I wonder how many geniuses there have been in the world that never had the opportunity to expand their natural skills because they were to busy just surviving.
Billions. IQ is normally distributed, so it's easy math. Lots of cynics think people are dumb or we don't have enough smart ones, but the truth is that we quite literally have more brains than we know what to do with. We are a species of bored underachievers trapped in a gravity well with nothing much to do and no future, so we spend our time fighting and drugging and making pointless doodads as townies trapped in so…
I believe IQ is actually logrythmically distributed.
I wish I could upvote this again. There is definitely this shift in the understanding of the world, and I believe it stems from an unwillingness to accept the cruelty of life. Accepting the harshness of the world and of human nature means also accepting the need to act in ways to survive and thrive in such an environment. Standards, dare I say virtues, have fallen to the wayside in pursuit of an easy, sedentary accep…
There is no shift. The question of whether individuals are primary influence on events or whether things are "in the air" and thus almost bound to happen (albeit caused by some individual or other) has been kicked around for at least a couple centuries. Napoleon was one of early examples often used. Was he a unique individual who exerted enormous influence on course of world events? Certainly. Were conditions in the…
Right, but the conditions being ripe for a Naploean still requires Napolean. Saying that "the time was such that someone like so and so HAD to rise up" is meaningless. Nothing HAS to happen, in the realms of human behavior. People may be likely to do something, or the potential to do a great thing might be more potent at one point in time than another, but that potency still requires an efficient cause to become real. People with vision and talent and will can, and do, and have been changing the world.
If you're interested in a smarter man than me going on about this idea, I suggest you read the Foundation series by Issac Asimov.
Humanity is ~7B, and "billons" implies >= 2B which is >= 30% of humanity. I'd define "great" to be the top 1% of minds, which is ~70 million people. So, yes, tens of millions of great minds are certainly wasted, but not billions . (Not that that's much consolation).
Apparently 107 billion humans have ever lived. 1% of that is greater than a billion. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 > here are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. That said, merely being in the top 1% of intelligence doesn't seem to be worthy of the genius title.
If you are in the top 1% or even 5% you are probably capable of genius things if given the opportunity. The majority never are.
There is no shift. The question of whether individuals are primary influence on events or whether things are "in the air" and thus almost bound to happen (albeit caused by some individual or other) has been kicked around for at least a couple centuries. Napoleon was one of early examples often used. Was he a unique individual who exerted enormous influence on course of world events? Certainly. Were conditions in the…
Right, but the conditions being ripe for a Naploean still requires Napolean. Saying that "the time was such that someone like so and so HAD to rise up" is meaningless. Nothing HAS to happen, in the realms of human behavior. People may be likely to do something, or the potential to do a great thing might be more potent at one point in time than another, but that potency still requires an efficient cause to become real…
Perhaps the conditions being ripe for Napoleon require a Napoleank not the Napolean, which is the crux of this individual vs circumstances debate. The interesting question is whether Napoleon (or Hitler or Stalin) was a unique individual necessary for the progression of events we call history or could that role have been fulfilled by another narcissistic, paranoid egomaniac (which Napolean, Hitler, and Stalin arguably were)? Was it fate, random chance, or is it a case of the nature of those randomly in power deciding the destiny of all? We'll probably never know.
There is no shift. The question of whether individuals are primary influence on events or whether things are "in the air" and thus almost bound to happen (albeit caused by some individual or other) has been kicked around for at least a couple centuries. Napoleon was one of early examples often used. Was he a unique individual who exerted enormous influence on course of world events? Certainly. Were conditions in the…
Right, but the conditions being ripe for a Naploean still requires Napolean. Saying that "the time was such that someone like so and so HAD to rise up" is meaningless. Nothing HAS to happen, in the realms of human behavior. People may be likely to do something, or the potential to do a great thing might be more potent at one point in time than another, but that potency still requires an efficient cause to become real…
What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Ruling out the possibility that grad students are today >20x intelligent than Einstein, and considering that Einstein needed no more experimental results than already available to everyone in 1905, the emphasis ought not to be as simplistic as "lone genius", but on his perseverance and nose for an interesting problem, enduring all the false twists and turns that exploring one entails.
I believe this is the general trait of who we recognize as great minds.
In 1905 Einstein was not only working as a patent clerk, he was also finishing his PHD thesis. (He got it for his paper on Brownian motion.) The other two papers, special relativity, for which he is famous, and the photo electric effect, for which he got the Nobel, are actually using the same trick, just take the (already existing) equations seriously. Granted that is the closest to "one weird trick" you will ever se…
> "one weird trick" Reading this, I couldn't help but think "Maintain correct time in orbit by using this one weird trick discovered by a patent clerk. Click to find out how!"... :)
Right, but the conditions being ripe for a Naploean still requires Napolean. Saying that "the time was such that someone like so and so HAD to rise up" is meaningless. Nothing HAS to happen, in the realms of human behavior. People may be likely to do something, or the potential to do a great thing might be more potent at one point in time than another, but that potency still requires an efficient cause to become real…
Perhaps the conditions being ripe for Napoleon require a Napoleank not the Napolean , which is the crux of this individual vs circumstances debate. The interesting question is whether Napoleon (or Hitler or Stalin) was a unique individual necessary for the progression of events we call history or could that role have been fulfilled by another narcissistic, paranoid egomaniac (which Napolean, Hitler, and Stalin arguab…
Yeah, kind of undecidable, in similar way to nature vs. nurture debate. However, I would say that the case for scientific advancements being "in the air" and nearly inevitable is much stronger than, say, the inevitability of a paranoid egomaniac arising as a leader, rather than a more even-keeled and humane figure. Political action often seems balanced to go either way, for ill or for good, while scientific progress is in comparison mostly in a single direction, onward and upward.
In 1905 Einstein was not only working as a patent clerk, he was also finishing his PHD thesis. (He got it for his paper on Brownian motion.) The other two papers, special relativity, for which he is famous, and the photo electric effect, for which he got the Nobel, are actually using the same trick, just take the (already existing) equations seriously. Granted that is the closest to "one weird trick" you will ever se…
> "one weird trick" Reading this, I couldn't help but think "Maintain correct time in orbit by using this one weird trick discovered by a patent clerk. Click to find out how!"... :)
"Lone wolf patent clerk rewrites 10 most important physics equations. #7 will shock you!"
> "one weird trick" Reading this, I couldn't help but think "Maintain correct time in orbit by using this one weird trick discovered by a patent clerk. Click to find out how!"... :)
For the machine learning folks: http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/
> You Only Learn Once: A Stochastic Weight Aggregation approach to Online Regret Minimization
oh cool, this is relevant to my interests, I'm reading papers on monte carlo tree search for adversarial games