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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

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 middle schooler, I really feel the issues in staff-constrained pandemic years.

It would be interesting to have past geniuses sit in today's world - I think we'd be dismayed that in the massive ocean of knowledge we have these days, they wouldn't seem so legendary anymore.

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Agreed. It's like complaining we don't make Leif Erikssons anymore. You can't discover a new continent every day.

That's a brilliant way of putting it! I'll save that for future use :)

That's true, but in the same time... We still have so much to discover, no matter the subject -- I study physics and, even at my level (not very advanced), there are obviously entire domains that are not clearly understood even by the most brillant minds.

But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and intelligence) needed in order to achieve something significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow everytime a Einstein discovers something.

i think its also a problem of funding. the problems of today are more resource intensive. i read that succesfull test to use mrna for medical treatment were done 20 years ago and nobody realy cared and knew about it. To realy develop into something viable took years to get the attention and funding.

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 then, but it's 9 times that now. If part of the qualification to be remembered as a genius is notoriety and publicity, which it must be, then because it's much more crowded at the top 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.

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 one(s) at the next "genius" level???

It's hard to know. In 100 years will the Beatles be remembered more than Beethoven? Who knows?

Edit: or if you prefer, maybe Miles Davis.

I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude.

As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference.

As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.

The human population isn't really important to that chart.

"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.

That's only true if acclaim scales with population. Or more specifically, if the "number of acclaimed scientists..." would scale with the total number of scientists in the absence of a falloff in rate of their creation. That's the point: I don't think it does. I think it's reasonable to assume that in a larger population, a given level of acclaim is harder to achieve for any given individual. Same fish, bigger pond.

I think the 1 easiest way to improve schools right now would be to differentiate kids by ability.

Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.

So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.

If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?

Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.

I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.

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