If we believe in some geographical correlation (due to exposure to new ideas, sharing interests, or anything else that's not genetic + a minimal threshold population being necessary), a prediction would be that online communities should facilitate the emergence of a "long lasting remarkable excess of creative accomplishment" by removing the geographical constraints.
Given what I see all around me (HN, reddit etc) I'd tend to believe that: free software has changed the world. Wikipedia offers free knowledge to anyone who wants it. Libgen offers all the scientific knowledge and book. Reddit and the likes offer to the fat-tail places to congregate and exchange ideas.
I'm curious what we'll create in the next 25 years!
It may not have been possible to make that prediction in 1997: I don't think they had any social network at the time, and online forums must have been reserved to a tiny fraction of the population.
At the time this was written, maybe a few rare people like Kurzweil foresaw what we'd have by now: his prediction of AGI around 2030 seems very plausible to me, but it seems to have been met with disbelief when it was made - and not just this one, but his predictions in general.
On Wikipedia I see: "Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate" but that in October 2010, Kurzweil claimed his accuracy rate comes to 86%.
Wikipedia offers low quality content that is not always correct.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has warned that the website can no longer be trusted — insisting it is now just “propaganda” for the left-leaning “establishment.”
> The most important question we can ask of historians is “Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?”
Why is this an important question? The reason the Nile river valley was so productive was because of the predictable annual flooding that layered fertile silt on the ground. You didn't have to be a genius to realize life there would be pretty sweet.
I know the Cult of the Great Man is strong on HN, but lol. What is this crap?
On the one hand, it's a perfectly reasonable (and interesting) question (IMO). On the other hand, as you are pointing out - Banks appears to be writing quite explicitly from the perspective that "genius" and "productivity" (in the sense of creative, scientific, technological, etc. advances) are obviously GOOD and IMPORTANT. And, there seems to be a strong current of "if we knew what served as the 'fertile silt' for these ... 'Cambrian explosions' of creativity / science / tech... we could use this knowledge to foster the appropriate conditions and better harness our magnificent human potential."
Now, granted, I'm obviously purposefully cherry picking (to a degree) from a large enough essay AND "putting words in his mouth" (hyperbolic, comparatively) to a degree that I'm almost certainly glossing over language that's more nuanced and judicious, say. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat surprised at ... his surprise, the rosy cast of the whole thing, and, I think the quite incomplete nature of his analysis of the data and information that IS available.
Further, I outright disagree with any premise that "genius" is straightforwardly or simply "net positive". I don't think there's a need to bring the subjective into it, per se. And, much like discoveries and advances in "nuclear chemistry / physics" (providing a particularly stark example, IMO - nuclear/radiological weapons / nuclear energy of various types, medicine, etc.), most of this is "neutral", at best. I used to be far more "pro-advances", and I'm still no Luddite etc., but, really ... the continuous barrage of, in some sense, "f'ing around and finding out" (esp. when it comes to technologies enabled by all of the work of geniuses) really ought to make more people question assumptions about what is seemingly so often taken for granted as being "good".
(Apologies for likely excessive verbosity - it's way too late...)
> The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made. It surprises me that essentially no scholarly effort has been directed towards it. I warmly solicit any suggestions from readers that may help me to clarify my own confusion and uncertainty regarding this.
Excess tends to have a negative connotation, but not as used in the article. It also mentions that "the great minds in each of these societies tended to hang out together" which resonates as true based on reading biographies from accomplished philosophers. I'm curious to read your thoughts:
All the exceptional people I have met have all thrived from positive social interactions with others with shared or overlapping interests. IOW, I don’t believe at all that genius thrives in isolation.
Unfortunately, we tend to bury intellectual curiosity (“play”) in burdens like coursework, or endless distractions (curse of the Internet)
Genius minds are rare but not that rare. Everyone is much better educated than they used to be too. So a lack of geniuses can't have anything to do with the people who get labelled as such. Similarly, as the article points out, genius does not appear to be a result of economic forces. Therefore I imagine 'geniuses' are made when the cultural conditions are ripe for people to sit around listening to each other and trying to improve. That is, the culture of the listeners than the nature of the speaker.
It is conspicuous how little time human society puts in to identifying and then learning from its most capable members. The academy is the big exception, but people generally only get exposure to academic thinking when they are young and in a poor position to influence the world.
We only believe certain time periods had more, because of the lasting impacts of many of those people.
Why did geniuses during these periods exercise so much cultural force? Probably just good timing, based on where that society was at. The author probably has the "cart before the horse".
When society is so imbalanced in terms of intellectual opportunity, and the fields so green for those few who have the chance, of course those few will have such a lasting impact.
Furthermore, if we were to say, rate these people out of 10 on the potential-to-make-breakthroughs scale, I would expect that any time a 9 or 10 comes along, that contemporary 6, 7, and 8s who may not have made some initial leap will be at the ready to drive that progress forward. Clustering of geniuses seems natural, given we typically rate someone's genius by their contributions rather than their standalone grey wattage.
It would be surprising if some Norwegian was building off greek philosophy principles back in the day. It's not at all surprising that Greek contemporaries and their students did the same, some of which are then labeled "genius".
That's the flip side of pointless bureaucracy, wheel-spinning and busywork. When something properly important comes along, everyone is ready to make it happen.
Note that when most people were poorly educated, those able and motivated to self-educate would stand out more.
So could it be that the level necessary be considered a 'genius' has increased over time, as a result of most people being so much better educated than in the past? Effectively, narrowing the gap between them and those considered genius-level?
I'd pretty much agree with that, with the possible distinction that the gap may not have narrowed exactly, but they have less opportunity to show it. The difference is time scale rather than ability:
This may sound weird or arrogant, but I have notebooks from back in school where I got bored and ended up on my way to inventing basic calculus concepts a year or two before I was introduced to them. Given enough time I'm sure I would have gone further, but then I took the classes before having the chance.
I read something recently that claimed that most of the European geniuses of the 1900-1940s had tutors, fitting in with one of the article's observations.
I think, perceived genius is a matter of scarcity in numbers.
Before, the society was divided clearly into very rich elites and peasants. The majority did not have access to anything that propelled genius.
And then comes one or two who are far removed from the median intellect/skills and are considered "genius".
Nowadays, with the median intellect/skills improving a lot, the very highly skilled people are not so much removed from the median. So, the numbers are less extreme.
There is also the matter of specialization. Before, "skills" were perceived in building and creating things that everyone understands. Like a painting, a sculpture. But a complex Distributed System maintaining 3B MAUs is not impressive to people simply because they don't understand. People can easily appreciate the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids but not the schematics of a Mars lander.
Give people Shakespeare, and they can appreciate in 2 years of relaxed training. Give them the CRISPR paper, and they are clueless.
So,
1. People with high intellect or skills were scarce in stark contrast to the majority. So they were called geniuses. There are more geniuses now.
2. We have advanced as a civilization and the focus is now on things that are harder to appreciate because of lack of understanding. Think the Taj in moonlight versus a Mars rover.
Also it's much easier to appear as a "genius" when a profession (philosopher, inventor etc.) is first conceived.
Being first allows for much wider and thus more impressive output, though in hindsight, not all of it might be of good quality. E.g. the ancient Greek philosophers made tons of bizarre assumptions about the physical world that they could have disproved empirically even back then. No one would go out on thin ice like that nowadays, and rightly so.
Having read the essay, I'll take a crack at a causal hypothesis: "geniuses" in the sense that the author seems to be using the term[1] cluster in periods and settings where:
1) their societies were "recently" exposed to existential threats (eg. Persian invasion for Athens, Spanish Armada for England, etc.), that were
2) mastered (Battle of Marathon, defeat of the Armada)
3) but left underlying problems unresolved
So, there would be incredibly motivation for these societies to try and address these problems, and perhaps some additional measure of confidence that problems could be mastered. And, in periods of existential crisis, normal patterns start to break down and new modes of expression and organization, new perspectives, etc. can start to manifest.
It's also interesting that the essay calls out that
> all three’s florescences were ended by right-wing revolutions (the Rule of the 400, Savonarola, and Cromwell).
as these responses are often prompted by some perception of chaos/lack of 'order' in a society - a breaking down of accustomed patterns.
So, in the spirit of the goal as stated by the essay:
> We want explanations that make sense, and which can be corroborated by specific historical research.
I would say: look for genius where there is also social turmoil and crisis - where there was a belief within a society that it may not be able to survive the problems that faced it, or where it experienced such rapid change that within a generation or two the previous assumptions about how the society worked and what was and wasn't acceptable/normal came into question - and you might find geniuses there.
And it would probably be a good idea to have a concrete, sensible definition of genius that we all agree on.
The issue is creating and maintaining critical mass for the superorganism of people, opportunity, money, and ideas. One such example is Stanford University and Palo Alto, arguably a mini "Venice" of our times by the deliberate sowing of the seeds by the Stanford family post 1884. Interestingly, A. Leland Stanford became something of a socialist in his later years. Jane Stanford either crossed paths with a sociopath or was detested enough to be murdered by one of her employees in Hawaii after a failed attempt in California.
Stanford is extremely impressive in the STEM fields, but everything that comes out of its humanities departments is some of the worst science I've ever seen in my life. If I see a humanities study from Stanford, I know immediately it's going to be 100% utter bullshit. It's an embarrassment to the institution and to academia as a whole.
So I question whether or not it's really the institution itself that allows for its success in the STEM fields, or whether it's just a self-perpetuating cycle.
A lot of people don't realize this but... Einsteins final equation in special relativity was already known and reported. What Einstein did there, most likely with much help from his wife, was rephrase the math. General relativity, again, likely with a lot of his wife's help was genius in the sense that the derivation was intense and a work of art.
Einsteins brilliance was his intuition and his relentless approach to problem solving. He KNEW the answer without doing the math. Keep that in mind. All things almost no one values today... People think that Wolfram alpha makes them a world class quantum phycisist, chatgpt makes them a theorist, and python packages make them avante garde tool builders or seasoned analysts.
We're giving up on intuition as a society so people can raise their egos and toss experience to the wolves, because it feels powerful. Meanwhile I've met machine shop geniuses, with GEDs who can outwit Ph.Ds in their own field...
As I’m preparing my final push of creativity I have been trying to create an environment that works only on intuition.
A big part of this is trying the integrate a “differential engine” into a physical computing environment that doesn’t relay on the “normal” tools for manipulating ideas.
Using intuition is very productive but one doesn’t know where they will end up. This causes problems in the commercial environment where others want to know what is going on. The ideas being based on intuition are hard to express and plan. The ability for a group to try to share an intuition I think is the power of small group development.
It always seems like that in the present but we can usually see more clearly how brilliant people in the past influenced things. There's too much noise in the now. We hear all the voices and they average out to mediocre thinking and discourse. Only decades from now it will be clear who the geniuses among us are and what long lasting contributions they are making. The same way it always seems like current pop music is garbage, but the oldies are golden. We just forgot about the old garbage and kept listening to the good stuff.
This problem is even more pronounced with LLMs. If we train them on lots of average text, how could they ever write something extraordinary, or even give useful advice? They don't reflect which training data are garbage, and they don't have any aspirations to excel.
There are interesting analogies to some current developments in AI to be made:
- the Internet and especially things like Twitter makes "clustering" way easier for geniuses and people that (want to) advance human knowledge; but this only works for people and areas where the "incumbents " are used to it- very visible in current (OS) LLM Research, which is mind-blowing in my opinion.
This is different to older methods of Sharing Research (journals and conferences) which were way slower an more lossy (only successes shared).
- If we reach AGI, one could describe it as an (almost, only Ressource-constrained) infinite cluster of geniuses ..
I am thinking about parallels with software development and whole "agile coaching" industry. Problem is that elite software dev teams happen by accident you cannot make them. Clustering of geniuses might seem like it could not be random but so is throwing tails 50x in a row which is perfectly valid random outcome which author don't want to admit and thinks random outcomes don't have clusters.
It is cool to do the analysis but I do not agree that it somehow is important question to spend too much time on it because there is no realistic solution that we can mechanistically apply to produce genius clusters. Just like mechanistically applied agile creates more problems than solves and is not delivering "elite teams" but mostly is used to push underachievers into worse problems where overachievers simply hop jobs for better pay.
The "problem" seems to be less one of "genius" and more one of individuals whose output was regarded as notable by historians and arts connoisseurs in subsequent centuries.
So the clustering effect is more or less expected. Shakespeare was incredibly culturally influential, and thus his most admired contemporaries in the arts are studied and admired a lot more than they otherwise would have been (still their plays are rarely performed and of their poetry of little influence on modern writers), and subsequent generations of creatives not so much (although it's hard to discount the talent and influence of the likes of Milton and Swift...)
Certainly the Elizabethan era in which theatres were profitable centres for public consumption of art was better for playwrights than eras in which they were banned, and better for remembered playwrights than eras in which performance art was not written down and generally performed to small audiences, but it seems odd to call out a handful of admired wordsmiths as a remarkable period of "genius" in the history of a country which subsequently invented much of modern science, conquered the majority of the world and launched the Industrial Revolution, and has literally hundreds of influential musicians, authors and television writers in the last century alone. If you tried to plot something as subjective as British "genius" on a graph, it would look much more like a rising trend than small clusters, and correlate very well with rises in access to education and funding, and giants' shoulders to stand on.
Some of the author's other theories seem tendentious too. There was a lot of private tutoring for the elites in Elizabethan England (and also pre and post Elizabethan England) but Shakespeare and Marlow and Jonson and Spenser went to public grammar schools, where they are thought to have studied rigid curricula in Latin in formal settings with lots of classmates (with notably different levels of acquired knowledge of the classics at the end), just like the upper middle class in subsequent centuries. That seems further from 'individualist' education than modern schooling. But obviously much better than no education, and more geared towards writing plays than a scientific education.
I would go the opposite route and suggest perhaps the idea of individual geniuses is flawed. The cluster is the genius. Even in the cases where we point specifically to single geniuses, outside of the times and places mentioned in this essay, if you look at the history more closely it is typical that the individuals in question didn't arise out of the blue.
They were part of a community that had collectively just about figured something out or created something new. One person was the one to make the last step and have their name in the history book. But in most cases it's likely if that person didn't exist, someone else would have made that step at approximately the same time in history.
Nowadays, it seems that "genius" advancements are increasingely narrow in their fields, "genius" breakthroughs require increasing amount of financial resoures and require much more knowledge of the current state.
And problem is further increased by businessmen investing into marketing to appear as geniuses to inflate their companies valuation - in my mind that's Elon Musk.
So we are no longer seeing "genuine" excess genius.
I believe "genius" is largely misunderstood, the being that one labels as "a genius" is really "just like most people" with two exceptional aspects: 1) they are very very good at their specialization, and 2) (this is the real reason) they are phenomenal communicators within their field, to the degree the majority of the members of their field appear inarticulate when compared to 'the genius' and their ability to explain, to convey complex, nuanced aspects of their specialization. The genius is a "genius communicator" more than they are a genius at their specialization, but due to that exceptional communication skill the become an attractive magnet for similar specialization gifted people like themselves whom are not as articulate, and together they achieve the advances - but only the genius communicator gets recognized because they are the catalysis, and those critical other collaborators don't have the social language skills to gain recognition.
I think the assumption of genius is a false one, but I admit I might be wrong about that. I'm not saying there aren't differences between individuals in their cognitive or creative abilities, but I don't think there are outliers in the way the term implies, and also believe that progress continues in a much different, more cumulative way involving many more people than a standard narrative suggests.
There was an article I read several years ago that I've tried to find since with no success that made the argument the notion of genius is a sort of secular replacement for or parallel to the saint concept. I thought it was apt.
I think the idea of genius is a bit dangerous, not only because it robs others of credit, but it sets up unrealistic expectations about how to make progress in society. I think it lays a certain kind of societal bait too, in that the arguments for tyrants and geniuses are probably two sides of the same coin.
Having said all that, I think the underlying topic of the essay — whether some time periods are characterized by more progress than others, and if so, what makes that happen, is probably worthwhile or important to discuss. It's extremely difficult though, as basic definitions are murkier than they seem and there's little in the way of hard quantitative or other empirical data to make arguments from.
Isn't the problem the audience? We use art as entertainment that has to appeal to a big audience. The education of artists is so good that a genius cannot stand out by their skills. Among all the Tiktok and Yt videos, how do we identify the deep innovations? Only in hindsight, when our culture has changed, will we identify the ones who initiated it.
It would take something like HN for cultured people to identify the geniuses of our times and to give them a platform.
Same here. It has been fun, but taking a long time to make connections and finding things out the hard way is kinda.. hard lol. All the best to you! Hope we are able to fulfill our dreams :)
I've had the opportunity to meet a few too. Thing is, privilege looks that way. Would a Hal Finney, crippled from debt since childhood, a drug habit, a total lack of a high school education, never mind CalTech, and traumatized from a horrible childhood, with an abusive alcoholic deadbeat father who never worked an honest day in his life, instead of being a petroleum engineer; would that Hal Finney still be Hal FInney, world renowned computer scientist who helped develop Bitcoin, among other achievements, and who later developed ALS from which he later passed?
You are entitled to your own opinion. I never met the guy. I don't disbelieve his genius, but I have my doubts that there weren't invisible environmental and cultural factors at play to get him to where he was.
The visibility of his genius to us is a result of his environment though. If Hal (whom, I reiterate, I never had the pleasure of meeting, though I have had the pleasure of working with some that I would consider geniuses) was born brown, into the kind of upbringing where he had a drug habit (self-imposed or otherwise), and was never deeply exposed to computers at all (eminently possible back then), never finished high school, never mind CalTech. His innate genius could still be there, but hidden behind a haze of drugs, depression, and mental illness, living homeless on the streets, how would we know it?
Even harnessed, his genius in a different environment would have lead him to be Richard Dawkins or Linus Pauling or Walter White, and not Hal Finney.
In a word, nope. There was another fellow in the dorm, Renee, who was a genius, too. He was brown.
It's a very humbling experience being around these two. You cannot train that into people.
Few Caltech freshmen were exposed to computers. This was 1975.
> drugs
Again with the drugs. Drugs destroy your mind, they are irrelevant to what I'm talking about. I know of no drugs that will turn you into a genius.
A little story about Hal. Hal rarely bothered to ever go to class. He'd pick up the textbook at the end of the semester, flip through it, and would ace the exam. Again and again and again. He did not know this material beforehand. It was just effortless to him. Renee, too.
Me, and most everyone else, had to work very hard all through the semester to have a hope of passing the final.
No, environment doesn't create geniuses. They are born that way.
Drugs are something that you've acknowledged as being able to tear down a brilliant mind, so I keep bringing it up to illustrate how its about the environment. It would be great if there was a drug to turn you into a genius, we'd all be on it! (Erdos comes to mind. There is also research with magnetic fields and brains being done that looks promising.) Being brought up by a narcissistic mother, a selfish father, and a broken home environment would do just as much, if not more, harm to somebody as drugs could, but is much harder to see.
What drove him to go to CalTech, and not MIT? Or CSUN? Or even let him graduate high school? How did that education even get paid for? Where would he be if he couldn't have afforded it; if there were no loans to take out? If he'd had a drinking problem and then slept through his exams? No amount of smarts could help him pass the test he wasn't there to take.
I don't ask this to tear the man down, may he rest in peace. I ask to challenge your notion that geniuses are just born that way. There's absolutely a genetic component, and they are born that way, but in the wrong environment, they fail to launch.
Genius needs to be nurtured and cared for, in just the right way, to happen, and when it happens, it's magical. To put an extreme example upon that, if the environment lead to him being shot dead at the age of seven, we'd be talking about someone else.
You seem to think that geniuses are made by their upbringing. You'd know it doesn't work like that if you'd met Hal.
Of course, a genius can be destroyed by his environment.
A little joke: Parents with one child are sure the outcome is nurture. Parents with two children know it's nature.
P.S. Caltech in the 70s would admit students regardless of their finances, and if they needed financial help they'd provide it.
P.P.S. At Caltech I learned what I could become, and I learned what I would never be. I would never be a Hal. It doesn't bother me, since there is so much I can do.
This comment thread is frustrating to read. You said:
>You seem to think that geniuses are made by their upbringing.
From the comment you are replying to:
>There's absolutely a genetic component, and they are born that way, but in the wrong environment, they fail to launch.
You seem more focused on disagreeing than on actually engaging with the point being made which is that "no discernible environmental or cultural factors at play" (your words) isn't strictly true, because (your words) "a genius can be destroyed by his environment."
Roots of progress puts it nicely: A great leap forward needs supporting factors, therefore it does not appear every year [1]. I think: If a great leap forward appears, famous people may retrospectively considered to be geniuses.
A change of society/industry and and admiration for geniuses accompany one another.
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[ 83.9 ms ] story [ 1495 ms ] threadGiven what I see all around me (HN, reddit etc) I'd tend to believe that: free software has changed the world. Wikipedia offers free knowledge to anyone who wants it. Libgen offers all the scientific knowledge and book. Reddit and the likes offer to the fat-tail places to congregate and exchange ideas.
I'm curious what we'll create in the next 25 years!
It may not have been possible to make that prediction in 1997: I don't think they had any social network at the time, and online forums must have been reserved to a tiny fraction of the population.
At the time this was written, maybe a few rare people like Kurzweil foresaw what we'd have by now: his prediction of AGI around 2030 seems very plausible to me, but it seems to have been met with disbelief when it was made - and not just this one, but his predictions in general.
On Wikipedia I see: "Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate" but that in October 2010, Kurzweil claimed his accuracy rate comes to 86%.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has warned that the website can no longer be trusted — insisting it is now just “propaganda” for the left-leaning “establishment.”
Why is this an important question? The reason the Nile river valley was so productive was because of the predictable annual flooding that layered fertile silt on the ground. You didn't have to be a genius to realize life there would be pretty sweet.
I know the Cult of the Great Man is strong on HN, but lol. What is this crap?
On the one hand, it's a perfectly reasonable (and interesting) question (IMO). On the other hand, as you are pointing out - Banks appears to be writing quite explicitly from the perspective that "genius" and "productivity" (in the sense of creative, scientific, technological, etc. advances) are obviously GOOD and IMPORTANT. And, there seems to be a strong current of "if we knew what served as the 'fertile silt' for these ... 'Cambrian explosions' of creativity / science / tech... we could use this knowledge to foster the appropriate conditions and better harness our magnificent human potential."
Now, granted, I'm obviously purposefully cherry picking (to a degree) from a large enough essay AND "putting words in his mouth" (hyperbolic, comparatively) to a degree that I'm almost certainly glossing over language that's more nuanced and judicious, say. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat surprised at ... his surprise, the rosy cast of the whole thing, and, I think the quite incomplete nature of his analysis of the data and information that IS available.
Further, I outright disagree with any premise that "genius" is straightforwardly or simply "net positive". I don't think there's a need to bring the subjective into it, per se. And, much like discoveries and advances in "nuclear chemistry / physics" (providing a particularly stark example, IMO - nuclear/radiological weapons / nuclear energy of various types, medicine, etc.), most of this is "neutral", at best. I used to be far more "pro-advances", and I'm still no Luddite etc., but, really ... the continuous barrage of, in some sense, "f'ing around and finding out" (esp. when it comes to technologies enabled by all of the work of geniuses) really ought to make more people question assumptions about what is seemingly so often taken for granted as being "good".
(Apologies for likely excessive verbosity - it's way too late...)
> The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made. It surprises me that essentially no scholarly effort has been directed towards it. I warmly solicit any suggestions from readers that may help me to clarify my own confusion and uncertainty regarding this.
Excess tends to have a negative connotation, but not as used in the article. It also mentions that "the great minds in each of these societies tended to hang out together" which resonates as true based on reading biographies from accomplished philosophers. I'm curious to read your thoughts:
Unfortunately, we tend to bury intellectual curiosity (“play”) in burdens like coursework, or endless distractions (curse of the Internet)
It is conspicuous how little time human society puts in to identifying and then learning from its most capable members. The academy is the big exception, but people generally only get exposure to academic thinking when they are young and in a poor position to influence the world.
We only believe certain time periods had more, because of the lasting impacts of many of those people.
Why did geniuses during these periods exercise so much cultural force? Probably just good timing, based on where that society was at. The author probably has the "cart before the horse".
Furthermore, if we were to say, rate these people out of 10 on the potential-to-make-breakthroughs scale, I would expect that any time a 9 or 10 comes along, that contemporary 6, 7, and 8s who may not have made some initial leap will be at the ready to drive that progress forward. Clustering of geniuses seems natural, given we typically rate someone's genius by their contributions rather than their standalone grey wattage.
It would be surprising if some Norwegian was building off greek philosophy principles back in the day. It's not at all surprising that Greek contemporaries and their students did the same, some of which are then labeled "genius".
because of "historical leverage". the same basic idea as a lever but instead of 'amplifying' over space, it does so over time.
sweet innocence
So could it be that the level necessary be considered a 'genius' has increased over time, as a result of most people being so much better educated than in the past? Effectively, narrowing the gap between them and those considered genius-level?
This may sound weird or arrogant, but I have notebooks from back in school where I got bored and ended up on my way to inventing basic calculus concepts a year or two before I was introduced to them. Given enough time I'm sure I would have gone further, but then I took the classes before having the chance.
Before, the society was divided clearly into very rich elites and peasants. The majority did not have access to anything that propelled genius.
And then comes one or two who are far removed from the median intellect/skills and are considered "genius".
Nowadays, with the median intellect/skills improving a lot, the very highly skilled people are not so much removed from the median. So, the numbers are less extreme.
There is also the matter of specialization. Before, "skills" were perceived in building and creating things that everyone understands. Like a painting, a sculpture. But a complex Distributed System maintaining 3B MAUs is not impressive to people simply because they don't understand. People can easily appreciate the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids but not the schematics of a Mars lander.
Give people Shakespeare, and they can appreciate in 2 years of relaxed training. Give them the CRISPR paper, and they are clueless.
So,
1. People with high intellect or skills were scarce in stark contrast to the majority. So they were called geniuses. There are more geniuses now.
2. We have advanced as a civilization and the focus is now on things that are harder to appreciate because of lack of understanding. Think the Taj in moonlight versus a Mars rover.
Being first allows for much wider and thus more impressive output, though in hindsight, not all of it might be of good quality. E.g. the ancient Greek philosophers made tons of bizarre assumptions about the physical world that they could have disproved empirically even back then. No one would go out on thin ice like that nowadays, and rightly so.
1) their societies were "recently" exposed to existential threats (eg. Persian invasion for Athens, Spanish Armada for England, etc.), that were 2) mastered (Battle of Marathon, defeat of the Armada) 3) but left underlying problems unresolved
So, there would be incredibly motivation for these societies to try and address these problems, and perhaps some additional measure of confidence that problems could be mastered. And, in periods of existential crisis, normal patterns start to break down and new modes of expression and organization, new perspectives, etc. can start to manifest.
It's also interesting that the essay calls out that
> all three’s florescences were ended by right-wing revolutions (the Rule of the 400, Savonarola, and Cromwell).
as these responses are often prompted by some perception of chaos/lack of 'order' in a society - a breaking down of accustomed patterns.
So, in the spirit of the goal as stated by the essay:
> We want explanations that make sense, and which can be corroborated by specific historical research.
I would say: look for genius where there is also social turmoil and crisis - where there was a belief within a society that it may not be able to survive the problems that faced it, or where it experienced such rapid change that within a generation or two the previous assumptions about how the society worked and what was and wasn't acceptable/normal came into question - and you might find geniuses there.
And it would probably be a good idea to have a concrete, sensible definition of genius that we all agree on.
So I question whether or not it's really the institution itself that allows for its success in the STEM fields, or whether it's just a self-perpetuating cycle.
e.g. Kepler needed Tycho's observational data; Einstein needed measurements showing the speed of light was constant in many directions.
Einsteins brilliance was his intuition and his relentless approach to problem solving. He KNEW the answer without doing the math. Keep that in mind. All things almost no one values today... People think that Wolfram alpha makes them a world class quantum phycisist, chatgpt makes them a theorist, and python packages make them avante garde tool builders or seasoned analysts.
We're giving up on intuition as a society so people can raise their egos and toss experience to the wolves, because it feels powerful. Meanwhile I've met machine shop geniuses, with GEDs who can outwit Ph.Ds in their own field...
A big part of this is trying the integrate a “differential engine” into a physical computing environment that doesn’t relay on the “normal” tools for manipulating ideas.
Using intuition is very productive but one doesn’t know where they will end up. This causes problems in the commercial environment where others want to know what is going on. The ideas being based on intuition are hard to express and plan. The ability for a group to try to share an intuition I think is the power of small group development.
- the Internet and especially things like Twitter makes "clustering" way easier for geniuses and people that (want to) advance human knowledge; but this only works for people and areas where the "incumbents " are used to it- very visible in current (OS) LLM Research, which is mind-blowing in my opinion. This is different to older methods of Sharing Research (journals and conferences) which were way slower an more lossy (only successes shared).
- If we reach AGI, one could describe it as an (almost, only Ressource-constrained) infinite cluster of geniuses ..
It is cool to do the analysis but I do not agree that it somehow is important question to spend too much time on it because there is no realistic solution that we can mechanistically apply to produce genius clusters. Just like mechanistically applied agile creates more problems than solves and is not delivering "elite teams" but mostly is used to push underachievers into worse problems where overachievers simply hop jobs for better pay.
So the clustering effect is more or less expected. Shakespeare was incredibly culturally influential, and thus his most admired contemporaries in the arts are studied and admired a lot more than they otherwise would have been (still their plays are rarely performed and of their poetry of little influence on modern writers), and subsequent generations of creatives not so much (although it's hard to discount the talent and influence of the likes of Milton and Swift...)
Certainly the Elizabethan era in which theatres were profitable centres for public consumption of art was better for playwrights than eras in which they were banned, and better for remembered playwrights than eras in which performance art was not written down and generally performed to small audiences, but it seems odd to call out a handful of admired wordsmiths as a remarkable period of "genius" in the history of a country which subsequently invented much of modern science, conquered the majority of the world and launched the Industrial Revolution, and has literally hundreds of influential musicians, authors and television writers in the last century alone. If you tried to plot something as subjective as British "genius" on a graph, it would look much more like a rising trend than small clusters, and correlate very well with rises in access to education and funding, and giants' shoulders to stand on.
Some of the author's other theories seem tendentious too. There was a lot of private tutoring for the elites in Elizabethan England (and also pre and post Elizabethan England) but Shakespeare and Marlow and Jonson and Spenser went to public grammar schools, where they are thought to have studied rigid curricula in Latin in formal settings with lots of classmates (with notably different levels of acquired knowledge of the classics at the end), just like the upper middle class in subsequent centuries. That seems further from 'individualist' education than modern schooling. But obviously much better than no education, and more geared towards writing plays than a scientific education.
They were part of a community that had collectively just about figured something out or created something new. One person was the one to make the last step and have their name in the history book. But in most cases it's likely if that person didn't exist, someone else would have made that step at approximately the same time in history.
And problem is further increased by businessmen investing into marketing to appear as geniuses to inflate their companies valuation - in my mind that's Elon Musk.
So we are no longer seeing "genuine" excess genius.
There was an article I read several years ago that I've tried to find since with no success that made the argument the notion of genius is a sort of secular replacement for or parallel to the saint concept. I thought it was apt.
I think the idea of genius is a bit dangerous, not only because it robs others of credit, but it sets up unrealistic expectations about how to make progress in society. I think it lays a certain kind of societal bait too, in that the arguments for tyrants and geniuses are probably two sides of the same coin.
Having said all that, I think the underlying topic of the essay — whether some time periods are characterized by more progress than others, and if so, what makes that happen, is probably worthwhile or important to discuss. It's extremely difficult though, as basic definitions are murkier than they seem and there's little in the way of hard quantitative or other empirical data to make arguments from.
It would take something like HN for cultured people to identify the geniuses of our times and to give them a platform.
Every time a new tool is invented, we see boosts in productivity.
I’d guess most so-called geniuses are stuck working some dead end job without the backing / connections to do something big.
A lot of entrepreneurs I have met come from families where there are other entrepreneurs and highly qualified people like lawyers and doctors.
I don’t think I’ve met a single entrepreneur (and btw I’m talking tech) who didn’t have some sort of familial backing.
“I had a F&F round where I raised 300k”
“My cousin (lawyer) helped me set up the legal entity”
“Everyone in my family is a business owner”
Most people don’t have these factors around them. Imo.
Hal Finney was one. There were no discernible environmental or cultural factors at play. He was just off the charts.
You are entitled to your own opinion. I never met the guy. I don't disbelieve his genius, but I have my doubts that there weren't invisible environmental and cultural factors at play to get him to where he was.
That is self-imposed. You can destroy anything with drugs.
If you'd spent some time with Hal, you would know he's an innate genius, not created by his environment.
Even harnessed, his genius in a different environment would have lead him to be Richard Dawkins or Linus Pauling or Walter White, and not Hal Finney.
It's a very humbling experience being around these two. You cannot train that into people.
Few Caltech freshmen were exposed to computers. This was 1975.
> drugs
Again with the drugs. Drugs destroy your mind, they are irrelevant to what I'm talking about. I know of no drugs that will turn you into a genius.
A little story about Hal. Hal rarely bothered to ever go to class. He'd pick up the textbook at the end of the semester, flip through it, and would ace the exam. Again and again and again. He did not know this material beforehand. It was just effortless to him. Renee, too.
Me, and most everyone else, had to work very hard all through the semester to have a hope of passing the final.
No, environment doesn't create geniuses. They are born that way.
What drove him to go to CalTech, and not MIT? Or CSUN? Or even let him graduate high school? How did that education even get paid for? Where would he be if he couldn't have afforded it; if there were no loans to take out? If he'd had a drinking problem and then slept through his exams? No amount of smarts could help him pass the test he wasn't there to take.
I don't ask this to tear the man down, may he rest in peace. I ask to challenge your notion that geniuses are just born that way. There's absolutely a genetic component, and they are born that way, but in the wrong environment, they fail to launch.
Genius needs to be nurtured and cared for, in just the right way, to happen, and when it happens, it's magical. To put an extreme example upon that, if the environment lead to him being shot dead at the age of seven, we'd be talking about someone else.
Of course, a genius can be destroyed by his environment.
A little joke: Parents with one child are sure the outcome is nurture. Parents with two children know it's nature.
P.S. Caltech in the 70s would admit students regardless of their finances, and if they needed financial help they'd provide it.
P.P.S. At Caltech I learned what I could become, and I learned what I would never be. I would never be a Hal. It doesn't bother me, since there is so much I can do.
>You seem to think that geniuses are made by their upbringing.
From the comment you are replying to:
>There's absolutely a genetic component, and they are born that way, but in the wrong environment, they fail to launch.
You seem more focused on disagreeing than on actually engaging with the point being made which is that "no discernible environmental or cultural factors at play" (your words) isn't strictly true, because (your words) "a genius can be destroyed by his environment."
[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revoluti...