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Comment by tynpeddler | Hacker News Reader

One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius.

I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as a proxy for genius, are particularly great. Acclaim is a dubious proxy because because it's more influenced by popular attention than actual technical capability.

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I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted.

If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)

I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.

My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.

I think people misunderstand the skills needed for progress nowadays (or maybe ever). We have clear avenues forward where we are basically just waiting for data to trickle in, then prune the falsified hypotheses, and repeat.

It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.

And even then we have the story of the quantization of blackbody radiation, when Planck was stuck and finally ended up using a formula that fot the data and called it a day.

As an addendum consider Paul Erdos. As far as I know everyone loved to work with him, he was basically running a big distributed institute in this regard. He did what organized workshops do nowadays, but in a slightly radical way, he basically changed "dorm rooms" every few weeks, and churned out papers like a machine on speed. Which in fact he was on all the time. And who can blame him? Stimulants are part of work culture anyway. Coffee, tea, anti-ADHD meds, etc. And with such drastically work focused "work-life balance" it's not surprising that he has results.

> It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.

Who says there are no more breakthrough to conjure out of the thin air?

There certainly are, but the later part of my comment tries to address this by illustrating how nothing is really "out of thin air" (still, the creative jumps from data/knowledge/premises/broken-models to a new hypothesis/better-models are invaluable, and almost always there's a prerequisite of years/decades of hard work to familiarize oneself with the data/old-models on such a level that the insight required for the jump basically comes intuitively "duh just try this, or that, or this helps to fit the data better" - which of course is intuitive to no one else, who did not put in those years).

I take issue with this, I don't see any discontinuous advances happening every year. I see incremental advances or the results of miniaturization and mass production making things small or cheap enough to reach mass market. Those are examples of progress but not of genius. Where are the revolutions? Why does it seem like physics has stalled, stuck on the same questions we've had for over half a century? We are making slow progress against universal scourges like cancer and Alzheimer's but there are no major breakthroughs that shake the foundations of biology and medicine. Psychology is still groping in the dark, unable to do much for the suffering millions endure. Where are the architectural advances beyond steel and concrete? The best we can do is 3D print odd looking homes. Why did it take almost 50 years to get ambitious space programs re-started? Even on the artistic front we are awash in a sea of nostalgia. I don't think genius is common at all and I agree with the article that we probably now produce them at a much lower rate.

First, Revolution is not the same thing as genius.

Second, even genius's don't bring frequent revolutions. Special and general relativity made very little impact on people's lives for decades. It took the Manhattan project, one of the largest industrial project of all times involving tens of thousands of people, to kickstart the nuclear age. And that involved a lot of things besides just relativity.

Third, we live in a world of revolutions that are so common people don't even grasp them. Ten years ago, Go was almost impossible for computers to play with any proficiency. Protein folding was still incredibly difficult and people were building dedicated super computers like Anton to try and make things faster. Now both of those effectively solved problems. Drone's have revolutionized battle fields in ways that are having very significant geopolitcal ramifications that effect hundreds of millions of lives. The raptor engines represent an incredible leap forward in the material sciences that will allow humanity to reach space more cheaply than ever before.

If there are no genius's today because cancer and Alzheimer's are still around, then Einstein wasn't a genius because he didn't solve those problems either.

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