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The End of Individual Genius?
An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"
The molecule claims to trump the atom.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
None of us are as dumb as all of us.
It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true.
There have been great people that came along and made breakthroughs, but always this was the result of their building work of others.
The myth of the lone scientist is just that, a myth. Newton, to pick an example of the 'great man working alone' wasn't the only one working in his field, he just 'rewrote' a lot of history to make this seem the case. We don't even use his version of calculus, but everyone still credits him.
Einstein too extended the work of many others. He did a lot of thinking on his own, but everything he did was an extension of the work of others. I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
This trend of working in groups can do naught but good.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Studies in bibliometrics also seem to indicate this pattern - not the genius aspect but the fact that many high profile or high impact papers are collaborations. In general the number of single author papers has declined.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/walsh.html
...the ingredients of a great and productive mind: cognitive abilities, educational opportunities, interest, and plain old hard work.
When you really love to do something, work and play become the same thing. Many of the great scientists didn't have to force themselves to do the work.
groups tend to be smarter than any individual member.
The trouble is that they also give us the 1929, 1987, and whenever the last stock Market crash was.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If somebody wouldn't have invented the wheel before me then I would have become quite famous, although I'm sure the venture capitalists would have stolen the company from under my feet and probably sold my ideas to the Big Three.
It doesn't take a genius to see the connection - rays from the satellites are making us dumb!
Want proof? Look at the stupidity on satellite TV - 837 channels and nothing on.
It's all a plot to cover up the climate change caused by all those rocket launches!
(All kidding aside, what sort of sense of "entitlement" do you have to have to feel that people need to be given set-top boxes? Stupid politicians. Then again, it's OPM - Other People's Money. Bail out the broadcasters. Bail out the banks. Bail out the worst car manufacturer in a century. Where the #@%! is MY bailout?
Exceptional entity requires support of other individuals in order to be elevated to glory. Be it science, presidential election or showbusiness. It is not a new thing, in fact it is older than ancient Rome and Greece. Nothing to see here, move along.
The ability to fail QUICKLY and move on is largely gone. It takes much longer to do innovation when the ability to test and fail takes so long. Next thing you know you are 30 years old and past your prime and have only failed a few times. Lots of small but quick failures is the way to go. Can't do that by committee.
Happens to me too! I'm as smart as, like, Einstein, but everything I can think of, is already invented, or something. I was just born late, I guess.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
He who markets the idea first reaps the rewards. Sales is everything. Humility and hard work are for the proletariat.
A recent study suggests that there are too many recent studies.
Eh. Whatever happened to multiple studies, or recurring studies over a longer period of time?
All you ever hear these days is 'a recent study', as if the mere fact that one group of researchers came up with it, it's golden fact.
Mind, it's a group of researchers...basically saying that group-research mentality is where it's at and that individual pioneers are all but over. Isn't that the fox guarding the hen house? ^^;
A great many studies are also done by fringe researchers, or paid for/sponsored by companies. If any news source runs with it, there often seems to be little (if any) fact checking done to make sure it's legit, and we never hear about/keep tabs on who is behind the studies. So you always here the 'a recent study suggests' part, but you never hear everyone else in the scientific/research community laughing or ignoring it because it's a joke.
Of course research groups would find out that research groups are great at research. Would Stephen Hawking find that Stephen Hawking is great at theoretical cosmology research?
Always take studies with a side of common sense and skepticism, particularly if there's not a fair mountain of corroboration.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
" The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"
Tell me about it- I have been working on this post since 2002. Sheeesh.
I read the topic as "The End of Evil Genius"...of course that would be the most interesting topic heading for a /. article in a while...
"... in recent decades especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding."
Put that way, it sounds like a Good Thing. More collaboration? Good! Funding? Good! Especially if working in such an institution means the scientists don't have to spend as much time and energy securing funding, and can spend it on research instead.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
At one time (the Renaissance) it was possible for one person to know all the science was known at the time. It's hardly surprising that as we accumulate more and more knowledge it takes longer to learn disparate facts that might be needed to make a leap. And that a group might tend to bring that knowledge together when a single person might not have all of them alone.
Of course, I didn't RTFA but this is /. so when has that ever stopped anyone from commenting?
Standardized education has extended its tentacles farther and farther. And since it's .. standardized .. you get less chance of anyone standing out. That's kind of against the entire idea of standardized education. Smear all those little minds in to one mildly mediocre band of test results. So now you have brilliant children having to work twice as hard just to be themselves.
Companies (and universities) own your soul. You can't come up with a great idea on your lunch break - it's not your idea. You might get to put your name on the list of people who worked on it but the company/university is going to take the credit and the money.
Take away the precocious youth and the curious adult and you lose the independent researcher.
I won't even get into extended lifespans, artificially extended childhood or a whole host of other, related societal issues.
I don't really see what Sputnik has to do with much - scientific, quasi political, enterprises have always required large-scale collaboration. The Apollo program was the same. Those activities were all government sponsored and government defined, not day-to-day inquisitive experimental science. CERN's goals are defined and executed by scientists, not by politicians (they just fund them, the same way they fund all public science).
There is truth in the message that large collaborations are becoming more common, and individual scientific achievements less (there are very few individual author papers in experimental science these days), but that is due to the nature of experimental science. The ability to execute world-revolutionary science in a small lab is becoming much much harder. The minutiae of nature is where most work is done, and minutiae now quite often requires large, expensive and extremely complex experiments. Measuring the mass of an electron can be done on a table with an oil drop experiment. Measuring the products of GeV collisions of hadrons requires CERN.
Working in groups is fine as long as there's relative freedom to work. The problem with institutionalized anything is that there's always more bureaucracy to suck up time away from creative progress. While status reports and performance reviews might be less in the academic world (I don't know if they are or not) than in the corporate world, I'm sure they are still a time-wasting headache.
I'm fairly sure the human race would be significantly more advanced if someone could travel back in time and assassinate Bismark. Both private and public sectors would be dramatically more productive if they didn't have to report progress, make funding proposals to the same extent, and handle human resources nonsense. This is the only reason why two guys in a garage can start a massive software company, and that same company stagnates and treads water after 8-10 years of existence.
Bureaucracy, middle managers, and human resources are the single biggest drain on human advancement.
In my view, TFA has got it very wrong because the writer has romanticized a fictitious "lone scientist" into existence. In reality, so-called "lone scientists" never work or think alone at all, and they never have. Instead, scientific thinking always takes place within an international sea of ideas.
Throughout all of history, scientific progress has always occurred within a framework of communication between thinking people, and those thought processes arise out of education in the relevant subjects followed by extremely extensive reading and discussing of ideas with others. New scientific insight has never popped out of nothing by some sort of magic. Novel ideas arise only by alternative analysis of other people's published or communicated thoughts.
Instead of the lone scientist being at a disadvantage now versus large organized groups, the opposite may even be true because of the Internet. Never before have lone individuals had so much up-to-date information at their disposal (including research data), and never before have they had the means to communicate with others so easily. This suggests that the lone scientist has a lot going for him or her today, at least in part.
Science contains two parts however, a theoretical one and an experimental one, and there is no doubt that the experimental side of science benefits hugely from good funding. However, you need the germ of a new idea before you can turn it into a theory let alone test it, and new ideas don't spring up directly through funding --- it's a more complex relationship.
Large research groups certainly provide a good environment for high-bandwidth scientific discussion among peers in a scientific discipline, but even those scientists will be communicating with others worldwide, particularly through conferences and publications, and so they're still adding to the international sea of ideas which is the real bedrock of science. Things haven't really changed much.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
In other words, eighty years ago, a 30-year old physicist and a technician or two could build a device to study the absorption of X-rays by various elements. The resulting publications might win a Nobel Prize.
These days, a 30-year old physicist is working as a post-doc in someone else's lab. He won't by the leading author on the grant proposal to design a new detector for CERN -- some 50-year old with an established track record will be. That 50-year old guy will probably still be alive when the detector is finally built and goes into action. He MIGHT still be alive when the Nobel Prize committee gets around to considering the results of the research.
If you think this is lamentable, ask yourself about bridges. How many people design and build large highway bridges BY THEMSELVES these days? None. Do you long for the days, millenia ago, when a single man, or perhaps a man and his brothers, might construct a bridge to span the local creek?
Practical architecture has become too big for one man to do all by himself. The items of interest just cannot be built by a single person in a human lifetime. The same is true in SOME spheres of the sciences, but not all.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
From TFA:
"Bejan's thinking, it should be noted, is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation."
Given this fact it should come as no surprise that the author's conclusion is a wishy-washy mess. He doesn't reject or accept the idea of "collective" research he just makes some broad strokes that provide for uninteresting conclusions. Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave if she read this.
Far far easier to put someone's name on the paper than say "No".
Common courtesy to build everyone's resume/CV. Hell we are all gaming the system together.
Christ, go ahead and put the janitor's name on there.
It's kind of weird the article compares Einstein - a theoretician - with large experimental / engineering enterprises such as Sputnik or CERN. Theoretical and experimental physics are two very different beasts (that don't always even get along), and to my knowledge, there aren't any grand collaborations in theoretical physics (still done on a small / individual scale).
This article is based on academic science papers published in the last 30 years. TFA states that government sponsored research essentially began in the early 50's. Could the increase in collaboration shown in your article be due to increases in government sponsored research rather than fundamental in the complexity of science as your article suggests?
"Correlation does not equal causation."
I don't agree at all. Of course there are more research groups than before, and more excellent research is done in groups, that doesn't mean that there aren't any extraordinary individuals.
I also think their definition of genius is a little bit narrow. I think "Einstein" just became a meme for "genius" and the others just haven't made an impression in the public mind.
Just try to make a graph with the number of geniuses per century. Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century for example, Galileo late 16th, Newton late 17th century. In the 20th century we have Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Goedel, James Watson and Francis Crick (ok these are two), Feynman just died 20 years ago!
To me, the genius density is increasing. Just because you can't think of an Einstein living today (and you can argue about that, too), doesn't mean that there won't be one in the next 50 years.
Years of stealthy replacement of educators, first at the college level, then the high school level have beaten the very idea out of people. Now that THOSE people are having kids, there's nobody who really remembers individual genius as something normal, and so the anti-reason, anti-individual Left has almost won. Don't stick out, fit in. Don't complain, accept. Don't succeed if others fail. Don't win if someone loses. Don't excel if someone falls behind. Don't live for yourself, live for others. When nobody will stick up for the 5 year old kid who instinctively knows that this is crap, then that kid is pretty much doomed.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
large groups to do science is simply the cost and complexity of experiments. Nowadays very few groundbreaking experiments can be done in your garage, you need access to expensive machines(and often lots of energy) in order to conduct your research. And since they probably won't hand the keys to the LHC(once its repaired) to some upstart grad student with a new theory, it becomes necessary to spend vast amounts of time "proving" yourself while building the necessary connections to see your experiment come to fruition.
I think this study is partially flawed because they only look at Nobel prize winners, which exclude fields like Mathematics(where no labs are necessary in many cases). If mathematicians are getting older then I would be more inclined to believe their conclusion.
Monstar L
I agree that lonely geniuses are extremely rare. Most people work in the context of their time and rely on the work of others. And besides, many people just have a need to debate their ideas critically with others. Many 'lonely geniuses' kept up an extensive scientific correspondence.
On the other hand, I think the same rule can be applied to science as to programming, i.e. that a good team is at most five to seven people strong. In larger teams communication breaks down quickly and people work at cross-purposes. Adding more people makes discovery slower, not faster. Large institutions may work as long as they provide a framework in which small, effective teams can work without creating too much administrative overhead.
A factor that contributes to the disappearance of the 'lonely genius' is the increasing specialization of scientists. The geniuses of the 17th and 18th century were not 'universal men' any more, but they still had a wide scope of interest and knowledge. These days individuals often have rather narrow knowledge, and teams need to be assemble of people from different fields to make good progress. (It's interesting to look at the recruitment lists of modern biotechnology centers.)
This raises the question whether there is "a limit of specialization", at which a team that is small enough to be effective is also too small to have a sufficiently wide range of knowledge. At which point scientific discovery must slow down to a crawl.
You seem to be leaving little room for ideas that aren't generally accepted by the field you're working in.
How likely would it have been that those guys would've been allowed to reformulate their contemporary thinking in the way they thought best if they'd have been forced to justify everything immediately to their colleagues? All this may work fine in periods of evolutionary growth of a theory (or complex of theories), but it seems rather less workable if and when people get stuck. (this is not to say that both these things can't be looked into by different researchers simultaneously, one still working and adding to the old paradigm while the other might be reformulating it, but the point you're making sort of ignores the aspect of office politics.)
"string theory" might be one such example.
... for sufficiently large values of n.
A single genial paper may have more value than several (even infinitely many) mediocre ones. However, the majority will define the rules - funding, "peer" review, etc - so individual genius is eventually suppressed anyway.
^[:q!
The lone scientist was not the article's myth. It's a common by-product of the manner in which the history of science is discussed.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Albert Einstein
I am glad that this is being talked about. I think the way things are going is towards communal creativity in society and it is not a bad thing, although a lot of people don't like the idea and find it hard to accept. If you look at things that are more visible to the average person than science, these too are collaborative ventures but I find interesting is that I think people often try to ignore the fact to the point of flat denial of the facts. Who makes boy band "music"? The image, choreography, probably lyrics, musical notes, instrument playing, production, marketing, promotion are probably all done to a greater or lesser extent by teams of seasoned professionals. Yet the people who buy the music like to buy into ideas like "I like what they sing. I like the way they look. I would like to date him. He's special." It's an illusion and not even a well hidden one. I think the sooner people start to accept the idea that we are small cogs in big machines the happier we will all be. It doesn't mean you "don't matter". You still matter completely to those around you and your loved ones and that's really all that counts. The other is an illusion. And it doesn't mean you can't do your job well and take pride in what you achieve together. Do you think that football players feel less pride when they win than tennis players, just because they are a team?
, , ,-research grants get you.
Not too surprising really.
It's very difficult for anyone to be a very good generalist in terms of original research work.
Individuals end up specializing, and the grants awarded for any tiny specialty generally aren't real big.
So then, is it that big grants are paying for things (great breakthroughs) that can't be done in groups?
Or are individual researchers doing things that won't pay?
More research is obviously needed.
~
At what point will it take a person their whole life to know enough about their subject to drop dead just as they are about to add a bit of new knowledge?
We can only escape this by becoming more and more narrow but that might present it's own limitations.
Perhaps we need to live longer and develop larger brains?
This is all just my personal opinion.
The article incorrectly categorizes Edison as a lone inventor. Edison had dozens of other inventors working for him. He is sometimes credited with inventing the modern research lab. Notably, Nikola Tesla worked for Edison for a short time. I'm sure if he had spent his whole career with Edison, he'd be just as anonymous as Edison's other employees.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Indeed, most think of me as a lone indeed, "mad" scientist, alas it was not so. For when I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy's apprehensions as tyros engaged in the same pursuit... ...But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Frahn-kehn-steen)
The large groups are a consequence of funding. People have a "logarithmic" perception of money where large sums do not seem as large as they really are (just listen to politicians talking about money). Large groups get more money per person then small groups, sometimes more then an order of magnitude larger. Just divide the price of a "big science" project by the number of scientists working on it, and then ask any typical science professor on a typical university how much money they get, per person,
on their group.
So if you want money create/join a large group!
Innovation is still tied to bright individuals. Von Braun and company took one decade to put a man on the Moon. Just watch the difficulties NASA has to go back there, or even just get off the ground.
However as "big science" has big money, it can hire public relations people that convince the politicians and journalists they are doing great innovations.
You know it may be true that the Genius incorporates the work of others, but, there's usually a piece of insight that they arrive at, sometimes exhaustingly, that other people simply cannot grasp or see and in fact will even argue with the line of thought right up until it is proved.
Groups tend to push people down to a common denominator of thought. You eliminate the pursuit of "wild ideas" and get locked into dogma, and wind up accomplishing nothing. Could a committee have made the insight to invent the calculus and use it then to explain the laws of motion? I don't think so. In fact, the committee of the day more or less threw its hands up at the problem and delegated it to Newton.
Please show me the committee that could have delivered Beethoven's 9th, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall, Newton's Principia, Einstein's Relativity, and other number of breakthroughs great and small. It doesn't exist.
This is my sig.
. And since they probably won't hand the keys to the LHC(once its repaired) to some upstart grad student with a new theory,
Why not hand the keys of the thing over to the kids every now and then? Maybe that's the problem? Last time I checked, the kids pay taxes for it too.
This is my sig.
This is why we need a better "theory of everything". The problem is that all the knowledge that we have accumulated is like so much trivia. There's not nearly enough abstraction where the universe is distilled down to a few essential rules that can easily applied to everything. It's not so much a problem of physics, really, as it is with pure mathematics. Physicists discover what works and how things work, but I think ultimately we want to take seriously and fund seriously mathematics as its own research discipline, so we can get that kind of abstraction that we need.
This is my sig.
Now get off my lawn!
V. Frankenstein PhD BioPhilosophy
The amount of information required to be the "top" of your field has increased tremendously since the early 1900's, and consequently requires more time to learn everything.
An analogy is video games. Back in the 80's, games were typically made by a few (or even one) people on a shorter timeline than today's top games, which require a large studio with typically a very large amount of people working together.
To become a genius, you not only have to be smart, but also have to put in a lot of single-focus effort from a young age. And the latter is what has become hard, these days. Too many distractions, from games, TV, Internet, Slashdot, etc.
Remember the Polgar sisters. Intelligence and hard dedicated work made them into chess grandmasters.
Interestingly, I thought I'd look at Wikipedia for her, to see how she is doing now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgar
Quote from her father: "Geniuses are made, not born"
Bert
Most of genial ideas were first rejected by community because they were not understood at that time. As a part of a group it will be impossible to impose such ideas to your companions.
L.
Newton and Leibniz may well have invented calculus independently. And I'd like to know which version you use, because Newton introduced the product rule, the chain rule, the notion of higher derivatives, Taylor series, and analyticity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus We don't use his notation, but that is a small difference.
You do a real injustice to suggest that math was "his field", as he invented calculus to help him invent classical mechanics. He invented F=ma. Not until Einstien 200 years latter was that improved upon significantly. He invented color theory. Which led him to construct the Newtonian telescope to remove the chromatic aberration his color theory implied.
And, thanks to his use of Newtons's rings to measure the quality of the mirrors he was grinding to build his telescope, they were the best telescopes available in the day.
If he was not a Genius, then there have never been any.
There is only one way to prove an assertion like this wrong, and it isn't to be found on Slashdot.
You start with two guys who have lots of (pick some) brains, luck, tenacity, etc...
As you add people to the enterprise, generally you will pick up "normal" people and experience regression toward the mean.
After that you bring on the bureaucrats to wrangle the herd and it goes down hill from there.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It is feasible that, within our lifetimes, we will see the "genius" contributions coming from AI systems, with the human element only being able to take credit for building and raising it.
Then we will have to revise our measurements again based on how quickly artificial systems are capable of making "genius" contributions, vs how slowly we ourselves are able to.
Reality is prettier inside my head...
This title is misleading. There are many types of genius outside of math and physics.
Artists, authors, composers, financial gurus, etc. can all be geniuses. To limit the definition of genius to a scientist is to discard most the minds who have greatly contributed to our society.
I'm not saying the submitter did this out of malice, but there is definitely a negative "stereotype" in the scientific community about intelligent people who do non-science-related work.
Perelman and Wiles both were working completely alone(or mostly alone for Wiles). Of cause they were using tools developed by others, but still they were lone researchers against insurmountable odds.
Here's my theory:
Until people are allowed to exclusively migrate to territory with others who share their theories of what makes human ecologies work for them, the social sciences are going to continue to swim about in the same pool of stagnant ideas without making any progress -- so we'll never know what causes what in human societies.
It's this obnoxious idea that controlled experimentation trumps argumentation and that people should consent to being treated -- an idea at the foundation of science and its ethics -- that is an Idea from Hell to all theocrats whether they're Catholic, Islamic or Politically Correct Bureaucrats who define "separatism" as the moral equivalent of demon possession.
Seastead this.
It is just as possible for a dedicated individual genius to have an impact. The problem is that our current society is so chock full of distractions and other interests that no person is inclined to study any one thing in sufficient depth.
If you make personal choices to devote your life to thought and study and experimentation and everything that made a Newton or Einstein or whoever, then it is still quite possible for a single person to come to conclusions not imagined by a committee of smart people.
For example: in 8th grade I was addicted to TV. My reaction? I quit TV cold turkey. I stopped watching TV and, therefore, filled my time up with doing science, reading books, building things and everything that inspires the imagination. That simple, single choice has led me to devour libraries. This is how one person could achieve that. You focus and concentrate.
or perish, in the scientific academic world.
So since it takes, not six years, but six years LONGER, to
come up with anything truly significant, it must mean that
A) Most scientific papers are full of nought but
drivel, detritus, and dutifully determined data, and
B) Significant breakthroughs will be hard to come by,
as most scientists toil wasting their time publishing
the drivel in order to be well accepted in their exclusive
communities. The geniuses will be driven mad by the
death of their career and loss of income as they try to
concentrate, for years, on teasing out a single significant
insight, at the sacrifice of the many papers and
conference cocktail parties.
A bit sad really. It's a good thing that the google
AI machine will be making the significant insights
from now on.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I think the difference between individual research and group research is roughly analogous to the difference between Open Source development and closed corporate development. (In some cases, it's not even analogy.) On the one hand you have people who generally like to work alone, or only with certain specific others, and would rather sit at their computers all day long than shave or get a regular paycheck... on the other, you have people organized in the rank-and-file, following a routine procedure in a social hierarchy. There is compelling work that comes out of both camps. If the modern state of computer software is any indication, then no, we have not seen the end of the individual genius -- in fact, all of this wonderful technology will most likely vindicate him.
there is no doubt that the experimental side of science benefits hugely from good funding.
Perhaps not. Perhaps the requirement of having to fund it himself will *allow* discovery of a less expensive experiment.
Anyway, computers are cheap now and almost anything can be purchased over the internet including printed circuit boards and machined parts.
I once read about a psych test -- get across a room without touching the floor in the room.
Speed counts.
Given two boards and two ropes the solution used was to tie a board to each foot and walk across.
Given one board and no ropes the solution was to position the board at the entrance to the room, take a running start landing on the board and slide across the room. A faster and cheaper solution to the two board/rope problem!
Group work will kill us all. Don't make me work with those idiots.
Already the development of QM can not be attrubute to a single person any more, but to a group of incredibly hard working and strongly connected group of mathematicians and physicists. The last theory which was kind of a *lonly genius* thing in physics was the theory of relativity, which boils down to a small number of involved persons.
accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century
Our minds are being /.'d by too much information?
Or is this not just a confounding effect caused by the rise of TV and, more recently, video games? LOL Imagine if Einstein got hooked on WoW.
People still make bridges to cross small creeks today! >:|
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I blame high taxes. The more one has to work, the less time they have for research. It's hard to get ahead when success is punished. I have several "brilliant" ideas. All of which require time and money. I make good money but much of it has been taken away from me. I could have had enough to retire by now if it weren't for taxes. Unfortunately, I need to keep working. My ideas are all going to waste because I have no time for research.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
It is not that there are no more great scientists who can make great individual contributions, rather it is that the average scientist has become better and more of them. With so many "very good" scientists it makes it much more difficult for the "great" scientist to stand out.
Here's my hypothesis: It is not that individual discovery is harder than it once was, it is that collective discovery is easier. As such, the number of people toiling in isolation has declined. Toss in a few other economic realities (eg: young individuals who used to go into research now go into business - cuz that's where the money is), and it looks like individual discovery is harder.
A more interesting perspective, I think, is the collective discovery angle. Here's a traditional piece of wisdom; "The laborer can only get paid based on the output of a single laborer, the manager can get paid a percentage of many laborers' output - therefore management can get paid more." Ignoring for the moment the shoddy math that is often implied by that sentiment (managers should get paid more, without regard to what the appropriate percentage is), collective discovery implies a new truth: "The knowledge worker is a member of a collective. The ability to enhance wealth creation by labor was once the sole prerogative of management. Now the ability to enhance wealth creation by labor is similarly, and often more greatly, affected by interaction with peer laborers. If one believes that income should be directly proportional to wealth creation (the objective of free market economics), this implies a new truth for income distribution among knowledge worker labor and management. The income associated with the enhancement of the ability of labor to create wealth, income traditionally reserved to management, should shift toward peer laborers, in recognition of their collective augmentation of each other, to maximize the efficiency of the economy."
Of course, it will take a long time for that to supplant the dogma of those steeped in traditional business models of labor.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I don't quite agree.
"Achievement" has many meanings. With the web well on the way past "2.1" and somewhere in the Alpha for 2.5 or something, smart people have a profound resource on tap for First Order questions.
Most great innovation is a coalescence in and around the Eureka moment where you buy people pizza. Let's suppose you are with, oh, the Memristor team. You just announced the Eureka.
Now you have all this iterative case study mapping to go fill out. "Ooh, look, here's some temperature fail data". When people aren't operating by political motives of hoarding their results, these little snips float along the web beautifully. "News tweet: R. J. Hirschmanakan of Finland reports that certain refrigerator circuits interfere with design #142a7."
People-Years of time gets shortened, until an Official Achievement is ready far sooner. Then the senior scientist can do a Sherlockian pipe smoke, and emerge four hours later to announce the theory of the ideal chemical ratios.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Unbeknownst to you, your computer noticed how dreadfully little of its resources you ask it to task out, so it signed up to FoldingAtHome under the handle IntelFanCompy7 and is currently co-authoring a paper on Bird Flu.
What are you doing these days?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I think of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan or Évariste Galois. People like Newton or Einstein hardly qualifies as being alone, as they were well surrounded by scientists in their circle. As for Edison, he is probably the polar opposite of a lone genius, neither alone (he had a team working for him) or a genius (scientifically at least).
Everybody who has ever written a scientific paper, knows that there is little connection between the number of authors and the number of people who have worked on it.
Often department heads who have barely glanced at a paper are assured of being named as authors. Young researchers who don't even understand the paper, are formally added to the authors list to increase their chances of applying for research funding, much like Royal Navy captions of the Napoleonic era added the names of the sons of their friends to the their ship's books. But the scientific writer who devoted much effort to turning hastily scribbled notes into a readable paper is not even mentioned.
Problem is, there's a game theory grid to trying to "hone your genius".
Suppose you're a diamond in the rough. Unconventional thinking is subconsciously held to a far higher standard to begin the path to acceptance. It's easy to disparage an unconventionalist when his first 7 takes sound "crackpot".
But the innovator needs SOME forum to thrash about in to get real raw worldly feedback.
Also, "Universal" or "PolyGeniuses" are a rare subset of your garden genius. Catch them outside of their strength and they will likely walk into one of the Third Tier blunders famous in the literature somewhere.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Dying of Bird Flu.
RIP Kurt Vonnegut.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
The tragedy/problem is that the range of "wild activities" and even "Proto-Useful" wild activities is so vast, and the really good gems are excruciatingly focused.
The key unstated point of certain tv shows like House is that the guy with the talent be reliable. Supposing the near-genius is only half as good, it would send people up in arms.
Ignoring tricksters, it takes someone at a HIGHER level to verify the first person's exposition. If that initial exposition is sufficiently tough, it could go untagged even if it is in fact wrong.
Going on a limb, I will "make up" the term "Improving the Babble". Even if the scuttle among the masses IS wrong, if it's wrong at a higher level, that should help pave the way for a legitimate powerhouse to eventually be able to take the lead.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You don't expect to understand how the mind of a genius works, do you? Even if you did, what's in it for you?
If many scientists flock together to gain funding, im sure they will be more successful in achieveing their goals, but do the truely radical ideas that can change the way we live get funding so easily? Many geniuses are ostracized from scientific communities because their ideas are out of the mainstream view. These eccentric scientists can still get the great geniuses of tomorrow. Another point to be made is that we do not know which discoveries are truly revolutionary until time has passed and history is being told, so even if large teams are getting large amounts of funding, that might not always mean they will be working on revolutionary ideas. Just because we see it as important and revolutionary now because it is new and an advancement, does not mean it will truly be revolutionary in the long run when we can reflect back upon a myriad of different technologies or ideas and the implications of each one.
Sounds like a Berkun quote... Anyway, I think the future will prove that the rumors regarding the end of individual genius had been greatly exagerated.
The easiest areas to make advances in are ones where others have not bothered to look at. Typically fields that are the intersection of various disciplines. There are the obvious ones, but I strongly suspect that almost any serious such intersection, as in intersection of real sciences, would yield interesting scientific insights after minimal or moderate work. But most people shun these because they like to specialise. This is why polymaths are so prolific, they see connections across fields that others don't see because the others only have one field.
Only my opinion of course.
Bitter and proud of it.
I'm not a scientist but a writer. I wonder how a writer who is steeped in some genre could ever break free and create a work for the ages to marvel at.
When one chooses a compelling environment (containing people- living and dead; and established truths, patterns, methods...) in which to work, the microscopic germs of thought that run contrary to that environment are quickly crushed and forgotten. The remaining thought pattern will tend to conform to what already exists.
Those germs, if allowed to grow and evolve, might have been the essence of a new train of thought that others could build upon for all future time. Such germs appear in many minds, in many fields of endeavor and suffer the fate of banishment due to social and environmental prejudices. The lifetime of such a germ may be less than one second. That is how much time is available to kill it or explore it and the environment is often the key factor.
It is critical that individual creative processes be encouraged and not always plunged into the mass of group thought.
...omphaloskepsis often...
If funding agencies believe it, it becomes true. Large granting institutions like the National Institutes of Health certainly behave as though they believe this. We often joke that it's easier to get a $30 million dollar grant to do research you're already doing than it is to get a $1 million grant to do something you haven't. There's more than a small kernel of truth to this. Certainly although I wouldn't discount the importance of good infrastructure to scientific research, it certainly has more to do with showmanship and politics than with a sober evaluation of what's best for moving biomedical research forward. I'd imagine this pattern is not unique to the NIH. In any case, between the heavy emphasis on "big science" and the difficult funding situation due to unfavorable federal budgets, individual researchers in many fields are being squeezed out, drastically reducing the pool of people who could potentially be doing good research relatively independently.
If they had bother to read, say, a single scientific journal from the past 50 years, there would be a realization; not only do great scientific minds still appear, but they appear more regularly now than ever before.
Einstein, Feynman, Bohr, Curie, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Heisenburg, Hawking, Planck, and many more who made outstanding individual contributions were ALL 20th century scientists! And there are dozens more like them, making BRILLIANT contributions to science. These are geniuses.
The article is ignoring how history is written; you don't write it as it is being experienced. Often someone isn't recognized for genius for 20 years after they've made some incredible discovery, theory, etc. 20 years from now we'll have a new list of geniuses for the 21st century.
Geniuses can join groups and take credit for brilliant discoveries that they make. That's how group research works; everyone learns from each other, but credit is given where credit is due. This article is nonsensical.
I don't quite agree.
"Achievement" has many meanings. With the web well on the way past "2.1" and somewhere in the Alpha for 2.5 or something, smart people have a profound resource on tap for First Order questions.
Most great innovation is a coalescence in and around the Eureka moment where you buy people pizza. Let's suppose you are with, oh, the Memristor team. You just announced the Eureka.
The way you're speaking I'm literally seeing a guy who says "I did it! I've discovered a new <Insert some jargon here />!" and then something on the screen: "Achievement unlocked! Moving society forward!"
I think video games spoiled us somehow... science is a continuous process, not a discrete one.
Of Code And Men
Hi.
I agree there's no Boris Karloff figures, but in any particular problem there's usually a lynchpin or three that stymies some otherwise viable process.
I see the role of the senior scientist of each group who gathers the low level data for a while from his team, then hunkers down somewhere to figure out the logjam.
Then the team goes back into gear wheeling out all the conceptual followup cases.
That moment of breaking the logjam is the Eureka moment that deserves a pizza party.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Andrew Wiles (Fermat's last theorem)
Grigori Perelman (Poincaré conjecture)
they had to isolate themselves, because the problems are too hard.
u r not sth aristotle?.....akimedies?
the u r working with ancients.....
if u r not a zero, then u r a team
Does this mean that they are going to offically lower my I.Q.??? - or are they going to just 86 me? I mean, I know I'm getting older, and I feel more and more stupid every day (mainly from reading the rants of trolls - or reading really dry and bad humor, like this), but do they really have to take this kind of extreme measure? (* end of bad joke *)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
The airheads are fine for recreational purposes, but they're hardly the sort that you marry and couple with on a genetic basis. There are the party and fucking kind and the settle down and marrying kind. These are independent properties.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century
This seems pretty insignificant when human life expectancy increased by more than 25 years during the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Timeline_for_humans
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Make no mistake. People work best as collaborative individuals, not collaborative tasks.
that so many claim it to be. e.g., Nassim Nicholas Taleb heaps scorn upon several recent winners of the Nobel Prize in economics and demonstrates how their work is completely invalid and incorrect and has contributed greatly to the current economic collapse.
High-Tc superconductivity was discovered in 1986; until then it was thought that BCS theory ruled out superconductivity at temperatures above 30 K. The experimental discovery of the first high-Tc superconductor by Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz was immediately recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.
This was a couple guys testing materials where the equipment cost I think was less than $100K. Publish to Nobel in one year.
Hmmm seems like everything is going multicore? :)
And by definition "unpredictable". The vast masses or false prophets, who may be very intelligent, cant foresee where these once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs will come. It's shear arrogance to say there will no more geniuses. Its like saying economists are smart enought to predict and engineer economic depressions.
I'm still here..
Most breakthroughs come from standing on the shoulders of giants. Before you can get taller than the giant by standing on his shoulders, first you have to climb up there.
Naaah, first you shoot the giant in the ankles, then when they fall down you shoot them in the head. Then you step onto the DB's shoulders. Easy. No difficult climbing involved.
For achieving greater heights, repeat, using more giants (ideally, try to get them to fall across each other).
Eric Baird
So when one of their team looked at the problem of root[2], and realised that the solution wasn't expressable as the ratio of any two integers, the Pythagoreans didn't thank the guy for pointing out that their basic assumptions had been wrong and give him an award -- they decided that the guy has committed the mathematical equivalent of treason, and had him killed as a heretic.
Hippasus.
The group approach is great for incremental research and "brute force" attacks on a problem, but when the solution to a problem requires a change to the initial assumptions of a subject, the body of certainty that the team represents can be a barrier to the acceptance of the correct solution. Hippasus' (important, correct) discovery was rejected by his research colleagues because it disagreed with how they'd been taught to see the world.
("Rejected" is putting it mildly. They drowned him. Pythagoas himself is supposed to have authorised Hippasus' execution)
Eric Baird
I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
Einstein initially tried to work in a group. After he got his qualification, he supposedly applied to every university in Europe. Nobody would have him.
Einstein blamed his inability to get a post on rotten references from his teachers, who had complained that he was too lazy to amount to anything, and refused to be "told" things by his elders and betters. When he questioned their facts or didn't bother turning up to their lectures, they probably regarded it as an personal affront.
That's how he ended up working as a patent clerk in 1905. He figured that as a scientist, he was unemployable.
Things changed after the publication of his 1905 papers, but he still wasn't able to go full time as a researcher until he got offered a f/t position in 1909. 'Til then, he was still working part-time at the patent office.
Eric Baird
Newton's reaction to this professional nicety was to decide to have nothing more to do with these shits, and he wrote to a friend that he was giving up research on natural philosophy (so that he wouldn't have to deal with these people any more). He then spent the next years working on biblical chronology, until Halley and co coaxed him back. The result was Principia and Opticks.
Eric Baird
Do you also prefer people from other countries not buying USA products?
Yes, of course. I would like to see the British making cars and aircraft again, for example. I think that, we've reached a point where there's no reason every country could not have its own manufacturing industry. Keep natural resources trading, let ideas flow freely among nations, but let everyone handle their own manufacturing. You get all the benefits and information exchange of free trade, but without all the social upheaval. This whole arbitrary linking of information flows with physical plant seems rather silly. Perhaps you could have an IP auction that was completely decoupled from manufacturing system... I don't know but, its a form of tying and its not efficient.
This is my sig.
Some odd assumptions seem to be percolating throughout the discussion here. One is that the only thing worthy of being called "genius" is a revolutionary discovery, a "paradigm-shift" that completely rearranges a field of knowledge. What if our paradigms are getting pretty good? What if we're so close to the real Reality that there just isn't that much distance to shift our paradigms? Or alternately, what if our paradigms are good enough for another century or so of "conventional" work, and we won't have any hope of another revolution without the steady accumulation of knowledge for many years to come? It seems to me that maybe there should be room in our view of science to celebrate these kind of steady accumulations as well as the rare and unpredictable revolutionary changes.
The other assumption seems to be that there's something wrong with collaboration. Working in groups and teams is the kind of thing that only mediocre intellgences resort to, eh? On the contrary, it seems to me that our only hope at present is to find ways of improving the ways groups of people work together. We need to improve our collective intelligence, not lament the rarity of True Genius.
Haha, that's before i learned to see the bigger picture :) Not sure if i still qualify as genius though, dropping the aspergers and dual-monocular vision* definitely dropped my IQ. It's amazing how computationally expensive 3d vision is, and the noticeable delay between stimuli and perception that results.
Oh, in case you're wondering. Yes, my grand unified theory does sound quite 'crackpotty'. Then again, what do you expect from something that explains not only the physical, but the subjective reality as well?
*ability to focus on two seperate details at the same time. Sure, not to the ability of 'rainman' reading two books at once. Then again, i also wouldn't get lost going from the fridge to the stove. My vision wasn't that focused on extremely tiny details, though my field of view was small enough to only fit one facial feature at a time. Sort of made social interaction a little difficult :)
Heh indeed!
Your goof captures the spirit of my idea, although I might class that something like a second tier. (Not that there's any hard & fast rule of this.) Third tier would be if you relied on that calculations before and after that goof to then continue some kind of further result as if they were still there.
Using your example, it would be something like developing an Average Sales Growth Per Zip Code comparison with NYC as a prototype template and accidentally including 10048. Then people begin to wonder why the template keeps failing.
"True Genius" is indeed really tough. There's a huge swath of folks like us just below that margin who are certainly smart, but not quite on that ethereal plane. Mental speed is one of the factors. Your note about "computationally expensive 2 details" was telling for me. True genius would crank something like 4 details (Quad-Monocular) with some sort of 50% speed increase to boot. You *could* do that if you had the time to parse down the quarters and then reassemble them, ... but by then you've missed the brass ring and the point becomes proven.
Problem is, I agree with the view that genius is close to madness. The price you pay for all that comp power is living in a world where every conclusion is not at all obvious to anyone. The weird paradox becomes that unlike everyone else, if you are "just a garden grade genius" then you spend your time explaining everything, and eventually that messes with your confidence in your intuition. The last component of a true genius might be a telescoping effect where you easily oscillate between "full power" and "pampering the world" ... and in so doing, "become likeable", ... and then having more time to be a genius.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Pampering the world sounds right! :) Something i've just recently discovered. Weird thing is, when i was a four-eyed, cobbled,arthritic cubicle geek who was incapable of looking at anything besides his shoes, no need to pamper anybody. People don't seem to take offense if you're smart but physically disabled. It's almost expected, like a merit badge.
The hard part for me is going back to full power. Apparently, you can't use your visual system to visualize mathematics and see the world in 3d at the same time. Or maybe i'm just too new at this whole 3d thing. I used to wonder how people could even think with any sort of intelligence while seeing the world properly without glasses. I still have my doubts :) Then there's the problem with the people with glasses. haha, they're good thinkers, but are stuck in the single plane focus of their lenses. Best to keep them on topic :)
The impossible part seems to be the likeable part. As a jack of all trades(and i do mean ALL) everybody always seems to dislike one of the trades. :)