10 Other Places Where Geniuses Hide

Last week, we discussed some of the main reasons for the supposed lack of geniuses today: As we innovate, it gets harder to do so in the same field, so most geniuses can be found in newer fields. But it’s not the only reason. Here are a few more.

1. Too Many Geniuses

For a long time, Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal fought each other for the top spot in global tennis. Debates on which was the best of all time raged. If two of them hadn’t existed, the third would have been lauded as the best player in the world, no questions asked. A true genius. But because there were three, it was unclear.

Now imagine there were 20 players at that level. Would we be talking about tennis geniuses? Probably not. Maybe we’d talk about a Golden Age of tennis, but that’s about it. What if instead of 20 there were 100? Then we might just say the overall level of tennis has improved, but there are no geniuses in tennis.

This puts this graph in a different light:

If there were only one genius working on improving our computing capacity, we would laud them as a genius—even if progress would be much slower.

But there are probably thousands of them, so we don’t pay attention to them, and we just see the result: a constant improvement in our computing ability.

So the fact that progress has accelerated in the last two centuries shows that, across the board, there are probably many more geniuses promoting our growth—their names are just drowned among a sea of geniuses.

This is a direct consequence of our booming population: The more people, the more geniuses, the less they stand out, and the higher the standards for the genius label.

There is a similar crowding effect in the arts. In the 1600s, there might have been just 100 serious books published every year in any language, and a genius one might only come up once every few years. Every critic would know and review it, every reader would hear about it and try to read it and discuss it. Geniuses were propelled to the podium of history very fast.

Meanwhile, there are over one million books published every year in the world, and thousands of them are promoted heavily by their authors and publishers to hundreds of millions of readers. How is any book supposed to stand out? It’s very hard. Instead, we have hundreds or thousands of must read books, and as a result a very small percentage is coined a masterpiece.

2. More Opportunities

There were only so many aristocrats who could sponsor the composition of Mozart’s operas. The limit in resources meant a limit in the number of people who could dedicate their lives to the arts or sciences. It’s no coincidence that before the 19th century, most people of science were nobles. The fewer the resources, the fewer the professional artists or scientists, and the easier it was to stand out as a genius.

Compare that to today, when we have eight billion people, and whatever you do, there’s somebody out there who does it better than you!

3. Interconnected World

And it’s not just that we’re eight billion; we’re also hyperconnected. So the competition is global now, meaning it’s even harder to compete, stand out, and be labeled a genius.

Not only that: Since the world is so connected, innovations spread at the speed of light. When somebody comes up with something new, they are immediately copied and remixed. They can’t harvest their innovation across several works that become unique and memorable. By the time somebody has created one amazing thing, 20 others have already improved upon it.

This is completely different from what happened before. Notice, for example, how Mozart became famous because he was able to copy better:

In Italy, [Mozart] heard music by many famous Italian composers. He heard a piece called Miserere by Gregorio Allegri, written for the Pope for the choir of the Vatican to sing. No one was allowed to see the written music, so that no one else could copy and sing it. But Mozart heard the piece once and then wrote it all down from memory.

People, regardless of their field, had a harder time copying back then, so extraordinary people could work for longer without others catching up. This gave them enough time to have a great run of extraordinary output.

4. Group Genius

As we harvest the low-hanging fruit of science, work moves to more complex fields, like AI alignment or immunology. It’s virtually impossible to be a solo scientist in these fields, as they're way too complex for one single person to handle. You need teams for breakthroughs. This means that the heads of such groups must not be just discipline experts, but also leaders. Leaders are wary of claiming genius, because that would jeopardize the support from their teammates, who feel they are as much part of the project as the leader.

Number of authors per scientific paper (geometric average). Source.

So instead of knowing the names of individual geniuses, we’re now much more likely to see the output of companies and groups.

This doesn’t apply as much in the arts, where many pieces are made by single creators, and even when there are pieces that require cooperation, leaders are credited (like film directors or videogame producers) and even individual contributors (actors, composers). As a proxy, look at the number of authors in arts and humanities papers:

Where we used to see 5-6 authors in science, we see 1-2.5 in arts and humanities. Source.