7 ms·

I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. With the benefit of hindsigh

• yetihehe 5y ago
  I agree. It's just that there is so much innovation everywhere, that those geniuses of old are not THAT outstanding. There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap. The same with music. You just need to search more. Youtube and spotify made this easier, I discover totally new astounding music authors and songs almost every month. Yeah, not everyone likes my music taste, but I see that many people also find new music they love. We just have so much variety now, that there is no single commonly recognisable genius.
  • armada651 5y ago
    > There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap. I think this hits the nail on the head. Because we now have access to an instant world-wide exchange of ideas scientists work more closely together on developing their respective fields than ever before. By the time a major breakthrough happens most experts in the field will have already seen it coming. Breakthroughs consist of many smaller leaps in knowledge and we are now hyper-aware of each small development, thus it doesn't seem like we're making big leaps anymore. Rather than creating new geniuses the Internet eliminated the need for the classic "genius" to make a breakthrough in a scientific field.
• duxup 5y ago
  Reminds me of the old "best music of the 70s" or whatever decade you picked. If you had a CD of 20 songs, they were pretty great. If you got a box set ... oh man you hit A LOT of stinkers.
• mwcampbell 5y ago
  > I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enough singer that one can record an impeccable vocal in one take apparently not a prerequisite for a recording contract? Edit: To bring this back around to the topic of the article, I think the discussion of autotuned vocals might hint at an answer to the question about individual geniuses: it's not as important for individuals to have extraordinary abilities when technology can help us all do so much. I admit I was being a curmudgeon above; I know that autotune can be used to subtly improve mediocre vocals, in addition to enabling the obviously artificial sound that many of us consider crap.
  • hansworst 5y ago
    My take on it is that because there are so many good singers out there, people generally don't really care about that aspect of music as much (anymore?). With so much technology available to basically anyone who cares enough to learn how to use it, it's becoming much more important to use that technology creatively than to have some natural talent for singing.
  • RC_ITR 5y ago
    Autotune is a tool like any other. Generally those who consumed media before that tool was invented will be skeptical of it because “things I like didn’t need it.” Those who begin consuming media after the tool was invented don’t have the same biases. A 50-years ago version of that would be microphones on broadway. It used to be a point of pride to fill a theater without amplification. Now we don’t really care.
    • mwcampbell 5y ago
      Fair. When I was a teenager in the 90s, my favorite vocal groups made obvious use of overdubbing, and they sounded different when performing live.
    • 5y ago
• alx__ 5y ago
  Been reading Chuck Klosterman's book, But What If We're Wrong?. Which is partly that thought. The things that get remembered in the global consciousness are not always the people or things we'd expect. It's possible that we have a "genius" right now that will be remembered in 100 years. But due to all the local noise it's hard to see through that and remain objective. Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.
  • mabub24 5y ago
    This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are much less stable than people think.
    • paganel 5y ago
      Even when it comes to philosophy I think it holds true. Up into the 1930s Bergson was regarded as one of the most important philosophers in Europe while Wittgenstein was barely mentioned outside a few, select circles, even he had already published his Tractatus. Nowadays Bergson returns blank stares when you mention his name to an Anglo audience while Wittgenstein is seen as one of the most important philosophers of the last few hundred years.
      • Der_Einzige 5y ago
        Which is profoundly sad since Wittgenstein is only saved by his prophetic beliefs about language - despite writing like a post-modernist while somehow being considered part of the "analytic tradition"... He is fashionable nonsense.
        • aqsalose 5y ago
          Funny, I thought his musics about "language games" was the part of his output more amenable to fashionable nonsense. I have met very few students who attempt to say anything about Tractatus, but quite many who espouse deep-sounding platitudes about "language is a game".
• itslennysfault 5y ago
  This is addressed early on in the article. Maybe one of the problems with lack of genius is that we don't actually read anymore. Ponder that! Spengler began writing Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years deceased. But Spengler could state, with the full expectation that his audience would not question him, that these men belonged in global pantheon of humanity’s greatest figures.
  • gmadsen 5y ago
    not only "geniuses", I'm sure the widespread reduction in reading in the general population has had significant affects across all aspects of society
    • adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      do you have evidence for your claim? everything I can find suggests that literacy is about as high as ever, as are book sales.
      • waserwill 5y ago
        I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, but the quantity of books sold says little about their quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make make profit rather than spreading good literature, and this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of unread books on my shelf, buying a book doesn't mean reading it. There is an aesthetic appeal to books, and though I want to read all I own, there will inevitably be books printed and sold but unread. There are high literacy rates, but this says little about whether material has been grasped and digested. References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is surprising.
        • 5y ago
• lodi 5y ago
  I think that's part of it, but I also think there's some merit to our intuition as well; sometimes you can viscerally feel if you're in a boom or bust cycle. During the reality TV phase I remember thinking "this is all garbage", and then shows like The Sopranos and The West Wing kicked off an era that had me thinking "I literally can't keep up with all the good shows; there's too much good TV to watch." I think this was a pretty common feeling, and not in hindsight but during the era. In gaming I remember marvelling at a PC boom in 98-99, and then hating the "xbox-ification" of PC games for a few years after that.
  • dllthomas 5y ago
    > During the reality TV phase I remember thinking "this is all garbage", and then shows like The Sopranos and The West Wing kicked off an era... The West Wing and The Sopranos l started in 1999. Jackass and Survivor started in 2000.
    • hexis 5y ago
      The Real World started in 1992. It was "credited with launching the modern reality TV genre" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series)
      • p_j_w 5y ago
        Yes, but the reality TV boom didn't hit for quite some time after. Maybe my memory is off, but it felt like a mid aughts thing.
        • bmhin 5y ago
          Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me like when they found their "reality game show" formula that was then replicated off of those base archetypes into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does feel about right for when the explosion happened. The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.
• kosasbest 5y ago
  > While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or other means, then you fade into the background. Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at social interaction and can't be a 'Youtuber' or 'influencer' so easily.
  • toyg 5y ago
    It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the scale of the planet. Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All these channels were very limited, so just by getting there one could ensure they had a position among the officially recognised elite. Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels, from all over the planet, unloading talent in any discipline 24/7. You can market the hell out of yourself and the world can still decide they are too busy caring about Korean singers and African memes. Which really is the beef I have with this article: genius is not recognised anymore because now we are a global village of billions, rather than an elite of a few hundreds of thousands, and we consume all sorts of radically different media rather than a handful of shared sources. So we simply don't agree on what is "genius" anymore, at a societal level; geniuses do their work in smaller groups, where they get some recognition, and that's it.
    • atq2119 5y ago
      > Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong. The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?
      • toyg 5y ago
        For all practical purposes, it is literally infinite. You won't be able to go through the entirety of YouTube in a single lifetime, and that's just one channel of distributed knowledge. And new channels appear every day, somewhere on the global network. The firehose will never stop, the network is effectively an infinite source of content. > what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to resources, networking chances, free time etc etc, the aristocrats of the past would have been effectively unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose opinion determined everybody else's view of them, effectively unchallenged.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• barrkel 5y ago
  That idea is countered right in the quoted passage by Tanner Greer. In the past, it was obvious who was genius, even a few years after people died. Now, it's less clear.
• pas 5y ago
  > While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books because it's simply extremely cheap to create stuff. so we have a glut of stuff. because nowadays everyone can buy an instrument and take a few classes, and put it on youtube. and since there's enormous demand for novelty, and there's a lot of styles, niches that producers/creators can fill, quality isn't really a singular thing anymore. > just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics." well, that's .. true, but also there's no classics anymore. there's a gamut of things. hundreds of years ago we had a few hundred/thousand extremely talented people who got into arts because they were talented, they visited each other in person to learn from each other over months and years. it was very very very homogeneous in time and space (and it was apparent who's the amazing real boss of that level/period/era) compared to today's hyperfast superglobal heterogeneous all-in content-bonanza, where it's impossible to consume all of it, impossible to filter it, impossible to comprehend/contrast/compare all of it to itself. Sure there was no point in comparing Van Gogh to Tchaikovsky even then - but there was room for two, now it got even more impossibler not less since there are so many new forms/genres/styles and a lot more amazing feats of creation, and more new talents each day, so relatively there's even less room (less time, less space) to fit the contemporary greats.
• alfor 5y ago
  The problem is that there's not much control group. My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow. School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.
  • ViViDboarder 5y ago
    > School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids. That probably depends on each persons means to teach their own children.
• ozim 5y ago
  So survivorship bias. Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 than it is now. Not saying that general relativity is well understood by general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people could not wrap their heads around. Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the level where mediocre people were before. We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much smarter than average Joe 100 years ago. And we should strive to move forward with that.