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We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're figuring out how to use AI to s
by jzellis 5y ago
We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're figuring out how to use AI to sell more dick pills and artfully distressed furniture to people devoid of erections and taste on the goddamn Internet, for more money in a year than Einstein saw in a decade.
- mettamage 5y agoIMO, the real smarties work in hft.
- amusedcyclist 5y agoThe smartest of them all teach math in universities
- vajrabum 5y agoI'm not so sure. At VMware in the 2000s we had Marketing Executive who had been a tenured math professor at Stanford. He joined early probably following the primary technical founder at VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, but still.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- roywiggins 5y agoHow much money was in physics when Einstein was working in it?
- toyg 5y agoTenured university members made pretty good money. As they do now, to be fair - it just got much harder to get there, because of larger and fiercer competition for a shrinking number of positions, so the effort/benefit ratio has fallen quite dramatically.
- samth 5y agoIt is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is harder now than in 1905.
- adamsmith143 5y ago>It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is harder now than in 1905. What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of tenure track positions available in any given year. Far more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes without any published work outside their dissertation.
- Talanes 5y agoReally depends where you define the starting line. Compare the two starting from birth, and definitely harder in 1905. Compare them as fully qualified individuals ready to apply, probably an edge in 1905.
- Datenstrom 5y agoWhile I feel the same sentiment about the brightest working on those or similar problems, is it that in the past there was not a similar proportion of the brightest working on similarly pointless and wasteful problems and that now they are all forgotten while Einstein is not? I feel like a large portion of the brightest may have always sold out, maybe Einstein was just obsessed with a particular problem enough to chase that an avoid the more lucrative but pointless problems.
- rmah 5y ago"is it that in the past there was not a similar proportion of the brightest working on similarly pointless and wasteful problems" It is that in the past a large portion of the world's brightest were working in the fields or fishing or mining or making bowls or adding up numbers as a clerk.
- giraffe_lady 5y agostill are tho
- amusedcyclist 5y agoThats vaguely insulting to all the people who do work on astrophysics, I work in AI and i'm pretty certain the average astronomer is a lot smarter than the average AI researcher. Its mostly a matter of pop culture perspective, astronomy just doesn't get the kind of media coverage it used to
- teachrdan 5y ago> i'm pretty certain the average astronomer is a lot smarter than the average AI researcher Perhaps! But is the smartest AI researcher / quant / etc. smarter than the average astronomer? The fact that so many of the smartest people in our generation go into these fields is surely bringing the average down in the hard sciences.
- amusedcyclist 5y agoI'm just not sure "smartness" is the limiting factor for progress. Astronomy is an old science and we're very much at the limits of our ability and understanding. "AI" is a very new field (maybe a science idk) and theres a lot of fertile ground of exploration and growth.
- hwillis 5y ago> We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy). From the beginning Einstein wanted to be a teacher and had little interest in money. Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
- Gollapalli 5y agoMaybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct. Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one. It’s a status competition with real resources on the table rather than an aristocratic hobby for the few who were interested.
- hwillis 5y ago> Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct. 1905 was very different from 1705. It was not particularly different from today, aside from cars, planes and computers. Hell, it was a golden age of physics research and incredibly well respected. The men and woman of the fifth Solvay conference [1], Emmy Noether and all the incredible mathematicians of the time- most of them did not come from means and could hardly be described as aristocrats. > Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one. No, you just pay the publishing fee. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jp...
- watwut 5y agoEinstein applied to higher institutions where he wanted to work, but he was not admitted. The patent office was the available job, so he took it.
- hwillis 5y agoYes. As I said, from the beginning he wanted to be a teacher. And despite having a job of necessity, he worked on physics anyway, and revolutionized the field over a single year. Maybe the answer is that we have become more effective at detecting and monetizing genius; Einstein might have languished for the rest of his life if he were less driven. Or maybe it's the opposite; we don't give smart people enough time or money without draining them of the time to work on novel discovery. Or both at once.
- strikelaserclaw 5y agomaybe we do have Einsteins today but since the problems are so deep and the fields so vast, it is hard for one man to truly stand out as dominating a whole field. Not to mention that so many more people have access to compete in the modern world compared to Einsteins world where only a subset of people from rich countries were being educated.
- leobg 5y agoI don’t think Einstein was optimizing for owning Lambos.
- tonguez 5y agoWhy are there no more Einsteins, von Neumanns, etc, anymore? Is Terry Tao the closest thing we have? Does DARPA (or some TLA or foreign equivalent) just snatch these people up early on in life? Why isn't Srouji working for something like DARPA? Are there people even better than Srouji working for something like DARPA?