Your Honor, this is a terrible misuse of statistics. Throw the book at him. Make it Statistics 101.
Seriously, place the numbers in context. We are at the highest levels of worldwide literacy and worldwide availability to higher education of any time in history. This is true for men and woman, but especially for women who have mostly equal opportunities everywhere today. We are also at the highest population of any in history. Therefore, the proportion of women capable of displaying their genius in an academic setting is not only higher than it ever was in sheer numbers it’s higher in percentage.
Can we add more women to that number in the future? Obviously, yes. But we can add more men as well. The nations you list as low in female literacy are also low in male literacy. Perhaps not as low, but hundreds of millions of males are illiterate. Women are not uniquely set aside.
The total worldwide illiteracy is high in absolute numbers but historically low as a percentage. Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian and was the only woman to win the Fields medal, the Nobel Prize of math. That wouldn’t have been possible before she was born.
Just because we still have a ways to go doesn’t negate that fact that we are at the tip of history, with by far the greatest number of humans with access to education.
Eh. I suspect that if you widen your historical window or go back and time and shoot Einstein, you’d find that the general theory would just have been discovered slightly later.
I seems as if most geniuses are the result of innate ability combined an economic advantage and often, to some extent, the result of a parent being in academia. Of the people mentioned so far, almost all of them came from wealth, and many of them had a parent who was an academic in the field they are a noted for.
I think today, in a world where information and resources are more widely available, that the one in a million smart person has much better odds of having that talent nurtured than say 100 years ago. I think that’s probably a good thing; but it makes for a much less easy to break ground.
Regarding the female illiteracy discussion above, there are 90 countries in the world that rank higher than USA, Japan and France in female share of secondary education enrollment.
It is becoming increasingly common in developing nations for girls to be kept in school, while boys drop out in order to join an unskilled work force in which men are paid more than women. In Sudan, 61% of high school students are girls.
I just had an interesting conversation relating to this topic. My father is a scientist who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s a very smart guy. He’s surrounded by very smart guys. He knows and has worked with several Nobel Laureates, members of the National Academy of Sciences, etc.
Just recently, there was a symposium (or something like that) to honor the career of one of his co-workers. This is someone who’s name I’ve heard occasionally from my dad, but someone who, as far as I know, has never achieved any kind of fame or prominence outside the astrophysics community.
But, apparently, everyone who got up to speak and talk about his guy’s career, including various nobel prize winners, mentioned how incredibly smart this guy is. So even in a field where just about everyone is smart, there are people who just stick out as SMART. (My dad says this is the smartest guy he’s ever met.)
So presumably some of the super-geniuses aren’t visibly pushing frontiers in dramatic and revolutionary ways. Rather, they’re just working more or less anonymously in teams of people doing good, productive work in various fields… and the people on those teams would say “DAMN that guy is smart”.
Shoot, I came into this thread to mention Grothendieck. (Also, Ed Witten, who was mentioned earlier. He’s probably the greatest living mathematical physicist, and his work covers both theoretical physics and pure math.) Grothendieck invented modern algebraic geometry from top to bottom, turbo-charging it from a concrete, computational subject into an extremely abstract and powerful one. He’s responsible for not just specific results (e.g., the Grothendieck spectral sequence, which is useful even in the nicer CW-category or in equivariant cohomology), but literally the foundations of the entire subject: schemes, sheaves and sheaf cohomology, cohomology as a derived functor, etc. There a lot of mathematicians whose work I read and come away thinking, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that.” With most of Grothendieck’s work, my thought is, “Wow, I would never have been able to think of that.” He had the raw mathematical talent and creativity of Ramanujan, but was able to put it on a solid foundation and was more interested in productively developing the subject rather than interesting oddities. And then he went crazy and lived out in the forest, so that’s cool too.
In the book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell compares two super geniuses from two different backgrounds (rich and poor). The poor one ended up working on a horse farm or something. The other became Robert Oppenheimer. I suppose he was always Robert Oppenheimer…but he became Robert Oppenheimer, atom bomb inventor.
I read that book about ten years ago. I can’t say how rigorous the science was, but it was a pretty interesting read. That story stuck out to me, I thought about it a lot differently ten years ago than I do now.
Did Oppenheimer try to poison his teacher? Am I remembering it right?
The poor one was Chris Langan, who came from an abusive and neglectful home. He ended up working a variety of manual labor jobs and working on some theory that implied the universe is a conscious construct (I don’t understand what he is talking about when he describes it).
You’ve set the bar pretty high. People like Newton and Einstein come along once every few centuries.
Newton gave us universal gravitation, the laws of motion, and co-developed calculus, and Einstein gave us relativity. These are all astounding developments that changed the world and any scientist with designs on joining their ranks is going to have to do something like reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity, discover a fifth force, scientifically explain consciousness, explain dark energy/dark matter, etc.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if none of us live long enough to see any of that.
At the same time, the Flynn effect means IQs are about 20-30 points higher than they were in the early 20th century (which means, assuming a 15 point standard deviation, that people with extremely superior cognitive abilities should be hundreds of times more common in a population now than in the past. And world population is 4x larger than the early 20th century too.
So the number of homo sapiens in 2017 who have a level of intellect on par with Einstein or Newton should be far far higher than in the past.
One thing I wonder about is if what we do know is approaching some sort of limit of what we can know (even accounting for the Flynn effect) where additional discoveries require greater and greater intellect to even understand until we get to the point where the only person who can comprehend the latest knowledge is its discoverer.
We are already seeing this in that centuries ago it would be relatively easy for a layman to grasp that all mass is attracted to all mass proportional to a few values whereas today “relatively” few can really manage a solid grasp on the fact that time and space are indeed malleable no matter how many times it’s explained to them. Hell, most people can’t tell you what gluten is yet they are scared to death of it.
It may be that it would be literally impossible for any current human to even remotely comprehend, for example, how quantum mechanics is to be reconciled with relativity if, say, some alien was to land on Earth and attempt to explain it.
It would be a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up, or the emergence of transhumanism, or the singularity leaving us in the dust, I guess…
Yep. We have lossy memories. Limited input bandwidth. Limited attention. Glacially slow thought cycle speeds, around 1 khz, asynchronous. All kinds of hard coded needs that interrupt us. At least 1/3 our day is lost to the need to sleep. Only one set of hands, max. And on top of all that, we age, declining in performance, and then arbitrarily die, losing any knowledge we had. Oh, and most of us are irrational, wasting much of our tiny individual resources on viral memes, chats on message boards, and so on.
I don’t know that we should even feel bad about the coming whatever that replaces us. We certainly don’t really deserve to remain in control.
This guy is a perfect example. His proff of Fermat’s Last Theorem is supremely intelligent, uses math than makes my four calculus and three advanced algebra college courses look like counting with your fingers, took more than years and yet he will never be famous.
I think the problema with our modern day geniuses is that their fields, like Wiles’ are so abstract that unless your are really, really into that field, you cannot comprehend even the simpified version of the summary of the abstract. The laws of gases, Newton’s laws, calculus, Volta, even relativity, can be understood in school; caring about Graham’s number aside from “dude, it’s huuuuuge” is very hard.
Flipping it the other way. Could this man, if he’d been born in a different time and place with the same genetics and training, have replicated Einstein’s work on relativity or other famous greats?
Quite likely. So this man’s a genius, but doesn’t that mean that once in a generation ‘super-geniuses’ don’t really exist?
We similarly sometimes find ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ through a series of contests. But whoever gets picked, there were actually thousands of other women who are indistinguishably close in beauty. The characteristics we are judging by are relatively common.
