5 ms·

I really like a lot of the conclusions the article draws -- 1:1 tutoring, Taking Children Seriously, Access to an Exceptional Milieu, etc. However, I have alwa

I really like a lot of the conclusions the article draws -- 1:1 tutoring, Taking Children Seriously, Access to an Exceptional Milieu, etc. However, I have always thought that the answer to the question "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. The 'ease of discovery' for breakthroughs in science and math are on a some sort of a non-linear curve, and they aren't getting easier.

thatoneguytoo 4y ago
IMO "abundance of low hanging fruit" is the main factor As Physics got more saturated, and matured, these geniuses somehow just stopped.
- substation13 4y ago
  Yep. And these historic geniuses were often Polymaths. Every field was smaller and an individual could realistically make several contributions.
  - thatoneguytoo 4y ago
    we see the same in tech too. many of the genius billionaires somehow just got started during the boom period.
    - danuker 4y ago
      The boom period may have more to do with macroeconomics affording hiring more people, than their ability to solve problems.
  - trudler 4y ago
    I don't get you guys... The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense. We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity. I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths. The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like. The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      > We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often That's what the idea is. Once someone has figured out the basics eg energy conservation, relativity, etc, what's the next guy going to do? Put a small wrinkle on it at best. So the detaily thing is actually not immense progress, it's some small modification or application to a niche area.
    - substation13 4y ago
      Of course, but those contributions are more often to the edge of our knowledge and done by a large professional research team, as opposed to a smart aristocrat in their spare time. That's the difference. The closest equivalent I can think of these days is Satoshi Nakamoto - assuming it's one person. But even their discovery is in a subfield of a subfield.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  We still are crowded with low hanging fruit, but apparently, it's invisible to the majority. Existing low hanging fruit off the top of my head: * air quality, safety and more sophisticated air management indoors is a virtually untapped field; as air borne viruses become more of an issue in our denser population, this issue is peer with water and food quality. * how to promote secondary thinking, soas to prevent public manipulation and abuse. * interpersonal rights management - systematic abuse of personal rights is institutionalized by modern corporate business and legal procedures; how to frame and formalize so this can be named, addressed, eliminated and the institutional abusers identified and dealt. I'm talking everything from entire industries that overwork, to leased prison labor. * interpersonal communication management - in the technology industries issues such as Imposter Syndrome and bully behavior is common; this has as a core underlying aspect deceptive language in a individual's self conversation - which can be addressed, corrected, and a level of personal wellness achieved while that individual becomes significantly more accepted and integrated socially. * Professional communications for scientific and technology careers: our industries are largely populated by gifted individuals who have not received any professional communications training, so our industries are ripe with confusion and miscommunication. How to impress the value of formal communication within the scientific and technology industries, and how to do so without the typical lame ineffectual methods that do not work now.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    I wouldn't put most of those in genius territory, I'd put them in hard work territory. But there don't seem to be as many, or as much of a percentage of, people wanting to do hard work either. You've landed a great list of worthy causes though, respect.
    - bsenftner 4y ago
      Nothing is recognized as genius until it is done, and the impact of the achievement ripples with secondary effects the majority never realized.
  - candu 4y ago
    Those are all highly worthwhile problems to work on... ...but I'm not convinced any of them are low-hanging fruit. Almost everything on this list would require sustained R&D across several fields of expertise, and many of them have the significant added challenge of overcoming entrenched interests / power structures. That's not to say we shouldn't try! Solving even a small part of anything here would materially improve quality of life for a lot of people - but these are not "I could solve this in a weekend" problems; these are generational problems, towards which meaningful effort could easily be measured in thousands of person-years from entire teams / organisations / ecosystems of smart people, and where even a chance at success would require a steady supply of adequate resources that is durable across periodic economic shocks. CERN is the closest thing I can think of as a useful mental model here: sustained cooperation across multiple nations, massive amounts of public investment, clear tangible outcomes over a period of decades.
l5870uoo9y 4y ago
Between the lines a lot of this boils down to the father being a clear intellectual role model. Including the child in his work, debates with equally intellectual dinner guests, homeschooling and taking the child intellectual endeavours serious. I imagine the child "feels" this encouragement both consciously and subconsciously.
danwee 4y ago
> "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. Same thoughts. Even though we, as civilization, had less resources in the past to discover "the world", one person could "easily" study the whole body of knowledge accumulated over the years and try to come up with something new. Add to that that the person is a genius, and you get something remarkable. Nowadays it's, imho, impossible for a single person to learn the whole body of knowledge of any single branch of science or arts.
Ekaros 4y ago
Computer science might be really good example. Just how prolific certain people where when digital computers came available. And how many things were "invented". Is this generation of geniuses? Or were the tools available finally and there was real need to come up with something.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  Exactly. There are always going to be fields wherein we don't know shit and anyone can come up and discover something. Right now discovering a new phenomenon or topic in math or physics is virtually impossible.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Pretty easy, media ignores them. Influencers with no factual knowledge but a strong opinion gather eyeballs and sell ads much better than a scientist with a nuanced opinion and a difficult niche topic to talk about. It also doesn't help that the general public in the west is somewhat hostile towards the idea that other people might be a lot more intelligent than they themselves. It's like the temporarily embarrassed billionaires, but for IQ.
- CM30 4y ago
  I think a slightly more... charitable explanation would be that most people who are geniuses at various topics aren't also geniuses at marketing, nor in many cases particularly good at self promotion. And it's not what you know that matters for fame, it's how good you are at selling yourself. Well, either that, or you get very lucky and the media picks up your story. You can see a possible example of a genius getting media coverage in a niche area by looking at Kaze Emanuar and his Super Mario 64 mods. He's basically the best programmer for the system in the world right now, and has almost singlehandedly moved the community forward on every technical level possible. His works also get a ton of coverage.
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    > His works also get a ton of coverage. Yet I had never heard about him before. And while I could find a hackaday article, I didn't find anything more mainstream. So I would estimate that 99.9% of the population will never hear about him.
    - CM30 4y ago
      That might be because of how much more diversified media coverage is now. For the most part, many great creators (and to be honest, celebrities and influencers too) are famous in a certain field, not across the entire world. The greatest philosophers of this era are likely only well known among other philosophers, and academics in related fields. Same with mathematicians, scientists, historians, etc. Meanwhile many great artists are only known among others in their field. Could the 'mainstream' media cover every genius or great creator? Probably not, there wouldn't be enough room. There are so many great people creating works and making discoveries that you likely won't ever know about more than 1% of them, at most.
ocimbote 4y ago
About the "low hanging fruits". I don't really agree they were such a thing. It's just retrospectively that we name them as such. Or you have a specific example in mind that I could use?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I think the term is probably triggering you because it makes the work sound unimportant. I would say it’s the opposite. What’s harder now is to find discoveries that have the following characteristics: (1) they’re fundamental and very important to many areas, (2) an independent researcher working alone is able to discover them, and (3) they don’t require a singular 1-in-a-trillion human mind to discover. Usually the evidence we cite for (3) in the past is that multiple independent researchers did indeed make major discoveries (or at least overlapped in their findings.) The Calculus is an example. But there are other examples as well. Even Einstein’s brilliant theories have some priority disputes, and might have been discovered by another researcher if he hadn’t (but we can’t say for certain.)
hyperthesis 4y ago
\tangent it's curious how Einstein made amazing discoveries in youth, and nothing later. Is it because he aged? Did he move too far from intuition to formalism? Or was there just nothing fundamental left to discover, that could be discovered with the data available? (aka reachable low hanging fruit) Probably the last, since no one has topped him yet... and physics departments have shrunk over time. OTOH, to your specific point, research has become more directed; funding is in specific areas. Einstein himself had his initial insights outside a university context. Feynmann's diagrams developed when he decided to just "play" - i.e. outside his proper research. I like to think there is gold just a step or two off the beaten path - but have no evidence for this.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
I think thats a lazy answer. Society back then was different and part of that was, that the gathering of knowledge, a nerdiness and enthusiasm for the new, was seen as something distinguished. Gentleman after the renessaince, bragged with book cases, private studies, curiosity cabinets and private museums. Add to that the lack of enterntainments and distractions, against which a chemical experiment set or a rocket kit had to not compete against, and you are getting closer to the answer. Back then, you might read a lexica for entertainment, and think the whole day about it, while doing something else.
mihaic 4y ago
I'd add another thing to the back of low hanging fruits: it also makes innovators less bold in their goals, limiting them from the start.

thatoneguytoo 4y ago

IMO "abundance of low hanging fruit" is the main factor As Physics got more saturated, and matured, these geniuses somehow just stopped.

substation13 4y ago
Yep. And these historic geniuses were often Polymaths. Every field was smaller and an individual could realistically make several contributions.
- thatoneguytoo 4y ago
  we see the same in tech too. many of the genius billionaires somehow just got started during the boom period.
  - danuker 4y ago
    The boom period may have more to do with macroeconomics affording hiring more people, than their ability to solve problems.
- trudler 4y ago
  I don't get you guys... The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense. We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity. I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths. The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like. The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    > We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often That's what the idea is. Once someone has figured out the basics eg energy conservation, relativity, etc, what's the next guy going to do? Put a small wrinkle on it at best. So the detaily thing is actually not immense progress, it's some small modification or application to a niche area.
  - substation13 4y ago
    Of course, but those contributions are more often to the edge of our knowledge and done by a large professional research team, as opposed to a smart aristocrat in their spare time. That's the difference. The closest equivalent I can think of these days is Satoshi Nakamoto - assuming it's one person. But even their discovery is in a subfield of a subfield.
bsenftner 4y ago
We still are crowded with low hanging fruit, but apparently, it's invisible to the majority. Existing low hanging fruit off the top of my head: * air quality, safety and more sophisticated air management indoors is a virtually untapped field; as air borne viruses become more of an issue in our denser population, this issue is peer with water and food quality. * how to promote secondary thinking, soas to prevent public manipulation and abuse. * interpersonal rights management - systematic abuse of personal rights is institutionalized by modern corporate business and legal procedures; how to frame and formalize so this can be named, addressed, eliminated and the institutional abusers identified and dealt. I'm talking everything from entire industries that overwork, to leased prison labor. * interpersonal communication management - in the technology industries issues such as Imposter Syndrome and bully behavior is common; this has as a core underlying aspect deceptive language in a individual's self conversation - which can be addressed, corrected, and a level of personal wellness achieved while that individual becomes significantly more accepted and integrated socially. * Professional communications for scientific and technology careers: our industries are largely populated by gifted individuals who have not received any professional communications training, so our industries are ripe with confusion and miscommunication. How to impress the value of formal communication within the scientific and technology industries, and how to do so without the typical lame ineffectual methods that do not work now.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  I wouldn't put most of those in genius territory, I'd put them in hard work territory. But there don't seem to be as many, or as much of a percentage of, people wanting to do hard work either. You've landed a great list of worthy causes though, respect.
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    Nothing is recognized as genius until it is done, and the impact of the achievement ripples with secondary effects the majority never realized.
- candu 4y ago
  Those are all highly worthwhile problems to work on... ...but I'm not convinced any of them are low-hanging fruit. Almost everything on this list would require sustained R&D across several fields of expertise, and many of them have the significant added challenge of overcoming entrenched interests / power structures. That's not to say we shouldn't try! Solving even a small part of anything here would materially improve quality of life for a lot of people - but these are not "I could solve this in a weekend" problems; these are generational problems, towards which meaningful effort could easily be measured in thousands of person-years from entire teams / organisations / ecosystems of smart people, and where even a chance at success would require a steady supply of adequate resources that is durable across periodic economic shocks. CERN is the closest thing I can think of as a useful mental model here: sustained cooperation across multiple nations, massive amounts of public investment, clear tangible outcomes over a period of decades.

l5870uoo9y 4y ago

Between the lines a lot of this boils down to the father being a clear intellectual role model. Including the child in his work, debates with equally intellectual dinner guests, homeschooling and taking the child intellectual endeavours serious. I imagine the child "feels" this encouragement both consciously and subconsciously.

danwee 4y ago

> "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. Same thoughts. Even though we, as civilization, had less resources in the past to discover "the world", one person could "easily" study the whole body of knowledge accumulated over the years and try to come up with something new. Add to that that the person is a genius, and you get something remarkable. Nowadays it's, imho, impossible for a single person to learn the whole body of knowledge of any single branch of science or arts.

Ekaros 4y ago

Computer science might be really good example. Just how prolific certain people where when digital computers came available. And how many things were "invented". Is this generation of geniuses? Or were the tools available finally and there was real need to come up with something.

nigamanth 4y ago
Exactly. There are always going to be fields wherein we don't know shit and anyone can come up and discover something. Right now discovering a new phenomenon or topic in math or physics is virtually impossible.

fxtentacle 4y ago

Pretty easy, media ignores them. Influencers with no factual knowledge but a strong opinion gather eyeballs and sell ads much better than a scientist with a nuanced opinion and a difficult niche topic to talk about. It also doesn't help that the general public in the west is somewhat hostile towards the idea that other people might be a lot more intelligent than they themselves. It's like the temporarily embarrassed billionaires, but for IQ.

CM30 4y ago
I think a slightly more... charitable explanation would be that most people who are geniuses at various topics aren't also geniuses at marketing, nor in many cases particularly good at self promotion. And it's not what you know that matters for fame, it's how good you are at selling yourself. Well, either that, or you get very lucky and the media picks up your story. You can see a possible example of a genius getting media coverage in a niche area by looking at Kaze Emanuar and his Super Mario 64 mods. He's basically the best programmer for the system in the world right now, and has almost singlehandedly moved the community forward on every technical level possible. His works also get a ton of coverage.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  > His works also get a ton of coverage. Yet I had never heard about him before. And while I could find a hackaday article, I didn't find anything more mainstream. So I would estimate that 99.9% of the population will never hear about him.
  - CM30 4y ago
    That might be because of how much more diversified media coverage is now. For the most part, many great creators (and to be honest, celebrities and influencers too) are famous in a certain field, not across the entire world. The greatest philosophers of this era are likely only well known among other philosophers, and academics in related fields. Same with mathematicians, scientists, historians, etc. Meanwhile many great artists are only known among others in their field. Could the 'mainstream' media cover every genius or great creator? Probably not, there wouldn't be enough room. There are so many great people creating works and making discoveries that you likely won't ever know about more than 1% of them, at most.

ocimbote 4y ago

About the "low hanging fruits". I don't really agree they were such a thing. It's just retrospectively that we name them as such. Or you have a specific example in mind that I could use?

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I think the term is probably triggering you because it makes the work sound unimportant. I would say it’s the opposite. What’s harder now is to find discoveries that have the following characteristics: (1) they’re fundamental and very important to many areas, (2) an independent researcher working alone is able to discover them, and (3) they don’t require a singular 1-in-a-trillion human mind to discover. Usually the evidence we cite for (3) in the past is that multiple independent researchers did indeed make major discoveries (or at least overlapped in their findings.) The Calculus is an example. But there are other examples as well. Even Einstein’s brilliant theories have some priority disputes, and might have been discovered by another researcher if he hadn’t (but we can’t say for certain.)

hyperthesis 4y ago

\tangent it's curious how Einstein made amazing discoveries in youth, and nothing later. Is it because he aged? Did he move too far from intuition to formalism? Or was there just nothing fundamental left to discover, that could be discovered with the data available? (aka reachable low hanging fruit) Probably the last, since no one has topped him yet... and physics departments have shrunk over time. OTOH, to your specific point, research has become more directed; funding is in specific areas. Einstein himself had his initial insights outside a university context. Feynmann's diagrams developed when he decided to just "play" - i.e. outside his proper research. I like to think there is gold just a step or two off the beaten path - but have no evidence for this.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

I think thats a lazy answer. Society back then was different and part of that was, that the gathering of knowledge, a nerdiness and enthusiasm for the new, was seen as something distinguished. Gentleman after the renessaince, bragged with book cases, private studies, curiosity cabinets and private museums. Add to that the lack of enterntainments and distractions, against which a chemical experiment set or a rocket kit had to not compete against, and you are getting closer to the answer. Back then, you might read a lexica for entertainment, and think the whole day about it, while doing something else.

mihaic 4y ago

I'd add another thing to the back of low hanging fruits: it also makes innovators less bold in their goals, limiting them from the start.