I'm not convinced. > I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entir

I'm not convinced. > I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age. We are living in a golden age. The beginning stages of one anyway. Where once a genius needed aristocratic tutoring, now genius is becoming so common that they're not the notable man of their time anymore. > Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how genius is produced. If genius were just a matter of genetic ability, then in the past century, as the world’s population increased dramatically, and as mass education skyrocketed, and as racial and gender barriers came thundering down across the globe, and particularly in the last few decades as free information saturated our society, we should have seen a genius boom—an efflorescence of the best mathematicians, the greatest scientists, the most awe-inspiring artists. This is 100% the case. There are so many brilliant people out of the ~7.5 billion of us that genius just isn't as notable anymore. And that genius, instead of resulting in household names like Einstein, results in the marvelous modern world we live in. We see the evidence of it every day in our day to day lives. It's easy to lose perspective on this because it's the every day world to us, but the way we live today is just not the way we did even 30 years ago, not to mention 70. I can name some great thinkers alive today, right now, and recently dead, in all sorts of fields from philosophy to mathematics to hard science. Peter Shor. Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, I'm sure anyone in this thread can name 10 more. There are unsung geniuses right now working for all sorts of companies, or just tinkering away anonymously in their bedrooms at their desktop computers. Just wait til the information availability afforded us by the internet breaks the institutional education system and begins producing scores of self taught polymaths and specialists at home. That's what the younger generation is going to live through. Art: you can right now find with simple internet searches art made by artists that is mind blowingly wonderful with infinite scrolling. Of course 90% of everything is crap, but I guarantee you can find excellent art of all kinds in seemingly endless supply by people you've never heard of within 5 minutes of reading this if you try. Its just good ol days nostalgia to me. A time when information availability was monopolized and bottlenecked of course will only produce a handful of notable people. When that bottleneck is gone as it is now they're just not as notable, and that is a good thing for them, us and everybody, except maybe the ones that controlled information flows before.