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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 po
by 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 agoThat'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 agoIt'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.