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It seems that the '1%' is symbolic, though. Just a round 'very small' number that sounds nice. Probably way less currently, orders of magnitude less. It seems

by K0SM0S 7y ago

It seems that the '1%' is symbolic, though. Just a round 'very small' number that sounds nice. Probably way less currently, orders of magnitude less. It seems that the proportion of ground-breaking individuals is less a function of population than of the state of things. Meaning, it doesn't matter how many are trying if there are only ever X slots available for 'greatness' at a given time. E.g. when one Musk or one Gandhi arises, a thousand others might have just missed that spot for this life. At the very least, there is a relation between the two — pushing population to extreme numbers obviously increases the number of exceptional individuals because there is more need; but I see a rather linear bottleneck here, whereas context dictates a lot of what you can and can't do. In that sense, the greatest are the most adaptive (evolution-style, applied to civilization), they find the 'correct formula' to solve in their own space and time. And execute on it. I think it's more of a “few thousand people” worldwide at any given time in recorded history, maybe 10x or 100x more today than in Ancient times but... nowhere near the population growth ratio. Obviously, it's all just my subjective perception. I could be so wrong it's actually not-not funny to think about it... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hitton 7y ago
Individual doesn't need to be "ground-breaking" to push humanity forward. Just pushing a little bit helps as well. I think that for instance even majority of postdocs (in useful areas of studies) and significant part of open source developers pushes humanity forward. On individual level it might not be very significant, but take millions of such little pushes and it becomes huge.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  That's what we'd think intuitively, but not what's demonstrated empirically in reality, history. It seems that at some point, it takes more of us to crack the same amount of "scientific difficulty" as it were — hard to be a lone genius typically these days. I don't know. But you definitely speak of a bias that I had and got almost unequivocally debunked by a colder, more statistical (retrospective, empirical) than logical perspective (models, thought experiment). I personally trust the former more ('facts' in layman terms).
  - Hitton 7y ago
    It's not the same amount of scientific difficulty though. Low hanging fruit (relatively speaking) was already picked. Impact of even greatest geniuses toady is miniscule compared to geniuses of yesteryear. Andrew Wiles', Grigori Perelman's and Terence Tao's impact on humanity is not even one thousandth of Leibniz's.

by K0SM0S 7y ago

Hitton 7y ago

Individual doesn't need to be "ground-breaking" to push humanity forward. Just pushing a little bit helps as well. I think that for instance even majority of postdocs (in useful areas of studies) and significant part of open source developers pushes humanity forward. On individual level it might not be very significant, but take millions of such little pushes and it becomes huge.

K0SM0S 7y ago
That's what we'd think intuitively, but not what's demonstrated empirically in reality, history. It seems that at some point, it takes more of us to crack the same amount of "scientific difficulty" as it were — hard to be a lone genius typically these days. I don't know. But you definitely speak of a bias that I had and got almost unequivocally debunked by a colder, more statistical (retrospective, empirical) than logical perspective (models, thought experiment). I personally trust the former more ('facts' in layman terms).
- Hitton 7y ago
  It's not the same amount of scientific difficulty though. Low hanging fruit (relatively speaking) was already picked. Impact of even greatest geniuses toady is miniscule compared to geniuses of yesteryear. Andrew Wiles', Grigori Perelman's and Terence Tao's impact on humanity is not even one thousandth of Leibniz's.