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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.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, groups tend to be dumber than any individual member. Being accused of groupthink is not a compliment.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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
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.
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
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).
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.
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
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.
Groups tend to be a moderating influence on the individual. So extremes of genius and stupidity are tempered by peer pressure. In small groups it can be presumed (at least) that compatible mindsets of genius can outmatch individual mindsets of genius. Groupthink is only (wholly) bad if the premise of thought is flawed.
For "scientists" groupthink shouldn't even be an issue because "Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas." (Ref. Wikipedia). A group of individual scientists by definition would be the antithesis of Group Think, though irrationality often trumps education and ideals.
Having alternative opinions and personalities is often better than following one bad or mediocre idea. In business however, things are often dictatorial and goals are driven by shareholders whose goals are only abstractly reflected in a balance sheet.
In my experience, even though groups are dumber than any individual member, individuals are smarter when they are in groups.
Individuals rarely challenge their own assumptions. Just having someone to listen to your ideas and ask a few pointed questions can save a huge amount of time wasted in unproductive directions.
It is when a group keeps steering you back to the same bad assumptions that it makes you dumber.
http://xkcd.com/756//
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//
Years of stealthy replacement of educators, first at the college level, then the high school level have beaten the very idea out of people.
I think you have no idea how much tougher the educational system used to be on people who stood out from the crowd. "Don't stick out, fit in. Don't complain, accept," indeed. Do you think being a genius as a schoolkid was easy for Newton?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.