141–150 of 505 posts
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 don’t agree with this at all. Genius is a subjective. There is no absolute measurement to gauge it. The best approximation would be IQ.
Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are…
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 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.
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:…
> 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 enoug…
(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)
Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are…
There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but Elon gets all the credit, he could still be one of them, I don't know enough about their process.
Maybe a few people in the biotech industry, I wouldn't know about them but the innovation there with crispr and mrna vaccines and other things seems quite crazy and cool
Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are…
Its not that we don't have genius anymore; we simply built a new pantheon out of the geniuses of the day about 150 years ago and then haven't been keeping up with the work of canonizing new members.
Dale Carnegie and Elon Musk get the "demi-god" status, somehow; we know their successes are the work of many others but who but the most obsessed know those names?
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:…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
It may be possible (albeit difficult) to quantify when paradigm shifts have occurred in different fields over time. Perhaps that can be used to roughly determine whether genius output has decreased.
My interpretation of this idea presented in the article is that these days most paradigm shifts are smaller, but they happen more frequently. So an individual brilliant person ends up having less of an impact themselves, relative to someone in the past. No one is individually remembered for being an incredible genius. But a huge number of very brilliant people makes smaller but faster incremental changes to science.
This may also be happening in the arts, but I don't know if it applies the same way.