Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

For example, public education system doesn't particularly touch on social skills, etiquette, rulership/leadership, Machiavellianism, business, investing, property management, etc.

By definition no public school can be as good as anything Russell got. Russell had the privilege of his brother teaching him geometry and hence set him on his path to mathematical greatness. He came from a distinguished family. No public education can replicate the personal 1 to 1 knowledge transfer/education.

> None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious

Yes. It's why people like Russell, Darwin, Turing, etc had the time to work on non-industrious subjects. If darwin, russell or turing were industrious, nobody would be talking about them today.

Public education system was created firstly to produce obedient soldiers for the state and secondly to provide drones for factories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston

There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but Elon gets all the credit, he could still be one of them, I don't know enough about their process.

Maybe a few people in the biotech industry, I wouldn't know about them but the innovation there with crispr and mrna vaccines and other things seems quite crazy and cool

Its not that we don't have genius anymore; we simply built a new pantheon out of the geniuses of the day about 150 years ago and then haven't been keeping up with the work of canonizing new members.

Dale Carnegie and Elon Musk get the "demi-god" status, somehow; we know their successes are the work of many others but who but the most obsessed know those names?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

I know an actual genius (recognised by various organisations) and, after doing 5 years of academic life (post graduation), he ended up being a software developer in a mediocre software agency in a country with incredibly low rates for developers.

Public education is just another example where the resource limits that any public solution intrinsically have turn out to invalidate the most useful part of that idea. Sure, we don't have geniuses anymore, scientific research is in shambles, everyone hates school but I'm so grateful that my barista has a degree in political science (which I paid with my taxes).

At the same time, when something public is mainstream and paid by everyone by default via taxes, the private sector has a much harder time. It sucks having to pay for public school even if I don't use it and the lack of choice in private schooling in my country is annoying.

Tim Duncan, widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time, held a basketball for the first time as a freshman in highschool when hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool and he had to pick a new sport to play.

All of the pretty architecture that you're talking about was built when the legal handcuffs for doing it didn't exist.

Tl;dr - I get what you're saying but can't ignore the structure of what we've set up that encourages/enables it.

I was surprised by the relatively poor quality of the building. All the walls were covered with carpeting, but the carpeting was falling off in some places. Some of the light fixtures hung awkwardly slanted from their slots. The door knob (of the apartment) was very cheap and was already showing signs of wear.

Keep in mind, this was a new building, built for wealthy people.

Something feels broken about this culture, where even the rich cannot buy nice things any more.

If worthwhile knowledge is in a "fractal" search space maybe there's hope. Those kids can still have a childhood and discover something new by the time they're 30, something worthwhile.

Another problem with modern genius might be that there are plenty of geniuses, but the proximity of their deep-in-the-fractal landscape is so far from what can be recognized and acknowledged by gatekeepers of genius sainthood that their work never comes to light. There also are probably lots of geniuses doing outsized work at relatively menial jobs in places where nobody can see it, and their work is taken for granted.

But I would also guess that being recognized as a genius was easier in past times, especially for aristocrat family members. The same way music artists will never be as huge as the Beatles or Michael Jackson once were because of the long tail effect, we now are exposed to so many bright minds, and not way to pick out an Einstein amongst them.

In other words: We might have all the geniuses we expect statistically, but when everyone is special, no one is special.

Or Alexander Grothendieck, who when given at university a choice of 14 open problems to pick one to work on one over a period of several years, solved several within months. Again he had a mixed experience of early training, and worked independently at first. Of course, he later collaborated with many others.

Newton literally said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" because he acknowledged that his work built on that of others. Indeed, if he had communicated his results earlier, maybe he would have worked with Leibniz on the calculus.

While people do like to focus on a singular visionary - rather than a history of invention or scholarship - that does not mean that there were not extraordinary individuals in history. Yes, they also had to be in the right place and the right time. They also had to have the time (usually, enough money) and the connections.

You managed to pick two of the most alone geniuses in history. Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked. Einstein's miracle year was done completely outside academia and the only two other people in the Olympia Academy said they had nothing to do with it.

Didn't most of his discoveries come during a pandemic where he had to work alone from home without much contact with the outside world?

Viewing my 4th grade history of Newtown knowledge through your lens, I am questioning how much of his story was now marketing.

But to do have specific examples of how his accomplishments came from a collective?

Yet, completely dismissing the possibility of remarkable individuals having very oversized impacts on humanity and history is also extremely diminutive. Yes, they were usually also lucky to be at the right place, at the right time and being surrounded by the right people. But their individual actions/efforts were still crucial catalysts to actually put all of those things together. It would be just as weird to dismiss the impact of individuals in history or science as it is to focus too much on them

Isaac Newton is on the short list of candidates for the most intelligent person who ever lived. "Marketing" is ancillary to that fact, at best.

You can kind of see this in sports in the US. Sports are only lucrative for the top performers, and those lucky enough as well. This leaves a wide swath of very high level athletes available to parents willing to pay. This also extends to competitive public funded sports depending on where you're at.

On one hand, it would be amazing for gifted tutors to be widely available, on the other- the situations that would create such availability are probably not going to be good. I'm just thankful that my career will hopefully afford me the ability to be a single income household, with the time and resources to tutor my own child.

They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job.

Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral.

Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.

If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)

I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.

My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.

Impossible to prove after the fact considering that in order for their discovery to be recognized, it has to be understood and somewhat built upon the ideas that are accepted today.

Note also that some of the people were "tutored" by their parents; homeschooling today could fill the same role.

And,

> So, where are all the Einsteins?

> The answer must lie in education somewhere.

That's a really glib dismissal of all other possible reasons, with almost no factual reason (or even argument) behind it.

Third, there's the "Where's Todays Beethoven" chart, "Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."

Note: "with the education and access to contribute to these fields". If you increase the denominator by many orders of magnitude, no matter what the numerator is the result will probably go down.

"Tutoring, one-on-one instruction, dramatically improves student’s abilities and scores. In education research this effect is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2-sigma problem” because in the 1980s the researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students '. . performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.”'"

The 2-sigma problem points to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem which has,

"Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"."

The "mastery learning" method "is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning), so there's that. (I'm a cynic; "my way produces much better results" with no further data tends to inspire distrust.)

"Consider the easy nature by which Darwin, at the age of only 16 and already in university,..."

And what proportion of university students were younger than 17 in the 1820s?

"Indeed, it’s remarkable how common aristocratic tutors were. Essentially universal."

One might suspect that where and when there is no more modern educational system that tutors would, in fact, be the only way to get any education.

One further note: the US pays roughly $15,000 per student per year as it is. Are you willing to work a full-time job for less than $30,000 per year? How's your Greek and Latin? Math? Science? Literature? (Assumptions: 2 half-time students per tutor. Some overhead will be necessary for the tutors.)

The more specialized we get the less likely everyone will learn about it in general education and thus the inventor/genius will be less renowned. That doesn't make it less of a breakthrough or less genius. The article doesn't address this at all.

Further, there are many counter examples of genius that wasn't privately/aristocraticly tutored like Richard Feynman. For his point to stand there must be more privately tutored geniuses than non-privately tutored geniuses and today less intensive private tutoring. He doesn't have data for either of these prerequisites.

I found the whole article and reasoning quite lacking right from the premise.

We Live In A Society™

It is dangerous and false to say that just having 1:1 interactions and just igniting interest would make everything better. In your case, likely your kids are fairly gifted and even downgraded teaching won't matter. But that is not the case with everyone. Most people should also not be looking for raising next Einstein but rather a well rounded and functioning individual.

It became an even more pressing need once women entered the workforce in full.

This became very evident during the pandemic, when so many parents suddenly had their kids at home during working hours.

If you can afford home schooling, awesome. Most can't.

This is far from a foregone conclusion and could lead to some bad consequences if, for example, we made school run five times as fast for everyone without checking to see which students would keep up with it.

Surely, the state sponsored education is also a formation but what I found was that teachers are people too(from all kind of backgrounds and ideologies). Therefore, you don't actually get your kids grown by the design of the government. The teachers do the magic.

In proper countries, where education is primarily education and not propaganda, they tend to appreciate that different kids have different learning pace and needs and you often have options for appropriate education.

There's this contrarian singer who famously homeschooled his daughter, later said it was a huge mistake to do it because she grew up to be too naive to function in the society. Who is going to break the heart of your kids? How they are going to learn to cope with it? Who is going to lie to them and how they are going to learn how to spot a lie? Who is going to be unfair to your kids and how they are going to learn to make it right?

I can't see homeschooling my kids unless the country I'm in turns into a crazy dictatorship with propaganda as a primary objective in the school.

I confirm that I found school very slow when I first went there, although I am happy I did since being at home with my mom all day long was becoming seriously boring (she decided to stay home when I was 1yo).

Getting used to middle school sure was a challenge but the academic part was fine. I did end up with a master in engineering.

The social side was more uncertain although, thinking back about it, I cannot decide whether I really was a weirdo or if that was just puberty kicking in. I certainly wasn't the most popular but I did have friends. I did sports and played music in a rock band (crappy but fun!), so...

Now, if I have a kid I am not sure I would homeschool her. Kids are hardwired to learn by they do need to be around an adult to learn by mimicking. It would require a serious lifestyle change.

I'd certainly be very interested in alternative schooling such as Montessori and the like though.

Don't misunderstand me: public school is great. It brings affordable education to everyone. It takes children off the streets. It makes society better.

But to be available to everyone, it is designed to be cheap and "industrial". Same content to everyone on the same rhythm, with very little variation. It is not difficult to understand that it cannot be optimum to every child.

I’d be curious to hear the experience of those who homeschool as parents as well as those who were homeschooled as children.

To me, it seems like the aristocratic tutoring gave those people the opportunity to work outside the system.

Some kids with use those new resources to create amazing things, and some without any true purpose at all. That was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow.

There is no reason to believe that humans have fundamentally changed in few hundreds years. So yesterdays kid - deep down - really are the same as todays kid, the environment changed but they didn't.

> “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.” Socrates - talking about Plato's generation

It's the zero barrier access to porn.

Some other things from the past which were argued to inevitably corrupt the younger generation from the "good old days:"

* Reading silently * Ballroom Dancing * Chess

As someone who leveraged playing and thinking about video games and emerging technology into a $300/hr consulting fee and being offered a "create your own role doing whatever you want" at a multi-billion dollar corporation after having been subpoenaed as an expert by the US government, advised cabinet nominees, consulted for about 10% of the Fortune 500s, and had CEOs flying in their oversees franchise management teams to hear me speak -- all before I was 30, I can acknowledge it was very corrupting indeed.

I left that career not just to play video games, but because I realized there's diminishing returns on personal wealth but inversely increased value on personal time as the available supply runs out.

If more kids these days figure that out earlier on, the world will be better off for it, not worse.

Besides, I'm less concerned with the loss of potential in kids these days not becoming wage slaves for maximum productivity and far more regretful at the lost opportunities for our ancestors born without the right anatomy, skin color, or wealth to pursue their own potential.

Even for those that did - given how much more interesting Da Vinci's notebooks were than his portraits - how much more interesting a world would we be living in were he and other geniuses to have not needed to finance their unfettered curiosity and interests with bullshit time wasting catering to the petty interests of the rich?

We only have so many hours in life, and in my experience much of society spends far more time at far less value on things like "stay at your desk until 6pm" than "solve this puzzle in this dungeon."

Video games are the least of the things holding back humanity.

The genius of prehistoric times would have been to discover better ideas to survive or hunt.

The genius of the previous generation was to improve computation. We are here being distracted by TikTok precisely because of that.

The genius of the next generation would be something else important to the current time.

No matter what the context of the time is, genius will emerge.

The criteria of what genetics, skills and training you need to be a genius will definitely change to suit the time. Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Darwin are no longer going to be the geniuses of today the same way they wouldn't be the geniuses of the previous generation.

TLDR; Genius is an emergent phenomenon that is rooted in the valuable contemporary problems that need to be solved.

I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from now will think the same about today's time. That's because hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with.

Add to that the ever increasing time pressure and funding problem. Remember, Einstein was a patent clerk. Most people simply cant afford to invest their time into allowing themselves to think freely. I am confident we could get the genius rate back up with something like UBI.

The story is "Sucker Bait":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Bait

Some things, like relativity are simple mind-blowing concepts, but other very important aspects of physics can feel like no one is doing such groundbreaking work because you're actually looking at a modern interpretation of something which has been condensed over a century e.g. a lot of papers from the early 1900s are very long winded, so the utterly beautiful ways they may be now treated (Noethers theorem may be an example) are not representative of how they burst onto the scene 100 years ago.

Maybe lack of a world war is a reason.

Maybe intellectual property law becoming common.

Maybe increasing awareness of the competing billions around us makes for different impulses IE Bezos-aspirations instead of scientific progress. If you have enough money, you can BUY the idea/smart person.

Maybe the glorification of sports/fashion/music/movies/games rather than science/knowledge.

Archimedes' buoyancy, newtons laws, etc. are all something that we know and learn about in elementary and high schools, and we remember their names, because they were either first to figure it out or more realistically, first to put it in writing in a way, that we can now use in "math/physics". Since the elementary to highschool curriculum is limited, we learn only "basic" stuff there, and most of that was attributed to historical physicists/mathematicians.

Now, in modern times, it is hard to invent anything "by yourself" (you need to work at a college and/or institute, to get access to proper equipment and mentors), and even when you discover something new, the discovery is so far away from "basic" math/physics, that the only ones who read the article and understand it are other mathetmaticians and physicists, kids will never learn about you, because the science is too advanced, and even when something attracts the mainstream media (to make you famous), the media then published that "scientists prove good exists" (the famous "god particle"), or worse.

I think this is especially true in the sphere of art & culture. The enormous variety of work being churned out by artists and creators-- combined with such easy access-- means that something truly groundbreaking won't be seen by as many people because those other people are drawn to other content, equally incredible, that appeals more to their own interests, making it much harder for something to break through siloed interests to the zeitgeist.

This is a tautology. At every point in history, all the big discoveries had already been made.

Take optimization using Monte Carlo. What do you prefer, ten little innocuous steps or a single bold large leap over a barrier?

I dont see human endeavor as linear. I see it as an infinite dimensional space that we are somewhat directed to explore. In this PoV little steps get me nowhere.

Also, consider that ten little scientists will quickly dominate the institution and crowd out the genius who they cannot understand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

The last change to the standard model was the prediction of the top quark in 1977. That was almost half a century ago.

You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single contributor is capable of.

Consider, if you will, a perspective of the book Lord of the Flies, in which a group of school children who are stranded on an island descend into chaos and violence. At the end, the children are saved by a passing ship and it’s crew.

Presumably, had the ship captain been there from the start things would have turned out very differently.

Is an aristocratic education analogous to hiring a sea captain?

In that vein, is sea captain an even better fit than educator?

To put some flavour back into the story from before, viewed as a group, as the group got older, the trials and tribulations of the world were exasperated by the inexperience or lack of wisdom of the group. And so had the sea captain been there, they would have acted as guidance, direction, wisdom type roles. For roughly all of life’s things.

The tutor would go on the grand tour and would live with them. They would often have multiple for different areas of interest, …

Ok so flip it around and now we’ve got a single child instead of a group and a group of sea captains instead of 1.

A group of sea captains of different specialities would approach total cultural transfer as the group got larger. For a definition of cultural that would be analogous to tesuji or clever reactions to the things that happen.

Therefore it goes beyond “teacher” in a modern school way.

So is it also therefore that the failure to produce geniuses is the difference between school in our context and life. Their context was closer or the difference smaller.

I’m going far field into blindly assuming that book learning, what we might call academic knowledge mostly remains, some might argue watered down or perverted but they at least still exist, where as non academic things, like you’d discover on the grand tour with Jeremy Clarkson have completely vanished.

If it could be shown that a focus on that version of academics has increased over time it might even be possible to say that more academia produces less geniuses, reword that into makes people dumber, smudge it a bit and: academics makes people dumber. Which would be quite funny.

End.

Ps. There would maybe be interesting things to find by looking specifically as the types of tutors and their life curriculum. Marcus Aurelius lists maaaaaaany things iirc. “and to Epiclitus I owe…” parts.

Ps. People argue about, paraphrased by me, life skills lacking in home schooling being problem with this but maybe I’ve shown that’s not necessity correct.

Ps. Similar themes to my preceding comment but I feel like it’s better. More of a statement than the beginning of a dialogue. More focussed and fleshed out even if relying on shorthand for some of it. Otoh I’ve introduced more of my own things and dropped threads for the sake of that focus. Still, I’ll think I’ll mark it positive progress. Good bot.

Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.

Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress.

This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.

Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference

We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.

We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.

Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.

And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet.

What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.

> b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future

I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.

The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large.

If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past.

Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us?

The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality?

Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest?

Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end?

We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish).

It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.

Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".

There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to.

That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that?

I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level.

Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then.

Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.

We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!

>... all the questions of the 90s are now solved.

This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.

>Ad tech? Check.

Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.

it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design..

We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old

Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.

> that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing

Hopper I agree with (also Frances Allen!), Shelley is an obvious entry, but I've never really been sold on Lovelace as a genius versus merely interesting.

If you had a CD of 20 songs, they were pretty great. If you got a box set ... oh man you hit A LOT of stinkers.

Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enough singer that one can record an impeccable vocal in one take apparently not a prerequisite for a recording contract?

Edit: To bring this back around to the topic of the article, I think the discussion of autotuned vocals might hint at an answer to the question about individual geniuses: it's not as important for individuals to have extraordinary abilities when technology can help us all do so much. I admit I was being a curmudgeon above; I know that autotune can be used to subtly improve mediocre vocals, in addition to enabling the obviously artificial sound that many of us consider crap.

Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.

    Ponder that! Spengler began writing Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years deceased. But Spengler could state, with the full expectation that his audience would not question him, that these men belonged in global pantheon of humanity’s greatest figures.

I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or other means, then you fade into the background.

Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at social interaction and can't be a 'Youtuber' or 'influencer' so easily.

In the past, it was obvious who was genius, even a few years after people died. Now, it's less clear.

because it's simply extremely cheap to create stuff. so we have a glut of stuff.

because nowadays everyone can buy an instrument and take a few classes, and put it on youtube. and since there's enormous demand for novelty, and there's a lot of styles, niches that producers/creators can fill, quality isn't really a singular thing anymore.

> just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics."

well, that's .. true, but also there's no classics anymore. there's a gamut of things. hundreds of years ago we had a few hundred/thousand extremely talented people who got into arts because they were talented, they visited each other in person to learn from each other over months and years. it was very very very homogeneous in time and space (and it was apparent who's the amazing real boss of that level/period/era) compared to today's hyperfast superglobal heterogeneous all-in content-bonanza, where it's impossible to consume all of it, impossible to filter it, impossible to comprehend/contrast/compare all of it to itself.

Sure there was no point in comparing Van Gogh to Tchaikovsky even then - but there was room for two, now it got even more impossibler not less since there are so many new forms/genres/styles and a lot more amazing feats of creation, and more new talents each day, so relatively there's even less room (less time, less space) to fit the contemporary greats.

My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow.

School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.

Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 than it is now.

Not saying that general relativity is well understood by general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people could not wrap their heads around.

Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the level where mediocre people were before.

We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much smarter than average Joe 100 years ago.

And we should strive to move forward with that.

Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.

So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.

If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?

Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.

I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.

this is not what this all talk is about

Einstein is an (prime) example of conceptualist - man, who introduced revolutionary concept into our understanding of the world.

There are a lot of Nobel laureates who are (hard) problem solvers.

But in physics looks like we truly need a conceptualist, new Einstein so to speak

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.

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?