Where Geniuses Hide Today
Where are today’s Michelangelos? Goyas? Shakespeares? Cervantes? Goethes? Montaignes? Pushkins? Dostoevskys? Balzacs? Mozarts? Where are our Einsteins, our Darwins, our Maxwells, our Newtons, our Aristotles, our Socrates? Why is there no more music as acclaimed as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Paintings as important as Las Meninas or the Mona Lisa? Why are there no more discoveries that rewrite textbooks, like the Theory of Gravity or Thermodynamics?
Dozens of thinkers complain that there are no more geniuses. Most just don’t know where to find them.
The Geniuses of Yesteryear
The most illustrious philosophers were Greek. And they are ancient! Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle; Aristotle went on to teach Alexander the Great, who would create the biggest empire the world had ever known.
The Greeks made such great discoveries as the size of the Earth, the distance of the Earth to the sun, the prediction of eclipses, the heliocentric theory, Euclid’s geometry, the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, etc.—Is Science Slowing Down?, Slate Star Codex.
What was in the ancient Greek water?
It probably wasn’t the water as, globally speaking, this was not limited to Greece. Within a few decades of Socrates’ life, the religions of Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Taoism emerged. Jews likely compiled the sacred Torah around that time, and Zoroastrianism was at its apogee. But civilization had been growing for millennia after the development of agriculture. Why did so many religions emerge at the same time? And why no golden ages of religions since?
A single person made all of this:
While Cervantes (the most famous Spanish author) was writing Don Quixote, Shakespeare (the most famous English author) was writing or publishing Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. Cervantes died on April 22, 1616. The following day, it was Shakespeare’s turn. What are the odds that people had been writing for millennia, and would go on writing for centuries more, but the most important authors of two of the most spoken languages wrote their most important works at exactly the same time?
The Spanish Golden Age of literature and plays in the 17th century didn’t just include Cervantes, but also Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Fernando de Rojas, Garcilaso de la Vega, Calderón de la Barca… This Golden Age would be reflected in other arts around that time too, with the most famous Spanish painter, Velázquez, being active at the same time. Why such a Golden Age? Why was it never replicated?
Germany had its Golden Age of the humanities about one century later, with Goethe, Schiller, and the Grimm Brothers in literature; Bach, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in music; Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel in philosophy…
The 19th century was especially fertile for Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol… Why?
France has had a more continuous string of famous authors, starting with Montaigne, and continuing with Molière, Racine, Corneille, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Proust, Camus, Sartre... Which French authors are at their level today? In the last 30 years?
This phenomenon of golden periods doesn’t just appear in the arts, but also in science. The Modern Era has plenty of famous discoverers and inventors: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, Laplace, Maxwell, Darwin, Mendeleev, Mendel, Pasteur… The late 19th and 20th centuries had their own giants, like Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, Curie, Turing, Fermi, Szilard, Von Neumann… The discoveries of many of these people forced a rewriting of elementary school science.
We can quantify this with graphs like this one:
From 1930 to 2000, we increased the number of researchers 30x. But the annual growth rate of the economy is the same or lower. Why? Aren’t scientists supposed to accumulate learning—which can be seen in productivity numbers?
We can see the same process in Moore’s Law. Yes, we do double our computing power every 2 years:
But to maintain this, we’ve had to throw ever more researchers at it!
Doesn’t that mean they are less productive per head?
We can see the same trend in agriculture:
We can see the same relationship in healthcare. From the paper that published this data:
Our robust finding is that research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look.
All this can be crystallized by this:
Say that Beethoven was the greatest musician of all time. Why has there been no one better in the last ~200 years - despite a vastly larger world population, highly democratized technology for writing and producing music, and a higher share of the population with education, basic nutrition, and other preconditions for becoming a great musician? In brief, where's today's Beethoven?
Where's today's Darwin (for life sciences), Ramanujan (for mathematics), Shakespeare (for literature), etc.?
Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgment, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient."
Or the way famed investor Peter Thiel put it:
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
This problem is exacerbated because our population has grown so much since these golden times:
And these people have become much richer:
Giving them access to education:
So we have many more people, with much more education, yet for some reason we can’t easily name geniuses in science and arts that revolutionize their fields. Where are our geniuses?
The Fake Answers
Erik Hoel thinks we’re lacking geniuses because we don’t tutor people one-on-one the way we used to, yet there are many more people now, and a fair share still get personal tutors, just after school or while homeschooled. In absolute terms, we probably have more individually tutored students than we used to.
If individual tutoring were the magical ingredient, Azerbaijanis would win Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize.
Where are the Azerbaijani geniuses?
Others think it’s because the Baby Boomers were anti-intellectual, and the subsequent generation didn’t fight back. As a result, we got a ton of nihilism and politicization of the arts. I guess this is true, but then, Mozart and company were all financed by kings and nobles, so I don’t think they were much less politicized. My guess is that present-day freedom of speech and artistic expression is much higher than it was two centuries ago.
Some think it’s because people focus on managing their careers and bureaucracy. But this was much truer in the past. That’s why it was mostly nobles who could afford to do science. The increase in the share of scientists and researchers had to come at the cost of an increased bureaucratic burden, but the overall capacity we are dedicating to arts and sciences is much higher than it used to be.
So what are the true reasons why we don’t have more geniuses?
The Standard True Answer: Ideas Are Harder to Find
A lot of philosophy can be created simply by observing the world around you with a critical eye. It so happens that the Greeks were the first in the Western world to do that and record it in writing, so they get all the credit. From there, every time a new philosopher adds some thoughts, it gets harder and harder to be novel and creative.
Not only that, but you need to know all the philosophy established before you in order to be innovative, so the more time passes, the harder it is to add something new.
This is the concept that ideas are harder to find.
We can see the same in a scientific field like physics. There are only so many physical laws. Once they are discovered, you need to spend a gazillion dollars on a Hadron collider, and even then, you can barely learn anything new.
The days when a doctoral student could be the sole author of four revolutionary papers while working full time as an assistant examiner at a patent office — as Einstein did in 1905 — are probably long gone. Natural sciences have become so big, and the knowledge base so complex and specialized, that much of the cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors.—Dean Keith Simonton, Scientific genius is extinct.
The same is true for other scientific fields like chemistry. As Scott Alexander puts it in Is Science Slowing Down:
Element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorus in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss. We should not be surprised that discovering element 117 needed more people than discovering phosphorus.
I think this also explains art fields like literature. Why were Cervantes and Shakespeare contemporaneous? Because of things like this:
And this:
Shakespeare and Cervantes appeared the moment books became a thing. And that was because of the printing press. A new technology opened a new field, creators flocked to it, and the best got to write their name in history. They ate all the low-hanging fruit, and it became much harder to innovate after them.
This has profound implications on where to find geniuses.
The Geniuses Hide in New
It’s extremely hard to innovate in fields like literature, because so many people have written in the past.
But look at cinema, a medium invented 130 years ago. Sure, early cinema had geniuses like Méliès, Orson Welles, Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman. But there is continuity between these people and Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Lasseter, Tarantino, Cuarón, Iñárritu, Del Toro, Michel Gondry, Kevin Feige, Denis Villeneuve, or Christopher Nolan.
Take Nolan. People imagine storytelling is a very old medium, and that everything has been invented there. Yet something few have explored like he has is the concept of non-linear storytelling. He started with Memento, which Nolan explains in this video, and can be summarized this way:
After Memento, he made Inception, where he explored nested storytelling:
Whereas Inception was complex but accessible for a mass audience, Nolan’s more recent film, Tenet, was not. He played with freaking entropy and time loops, which was so complex that it flew over most people’s heads.
I have no doubt that in 100 years, people will see Nolan as a genius of cinematic storytelling.
And this is a field that is 130 years old! What happens when you have new media, like TV? You get a Golden Age that began just 25 years ago and, I believe, still continues: The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones… And for those infidels like you who think we’re done, I present to you the IMDB ratings for Arcane:
One of the creators, Christian Linke, had a pretty standard upbringing and started his career as a data analyst at Riot Games. He worked his way up to getting the rights to make this series. That’s genius.
This is why we’re still minting lots of geniuses in television:
If this is the case, geniuses appear to us in new fields because that’s where there’s room to innovate, so to find geniuses, we just need to look at new fields. This is why the graph above looks up and to the right, while the ones for movies and albums have passed their peaks:
Conversely, if we look at new fields like videogames, we should be seeing many more geniuses alive today. Of course, most of the works of art in videogames are recent:
I used to work in videogames. Of course, a 72-year-old creator like Shigeru Miyamoto, behind games like Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, will be amongst the most famous, because he was a trailblazer.
But we have much more recent masterpieces in videogames. Neil Druckman and Bruce Straley, behind The Last of Us, will be remembered in 100 years as geniuses of videogame storytelling. Both are in their mid-40s.
The creators of many other games will make history, including those of Mass Effect, GTA, or The Witcher. Some of the scenes from these games still haunt me to this day.
If this is true, new media should see new geniuses.
Casey Neistat trailbrazed vlogs when YouTube arrived. His innovations in scene cutting and editing will be remembered.
But of course the YouTuber par excellence is Mr Beast.
This is no coincidence. He has spent 12 years posting one video every 11 days on average. He has reverse engineered YouTube, one video at a time, and created exactly the type of content that the masses want. In the process, he has created a completely new genre of content, with bombastic shots, absurd premises, and gobsmacking prizes. Is he not a genius?
Naturally, TikTok and its innovation of short vertical videos is a new format, and with it have come new geniuses. 22 seconds can now live rent-free in the heads of hundreds of millions of people:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If you can’t see it, here’s a YouTube version.
Or reinvent comedy:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I don’t understand d’Amelio, but over 150M people do. Is she, then, not a genius?
Quietly, we’ve been moving from the offline world to the online world. This is where we find most of the business and product innovation of the last 30 years. Why? Because the physical frontier had been explored for millennia, but the online world was the new frontier, lawless and full of promises of freedom and gold. Genius finds the path of least resistance.
So it’s no surprise that’s where you find geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg, who created an app used by billions of people, and has since been able to fence off enemies like Snapchat and TikTok by taking the best from them, while at the same time innovating on mobile, virtual reality, and AI. Jeff Bezos first built an online shop, then a logistics company, then a servers company, then a marketplace. Sam Altman is no angel, but he brought AI to the masses, raising absurd amounts of money, with a gluttonous hunger for more, accelerating the race to the AI singularity by over a decade.
Geoffrey Hinton just won a Nobel Prize for creating artificial neural networks, the precursors of today’s AIs. Is he not a genius? Demis Hassabis just won a Nobel Prize for his work using AI on biology. We’re now able to predict the shape of most molecules just based on their composition. We will soon be able to create them. We will be able to invent new drugs in days instead of decades. Impossible paths in biology are now possible. Is he not a genius?
Speaking of new fields and AI: AI alignment is probably one of the most important fields in the history of humanity. Our future existence depends on it. Yet the field is small enough that most people in it know each other by name. If you are very intelligent and want a shot at making it in history, this field is probably your best bet. If we survive, Eliezer Yudkowsky will certainly be known centuries from now as the one guy who raised the alarm.
His friend Robin Hanson has broken new ground across several fields, from UFOs to governance. His work on prediction markets and futarchy is not well known, but in big part that’s because these are new fields, like digital governance.
Speaking of which, what about Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the creator of blockchain technology and Bitcoin? Is he not a genius? Is Vitalik Buterin, behind the Ethereum network, not a genius too?
Some geniuses are so good that they can straddle the worlds of both bits and atoms. Steve Jobs was behind the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and Pixar. After making a fortune with an online business, Elon Musk is reinventing half a dozen hardcore industries. Palmer Luckey brought us virtual reality, and when he was kicked out of Facebook, he went on to revolutionize the arms industry. Are these not geniuses?
Yes, there are plenty of geniuses today. They’re just in new fields, because old ones get saturated.
Takeaways
Today’s Michelangelo is Christopher Nolan.
Today’s Da Vinci is Elon Musk.
Today’s Newton is Geoffrey Hinton.
For me, the primary reason why people don’t find geniuses today is because they look at past geniuses and extrapolate to the present to compare. But past geniuses were in specific fields, and it gets harder and harder to innovate in them! Most of the innovation happens in new fields, so that’s where you will find the geniuses of today.
That said, this is not the only explanation for the drop in geniuses. There are others like snobbery, time, crowding, interconnection, IQ heritability, narrowness, and money. I’m going to cover these in this week’s premium article.