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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

The same is true of most (all?) scientific discoveries. A good evidence for it the fact that most important breakthroughs were made independently, within the space of months or years, by two or more people/teams that didn't collaborate with each other.

My takeaway is that science is very incremental, and discoveries depend on what the state of scientific knowledge is at any given time, and not on particular smart individuals.

I also believe the same applies to social progress - e.g. if Martin Luther died as a child, someone else would start the Reformation; if Marx and Lenin decided to pursue art instead of economics/politics, someone else would invent communism anyway, etc.

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Its very tempting to believe that because most of math/science (e.g.) is incremental, that all math is incremental. Once in a long while I stumble onto something really new, a theorem or a proof which simply has no precedent. These things make you go "wow how did someone think of that?" - and it is the ability to do that which distinguishes a genius from a regular and competent mathematician.

It's very easy to dismiss all ideas as being incremental, but I think there exist real, rare sparks of genius which leapfrog the field forward, and these sparks of genius only get deeper and more mysterious the more you think of it. My only reaction to these ideas is a certain sense of awe.

Someone mentioned this earlier - "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson is pretty much this thesis exactly. Progress comes from building on previous work, usually collaboratively.

Now, I think it's fair to say that there are "geniuses" and it's perhaps a little uncharitable to claim that we shouldn't look up to them at all - but there is certainly more than one dimension to progress.

This sort of determinism seems wrong. It implies that if you had a Monte Carlo simulation engine of the universe and ran it 1,000 times beginning at the 20th century through today, you would expect those iterations to look a lot like our world. Only with some of the names and people being different, but fundamentally, everything else would still have happened.

That seems unlikely, no?

Yeah, sort of. I'd say it's quite likely.

The thing about how engineering and the markets work - they are attracted towards local optimas. So I'd expect each iteration to e.g. have cars that are more-less like we know. I'd expect it to have soft drinks; maybe not Coca Cola, but something very similar and recognizable to us, etc.

Incremental, or low cost/risk? A more general concept. Because sometimes what seems non-incremental, is just a change in economics.

At a history of biology colloquium, a sociology of science person, was trying to fit a narrative of new perspectives unlocking previously unconsidered questions. And the pushback was, no, the dominant effect was the cost of various tools dropping by multiple orders of magnitude. Which changed previously intractably (and thus uninteresting) questions, into potentially fruitful ones (worth pursuing).

One of the many problems with patents, is non-obviousness being incorrectly assumed time-invariant. Granting multi-decade monopolies for "you did it this year, that's cute - everyone else was waiting until next year, when it would be easy", which doesn't promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Although it's true that there are many examples of multiple independent discoveries (supporting the zeitgeist theory of invention), this does not fully explain the nature of discovery and invention.

Consider that many of the examples, when examined carefully, fail to maintain the independence constraint. If the inventors were not in communication with each other but were consulting the same sources, or studying the same past failures (which was often) the case for independence becomes weaker. Nonetheless, one can still make the argument that since all the pieces were in place, that the inventor was less important. Three things stick a wrench in this: people who were truly ahead of their time, when there are many qualified yet with only a few succeeding and when there are outstandingly prolific individuals.

1) A notable example of someone ahead of their time is Hermann Grassmann, who toiled for many years in relative obscurity, quietly nursing a zoo of groundbreaking ideas. Gregor Mendel is another example. His discoveries took 30 more years to be independently rediscovered by 3 different individuals when the time was more ripe.

2) At each point in time, one can argue that many individuals met the criteria, from an intellectual and knowledge standpoint, to produce an invention yet only a handful do. There were plenty of people just as or even more intelligent than Einstein. Some even got very close to making the breakthroughs he did but none ever quite did. It seems genius individuals are able to grasp enough of a space to take steps that are locally suboptimal but end up escaping local optima for far better optima. There's a great deal of chance to this and it's not an issue of just out of the box thinking and high IQ (but sadly for the rest of us, it's likely still an innate quality).

3) It's difficult to look at the works of Gauss and Euler and not think there was something special about them. Genius individuals tend not to be one hit wonders and usually have something of an outsized effect on their field. While it's true that there is a rich get richer effect, the ability of geniuses to generate novel ideas and fields of investigation slightly outpaces their peers. And when advantages multiply, which is likely the case for productivity, these unique individuals end up dominating.

In the language of machine learning, geniuses seem able to sample more widely and are better at learning to learn. Even though it's likely that they're only a bit better at those things and they don't think qualitatively differently than the average person, it still ends up making a large amount of difference.

All in all, 2) impacts 3) which makes it so multiple independent discoveries can more readily occur. This doesn't mean the importance of environment can be discounted. Genius only appears under conditions of stability and sharing, the availability of gifted mentors and a rich set of freely shared and interacting ideas.

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