Another pseud bites the dust

A friend once explained to me the phenomenon of 'historical' figures being able to achieve much more (sometimes across multiple fields like polymaths) because the base-knowledge required to 'master' a field was lesser than it is now.

Don't remember the name of the concept, but my understanding was that, consider now that in science for example you must study a very minute field of a particular subject area within science until you're essentially 30 before you make 'actual' contributions of your own, and those contributions are still very field-specific.

Or maybe I'm just wrong about this/understanding it incorrectly.

Food for thought.

All that bullshit is just a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that you weren't born as von Neumann.

I mean, there might be some truth to it, but most geniuses don't merely contribute to a field, they CREATE new fields. They discover things other people didn't even imagine. To sum it up with a Schopenhauer's quote:

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

In this sense, Hawking wasn't a genius. Newton was a genius. Einstein was a genius.

>because there currently aren't any true genius-level scientists like we've seen in the past at the moment.
This is wrong. The reason it appears that way is because most of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Nearly every major breakthrough that happens now is the result of large teams of people, building on the work of other scientists e.g CERN. Most fields are now too complex for a lone autist to handle alone (not to mention fund). As an aside, I think that Nobel prizes should be awarded to research groups or institutions now, instead of the PI (and a couple other people) taking all of the credit.
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>Ed Witten exists

Good post

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>genius-level scientists
There are more than ever. It's just that all the easy shit has been taken care of. Today we're on the brink of requiring hyper-specialisation and automation to simply continue. Also, said genius-level scientists are less accessible or known-of, given the nature of their work isn't broad or approachable. Even the best of popsci summaries barely approach or capture.

I bet he didn't even read the Western canon. What a waste of a life.

>fucking his nurse;
Alpha male, don't even debate it

Interdisciplinary collaboration

What, if anything, does it mean for the future development of science that that the age of the universal genius, who unified the entirety of the scientific knowledge of their time in one mind, is irrevocably gone?

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Too slow queermo

and the thing is the stuff those guys do always seem totally obvious afterwards but for all of human history up to that point no one could do it, it's like that spectre bug in x86 chips, not saying it's newton level, but that this is a whole new class of exploit that until last summer didn't even exist, the vulnerability was there since the 90s but no one (nsa?) knew about or thought to exploit it, your average infosec pro looks for new buffer overflows or injection attacks, the spectre guy found a whole new attack vector

>What a waste of a life
Spoken like a punk-ass bitch.
mchawking.com
youtube.com/watch?v=5bueZoYhUlg

this

this is essentially what I was getting at in and in regards to I think there is some truth in that we're reaching a point where 'entire new fields' aren't just being discovered the same way someone discovered chemistry. The general layout of the natural world seems to have been discovered, so all the 'massive leaps' have been made, whereas now we specialize into very minute categories.

the first really major advance in natural language understanding/processing will probably be some multidisciplinary guy with a background in psychology, anthropology and literary theory, computer science guys just approach it like a math problem to be optimized, and yeah they all know their chomsky grammar stuff, but it will be some fucker heavy into saussure and derrida that's gonna pop it open

this is sort of my pipe-dream. I recently found out about critical theory/derrida and it's blowing my mind in that it's the type of stuff I've always thought about but never knew was an actual field.

>the chad paralyzed theoretical physicist

i think what your friend explained to you was called 'common sense'

I wouldn't say it's necessarily common sense.

The idea that 'knowledge' and 'scientific progress' is linear in a sort of reverse-exponential way (I could explain this better but its 3am and I think I'm getting my point across) isn't exactly common sense to the average person, I think.

This doesn't apply to maths though yet we see the same phenomenon, not that many geniuses who manage to make more than one significant breakthrough. By no means am I claiming people are less intelligent, simply that geniuses on the level of Descartes, Leibniz, Riemann, Euler and Poincaré simply happen to not be around at the moment. Especially now that people are looking towards AI to solve maths problems it feels like there's less of a reason than ever for people to fully commit themselves to maths.

Thanks fren

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the use of the phrase 'lone autist' in this post made me spit cereal like, fucking everywhere. Holy shit.

t. everyone ever before Genius initiates something novel

Well, it is.

Keep your easy platitudes, there are no Leibnizes or Miltons living today, even with massive populations and near universal literacy

Will this eventually prove to be complete nonsense like all his other theories?

argue with
then.

I see no reason why there aren't any 'true geniuses' living today.

I think what it comes down to is possibly that humanity has a certain level of potential intelligence for a single person that has not really changed in the past~2,000 years (because on an evolutionary scale we are the same as we were then).

So what one person could accomplish then was X (chopping low hanging fruit like an earlier poster said), but now we are reaching a point where it takes TEAMS to accomplish most things.

It would make more sense in a way to say Liebniz is to IBM because the problems are more complex in 2018 compared to Liebniz's time

>heavy into saussure
No semiotician is saussurian in the current year, even the very few surviving European structuralists, whom go with pic related, whom you didn't know existed before you read this post. Semioticians are puzzled saussurians even exist, regarding the guy as a museum piece for literary theory departments.
I'll have you know you are hoping for the second coming of Charles Sanders Peirce.

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