The Problem of Excess Genius (1997)

Genius minds are rare but not that rare. Everyone is much better educated than they used to be too. So a lack of geniuses can't have anything to do with the people who get labelled as such. Similarly, as the article points out, genius does not appear to be a result of economic forces. Therefore I imagine 'geniuses' are made when the cultural conditions are ripe for people to sit around listening to each other and trying to improve. That is, the culture of the listeners than the nature of the speaker.

It is conspicuous how little time human society puts in to identifying and then learning from its most capable members. The academy is the big exception, but people generally only get exposure to academic thinking when they are young and in a poor position to influence the world.

I think, perceived genius is a matter of scarcity in numbers.

Before, the society was divided clearly into very rich elites and peasants. The majority did not have access to anything that propelled genius.

And then comes one or two who are far removed from the median intellect/skills and are considered "genius".

Nowadays, with the median intellect/skills improving a lot, the very highly skilled people are not so much removed from the median. So, the numbers are less extreme.

There is also the matter of specialization. Before, "skills" were perceived in building and creating things that everyone understands. Like a painting, a sculpture. But a complex Distributed System maintaining 3B MAUs is not impressive to people simply because they don't understand. People can easily appreciate the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids but not the schematics of a Mars lander.

Give people Shakespeare, and they can appreciate in 2 years of relaxed training. Give them the CRISPR paper, and they are clueless.

So,

1. People with high intellect or skills were scarce in stark contrast to the majority. So they were called geniuses. There are more geniuses now.

2. We have advanced as a civilization and the focus is now on things that are harder to appreciate because of lack of understanding. Think the Taj in moonlight versus a Mars rover.

The "problem" seems to be less one of "genius" and more one of individuals whose output was regarded as notable by historians and arts connoisseurs in subsequent centuries.

So the clustering effect is more or less expected. Shakespeare was incredibly culturally influential, and thus his most admired contemporaries in the arts are studied and admired a lot more than they otherwise would have been (still their plays are rarely performed and of their poetry of little influence on modern writers), and subsequent generations of creatives not so much (although it's hard to discount the talent and influence of the likes of Milton and Swift...)

Certainly the Elizabethan era in which theatres were profitable centres for public consumption of art was better for playwrights than eras in which they were banned, and better for remembered playwrights than eras in which performance art was not written down and generally performed to small audiences, but it seems odd to call out a handful of admired wordsmiths as a remarkable period of "genius" in the history of a country which subsequently invented much of modern science, conquered the majority of the world and launched the Industrial Revolution, and has literally hundreds of influential musicians, authors and television writers in the last century alone. If you tried to plot something as subjective as British "genius" on a graph, it would look much more like a rising trend than small clusters, and correlate very well with rises in access to education and funding, and giants' shoulders to stand on.

Some of the author's other theories seem tendentious too. There was a lot of private tutoring for the elites in Elizabethan England (and also pre and post Elizabethan England) but Shakespeare and Marlow and Jonson and Spenser went to public grammar schools, where they are thought to have studied rigid curricula in Latin in formal settings with lots of classmates (with notably different levels of acquired knowledge of the classics at the end), just like the upper middle class in subsequent centuries. That seems further from 'individualist' education than modern schooling. But obviously much better than no education, and more geared towards writing plays than a scientific education.

> The most important question we can ask of historians is “Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?”

Why is this an important question? The reason the Nile river valley was so productive was because of the predictable annual flooding that layered fertile silt on the ground. You didn't have to be a genius to realize life there would be pretty sweet.

I know the Cult of the Great Man is strong on HN, but lol. What is this crap?

But I think there are more and more problems that lies in how people are being less and less creative and more mediocre nowadays.

Too much attention grabbing stuff such as social media and electronic entertainment (television, eSports, gaming consoles, and arcade games) has hindered our ways of thinking.

We are less likely to be boring in this age. Geniuses are killed because we don't dream and hope for something anymore.

We measure genius by acts of genius. This requires such an act be possible.

e.g. Kepler needed Tycho's observational data; Einstein needed measurements showing the speed of light was constant in many directions.

Conclusion:

> The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made. It surprises me that essentially no scholarly effort has been directed towards it. I warmly solicit any suggestions from readers that may help me to clarify my own confusion and uncertainty regarding this.

Excess tends to have a negative connotation, but not as used in the article. It also mentions that "the great minds in each of these societies tended to hang out together" which resonates as true based on reading biographies from accomplished philosophers. I'm curious to read your thoughts:

I think the assumption of genius is a false one, but I admit I might be wrong about that. I'm not saying there aren't differences between individuals in their cognitive or creative abilities, but I don't think there are outliers in the way the term implies, and also believe that progress continues in a much different, more cumulative way involving many more people than a standard narrative suggests.

There was an article I read several years ago that I've tried to find since with no success that made the argument the notion of genius is a sort of secular replacement for or parallel to the saint concept. I thought it was apt.

I think the idea of genius is a bit dangerous, not only because it robs others of credit, but it sets up unrealistic expectations about how to make progress in society. I think it lays a certain kind of societal bait too, in that the arguments for tyrants and geniuses are probably two sides of the same coin.

Having said all that, I think the underlying topic of the essay — whether some time periods are characterized by more progress than others, and if so, what makes that happen, is probably worthwhile or important to discuss. It's extremely difficult though, as basic definitions are murkier than they seem and there's little in the way of hard quantitative or other empirical data to make arguments from.

I am thinking about parallels with software development and whole "agile coaching" industry. Problem is that elite software dev teams happen by accident you cannot make them. Clustering of geniuses might seem like it could not be random but so is throwing tails 50x in a row which is perfectly valid random outcome which author don't want to admit and thinks random outcomes don't have clusters.

It is cool to do the analysis but I do not agree that it somehow is important question to spend too much time on it because there is no realistic solution that we can mechanistically apply to produce genius clusters. Just like mechanistically applied agile creates more problems than solves and is not delivering "elite teams" but mostly is used to push underachievers into worse problems where overachievers simply hop jobs for better pay.

I read something recently that claimed that most of the European geniuses of the 1900-1940s had tutors, fitting in with one of the article's observations.

There are interesting analogies to some current developments in AI to be made:

- the Internet and especially things like Twitter makes "clustering" way easier for geniuses and people that (want to) advance human knowledge; but this only works for people and areas where the "incumbents " are used to it- very visible in current (OS) LLM Research, which is mind-blowing in my opinion. This is different to older methods of Sharing Research (journals and conferences) which were way slower an more lossy (only successes shared).

- If we reach AGI, one could describe it as an (almost, only Ressource-constrained) infinite cluster of geniuses ..

If we believe in some geographical correlation (due to exposure to new ideas, sharing interests, or anything else that's not genetic + a minimal threshold population being necessary), a prediction would be that online communities should facilitate the emergence of a "long lasting remarkable excess of creative accomplishment" by removing the geographical constraints.

Given what I see all around me (HN, reddit etc) I'd tend to believe that: free software has changed the world. Wikipedia offers free knowledge to anyone who wants it. Libgen offers all the scientific knowledge and book. Reddit and the likes offer to the fat-tail places to congregate and exchange ideas.

I'm curious what we'll create in the next 25 years!

It may not have been possible to make that prediction in 1997: I don't think they had any social network at the time, and online forums must have been reserved to a tiny fraction of the population.

At the time this was written, maybe a few rare people like Kurzweil foresaw what we'd have by now: his prediction of AGI around 2030 seems very plausible to me, but it seems to have been met with disbelief when it was made - and not just this one, but his predictions in general.

On Wikipedia I see: "Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate" but that in October 2010, Kurzweil claimed his accuracy rate comes to 86%.

I believe "genius" is largely misunderstood, the being that one labels as "a genius" is really "just like most people" with two exceptional aspects: 1) they are very very good at their specialization, and 2) (this is the real reason) they are phenomenal communicators within their field, to the degree the majority of the members of their field appear inarticulate when compared to 'the genius' and their ability to explain, to convey complex, nuanced aspects of their specialization. The genius is a "genius communicator" more than they are a genius at their specialization, but due to that exceptional communication skill the become an attractive magnet for similar specialization gifted people like themselves whom are not as articulate, and together they achieve the advances - but only the genius communicator gets recognized because they are the catalysis, and those critical other collaborators don't have the social language skills to gain recognition.

Having read the essay, I'll take a crack at a causal hypothesis: "geniuses" in the sense that the author seems to be using the term[1] cluster in periods and settings where:

1) their societies were "recently" exposed to existential threats (eg. Persian invasion for Athens, Spanish Armada for England, etc.), that were 2) mastered (Battle of Marathon, defeat of the Armada) 3) but left underlying problems unresolved

So, there would be incredibly motivation for these societies to try and address these problems, and perhaps some additional measure of confidence that problems could be mastered. And, in periods of existential crisis, normal patterns start to break down and new modes of expression and organization, new perspectives, etc. can start to manifest.

It's also interesting that the essay calls out that

> all three’s florescences were ended by right-wing revolutions (the Rule of the 400, Savonarola, and Cromwell).

as these responses are often prompted by some perception of chaos/lack of 'order' in a society - a breaking down of accustomed patterns.

So, in the spirit of the goal as stated by the essay:

> We want explanations that make sense, and which can be corroborated by specific historical research.

I would say: look for genius where there is also social turmoil and crisis - where there was a belief within a society that it may not be able to survive the problems that faced it, or where it experienced such rapid change that within a generation or two the previous assumptions about how the society worked and what was and wasn't acceptable/normal came into question - and you might find geniuses there.

And it would probably be a good idea to have a concrete, sensible definition of genius that we all agree on.

At Caltech, I had the opportunity to get to know a real genius or two. They are for real.

Hal Finney was one. There were no discernible environmental or cultural factors at play. He was just off the charts.

Roots of progress puts it nicely: A great leap forward needs supporting factors, therefore it does not appear every year [1]. I think: If a great leap forward appears, famous people may retrospectively considered to be geniuses. A change of society/industry and and admiration for geniuses accompany one another.

[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revoluti...

Isn't the problem the audience? We use art as entertainment that has to appeal to a big audience. The education of artists is so good that a genius cannot stand out by their skills. Among all the Tiktok and Yt videos, how do we identify the deep innovations? Only in hindsight, when our culture has changed, will we identify the ones who initiated it.

It would take something like HN for cultured people to identify the geniuses of our times and to give them a platform.

People need tools, even geniuses. Tools can be completely intellectual, e.g. complex numbers.

Every time a new tool is invented, we see boosts in productivity.

The Hungarian ”Martians” are another cluster of geniuses, not mentioned in the article

Give someone capital and see what they can imagine and build.

I’d guess most so-called geniuses are stuck working some dead end job without the backing / connections to do something big.

Nowadays, it seems that "genius" advancements are increasingely narrow in their fields, "genius" breakthroughs require increasing amount of financial resoures and require much more knowledge of the current state.

And problem is further increased by businessmen investing into marketing to appear as geniuses to inflate their companies valuation - in my mind that's Elon Musk.

So we are no longer seeing "genuine" excess genius.

Genuis seems sporadic and unrepeatable, of more interest to me is scenius...

The issue is creating and maintaining critical mass for the superorganism of people, opportunity, money, and ideas. One such example is Stanford University and Palo Alto, arguably a mini "Venice" of our times by the deliberate sowing of the seeds by the Stanford family post 1884. Interestingly, A. Leland Stanford became something of a socialist in his later years. Jane Stanford either crossed paths with a sociopath or was detested enough to be murdered by one of her employees in Hawaii after a failed attempt in California.