11–20 of 505 posts
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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 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…
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.