One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of these "bullshit jobs" are about filling the employee's time with meaningless tasks that don't offer opportunities for distractions, not even culturally useful distractions like math or science or art.
Maybe the next Einstein is currently being asked to at least wiggle their mouse every 30 seconds to pretend they are busy on corporate spreadsheets, spend at least four hours in meetings each day, and aren't even allowed pencils and papers to sketch on at their desk because it is a PII or other corporate secrets exfiltration risk. Good luck to them stringing together a coherent thought, much less a working theory to revolutionize physics.
I was a USPTO patent examiner twice before. The job today is not as you describe, and I doubt it was as you describe in Einstein's day either.
By Einstein's own words, being a patent examiner was a lot of work [1, pp. 102--103]:
> he complained about the workload: "I have a frightful lot of work. Eight hours at the office each day and at least one private lesson, and then I have my scientific work." [26] Once he had settled in, though, he found his forty-eight hours per week at the office tolerable. When his friend Habicht was not entirely satisfied with the school service, in which he had landed after completing his studies, Einstein suggested that one day he would smuggle Habicht in among the "patent slaves" and tried to commend the work to him by observing that "along with the eight hours of work there are also eight hours of fun in the day, and then there is also Sunday." [27]
As a former patent examiner, I know precisely what he meant when he described himself as a "patent slave". I basically had a quota to meet, and it was quite challenging to do and meet any reasonable quality standard.
You can find sources like [2, p. 4] that indicate he did do some research at the Swiss patent office, but it's a secondary source:
> Rudolf Kayser, Einstein's son-in-law writes in his biography on Einstein, "He soon discovered that he could find time to devote to his own scientific studies if he did his work in less time. But discretion was necessary, for though authorities may find slow work satisfactory, the saving of time for personal pursuits is officially forbidden. Worried, Einstein saw to it that the small sheets of paper on which he wrote and figured vanished into his desk-drawer as soon as he heard footsteps approaching behind his door.
I don't doubt that he did some research there, but it probably wasn't much judging by Einstein's own words and my own time as a patent examiner over 100 years later.
[1] A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein: a biography. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1997.
Thank you. A comment that puts some half-invented "factual" opinion into perspective with genuine and sourced details is always appreciated. If anything, most people today have more leisure time than was remotely the case in Einstein's youth, but they often fill it with a complete surfeit of blandly trivial distractions, and in some cases, evade responsibility for this detail by claiming that they're somehow suffering excessively under corporate wage slavery.
Second view might be that there is lot more distractions.
Every computer worker have internet and probably phone. With all of the social media, and endless ways to waste time. So even if Einstein would have time, they would be occupied on wasting their time on HN or something else. You might have been able to bring a book or day's newspaper to office, but after you are done with that?
> Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
> He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.
> And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
>> we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive?
Aren't you describing most office jobs? Don't a lot of people in our industry say they do "1, maybe 2 hours of real work each day"?
> Don't a lot of people in our industry say they do "1, maybe 2 hours of real work each day"?
Yes, but that doesn't mean people have 6 or 7 hours of free time every day. It means that 6 or 7 hours of the day is absorbed by work activities that don't contribute to the actual work.
Not from my understanding, it's very rare for peripheral activities to take up multiple hours every day on average, in a well oiled team at least.
Of course there will always be Dilbert esque situations but the vast majority of actual or potential super-geniuses I imagine would have at least a few hours of actual free time per day, on average.
It's true that if you just add up the minutes, then peripheral activities don't take up the majority of the time. But you also have to take into account the cost of context-switching. An hour-long meeting costs more than an hour of time because you have to ramp back up to speed afterwards. On average, this takes about 20 minutes. When you add in all of the distractions through the day -- meetings, people talking in the next cube, people stopping by for a "quick question", that sort of thing, that ramping-up can absorb a ton of time.
Very well said. Im currently (most of time actually) have a great job, where I have quite a lot of free time (DC admin). Thanks to this, some of that time is spent on R&D of my own tools. And this creates nicely feedback loop. I have better tools, so I do my job better and more effective, creating more free time that I can spend on R&D.
Maybe what worked for the real Einstein isn’t working for the next one, geniuses exist and may be more common than we think, but opportunity, necessity, and nurture perhaps steered them from even realizing their own potential, or even knowing they have it.
“ideas are getting harder to find” seems especially unconvincing outside the hard sciences in domains like music or fiction.
Odd choice for the article to focus on Einstein when this is definitely the case in physics. The lowest hanging fruit has been picked, and reaching the higher branches requires facilities with large collaborations to support them. There are still important ideas coming from individuals, but for comparison the discovery of the photoelectric effect or Rutherford scattering or electromagnetic induction are all things that can be worked out by a single person with a tabletop setup.
It used to be possible for a single person to have all of Physics in their head. Now the amount of information is so large that it's just physically impossible. Physics isn't being created, but uncovered.
> Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengler, the original chronicler of the decline of genius back in 1914, to point out our current genius downturn.
The author has a recency bias. I think the real burst of genius was from 800BC to 300BC.
During that time you had Homer, Archimedes, Pythagorus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Confucius, Zeno of Citium. You had the Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita. Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism all have their foundational writings/teachings written down during this time.
Way more people have read and studied and learned from Homer than from Tolstoy. Aristotle is way more influential than William James.
Or maybe, different historical periods produce different types of genius, and many times it is apparent only looking backwards in time who the geniuses were and what was their true impact.
Axial Age (also Axis Age,[1] from the German Achsenzeit) is a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.
I dont really believe this crazy tutoring theory AT ALL. What has changed is that education has become widespread. It is well known that standardized education destroys creativity. Ramanujen was largely self-taught! The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot!
If you were born in Oppenheimer's era you gained a huge advantage of parents wealthy enough to pay for undergrad school (perhaps a paltry 5%) AND graduate school (perhaps 0.01%) so the gulf in education and knowledge between these wealthy educrats and the average man on the street was far more enormous, and these educrats had a much bigger inside track to discovery ...
So to summarize, a genius is measured by their intellectual height above the AVERAGE person and the average has increased a lot. At the same time, standardized education is killing diversity and creativity...
>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.
I think the improvement of pitchers has been understated. 30 years ago, a guy that could throw a 100 mph pitch 1 or 2 times a game was the Ace of the starting rotation. Now, pitchers that can throw 100+ come out of the bullpen in relief because just heat isn't enough.
Something like track and field sports might be best objective comparison. Excluding sports where equipment has been changed. The shoes might have gotten somewhat better, but still on top level it seems we have quite narrow band which is above previous record holders.
Not crazy at all. Even the most cursory application of individual tutoring in today's mass education settings comes with a 2-sigma disparity in outcomes compared to ordinary teaching. And that's disregarding everything else that might have been different about these elite tutoring practices - including, yes, a less standard and more creative education, compared to the modern focus on one-size-fits-all.
I think you've missed his point here. What he was saying is that the purpose of college is only partly to give an education. The main thing college gets you is credentials and socialization. If what you want is just a good, broad education and you don't care about those other things, then the library is provides that to you.
In any public library (in the US, anyway), you can check out books from every library that is part of the inter-library loan service. This include all (I think) other public libraries as well as a healthy number of college libraries. You're not even limited to books!
Have a chat with your local librarian. You might be pleasantly surprised at how deep that resource goes.
I'm aware of that. Nonetheless, I can say definitively that the South Central Library System of Wisconsin (which includes Madison) does not include the University of Wisconsin libraries, and the holdings of the latter are vastly superior, at least in terms of academic-related material. I've not been pleasantly surprised.
> Maybe we don’t make Einsteins anymore because we don’t make Max Talmuds anymore.
I think the influence of Max Talmud on Albert Einstein is overstated here. It seems that Einstein pushed himself rather than getting pushed by Talmud. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein "Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. He began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry when he was twelve; he made such rapid progress that he discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday. A family tutor, Max Talmud, said that only a short time after he had given the twelve year old Einstein a geometry textbook, the boy "had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics ... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow."
> Stradivari violins, hand-crafted by members of the Italian Stradivari family, are legendarily considered to have a superior and unique sound compared to violins made with even the most modern techniques.
I read somewhere that Stradivarius aren't better than modern violins in double blind studies, so this 'point' does a disservice to the author and shows that it's quite difficult to differentiate between 'it was better before' and real 'retrogress'..
"This study compares Stradivari and new violins principally from the listener’s perspective. Projection and preference are taken as the broadest criteria by which listeners might meaningfully separate violins in a hall. Which violins are heard better, and which are preferred? Also explored is the relationship between evaluations made by listeners and those made by players. Two separate experiments were conducted: one in the suburbs of Paris and the other in New York City. In Paris, violins were played with and without an orchestra by blindfolded soloists behind an acoustically transparent screen. The same was done in New York but without an orchestra.
The results are unambiguous: listeners found that new violins projected significantly better than those by Stradivari. Moreover, listeners preferred new violins over old by a significant margin. Although the listeners came from various professional backgrounds (they included musicians, violin makers, and acousticians), very similar results were obtained from all backgrounds.
We find a strong correlation between projection with and without an orchestra. This correlation seems fortunate for both players and researchers, in that an orchestra is evidently not required to meaningfully test projection."
[...]
"Note that this study relied on soloists, whose primary need is to be heard over an ensemble. The vast majority of violinists, however, are required to blend into ensembles. Research is needed to clarify the relationship between projection and “blendability.” Less projecting violins could have the advantage in this regard."
Second issue might be funding of research. Where new ideas aren't getting funding.
On other hand this likely leads to lot less waste and as society we are already tight on money as things get more expensive. So we cannot just waste it to any random idea or apparent crank... Or pseudoscience...
Bear with me and wait til the end. There is a point.
I'm autistic, and of the scary smart variety. In my life, I've only met a handful of people who are smarter than I am. Not a brag, just a fact. After all, someone has to be on the far edge of the bell curve.
I know that I could have done incredible things if my life had gone differently. I spend most of my free time thinking about quantum physics and cosmology and the nature of reality. These things make sense to me on a very deep level. I don't think I'd produce a breakthrough on the scale of relativity, but I know I have something to contribute.
I say could have because life has not been kind to me. I grew up poor in a poor small town. School was hard, to put it lightly. The US education system is/was a one size fits all thing, and you suffer the consequences if you don't fit. I was there to learn, but I couldn't get material fast enough. If I tried to get ahead, I was beaten back down. No one ever tried to actually help or understand me. No one, not even my parents.
I couldn't get through college for similar reasons. I tried three times but I could never get any value out of it, it was just a waste of my time.
Because I grew up poor and I don't have a degree, I did not have many opportunities. Until very recently, my life has simply been grinding away at whatever meaningless job kept me from starving.
Being beaten down by the system over and over, and being a wage slave does not leave much time or motivation for independent study. The notion of even having enough free time to work out something like relativity has been an absurd fantasy my whole life.
All in all, life has been lonely and traumatizing. The isolation of not having an intellectual peer is really profound, and it's taboo to even talk about. The moment you say you're smarter than the average bear, people come crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how wrong you are. I've heard many anecdotes from people like me who have hidden their true talent their entire life. I wanted so desperately to fit in, to find a peer group, to not be so utterly alone. I hid my talents even from myself. I built walls so high that even decades later I still don't know what I'm really capable of. I've never explored the full extent of my abilities.
I'm no Einstein, but if someone like me has been so thoroughly stymied by life and society, I have no trouble imagining an Einstein or a Hawking being crushed into the dirt.
Sometimes I get really sad thinking about what could have been and where it all went wrong. I grieve for the person I could have been. I wasted decades of my life and have nothing but scars and burnt bridges to show for it. I try not to go down that particular mental path too often.
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The other side of this coin is the nature of scientific development these days. We've pushed knowledge so much farther than most people realize. It now takes teams of people and ludicrous amounts of resources to pursue a breakthrough. Probably most of our modern day geniuses are quietly toiling away on developments that the public won't ever realize or appreciate.
We're on an exponential curve of scientific and technologic advancement. We're making all kinds of breakthroughs all the time. But there probably isn't a breakthrough to be made on the reality shattering scale of general relativity. At least not one that a single person can come up with in their spare time.
There's lots of reasons we don't have a modern Einstein. Geniuses absolutely do still exist, but they're either denied the opportunity to contribute or their contributions are just one of many in their field. Within the scientific community, many of these people are known and appropriately appreciated, but there's nothing sensational enough to capture the attention of the media and the public.
I'd say it's mostly social reasons, but also we've pushed the boundary of knowledge so far that it's just harder to punch through than it was a century ago. I guarantee geniuses at or beyond the level of Einstein are still being born today, but no one cares to recognize them the same way.
I know it's really bad form to quote the first sentence of an article and say you stopped reading there but...
> entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age
Assumes facts not in evidence!
I think that we are so inundated in amazing things and have so much access to amazing things that instead we're just forgetting how to be amazed!
The metrics given in the article aren't convincing. So the number of "geniuses" per capata is down. So? The absolute numbers of people are way up! And what it takes to be "accomplished" has accordingly increased.
I'm just a random guy and tooting around with recreational mathematics I've from time to time made a discovery I found that I thought was really interesting only to find on further research it WAS an interesting discovery ... in the 1940s by some big name (or in the 1800s by Gauss). This is only possible-- for me-- because I'm standing on the shoulders of many greats and I have tremendous tools available to me that didn't exist even decades ago.
To me that sounds like the renaissance the that the author presumes doesn't exist!
Now this stuff isn't usually resulting in published work-- but that's because it's already published (and well enough available that I know it's published). The bar is higher now.
So it's a darn good thing that we have all these advances because they're whats needed to continue making progress and accelerating, even if it doesn't look that impressive when divided by our exponential population growth. With so much amazing happening people are off doing stuff that isn't captured by the metrics. Some of that stuff could be amazing in it's own light too, but in ways our historical perspective doesn't capture and appreciate.
As far as singular genius goes: As we all become better, due to better tools and better access to knowledge, it makes sense that our accomplishments will become more compressed against the ceiling of what's possible given our current technology. Moreover, we work on more things today that are of a scope greater than any single human-- and this work depends on the collective effort of large teams.
These change likely decrease the importance and visibility of singular genius.
Even if we accept that it's less common now, due to rarity singular genius is difficult to rigorously study and probably impossible study so ethically: Maybe it's down because incest is less common or because child abuse is less common! There are a lot of things which have changed in recent errors which we would not reverse for the sake of more outstanding geniuses.
Instead of looking back and lamenting the that the concentration of singular genius seems to have decreased there is probably so much more to gain from growing into all the new possibilities that have opened to us recently, many of which we've only barely begun to comprehend.
(and, if it isn't clear-- I didn't actually stop reading at the beginning ;) )
Totally agree. There's no way it's early enough to say whether or not something has triggered a golden age today - we need the benefit of historical perspective for that.
Other assumed facts:
1) we ever started "making Einsteins" in the first place
2) Assuming (1), we actually stopped
Lots of other things are possible:
- there are people of incredible genius out there making profound discoveries the author is unaware of
- there are people of incredible genius out there making profound discoveries the impact of which has yet to be generally felt or appreciated
- So much is being published now and some fields are so niche and complex that it takes time for the community to process and undestand work that is done
- People are empowered by better tools etc to tackle bigger things which take longer and require more collaboration (eg the langlands project)
- geniuses aren't made at all, but instead just come along every now and again at random. You can't extrapolate from a stochastic process involving very rare events and make any kind of determination whatsoever about trends without having that determination basically just reflect your assumptions.
Maybe the next Einstein is currently being asked to at least wiggle their mouse every 30 seconds to pretend they are busy on corporate spreadsheets, spend at least four hours in meetings each day, and aren't even allowed pencils and papers to sketch on at their desk because it is a PII or other corporate secrets exfiltration risk. Good luck to them stringing together a coherent thought, much less a working theory to revolutionize physics.