demand for novelty, and there's a lot of styles, niches that producers/creators can fill, quality isn't really a singular thing anymore.
> just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics."
well, that's .. true, but also there's no classics anymore. there's a gamut of things. hundreds of years ago we had a few hundred/thousand extremely talented people who got into arts because they were talented, they visited each other in person to learn from each other over months and years. it was very very very homogeneous in time and space (and it was apparent who's the amazing real boss of that level/period/era) compared to today's hyperfast superglobal heterogeneous all-in content-bonanza, where it's impossible to consume all of it, impossible to filter it, impossible to comprehend/contrast/compare all of it to itself.
Sure there was no point in comparing Van Gogh to Tchaikovsky even then - but there was room for two, now it got even more impossibler not less since there are so many new forms/genres/styles and a lot more amazing feats of creation, and more new talents each day, so relatively there's even less room (less time, less space) to fit the contemporary greats.
Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 than it is now.
Not saying that general relativity is well understood by general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people could not wrap their heads around.
Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the level where mediocre people were before.
We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much smarter than average Joe 100 years ago.
I completely disagree with the premise, that geniuses are vanishing - I think we have more than ever, it just takes a lot more to make notable progress these days. However, the article still ended up being a decent read, exploring how a lot of geniuses had tutors. I think our education system is messed up in a lot of ways, and we'd have a better society if kids got more adult attention. Saying this as a parent of a middle schooler, I really feel the issues in staff-constrained pandemic years.
It would be interesting to have past geniuses sit in today's world - I think we'd be dismayed that in the massive ocean of knowledge we have these days, they wouldn't seem so legendary anymore.
That's true, but in the same time... We still have so much to discover, no matter the subject -- I study physics and, even at my level (not very advanced), there are obviously entire domains that are not clearly understood even by the most brillant minds.
But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and intelligence) needed in order to achieve something significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow everytime a Einstein discovers something.
i think its also a problem of funding. the problems of today are more resource intensive. i read that succesfull test to use mrna for medical treatment were done 20 years ago and nobody realy cared and knew about it. To realy develop into something viable took years to get the attention and funding.
I think there's something in this. The "where's today's Beethoven" chart would be completely explained either by an actual decline, or by it becoming harder to be rated a genius against contemporaries over time. And that itself is mostly a numbers game too: the human population now is 7 times larger than it was at Beethoven's death. Vienna's population (relevant since we're talking about Beethoven) was about 200,000 then, but it's 9 times that now. If part of the qualification to be remembered as a genius is notoriety and publicity, which it must be, then because it's much more crowded at the top it's more than likely that all the individuals currently of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't break away from the pack and individually dominate the field.
Re: "it's more than likely that all the individuals currently of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't break away from the pack and individually dominate the field". But doesn't that imply we should see individuals heads and shoulders above Beethoven? If we see a lot of Beethoven's at the merely "extremely good" level where is(are) the one(s) at the next "genius" level???
I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude.
As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference.
As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.
The human population isn't really important to that chart.
"Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."
The denominator has increased massively faster than the base population.
That's only true if acclaim scales with population. Or more specifically, if the "number of acclaimed scientists..." would scale with the total number of scientists in the absence of a falloff in rate of their creation. That's the point: I don't think it does. I think it's reasonable to assume that in a larger population, a given level of acclaim is harder to achieve for any given individual. Same fish, bigger pond.
I think the 1 easiest way to improve schools right now would be to differentiate kids by ability.
Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.
So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.
If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?
Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.
I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.
Are they pointing out a lack of geniuses, or just a lack of pop culture geniuses? And are the silos in knowledge so stratified now that we as a culture just don't recognize those who are?
Perhaps the problem is not a decline in genius, but that too many geniuses are now given the opportunity to fulfill their potential (whereas before they'd have lacked education, compared to aristocrats), making it difficult to stand out and receive popular acclaim.
Define fulfilling potential? If early childhood education was something that a "genius" could afford to focus on(in terms of opportunity cost), wouldn't the contributions of the students far outstrip the potential individual contributions of the single "genius"? My focus is on the availability of these tutors for individuals.
You can kind of see this in sports in the US. Sports are only lucrative for the top performers, and those lucky enough as well. This leaves a wide swath of very high level athletes available to parents willing to pay. This also extends to competitive public funded sports depending on where you're at.
On one hand, it would be amazing for gifted tutors to be widely available, on the other- the situations that would create such availability are probably not going to be good. I'm just thankful that my career will hopefully afford me the ability to be a single income household, with the time and resources to tutor my own child.
I think the author answers half of the question in his post: at least in the hard sciences, it’s becoming massively harder to stand out because most, if not all, the low hanging fruit has been picked.
The second half is that there are far more scientists/writers/artists/etc now than ever before, and more people have access to all their work, meaning no one/handful of individuals naturally rises to prominence.
I think in general this is actually a good thing. The only problem is it becomes harder for the general population to follow what’s going on in certain fields, either in the present or as historical context, because they no longer have very easily identifiable figureheads.
Edit: to be clear, I think the idea that somehow genius or general intelligence and deep expertise is declining is laughable. If anything we’re seeing an explosion of expertise in all the fields I work in.
The article seems to define genius by how socially popular the individual is?
But that's a terrible metric. Is the difference between Einstein and a cutting edge quantum physicist today marketing?
He might be right in his conjecture that one-on-one tutoring produces 'geniuses' but this article contains no evidence of it. I don't think it even contains evidence the top intellectuals are less common, just that they're less popular.
Giroux is a bit too left for me, but the prognosis and message for
hope in this video is spot-on in my opinion. [1]
According to this narrative we stopped making Einsteins because it's
simply no longer in the interests of the "elites" to have smart people
around. Education became a liability to those cheering for cybernetic
governance and social control media.
Similar explanations are proffered by John Taylor-Gatto, Sir Ken
Robinson, Noam Chomsky, and of course Paulo Friere.
While I don't fully agree with the ideologies of these thinkers,
frustratingly, from what I see inside higher education, everything is
designed to produce narrow-minded, uncritical, docile people who will
not ask too many questions or think too hard.
In other words "prepare them for adulthood" where those skills will serve them well. It's hardly like those guys have discovered a deep secret.
They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job.
Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral.
Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.
> understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then
dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you
can have as an adult.
You are in charge. That is the only thing you need to know about being
an adult.
I've got plenty of theories but nothing solid. Einstein and the other Big Name Scientists at the time seemed to be part of a small intellectual elite; it feels like this group of intellectuals has since then increased, but since the big discoveries had already been made, they spend their time iterating on them. Similar discoveries made back then about the nature of reality and physics were all made around that time, a good hundred years ago.
But I think that, quite likely, that was it. There's no new Major Discovery that could propel one scientist into fame to be made anymore. At best we have e.g. Stephen Hawking who introduced some new concepts about space (building on top of e.g. Einstein) and who made theoretical physics more accessible to the masses. Or Oppenheimer who is credited (although by a long shot not the "inventor") with nukes.
The other part is that Einstein and co - at least, reading their biography - were part of the elite, a small group of people, aristocrats, rich folk, who didn't have to work but could instead attend universities wherever they wanted, take long walks in the park to talk and think about the sciences, write long letters to colleagues, etc - people for who intellectual pursuits was what they could spend all their energy on. But, this is hindsight and idealisation based on biographies and surviving letters, so take that with a grain of salt.
Anyway, I think there's plenty of Einsteins out there, but their work is in smaller, less revolutionary increments.
That said, as a society we need to make sure there is enough room for intellectuals, that is, provide funding and livelihoods for them and universities they belong to, and provide budgets for the projects to put their theories into practice, e.g. nuclear fusion, the Large Hadron Collider, the James Webb space telescope, etc.
When Einstein proposed General Relativity it could be tested by nothing more complex than a camera. If anyone comes up with a theory of physics to explain further what we observe about the world the test usually entails a multi trillion dollar machine, a team of thousands of scientists and decades of engineering to bring about a test. Usually these things require novel engineering and for environments where we have no experience. Just look at the JWST. Even then the theories being tested by the JWST are predictions traceable to Einstein. I think we need a better "standard candle" than Einstein to go by. We have plenty of very clever people working on hard problems and coming up with clever solutions. Einstein also wasn't infallible. He's treated like a singular genius that erred in no thing. Einstein rejected Plate Tectonics just to name one scientific area where he managed to blunder badly.
Those only come about every several generations. Many of them needed the entire thinking population of humans in the meantime to package up ideas in a different way so they could bring about their flash of insight.
Nearly all physicists are conceptualists though. Fundamental physics pretty much relies upon an aggressive pursuit of information density rather than the classification of evidence. Theoretically at least.
Still, there are conceptualists and there are problems solvers. E.g. Bohr and Bohr. While father was conceptualist, son was clearly problem solver. Both got nobel prize
This is an interesting analysis. I see a number of factors in play:
1. Population size: the more people you have, the more likely you are to make "geniuses". The genius chart late in the piece maps with this hypothesis;
2. Baseline education: the idea here is that geniuses are less of a gap if the normal level of education and competency is higher;
3. Low-hanging fruit: things seem obvious in hindsight of course but it's also true that some of the big jumps in certain fields come down to what were fairly simple ideas. Those who come up with them are typically labelled "geniuses". That may or may not be the case. But the point is that progress in fields isn't smooth. We've now been in a period in physics where for decades now we've simply confirmed what we already suspected. Useful of course. As is disproving various theories (which is constantly happening).
But the 20th century had 2 massive jumps forward in physics: namely relativity (obviously) and the various quantum mechanics related fields (QFT, QCD, etc). This isn't my area of expertise but my understanding is that a big part of this was realizing just how deeply tied physics and certain areas of mathematics are.
Oh and for the record, I'm really talking about fundamental physics here. Other fields like condensed matter physics are a completely different beast.
But is the 20th century typical? It's hard to say. I suspect it isn't. I once heard research described as spending years of your life working on a problem and your reward is you get to throw a few pebbles on a pile. Eventually that pebble pile becomes a mountain. Someone throwing more than a few pebbles on is realtively inrequent.
I'm not sure how much "aristocratic teaching" really has to do with it.
We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're figuring out how to use AI to sell more dick pills and artfully distressed furniture to people devoid of erections and taste on the goddamn Internet, for more money in a year than Einstein saw in a decade.
I'm not so sure. At VMware in the 2000s we had Marketing Executive who had been a tenured math professor at Stanford. He joined early probably following the primary technical founder at VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, but still.
Tenured university members made pretty good money. As they do now, to be fair - it just got much harder to get there, because of larger and fiercer competition for a shrinking number of positions, so the effort/benefit ratio has fallen quite dramatically.
>It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is harder now than in 1905.
What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of tenure track positions available in any given year. Far more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes without any published work outside their dissertation.
Really depends where you define the starting line. Compare the two starting from birth, and definitely harder in 1905. Compare them as fully qualified individuals ready to apply, probably an edge in 1905.
While I feel the same sentiment about the brightest working on those or similar problems, is it that in the past there was not a similar proportion of the brightest working on similarly pointless and wasteful problems and that now they are all forgotten while Einstein is not?
I feel like a large portion of the brightest may have always sold out, maybe Einstein was just obsessed with a particular problem enough to chase that an avoid the more lucrative but pointless problems.
"is it that in the past there was not a similar proportion of the brightest working on similarly pointless and wasteful problems"
It is that in the past a large portion of the world's brightest were working in the fields or fishing or mining or making bowls or adding up numbers as a clerk.
Thats vaguely insulting to all the people who do work on astrophysics, I work in AI and i'm pretty certain the average astronomer is a lot smarter than the average AI researcher. Its mostly a matter of pop culture perspective, astronomy just doesn't get the kind of media coverage it used to
> i'm pretty certain the average astronomer is a lot smarter than the average AI researcher
Perhaps! But is the smartest AI researcher / quant / etc. smarter than the average astronomer? The fact that so many of the smartest people in our generation go into these fields is surely bringing the average down in the hard sciences.
I'm just not sure "smartness" is the limiting factor for progress. Astronomy is an old science and we're very much at the limits of our ability and understanding. "AI" is a very new field (maybe a science idk) and theres a lot of fertile ground of exploration and growth.
> We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it.
Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy).
From the beginning Einstein wanted to be a teacher and had little interest in money. Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
Yes. As I said, from the beginning he wanted to be a teacher. And despite having a job of necessity, he worked on physics anyway, and revolutionized the field over a single year.
Maybe the answer is that we have become more effective at detecting and monetizing genius; Einstein might have languished for the rest of his life if he were less driven. Or maybe it's the opposite; we don't give smart people enough time or money without draining them of the time to work on novel discovery. Or both at once.
I dont remember the exact schools. He was looking for academic teaching/research position. But, he could not find the one. He got the patent job through his friend's father.
> Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
Quite possibly, or dare I say probably. The amount of available products and experiences one could purchase with more money was significantly smaller in Einstein's time than today. I think it'd be quite a reasonable hypothesis to posit the explosion of consumerism coupled with the everything everywhere effects of online life have caused folks to be considerably more aware of, and interested, monetary gain.
> Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
How often people could afford a home and basic necessities for a family (including stability) without focusing on money back then? And how often can people afford those now without focusing on money?
Einstein was a bad example. What is true though is that intelligent people choose not to risk their health and safety by living in poverty.
There is this narrative parroted by the ultra-rich and corporations that life is much more livable for the poor in the modern era (because we have microwaves), but that is simply not true.
>Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
Check out career fairs at "top" universities. Kids are clamoring to get into IB and Consulting and giant tech companies. Legions of the best and brightest are literally just chasing prestige and dollars. I mean the number of MIT Math/Physics/CS/etc PhDs alone that go on to do Quant finance is dizzying and should make people think twice about our current society and how it incentivizes work.
It's pretty simple, why go on the Academic Research Post-Doc -> Faculty grind to make relative peanuts when you can walk into a hedge fund and make 300k+ your first year out of your phd?
Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct. Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one. It’s a status competition with real resources on the table rather than an aristocratic hobby for the few who were interested.
> Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct.
1905 was very different from 1705. It was not particularly different from today, aside from cars, planes and computers. Hell, it was a golden age of physics research and incredibly well respected. The men and woman of the fifth Solvay conference [1], Emmy Noether and all the incredible mathematicians of the time- most of them did not come from means and could hardly be described as aristocrats.
> Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one.
I do think so. I think wealth disparity has enabled intellectual folks to, very quickly, propel themselves into the upper class, by essentially being part of the money machine that keeps rich people rich (hedge funds, ads, etc.). I don’t have any data to support this but I believe this was literally impossible before some decades ago. Certainly was not available to Einstein.
More evidence: people literally write songs about wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. We live in a disgusting age.
maybe we do have Einsteins today but since the problems are so deep and the fields so vast, it is hard for one man to truly stand out as dominating a whole field. Not to mention that so many more people have access to compete in the modern world compared to Einsteins world where only a subset of people from rich countries were being educated.
Why are there no more Einsteins, von Neumanns, etc, anymore? Is Terry Tao the closest thing we have? Does DARPA (or some TLA or foreign equivalent) just snatch these people up early on in life? Why isn't Srouji working for something like DARPA? Are there people even better than Srouji working for something like DARPA?
I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. That's why we're not seeing "Einsteins" everywhere.
In fact, there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast. In fact, I'd say we're not far from that now, as there are more and more stories along the lines of "an obscure corner of maths has been found to explain 'X' in physics".
> I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked.
I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from now will think the same about today's time. That's because hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with.
I think much of it is caused by the way we work on problems. We work on individual problems that get more and more complex and demand an ever increasing entry hurdle to be able to have a meaningful conversation on the subject. We zoom into existing problems. Yet most of the fundamental breakthroughs were often in hindsight "trivial". Because very often what it needs is a new perspective that allows for the creation of much more efficient alternatives. True innovation.
Add to that the ever increasing time pressure and funding problem. Remember, Einstein was a patent clerk. Most people simply cant afford to invest their time into allowing themselves to think freely. I am confident we could get the genius rate back up with something like UBI.
> there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast.
Also as things get older they get better and better explained.
Some things, like relativity are simple mind-blowing concepts, but other very important aspects of physics can feel like no one is doing such groundbreaking work because you're actually looking at a modern interpretation of something which has been condensed over a century e.g. a lot of papers from the early 1900s are very long winded, so the utterly beautiful ways they may be now treated (Noethers theorem may be an example) are not representative of how they burst onto the scene 100 years ago.
Technology is not a linear or even guaranteed path.
Asking "why don't we have more Einstein's?" ignores that Einstein's great contributions could only have been made at the point in history he existed: without the Michelson-Morley experiment, a fixed speed of light was not a known problem in physics.
Today in particle physics though we lack such an experiment - there are no substantial inconsistent results which can form the basis of new theory: no results which conclusively point to any of the myriad new theoretical approaches being right.
If such a result is found, then it's likely a theoretical basis which has already been written will prove successful in helping explain and develop a new theory to extend our understanding, and some Nobel prizes will be given. Is it's developer an accomplished scientist? Yes. But were there peers and competitors somehow not as talented? Maybe, but more likely they simply weren't first - and weren't lucky enough.
There is still room for genius in the most controversial areas of philosophy. There's room for great, era-defining theories in politics and in genetic engineering of humans.
Some food for thought, for the people interested in this:
Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on-one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 textbook curricular politicized 'education'.
However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any broad genius decline.
I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of reasons:
* All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves to satisfy publishers.
* Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly emphasized in many ways.
* Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of fear.
* Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism.
* Scientism
* Media priorities
All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo.
I'm not sure that intensive tutoring ever "went out of style" though, so much as gradually becoming infeasible because of (1) the amount of high-skill effort involved, which became more and more costly due to the expanding alternate employments of similarly skilled work; and (2) general progress meaning that even with intensive tutoring you could not reach the research frontier any more effectively than others, so making "genius"-level contributions would still be hard.
It's an interesting argument regardless, and intensive "tiger mom/dad" parenting, while generally less effective, still derives much of its general orientation from these 'aristocratic' norms.
Is there proof that tiger parents are not effective? Many high achievers I have met have had parents that pushed them from early on. Casually dismissing this effect without any metrics seems an error.
I think a more convincing theory for me is that society abounds with "IQ shredders". Sure, we're now living in an era of abundant information, but we're also living in an era of abundant distractions and hazards.
fyi, IQ shredder means social and technological innovation that keeps higher IQ people from reproducing, and hence lowering down of IQ over generations. Nothing to do with distractions and hazards.
504 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadFurther, is there enough room for any given Einstein in this dogmatic landscape?
You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single contributor is capable of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
We have a much bigger physics community today but the closest thing to the above happening are these two events
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons#Discovery
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson#Dis...
with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation#Observati...
as a distant third that has played out very slowly which is attributed to a very strange theorist character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo
There is public fascination with Steven Hawking, but Hawking's work has been confined to questions where the answers are unobservable (what's inside a black hole? what do you see in 10⁶⁴ years when stellar origin black holes start to pop?)
I don’t even care how pessimistic you are - if you fail to see how we are a) blooming right now and b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future, the wording is exactly right: YOU fail to see it.
It’s there. It’s everywhere. The fact that you can read this message, that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing. If you lost that sense of wonder, maybe it’s time to reconsider your models.
Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.
Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress.
This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.
So what does create real progress to the masses?
>we could be doing so much better as a species
...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme.
If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought.
>We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars
this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!
Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?
The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.
Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.
Taxing billionaires will not solve anything. It is just a shoe in the door for more taxes for you. No matter what the government gets in taxes it will never be enough to satiate the desire to spend other people's money. Just remember, anything that is applied to billionaires also will be applied to you. After all, we are all equals.
Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference
I see simply no other way out of very deeply the status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our species.
The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect any continuous level of progress in our problem-domains (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, there is an active demand for inequality. People want to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will continue to change in our favor - maybe forever.
I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.
It will lead to physical elimination of that 50%, and probably more.
>I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.
Monkeys, from which we split off millions of years ago, have very strong hierarchies. It's great to believe we can fix everything with culture, but biology exists.
>The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources.
Resources will always be limited. Our wants, collectively, are infinite.
Just think about "thought influencers". It's nothing but status games, and that will not go away even if every single physical need has been taken care of. Why? Because the top influencer can program brains of millions, and some - even of BILLIONS of other humans.
How do you fix that with more resources, the competition over who gets to influence and brainwash everyone else?
Edit:. Appreciate you for putting your opinions out in open air.
I do not think that is an objective statement at all. I think one could just as readily make a highly data-supported argument that never in history have we been more factionalized or inundated with low-quality media than in the current moment.
Eventually the ads have to be for something.
We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.
We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.
That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur?
Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth.
Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.
> What huge societal improvements do holograms permit?
Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they?
> Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
Life is graphene. It's fantastic.
So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army?
> Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.
He could also do this with his children?
It's not like star wars, human clones would still be human.
Indeed, already 15 years ago. Hurry up slackers, I want an innovation that literally changes our whole lives every decade please
All of these statements apply to Einstein's era as well.
We do, however, as of the past ten years or so have reuseable rockets (non trivial), inexpensive virtual reality goggles, mRNA vaccines, bioreactor grown meat, on demand access to an enormous quantity of humanity's artistic creations at any time, nearly-out-of uncanny valley digital human replicas, self driving cars with a low probability of killing you getting from point A to point B, and, yes, some really cool video games.
we do have physics of warp-drives somewhat figured out, but engineering remains a challenge. there are some warp fields experiments going on. if were to apply your metric, GPS was invented in 1915, by Einstein.
Damn.. I'm not sure what more you are wanting given the amount of time that has passed? You wanted humanity to go from its first flight and engine-powered vehicle to warp drives, cured cancer and Moon colonies in less than 200 years?
The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was yesterday.
1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity..
We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are clueless.
There's very little that isn't.
Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of throwing things.
Any definition of innovation that doesn't include smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear they were novel and massively impactful on society.
And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 years between first powered flight and men stepping on the moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds information are going to do things with their minds that you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in novel ways and nobody can stop them.
No mention of CRISPR-Cas9, the explosion of deep learning and "AI," the James Webb Space Telescope, detection of gravitational waves...?
My god. Are people really that myopically spellbound by computing these days?
Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.
And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet.
What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.
And the median value of that reasearch is zero.
There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are a fair number of results that are not useful along with some which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the species.
First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to remember that literally the best results science have to offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in the past. What science produces are models of reality, and while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead of going down this path, we can instead be content that some research is wrong, because the scientific process is one of continually refining those results. Also, we note that despite everything literally being wrong, society, technology, and engineering still make progress. Being wrong does not mean being useless.
Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is useful in one era is completely useless in another. For example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was brand new. Should that research not have been done until it was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then it wouldn't be research, would it?
So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of research with the intent that it would increase the sum total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you:
1) identify the bottom half of research before it's conducted
2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, and how do you intended to squelch useless research while allowing useful research to persist unimpeded
3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" research
4) fund useful research while passing over useless research
I think the answer to those questions would basically involve re-inventing the scientific process.
I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn out to be useless at least has the positive value of showing how something isn't to be done. This has the positive result of allowing someone else to try a different method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the latter without the former.
I understand what you're trying to say -- yes Newton was wrong and now we have refined Newton with Einstein. But Ptolemy was wrong, and we have not refined Ptolemy with Gallileo, we threw Ptolemy out.
As an example, the original power pose study has never been replicated. The idea that posing in a specific way led to a neuro-endocrine response was simply wrong. And yet it got cited many times. One of the the original authors disavowed it, the other continued promoting it, but now with a much weaker claim. Is it science? Or is it a waste of resources?
I think much of the research I'm deriding is actually pretty good thinking. Published as essays or thought experiments I think a lot of it would have value. But because of a perverse demand for publications, any good idea has to have prior work, p-values and if you can get a grant and fMRI slapped onto it.
It is very hard to say with basic research, what is pointless. For instance, there is little application for bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So hard to value.
But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only becomes valuable once we can do that.
For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so!
Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.
> b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future
I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.
But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.
Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan.
Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
I think of it differently: it already did. The old world is already dead. It will just take a couple of generations until that realization kicks in, or until the consequences of that realization are implemented in our cultures and systems. The political incentives in western democracies are not aligned with the interests of the following generations. The opposite is the case, current politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I think exactly that's what is conductive for progress.
Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction is essentially the product of people who hold on to concepts of the world that have already lost their meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost exclusively people born before 1990. The number is arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point.
Thank you for your comments.
What better motivation for a scientist to innovate than the threat of starvation and violence?
The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large.
If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past.
Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us?
The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality?
Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest?
Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end?
We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish).
It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.
Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".
There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to.
That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that?
I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level.
Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then.
Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.
1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work.
2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.
We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing.
A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is.
We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon.
We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now?
"VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?
>... all the questions of the 90s are now solved.
This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.
>Ad tech? Check.
Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.
you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...].
Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated.
>This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.
Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording.
>Ah, yes! Advertising technology!
Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
>Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
One of the most significant applications of Einstein's work was to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design..
We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old
PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations of slow progress.
PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient and lighter machines that were not possible before.
Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.
> that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing
Edit: And yes, the internet has brought about immense and immeasurable benefits to science and innovation. It can both be true that most people on Facebook are dunces and getting dumber because of Facebook, and that there has been massive developments in research and development that would not have happened without the internet.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Because we now have access to an instant world-wide exchange of ideas scientists work more closely together on developing their respective fields than ever before. By the time a major breakthrough happens most experts in the field will have already seen it coming.
Breakthroughs consist of many smaller leaps in knowledge and we are now hyper-aware of each small development, thus it doesn't seem like we're making big leaps anymore. Rather than creating new geniuses the Internet eliminated the need for the classic "genius" to make a breakthrough in a scientific field.
If you had a CD of 20 songs, they were pretty great. If you got a box set ... oh man you hit A LOT of stinkers.
Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enough singer that one can record an impeccable vocal in one take apparently not a prerequisite for a recording contract?
Edit: To bring this back around to the topic of the article, I think the discussion of autotuned vocals might hint at an answer to the question about individual geniuses: it's not as important for individuals to have extraordinary abilities when technology can help us all do so much. I admit I was being a curmudgeon above; I know that autotune can be used to subtly improve mediocre vocals, in addition to enabling the obviously artificial sound that many of us consider crap.
With so much technology available to basically anyone who cares enough to learn how to use it, it's becoming much more important to use that technology creatively than to have some natural talent for singing.
A 50-years ago version of that would be microphones on broadway. It used to be a point of pride to fill a theater without amplification. Now we don’t really care.
Microphones are still not used by purists in opera or classical music, exactly because of the point I made above.
The technical proficiency of a trumpeter is completely orthogonal to whether they use a mute on a particular piece, since it is just a simple hardware technique. And the same thing with autotune. Incredible singers can and do use it for its technical effect, because they think that effect contributes to the song.
As a listener you can disagree, just as I find the heavy strings vibrato of classic pop a distraction. But you can't assess how good a song is by categorizing techniques used in it. Claims that new techniques rob music of something ineffable, or just sound bad, are ubiquitous for new musical techniques and are as old as instruments at least.
If you think autotune is the First Bad One when people said the same things about piano pedals, metal violin strings, geared tuning pegs, electric amplification, I just want you to consider the company you're in here.
You can not like it but stop claiming it's objectively bad when it is not.
I'm not saying autotune is this good. I'm saying that if nearly everyone is using it and continues to use it after, at this point, decades, they must be getting something out of it. Masterful singers also use it, some quite a lot, so it can't be as simple as covering up limited skill or range.
(And of course, "the obviously artificial sound" can be an aesthetic choice made by vocalists fully capable of recording impeccable vocals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc)
For anyone wondering, I believe this is referring to Lana Del Rey. Not sure what the purpose of redacting the name was...
Maybe that's not who you were referring to though? Iirc, the criticisms weren't just about her swaying, but singing that was described as "mumbling". That latter criticism is explicitly the opposite of what we're discussing.
It's kind of funny that you'd think this invocation would be harmful, given that the very premise is that how she chooses to move onstage is irrelevant to her musicianship.
To give some more detail about both 1 and 2 -
Pitch control is more than just hitting the note; its about how well you can onset at the right pitch, how well you can hold the pitch once hit, how well you can jump each pitch interval and land on the right pitch, how well you can pitch through different articulations, different vocal ranges, etc. The modern pop sound has accepted that superhuman levels of pitch control that lock the vocal into tune with the perfectly tuned synthesizers/samplers are more important than a natural sound.
Also, since we've been using autotune for so long, it has almost become natural. We expect to hear it to some degree on every track, especially in more difficult vocal areas. If it wasn't present, one might feel the song sounds "indie" or worse, dated.
Lastly, one thing that fascinates me about the autotune complaints are that it's just one stage of a very long vocal processing chain. To my ears, the tweaks provided by dynamics processors are much more dramatic than autotune when applied to a reasonably proficient singer. Autotune is just one step of a processing chain that can easily run through 10+ processors to end up at the right sound.
I'm going to stop you right there and point out that there is an absolutely massive space outside of Top 40. If you're willing to actually expend some effort to go looking, there's undoubtedly music out there for you. And this is nothing to do with age. I'm 40 and there's more new music coming out that I like than I can keep up with. I was recently talking to my almost 60 year old uncle and he finds the same to be true.
Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.
He is fashionable nonsense.
There is some irony in dismissing him as "nonsensical", because he himself suggested the Tractatus was "nonsense". The point of writing it was to demonstrate that philosophy in his time (e.g. the logical atomism of Russell) had gone astray.
And the last thing these schemes need is a living artist who can - upon his work reaching stardom - simply make more of it.
In this respect, dead poets are much safer to bet the farm on.
And it makes sense, especially in our times, sophisticated PR (and Einstein enjoyed that, too, in addition in being a genius) just trumps any recognition one might get in a life time, in the short term that is.
If you are not seeking some grandiose recognition (like Newton or Edison, famously) you are potentially a better explorer of the yet Unknown not bothering wasting any energy and being less corruptable by discoveries, you are happy to share with others and helping to bring about.
Off the top of my head: Three examples of rather unknown "geniuses" in physics in no particular order:
Chien-Shiung Wu, Oliver Heaviside, John Michell
One could also argue, as I sometimes do, too, that a genius is just a convenient narrative device in order to highlight and illustrate some important turning point with the historical person serving as some responsible "actor" in bridging over an otherwise complex and often self-contradictory development into a tangible coherent state.
There needs to be a new term. "Genius" is too limp to describe individuals who radically alter the curriculum taught to undergraduate students.
Shrodinger, maybe? He is a really large part of the reason people study matrices before college, and then go and complain because nobody can show them a use for the thing.
But any demonstration requires modern knowledge, and matrices are one of the very few modern thing students see. If you want to show them 3D graphics, you will need to teach programing first. Yeah, some will know it by them, but schools also can't rely on that.
(As an aside, chemistry also has some weirdly modern knowledge on its curriculum. Also out of context, just thrown in there because it's important.)
The nearest application I can think of is for modeling stochastic processes, but students see so little statistics that I imagine that will only change the object on the "why am I even studying X?" complaint.
The kind of example you would get for matrix math would be something like: "Here is a triangle described by these points, here is a matrix that projects them in a 3D camera. In such-and-such 3D library, points are projected with the matrix by doing these steps. Compute and plot the result of applying the matrix to each point." And then in successive examples you can add some details about how you go about building up the matrix by computing the camera, translating the poly and so forth, and make comparisons to how it can be done in some scenarios using only trigonometry, and further comparisons to camera lenses and artist's 3D projection with horizon and vanishing points. If you put all those connections there in one place, you have the starting point, and then it can be elaborated on into both the pure math topics(why does this mathematical representation work) and the computing topics(how do I automate the process of plotting points).
What tends to happen is that the text doesn't allow enough of a detour to make all of those connections, so you instead get an extraordinarily brief allusion to application in a single word problem, after a completely abstract introduction.
There are high literacy rates, but this says little about whether material has been grasped and digested. References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is surprising.
If I don't make it a daily habit, it becomes difficult to read a novel, I am unable to maintain the attention required, which phone scrolling im sure has exacerbated.
The West Wing and The Sopranos l started in 1999. Jackass and Survivor started in 2000.
The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.
I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or other means, then you fade into the background.
Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at social interaction and can't be a 'Youtuber' or 'influencer' so easily.
Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All these channels were very limited, so just by getting there one could ensure they had a position among the officially recognised elite.
Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels, from all over the planet, unloading talent in any discipline 24/7. You can market the hell out of yourself and the world can still decide they are too busy caring about Korean singers and African memes.
Which really is the beef I have with this article: genius is not recognised anymore because now we are a global village of billions, rather than an elite of a few hundreds of thousands, and we consume all sorts of radically different media rather than a handful of shared sources. So we simply don't agree on what is "genius" anymore, at a societal level; geniuses do their work in smaller groups, where they get some recognition, and that's it.
I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong.
The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?
> what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors
I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to resources, networking chances, free time etc etc, the aristocrats of the past would have been effectively unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose opinion determined everybody else's view of them, effectively unchallenged.
In the past, it was obvious who was genius, even a few years after people died. Now, it's less clear.
because it's simply extremely cheap to create stuff. so we have a glut of stuff.
because nowadays everyone can buy an instrument and take a few classes, and put it on youtube. and since there's enormous demand for novelty, and there's a lot of styles, niches that producers/creators can fill, quality isn't really a singular thing anymore.
> just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics."
well, that's .. true, but also there's no classics anymore. there's a gamut of things. hundreds of years ago we had a few hundred/thousand extremely talented people who got into arts because they were talented, they visited each other in person to learn from each other over months and years. it was very very very homogeneous in time and space (and it was apparent who's the amazing real boss of that level/period/era) compared to today's hyperfast superglobal heterogeneous all-in content-bonanza, where it's impossible to consume all of it, impossible to filter it, impossible to comprehend/contrast/compare all of it to itself.
Sure there was no point in comparing Van Gogh to Tchaikovsky even then - but there was room for two, now it got even more impossibler not less since there are so many new forms/genres/styles and a lot more amazing feats of creation, and more new talents each day, so relatively there's even less room (less time, less space) to fit the contemporary greats.
My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow.
School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.
That probably depends on each persons means to teach their own children.
Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 than it is now.
Not saying that general relativity is well understood by general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people could not wrap their heads around.
Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the level where mediocre people were before.
We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much smarter than average Joe 100 years ago.
And we should strive to move forward with that.
It would be interesting to have past geniuses sit in today's world - I think we'd be dismayed that in the massive ocean of knowledge we have these days, they wouldn't seem so legendary anymore.
But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and intelligence) needed in order to achieve something significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow everytime a Einstein discovers something.
Edit: or if you prefer, maybe Miles Davis.
As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference.
As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.
"Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."
The denominator has increased massively faster than the base population.
Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.
So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.
If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?
Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.
I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.
Perhaps the problem is not a decline in genius, but that too many geniuses are now given the opportunity to fulfill their potential (whereas before they'd have lacked education, compared to aristocrats), making it difficult to stand out and receive popular acclaim.
You can kind of see this in sports in the US. Sports are only lucrative for the top performers, and those lucky enough as well. This leaves a wide swath of very high level athletes available to parents willing to pay. This also extends to competitive public funded sports depending on where you're at.
On one hand, it would be amazing for gifted tutors to be widely available, on the other- the situations that would create such availability are probably not going to be good. I'm just thankful that my career will hopefully afford me the ability to be a single income household, with the time and resources to tutor my own child.
Edit: to be clear, I think the idea that somehow genius or general intelligence and deep expertise is declining is laughable. If anything we’re seeing an explosion of expertise in all the fields I work in.
But that's a terrible metric. Is the difference between Einstein and a cutting edge quantum physicist today marketing?
He might be right in his conjecture that one-on-one tutoring produces 'geniuses' but this article contains no evidence of it. I don't think it even contains evidence the top intellectuals are less common, just that they're less popular.
According to this narrative we stopped making Einsteins because it's simply no longer in the interests of the "elites" to have smart people around. Education became a liability to those cheering for cybernetic governance and social control media.
Similar explanations are proffered by John Taylor-Gatto, Sir Ken Robinson, Noam Chomsky, and of course Paulo Friere.
While I don't fully agree with the ideologies of these thinkers, frustratingly, from what I see inside higher education, everything is designed to produce narrow-minded, uncritical, docile people who will not ask too many questions or think too hard.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-3_DIi5HM
They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job.
Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral.
Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.
You are in charge. That is the only thing you need to know about being an adult.
But I think that, quite likely, that was it. There's no new Major Discovery that could propel one scientist into fame to be made anymore. At best we have e.g. Stephen Hawking who introduced some new concepts about space (building on top of e.g. Einstein) and who made theoretical physics more accessible to the masses. Or Oppenheimer who is credited (although by a long shot not the "inventor") with nukes.
The other part is that Einstein and co - at least, reading their biography - were part of the elite, a small group of people, aristocrats, rich folk, who didn't have to work but could instead attend universities wherever they wanted, take long walks in the park to talk and think about the sciences, write long letters to colleagues, etc - people for who intellectual pursuits was what they could spend all their energy on. But, this is hindsight and idealisation based on biographies and surviving letters, so take that with a grain of salt.
Anyway, I think there's plenty of Einsteins out there, but their work is in smaller, less revolutionary increments.
That said, as a society we need to make sure there is enough room for intellectuals, that is, provide funding and livelihoods for them and universities they belong to, and provide budgets for the projects to put their theories into practice, e.g. nuclear fusion, the Large Hadron Collider, the James Webb space telescope, etc.
This is a tautology. At every point in history, all the big discoveries had already been made.
this is not what this all talk is about
Einstein is an (prime) example of conceptualist - man, who introduced revolutionary concept into our understanding of the world.
There are a lot of Nobel laureates who are (hard) problem solvers.
But in physics looks like we truly need a conceptualist, new Einstein so to speak
1. Population size: the more people you have, the more likely you are to make "geniuses". The genius chart late in the piece maps with this hypothesis;
2. Baseline education: the idea here is that geniuses are less of a gap if the normal level of education and competency is higher;
3. Low-hanging fruit: things seem obvious in hindsight of course but it's also true that some of the big jumps in certain fields come down to what were fairly simple ideas. Those who come up with them are typically labelled "geniuses". That may or may not be the case. But the point is that progress in fields isn't smooth. We've now been in a period in physics where for decades now we've simply confirmed what we already suspected. Useful of course. As is disproving various theories (which is constantly happening).
But the 20th century had 2 massive jumps forward in physics: namely relativity (obviously) and the various quantum mechanics related fields (QFT, QCD, etc). This isn't my area of expertise but my understanding is that a big part of this was realizing just how deeply tied physics and certain areas of mathematics are.
Oh and for the record, I'm really talking about fundamental physics here. Other fields like condensed matter physics are a completely different beast.
But is the 20th century typical? It's hard to say. I suspect it isn't. I once heard research described as spending years of your life working on a problem and your reward is you get to throw a few pebbles on a pile. Eventually that pebble pile becomes a mountain. Someone throwing more than a few pebbles on is realtively inrequent.
I'm not sure how much "aristocratic teaching" really has to do with it.
What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of tenure track positions available in any given year. Far more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes without any published work outside their dissertation.
I feel like a large portion of the brightest may have always sold out, maybe Einstein was just obsessed with a particular problem enough to chase that an avoid the more lucrative but pointless problems.
It is that in the past a large portion of the world's brightest were working in the fields or fishing or mining or making bowls or adding up numbers as a clerk.
Perhaps! But is the smartest AI researcher / quant / etc. smarter than the average astronomer? The fact that so many of the smartest people in our generation go into these fields is surely bringing the average down in the hard sciences.
Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy).
From the beginning Einstein wanted to be a teacher and had little interest in money. Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
Maybe the answer is that we have become more effective at detecting and monetizing genius; Einstein might have languished for the rest of his life if he were less driven. Or maybe it's the opposite; we don't give smart people enough time or money without draining them of the time to work on novel discovery. Or both at once.
Quite possibly, or dare I say probably. The amount of available products and experiences one could purchase with more money was significantly smaller in Einstein's time than today. I think it'd be quite a reasonable hypothesis to posit the explosion of consumerism coupled with the everything everywhere effects of online life have caused folks to be considerably more aware of, and interested, monetary gain.
How often people could afford a home and basic necessities for a family (including stability) without focusing on money back then? And how often can people afford those now without focusing on money?
It is very, very likely that it has.
There is this narrative parroted by the ultra-rich and corporations that life is much more livable for the poor in the modern era (because we have microwaves), but that is simply not true.
Check out career fairs at "top" universities. Kids are clamoring to get into IB and Consulting and giant tech companies. Legions of the best and brightest are literally just chasing prestige and dollars. I mean the number of MIT Math/Physics/CS/etc PhDs alone that go on to do Quant finance is dizzying and should make people think twice about our current society and how it incentivizes work.
It's pretty simple, why go on the Academic Research Post-Doc -> Faculty grind to make relative peanuts when you can walk into a hedge fund and make 300k+ your first year out of your phd?
1905 was very different from 1705. It was not particularly different from today, aside from cars, planes and computers. Hell, it was a golden age of physics research and incredibly well respected. The men and woman of the fifth Solvay conference [1], Emmy Noether and all the incredible mathematicians of the time- most of them did not come from means and could hardly be described as aristocrats.
> Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one.
No, you just pay the publishing fee.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jp...
More evidence: people literally write songs about wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. We live in a disgusting age.
In fact, there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast. In fact, I'd say we're not far from that now, as there are more and more stories along the lines of "an obscure corner of maths has been found to explain 'X' in physics".
I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from now will think the same about today's time. That's because hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with.
Add to that the ever increasing time pressure and funding problem. Remember, Einstein was a patent clerk. Most people simply cant afford to invest their time into allowing themselves to think freely. I am confident we could get the genius rate back up with something like UBI.
The story is "Sucker Bait":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Bait
Some things, like relativity are simple mind-blowing concepts, but other very important aspects of physics can feel like no one is doing such groundbreaking work because you're actually looking at a modern interpretation of something which has been condensed over a century e.g. a lot of papers from the early 1900s are very long winded, so the utterly beautiful ways they may be now treated (Noethers theorem may be an example) are not representative of how they burst onto the scene 100 years ago.
Asking "why don't we have more Einstein's?" ignores that Einstein's great contributions could only have been made at the point in history he existed: without the Michelson-Morley experiment, a fixed speed of light was not a known problem in physics.
Today in particle physics though we lack such an experiment - there are no substantial inconsistent results which can form the basis of new theory: no results which conclusively point to any of the myriad new theoretical approaches being right.
If such a result is found, then it's likely a theoretical basis which has already been written will prove successful in helping explain and develop a new theory to extend our understanding, and some Nobel prizes will be given. Is it's developer an accomplished scientist? Yes. But were there peers and competitors somehow not as talented? Maybe, but more likely they simply weren't first - and weren't lucky enough.
Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on-one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 textbook curricular politicized 'education'.
However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any broad genius decline.
I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of reasons:
* depleted soil
* pesticide residue
* fertiliser residue
* contaminated water
* dodgy preservatives
* corn and sugar subsidies
* poorly understood food additives
* selection for looks over nutritional quality
* ocean pollution - mercury in fish, for example
* Over-processing
There's environmental factors to consider:
* air pollution
* water pollution
* forever chemicals
* lingering lead and the like
* noise pollution
* distractions - ie; porn, gaming, porn, movies, porn, TV, tinder, phones, porn, etc.
Cultural and societal factors:
* All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves to satisfy publishers.
* Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly emphasized in many ways.
* Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of fear.
* Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism.
* Scientism
* Media priorities
All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo.
I'm not sure that intensive tutoring ever "went out of style" though, so much as gradually becoming infeasible because of (1) the amount of high-skill effort involved, which became more and more costly due to the expanding alternate employments of similarly skilled work; and (2) general progress meaning that even with intensive tutoring you could not reach the research frontier any more effectively than others, so making "genius"-level contributions would still be hard.
It's an interesting argument regardless, and intensive "tiger mom/dad" parenting, while generally less effective, still derives much of its general orientation from these 'aristocratic' norms.