Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?
they're working on getting you to click on an ad
I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler
I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.
I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.
It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
"The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ?
More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones...
(Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?)
Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.
No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.
They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.
They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.
They're working on fusion.
And so on and so forth.
Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
[1] This is up 1.1% year-over-year, and only up 6.5% p.a. over the last three years - not a pandemic-driven bubble. Source is https://www.redfin.com/county/733/IL/DuPage-County/housing-m...
Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.