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Whenever it's Homo Sapiens remember that's just ordinary modern man, no different than us now. Pre-Historic or not. So naturally every generation or at least
by fuzzfactor 3y ago
Whenever it's Homo Sapiens remember that's just ordinary modern man, no different than us now. Pre-Historic or not.
So naturally every generation or at least every hundred years or so there's always been an Einstein, Tesla, or DaVinci come along.
- singularity2001 3y agoif you account for population density, and maybe surrounding of education, one would expect these geniuses to spread out exponentially though
- qwytw 3y agoI guess the problem nowadays is that most things got so complex and specialized that the impact a single person can make is rather limited. So we're simply not seeing these geniuses because incremental 'discoveries' ordinary people can't understand don't really make for good headlines.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 3y agoStrange convergance: I always think of a Paul Graham essay on this[0]. He mentions Florence generating several geniuses, even though nearby Milan was the same size and same almost everything. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
- labster 3y agoThat should depend on population size. I can’t think of any geniuses 100 years after Imhotep. Galen is roughly a century after Heron. And in the 20th century, we had Einstein, Heisenberg, Curie, Lorenz, Planck, Schrödinger, and Feynman in physics alone.
- detourdog 3y agoThe question should be in 4,000 year what names do we still have from the last 100 years.
- BirAdam 3y agoThe answer is: “those whose name was everywhere” which unfortunately will mean Louis Vuitton, Donald Trump, George Washington, and maybe Queen Elizabeth II? 4000 years is a long time, and our civilization will likely be gone, nothing but ruins.
- Retric 3y ago100 years isn’t that long we still remember Henry Ford etc. But even 1,000 years is going to erase everyone on that list outside of serious history nerds. Quick who was the first kind of England, and who started or ran the east India trading company?
- BirAdam 3y agoMy thought is more just the ubiquity of the names. If even a few objects are well preserved with those names on them, then the names will be remembered. What the people did may not be remembered, but the name may be. The ubiquity of Louis Vuitton and knock off products, Trump putting his name on… everything, etc.
- Retric 3y agoIf you just mean the actual names, I think most of our names will be recorded somewhere in 4,000 years. Genealogy doesn’t take up much space and people have been keeping widespread records for hundreds of years in many areas. The extreme is the Lurie Family which can “trace” part of it’s lineage back 3,000 years and that was with paper records. (700 years of that is well documented, prior to that is less certain.)
- bombcar 3y ago
- imiric 3y agoSharing of accumulated knowledge is crucial to our advancement, though. Geniuses may have lived thousands of years ago, but their potential was mostly lost without access to knowledge of their ancestors, or other tribes. Which also happens today in places with poor education. We only hear about the Newtons and Einsteins because they were born at the right place and time.
- BirAdam 3y agoPeople used to memorize stuff. They’d memorize a lot of stuff. The geniuses of the Stone Age did little things, like finding better ways to make fire, flint knap, leather processing, weaving and looms, tent making, taming animals, inventing the wheel, food preservation, which plants were good for what ailments. You know, all the stuff you need without question.
- intelVISA 3y agoWho is our century's Tesla? Fabrice? Solomon Hykes? In terms of impact both are huge, Fabrice's works are a marvel and Hyke's repackaging of ELF with YAML is considered business genius - he could sell anything I'm sure.
- thewildginger 3y agoStephen Hawking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 3y ago> Who is our century's Tesla? Some dude named "Bob" who lives in a trailer in the woods and never talks to anyone.
- kwere 3y agoI hope Bob doesnt want to publicize its own finding trough planting bombs
- SuoDuanDao 3y agoI'd say Jo Zayner's the closest to Tesla due to the showpersonship and self-experimentation in public.
- tgv 3y agoUnder a whole bunch of assumptions.
- somenameforme 3y agoYou're not considering a lot of factors here. One of the most noncontroversial would be population size. Past human population sizes are little more than guesses, but the one thing that's for sure is that they were far lower, and probably in the low millions at some point. So modern humans would expect to have on the order of something like 8000x as many geniuses than ancient humans, based on population alone. Another noncontroversial one would be nutrition. Malnutrition results in impaired intellectual ability, and malnutrition was much more common in the past. You definitely would expect to see a proportional number of outliers on a time scale.
- BurningFrog 3y agoWithout a modern society around them, providing universities, technology, communication etc, these geniuses would just end up being the best farmer or handyman in the village. Also, human population was very small in the old days: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#world-population-from-10-000-bce-to-today https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#world-pop...
- wongarsu 3y agoAbout 7% of all humans who have ever lived are currently alive. Which would mean that also about 7% of all geniuses ever are currently alive, and thanks to modern agriculture most of them are not stuck farming.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThis also means that, empirically, only 93% of all humans have died so far.
- wongarsu 3y agoWhich puts our confidence that everyone will die at less than 3-sigma. It could just be a coincidence so far
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoThis is actually one of my favorite examples of cherry-picking statistics to support a false statement. "There's about a 7% chance I won't die because, of all humans who have ever lived, only about 93% have died." Of course, this ignores the entire concept of "life expectancy" but such is the nature of cherry-picking statistics to support a false statement.
- jameshart 3y agoAnd inventing ‘scratching a plan into something so people understand it’ is not an Einstein level invention. It’s immediately graspable by small children so it seems likely that it’s something humans have been doing for a veeeery long time. These ‘blueprints’ are preserved because they were carved in rock. All the thousands of years of prior art of scratching lines in the dirt are lost to time.