I wrote the comment below using my old Substack user ID when Eric’s article came out about two years back. Even though I am not able to find my comment anymore for some reason, I can find a copy of it:
I agree that one-on-one education was probably one of the crucial reasons for many inventions in the 18th, 19th, and early part of the 20th centuries.
The invention has become more complicated as most low-hanging fruits have already been picked. Future inventions require collaboration from multiple fields and a very high level of specialization, even in a particular subfield. As you can see, people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job by only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield, as you get during your bachelor’s degree.
I also believe that two world wars, from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years later, led to inventions in certain areas mostly related to war and space technology. However, basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and many folks having to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars, millions of them dying in their peak years. Another factor was that Europe took a long time to recover from these wars.
However, I think another factor has played a role, especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today, 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolize the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A Harvard study found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. In 1970, twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, but 20 years later, the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
In 1970, American stocks were held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling financial assets. We would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between London and New York financial markets in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point, though, these taxes would make all of us more prosperous. They would give everyone a more equal share of the pie, and the whole pie would be more significant. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could return to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
Something will suffer when our best and brightest apply their knowledge in zero-sum games like Wall Street or try to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page. I think that is another factor playing a significant role.
I also know several of my friend's children went to an Ivy League/MIT, etc., school, and most of their classmates went to either Wall Street, consulting, or a tech company like the one mentioned above because of the much higher pay. The incentive to go through the pain of inventing, which takes decades, and the chance that you may be a complete failure, is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So, to summarize, I think the priorities have changed. We still produce several geniuses, but they are very specialized and are focused on industries that do not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is still probably the best way to produce many more geniuses than the current education system, and people who can afford it are still doing it.
I would add a few more points to it since my thinking has evolved in the last 2 years:
1. The sheer volume of people and ideas in today’s interconnected world makes standing out as a genius much harder. For instance, while Shakespeare operated in a relatively small intellectual ecosystem, modern writers compete with thousands of others globally. Similarly, the proliferation of knowledge means that even groundbreaking ideas often get lost in the noise, as the attention of both experts and the public is spread thin.
2. Modern educational systems often prioritize standardized testing and conformity over fostering creativity and independent thought. This may suppress the emergence of geniuses who think differently. Furthermore, the rising cost of education and student debt may push talented individuals toward safer, high-paying careers rather than risky, innovative fields like research or entrepreneurship.
3. Globalization has expanded the talent pool, with countries like China, India, and other non-western countries producing thousands of highly educated individuals yearly. While this increases the likelihood of innovative breakthroughs, it also means that geniuses may emerge outside the traditional Western lens, making them less visible to those accustomed to evaluating genius through a Eurocentric or American-centric perspective.
I was talking to someone just the other day about the fact that all of the kids who did well academically in my final year at school did engineering, medicine or law. Only the "dumb" kids did business studies.
If you dramatically change the incentives and the things that a society values then it is hardly surprising that many of the best and brightest finish up moving money around.
PS I think the Reagan era tax cuts were more a consequence of what happened in 1971 rather than the underlying cause
The top three for people I know are medicine, Wall Street, and tech companies. If you cannot get into one of the above three, the rest of them go to consulting.
I would also add Video Games, especially in the 90s. Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy got me into music. Pure masterpiece of a scores for 10+ games. Also Chrono Trigger.
Not sure about "genius", but I have the theory that revolutionary ideas are having a tough time because the scientific world is geared towards paper production of small incremental improvements.
I actually think that the "tech trees" in popular games like Civilization do a pretty good job of instanciating a lot of what you're saying. Later discoveries tend to "cost" exponentially more units of "Science(TM)" to "discover" and have far more complex pre-requisites.
Nice analysis. I do think there is an important sort of philosophically pragmatic element of differentiating the person from the description of them. Feels like what we end up calling “genius” is the social attribution or credit for having created something “great” - where “great” is usually “new” in an unexpected way. So a genius is someone playing in the adjacent possible in Stuart Kauffmans terms who gets credit socially for what they found there. What is complex is the difference between the act of discovery, the scaling of and application of that discovery for social benefit and then the resulting social credit. There is a sort of value chain there. And a Miniver Cheevy problem emerges if you see something but are born at the wrong time - to be a genius you have to see it and others around you have to be able to understand and use the innovation or see the value of the art.
this is where i love the first folio and your example of the printing press — and I think the printing press scaled because of the value in governments in the west printing anti ottoman propaganda flyers… so the economic value of the printing press was kind of NY Post / Inquirer from the start. but the presses also enabled the printing of books to build libraries so you could show your status and there was also demand for books for learning and entertainment.
As Emma Smith describes in the Making of the First Folio, one result of this new book economy was the First Folio - a book of plays. For some reason the Kings Men owned the rights to a number of the plays (they probably were really collaborations and that is an element of genius too - that is collaborative not individual) and after Shakespeare died two of them needed money and hatched a plan to get some scratch by selling book subscriptions to posh boys of a collection of shakespeares plays… And the printing of the plays in a book when others weren’t then also preserved the plays.
But where was the genius? Was it Shakespeare or the Kings Men or the printer or none of them? Or was the genius actually in the way the came together and the ability to create and the economic appetite to share and scale?
I have no idea of the answer - the questions just seem to turn up more questions as good questions always do.
I mean Cervantes was a failed play write who penned a delightful revenge novel. Nils Bohr might have actually understood quantum mechanics but our language lacked and seems to still lack mechanisms to convey its meaning. Cells are machines but flows, and biology seems stuck until it gets to thinking in flows ala Dan Nicholson, and so on.
To be a genius you have to see it and others around you have to be able to understand and use the innovation or see the value of the art.
The above said by you is so true. That’s the reason geniuses are born according to the situation. It is two way. Just being inventor or artist might not help. Whatever someone invented or in art should be understood and recognized. Sometimes the understanding might take beyond the years of inventor or artist.
Short preamble: Tomas, yours is the first and so far only blog I felt compelled to contribute to financially. With your latest 2 topics (Genius, Population) I have disagreements. (Sorry that you only get feedback from me when I have an objection, but I don't comment "Thanks, that was interesting" on your other enlightening posts, so as not to clutter up the threads.)
Genius is an ill-defined term. You can have an IQ of 160 and make no major contributions. Your blog is talking about people who have been or will be retroactively recognised by history as having created something novel and valuable.
Also you need to separate arts, technology and sciences, the latter being less subjective. Your post mixes all that up.
You are also mixing up constant incremental improvements, which you measure for example with for your "Researcher impact on Moore's law" graph, and the rare jumps in understanding when someone comes up with a revolutionary idea.
The environment in which ideas flourish is a topic very close to my heart. If you are interested I can outline my depressing experiences with academia. In ancient Greece you had academies to encourage an exchange of ideas, Newton and Hook had their Royal Society. What creates these Golden Ages that you mentioned, and what creates Dark Ages, where unorthodox thoughts are discouraged, would be a super interesting topic for a follow-up post from you.
Thank you for the honor, and for commenting. I love that you share disagreements!
Agreed that genius is ill-defined. Your definition suits me.
I will write about what you're saying regarding arts vs tech. Tomorrow! They are partially the same, but only partially, and I don't find the difference in this context fundamentally important. Maybe I'm wrong. Enlighten me!
I am not sure I'm mixing disruptive vs incremental innovation? Why do you interpret Moore's Law this way? The point there is one instance of many where it gets harder and harder to get yields from innovation, knowing that top-line summaries of innovation hide both incremental and disruptive innovations
OK, looking forward to tomorrow's article then. Maybe you also cover golden ages vs dark ages. I'll think of some examples of disruptive vs incremental innovation to make sure we don't talk past each other.
Following David Deutsch. New explanatory knowledge is the product of human beings, and it is not produced at a uniform rate. Modern social systems, adopting a reductionist view of knowledge, discount or ignore the special ability of humans to apply creativity and imagination to develop good explanations. While this process doesn’t graph well, I think there are unrecognized geniuses among us, and they deserve our attention
Tomas Pueyo I generally don't take time to like or comment, but I sure do always Like what your write and consider it to be a real contribution to expanding my horizons' and understandings and I'm not a beginner at this enterprise, by a long shot. So, thank you for your effort. Thank you for being you.
No puedo hablar de arkane, mis hijos la siguen, yo no, por mi edad y aficiones no le hago casi, ya les preguntaré. Pero Nolan, sin discusión, será un genio del arte recordado. Cómo orson welles, como Billy Wilder,.... Estoy de acuerdo, muchos genios surgen en los nuevos campos, buscan caminos no trillados, y a veces no se les reconoce. De todas maneras, la manera tradicional de investigar, individual, casi secreta, se convirtió con la universidad en algo abierto a la humanidad, y a raíz de la complejidad del conocimiento es un trabajo en equipo, muchas veces inmenso equipo. Pero, como muestra la película oppenheimer, el equipo también existía antes. Sin Sócrates y su academia, no habría platón ni Aristóteles ni Alejandro. Sin sus mecenas, da Vinci no habría logrado tanto, y así. La vacuna de ARN se diseñó para el ébola, pero no era un virus rentable. Hasta que no salió la pandemia del COVID no hubo rentabilidad para que financiarán a los inventores. Está el genio en potencia, el campo nuevo, y el dinero o el equipo. La conjunción de los tres es la genialidad
What are your thoughts on the effect of an overly connected world? Nowadays you can find ideas and research on almost any topic on the internet. I believe it is harder to be innovative–to have an idea that is truly novel–when you are already biased by the information you consumed. It anchors you to start from there, so it's harder to do something truly novel.
This was such a thought-provoking read. The idea that modern genius might be hidden in unconventional spaces really struck a chord with me. It’s made me question how societal structures and biases influence not only who gets recognised as a genius, but also who gets the opportunity to realise their potential in the first place.
Your insights have inspired me to dig deeper into this topic and how creativity and brilliance thrive in overlooked spaces and what that means for how we value different kinds of innovation. Thank you for such a compelling and eye-opening piece!
I think the genius now is within the topic. Example, in horsemanship, we've got Warwick Schiller actively reshaping horse training concepts and going far beyond the last genius, Tom Dorrance. In sheep, we've got the Tattykeel team and guys like Jacob Wolki. I do believe there's progress and new genius but in specialities so household names are less common due to reasons you illustrated.
Great piece, but I think you (and almost everyone else) are mistaken about ideas being harder to find. These are the basic points from Adam Mastroianni's "Ideas aren't getting harder to find" article:
1. historical precendent and how we've thought we were running out of low-hanging fruit many, many times before: People have repeatedly and wrongly predicted we were running out of ideas throughout history. Examples include physics in the 1890s, surgery in 1873, and psychology in 1920.
2. knowledge builds upon itself and is not fundamentally pulling from a limited vat of truth: Each discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Knowledge isn't a finite list that gets depleted - it's more like a branching tree that keeps growing.
3. we have modern advantages, and you don't need to read Darwin to do evolutionary biology:
- We don't need to rediscover everything from scratch
- We have better tools and technology than ever before
- We can run experiments faster and more efficiently
- Data is more accessible than ever
4. the problems are likely in our scientific and academic institutions: The apparent slowdown in scientific progress may be due to:
- Hypercompetitive academic environment favoring careerists over innovators
- Peer review system discouraging revolutionary ideas
- Researchers focusing on publishable rather than groundbreaking work
- Perverse incentives in academia
5. why we're still perceiving an apparent slowdown in scientific progress/innovation: Declining research productivity per capita could be due to:
- Natural diminishing returns when adding more researchers
- Shift from industrial labs to less efficient academic departments
- Scientists becoming overly focused on citations
- Management overhead of large research teams
- Competition between researchers
The real problem isn't that ideas are getting harder to find, but rather that our current scientific institutions and incentive structures make it harder to pursue truly innovative ideas. I think Adam Mastroianni is correct about this (but I think you're right about most everything else, as usual!).
I wrote the comment below using my old Substack user ID when Eric’s article came out about two years back. Even though I am not able to find my comment anymore for some reason, I can find a copy of it:
I agree that one-on-one education was probably one of the crucial reasons for many inventions in the 18th, 19th, and early part of the 20th centuries.
The invention has become more complicated as most low-hanging fruits have already been picked. Future inventions require collaboration from multiple fields and a very high level of specialization, even in a particular subfield. As you can see, people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job by only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield, as you get during your bachelor’s degree.
I also believe that two world wars, from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years later, led to inventions in certain areas mostly related to war and space technology. However, basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and many folks having to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars, millions of them dying in their peak years. Another factor was that Europe took a long time to recover from these wars.
However, I think another factor has played a role, especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today, 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolize the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A Harvard study found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. In 1970, twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, but 20 years later, the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
In 1970, American stocks were held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling financial assets. We would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between London and New York financial markets in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point, though, these taxes would make all of us more prosperous. They would give everyone a more equal share of the pie, and the whole pie would be more significant. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could return to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
Something will suffer when our best and brightest apply their knowledge in zero-sum games like Wall Street or try to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page. I think that is another factor playing a significant role.
I also know several of my friend's children went to an Ivy League/MIT, etc., school, and most of their classmates went to either Wall Street, consulting, or a tech company like the one mentioned above because of the much higher pay. The incentive to go through the pain of inventing, which takes decades, and the chance that you may be a complete failure, is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So, to summarize, I think the priorities have changed. We still produce several geniuses, but they are very specialized and are focused on industries that do not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is still probably the best way to produce many more geniuses than the current education system, and people who can afford it are still doing it.
I would add a few more points to it since my thinking has evolved in the last 2 years:
1. The sheer volume of people and ideas in today’s interconnected world makes standing out as a genius much harder. For instance, while Shakespeare operated in a relatively small intellectual ecosystem, modern writers compete with thousands of others globally. Similarly, the proliferation of knowledge means that even groundbreaking ideas often get lost in the noise, as the attention of both experts and the public is spread thin.
2. Modern educational systems often prioritize standardized testing and conformity over fostering creativity and independent thought. This may suppress the emergence of geniuses who think differently. Furthermore, the rising cost of education and student debt may push talented individuals toward safer, high-paying careers rather than risky, innovative fields like research or entrepreneurship.
3. Globalization has expanded the talent pool, with countries like China, India, and other non-western countries producing thousands of highly educated individuals yearly. While this increases the likelihood of innovative breakthroughs, it also means that geniuses may emerge outside the traditional Western lens, making them less visible to those accustomed to evaluating genius through a Eurocentric or American-centric perspective.
I was talking to someone just the other day about the fact that all of the kids who did well academically in my final year at school did engineering, medicine or law. Only the "dumb" kids did business studies.
If you dramatically change the incentives and the things that a society values then it is hardly surprising that many of the best and brightest finish up moving money around.
PS I think the Reagan era tax cuts were more a consequence of what happened in 1971 rather than the underlying cause
The top three for people I know are medicine, Wall Street, and tech companies. If you cannot get into one of the above three, the rest of them go to consulting.
Today's genius music composers are employed by Hollywood. The music by John Williams is perhaps as widely known as the music by Beethoven.
I would also add Video Games, especially in the 90s. Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy got me into music. Pure masterpiece of a scores for 10+ games. Also Chrono Trigger.
and Hans Zimmer!
A master!
Very good point!
Not sure about "genius", but I have the theory that revolutionary ideas are having a tough time because the scientific world is geared towards paper production of small incremental improvements.
https://thewaytheworldworks.com/2013/08/17/crackpots-humanitys-unappreciated-resource/
I actually think that the "tech trees" in popular games like Civilization do a pretty good job of instanciating a lot of what you're saying. Later discoveries tend to "cost" exponentially more units of "Science(TM)" to "discover" and have far more complex pre-requisites.
Very good point!
Nice analysis. I do think there is an important sort of philosophically pragmatic element of differentiating the person from the description of them. Feels like what we end up calling “genius” is the social attribution or credit for having created something “great” - where “great” is usually “new” in an unexpected way. So a genius is someone playing in the adjacent possible in Stuart Kauffmans terms who gets credit socially for what they found there. What is complex is the difference between the act of discovery, the scaling of and application of that discovery for social benefit and then the resulting social credit. There is a sort of value chain there. And a Miniver Cheevy problem emerges if you see something but are born at the wrong time - to be a genius you have to see it and others around you have to be able to understand and use the innovation or see the value of the art.
this is where i love the first folio and your example of the printing press — and I think the printing press scaled because of the value in governments in the west printing anti ottoman propaganda flyers… so the economic value of the printing press was kind of NY Post / Inquirer from the start. but the presses also enabled the printing of books to build libraries so you could show your status and there was also demand for books for learning and entertainment.
As Emma Smith describes in the Making of the First Folio, one result of this new book economy was the First Folio - a book of plays. For some reason the Kings Men owned the rights to a number of the plays (they probably were really collaborations and that is an element of genius too - that is collaborative not individual) and after Shakespeare died two of them needed money and hatched a plan to get some scratch by selling book subscriptions to posh boys of a collection of shakespeares plays… And the printing of the plays in a book when others weren’t then also preserved the plays.
But where was the genius? Was it Shakespeare or the Kings Men or the printer or none of them? Or was the genius actually in the way the came together and the ability to create and the economic appetite to share and scale?
I have no idea of the answer - the questions just seem to turn up more questions as good questions always do.
I mean Cervantes was a failed play write who penned a delightful revenge novel. Nils Bohr might have actually understood quantum mechanics but our language lacked and seems to still lack mechanisms to convey its meaning. Cells are machines but flows, and biology seems stuck until it gets to thinking in flows ala Dan Nicholson, and so on.
To be a genius you have to see it and others around you have to be able to understand and use the innovation or see the value of the art.
The above said by you is so true. That’s the reason geniuses are born according to the situation. It is two way. Just being inventor or artist might not help. Whatever someone invented or in art should be understood and recognized. Sometimes the understanding might take beyond the years of inventor or artist.
Short preamble: Tomas, yours is the first and so far only blog I felt compelled to contribute to financially. With your latest 2 topics (Genius, Population) I have disagreements. (Sorry that you only get feedback from me when I have an objection, but I don't comment "Thanks, that was interesting" on your other enlightening posts, so as not to clutter up the threads.)
Genius is an ill-defined term. You can have an IQ of 160 and make no major contributions. Your blog is talking about people who have been or will be retroactively recognised by history as having created something novel and valuable.
Also you need to separate arts, technology and sciences, the latter being less subjective. Your post mixes all that up.
You are also mixing up constant incremental improvements, which you measure for example with for your "Researcher impact on Moore's law" graph, and the rare jumps in understanding when someone comes up with a revolutionary idea.
The environment in which ideas flourish is a topic very close to my heart. If you are interested I can outline my depressing experiences with academia. In ancient Greece you had academies to encourage an exchange of ideas, Newton and Hook had their Royal Society. What creates these Golden Ages that you mentioned, and what creates Dark Ages, where unorthodox thoughts are discouraged, would be a super interesting topic for a follow-up post from you.
Thank you for the honor, and for commenting. I love that you share disagreements!
Agreed that genius is ill-defined. Your definition suits me.
I will write about what you're saying regarding arts vs tech. Tomorrow! They are partially the same, but only partially, and I don't find the difference in this context fundamentally important. Maybe I'm wrong. Enlighten me!
I am not sure I'm mixing disruptive vs incremental innovation? Why do you interpret Moore's Law this way? The point there is one instance of many where it gets harder and harder to get yields from innovation, knowing that top-line summaries of innovation hide both incremental and disruptive innovations
OK, looking forward to tomorrow's article then. Maybe you also cover golden ages vs dark ages. I'll think of some examples of disruptive vs incremental innovation to make sure we don't talk past each other.
Following David Deutsch. New explanatory knowledge is the product of human beings, and it is not produced at a uniform rate. Modern social systems, adopting a reductionist view of knowledge, discount or ignore the special ability of humans to apply creativity and imagination to develop good explanations. While this process doesn’t graph well, I think there are unrecognized geniuses among us, and they deserve our attention
Tomas Pueyo I generally don't take time to like or comment, but I sure do always Like what your write and consider it to be a real contribution to expanding my horizons' and understandings and I'm not a beginner at this enterprise, by a long shot. So, thank you for your effort. Thank you for being you.
I'm glad to hear, thanks!
This was such a great read and wonderful compilation! Thanks for sharing.
No puedo hablar de arkane, mis hijos la siguen, yo no, por mi edad y aficiones no le hago casi, ya les preguntaré. Pero Nolan, sin discusión, será un genio del arte recordado. Cómo orson welles, como Billy Wilder,.... Estoy de acuerdo, muchos genios surgen en los nuevos campos, buscan caminos no trillados, y a veces no se les reconoce. De todas maneras, la manera tradicional de investigar, individual, casi secreta, se convirtió con la universidad en algo abierto a la humanidad, y a raíz de la complejidad del conocimiento es un trabajo en equipo, muchas veces inmenso equipo. Pero, como muestra la película oppenheimer, el equipo también existía antes. Sin Sócrates y su academia, no habría platón ni Aristóteles ni Alejandro. Sin sus mecenas, da Vinci no habría logrado tanto, y así. La vacuna de ARN se diseñó para el ébola, pero no era un virus rentable. Hasta que no salió la pandemia del COVID no hubo rentabilidad para que financiarán a los inventores. Está el genio en potencia, el campo nuevo, y el dinero o el equipo. La conjunción de los tres es la genialidad
Great post!!!
Such a good article, loved it.
What are your thoughts on the effect of an overly connected world? Nowadays you can find ideas and research on almost any topic on the internet. I believe it is harder to be innovative–to have an idea that is truly novel–when you are already biased by the information you consumed. It anchors you to start from there, so it's harder to do something truly novel.
Huge effect! I discuss it here:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/10-other-places-where-geniuses-hide
This was such a thought-provoking read. The idea that modern genius might be hidden in unconventional spaces really struck a chord with me. It’s made me question how societal structures and biases influence not only who gets recognised as a genius, but also who gets the opportunity to realise their potential in the first place.
Your insights have inspired me to dig deeper into this topic and how creativity and brilliance thrive in overlooked spaces and what that means for how we value different kinds of innovation. Thank you for such a compelling and eye-opening piece!
I love how you put it. "Modern genius might be hidden in unconventional spaces".
I am so glad it's sparking ideas!!!
I think the genius now is within the topic. Example, in horsemanship, we've got Warwick Schiller actively reshaping horse training concepts and going far beyond the last genius, Tom Dorrance. In sheep, we've got the Tattykeel team and guys like Jacob Wolki. I do believe there's progress and new genius but in specialities so household names are less common due to reasons you illustrated.
Great piece, but I think you (and almost everyone else) are mistaken about ideas being harder to find. These are the basic points from Adam Mastroianni's "Ideas aren't getting harder to find" article:
1. historical precendent and how we've thought we were running out of low-hanging fruit many, many times before: People have repeatedly and wrongly predicted we were running out of ideas throughout history. Examples include physics in the 1890s, surgery in 1873, and psychology in 1920.
2. knowledge builds upon itself and is not fundamentally pulling from a limited vat of truth: Each discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Knowledge isn't a finite list that gets depleted - it's more like a branching tree that keeps growing.
3. we have modern advantages, and you don't need to read Darwin to do evolutionary biology:
- We don't need to rediscover everything from scratch
- We have better tools and technology than ever before
- We can run experiments faster and more efficiently
- Data is more accessible than ever
4. the problems are likely in our scientific and academic institutions: The apparent slowdown in scientific progress may be due to:
- Hypercompetitive academic environment favoring careerists over innovators
- Peer review system discouraging revolutionary ideas
- Researchers focusing on publishable rather than groundbreaking work
- Perverse incentives in academia
5. why we're still perceiving an apparent slowdown in scientific progress/innovation: Declining research productivity per capita could be due to:
- Natural diminishing returns when adding more researchers
- Shift from industrial labs to less efficient academic departments
- Scientists becoming overly focused on citations
- Management overhead of large research teams
- Competition between researchers
The real problem isn't that ideas are getting harder to find, but rather that our current scientific institutions and incentive structures make it harder to pursue truly innovative ideas. I think Adam Mastroianni is correct about this (but I think you're right about most everything else, as usual!).
I agree with some of these! I explore them here
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/10-other-places-where-geniuses-hide
Great post. Thanks for the shoutout!
I need to get back on my To Dos and properly reply to you!