271–280 of 505 posts
I think most people here are missing the point. This is not about incremental progress but about breakthroughs. Religion was breakthrough. Electricity was a breakthrough. General Relativity was a breakthrough. The Internet was another breakthrough and now we are enjoying these things. A similar breakthrough today could be: Quantum mechanics, Fusion and a fully functional decentralized Internet (not to be confused wit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 p…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Real World started in 1992. It was "credited with launching the modern reality TV genre" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series)
Yes, but the reality TV boom didn't hit for quite some time after. Maybe my memory is off, but it felt like a mid aughts thing.
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:…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Edit: or if you prefer, maybe Miles Davis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 te…
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 throughou…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Shannon. Maybe rms. 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?
Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the industrialist Andrew Carnegie?
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 m…
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…
"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.
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.
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
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.
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao 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