Are true geniuses extinct?

[PeterDonis]

on average, people used to live while working a good 20 hours per week less than in today's modern society.

Sure, if you don't need any modern conveniences. Are you planning to go live with the Bushmen? If not, why not? I'm guessing it's because you don't want to live at that standard of living. Neither do I. But then looking at how much work it takes to support that standard of living that we don't want to live at is pointless.

it makes no sense that an average person works 2000+ h/year and cannot take care of their basic "needs" - however you define them - especially something as basic as eating. (18% percent of food bank visitors has employment as primary income.) You are either extremely unlucky, totally inefficient, you're getting rob or ... you spend too much on your "wants".

The source you cite does not give any way of telling which, if any, of your four claims (unlucky, inefficient, robbed, poor choices of what to spend on) are applicable to the people described. First, "employment" is not at all the same as "working 2000+ h/year". Second, the article gives no information about what income those people are able to get from their "employment". Third, the article gives no information about where there income is going other than food.

And unless you're including "lives in a society which, because of way too much micromanagement from the top down by government, has a horrendously inefficient market for matching up workers with jobs that productively utilize their skills and pay them accordingly" in "extremely unlucky", you're not taking into account an obvious fifth cause of the predicament described in the article. Which is surprising to me since a number of your other comments seem to point in that obvious direction. But of course that is not the fault of the individuals involved, it's the fault of society, and you appear to want to blame the individuals.

 

[Agent Smith]

However, like all of us, she can be stupid. Her critique of Wile's proof of Fermat's last theorem demonstrated serious mathematical ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Fermat's_Last_Theorem

Not everyday is Sunday I suppose.

It's said that in today's world there can be no polymaths.

 

[Agent Smith]

This problem is straightforward to solve: Work only for what you need, not what you want. We need [basic] food, shelter, and clothing.

We don't need to travel across the world, live in mansions, or have machines to do every simple task for us, which forces us to have more machines to help us maintain our physical health.

 

[javisot20]

To be a genius you have to prove it, it is not enough to have a great ability to solve intelligence tests. Not all people with great ability to solve intelligence tests prove to be geniuses. It seems that it is increasingly difficult to prove to be a genius in today's society. In the same way, in scientific bibliometrics the volume of disruptive science falls and the volume of continuous science increases.

https://francis.naukas.com/2023/01/08/atencion-pregunta-esta-disminuyendo-la-ciencia-disruptiva/in Spanish, but it can be translated.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

- the book on fundamental physical laws of nature is largely closed

I remember this being said not long before we discovered we had missed 95% of the universe - dark energy and dark matter.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I am still waiting to see the fundamental physical constants either derived, or proven to be statistical in an infinity of universes.

 

[Pythagorean]

the book on fundamental physical laws of nature is largely closed

I'd definitely challenge this as a variant of human hubris. We've uncovered about 100 questions for every question we've answered - we've opened a pandora's box in the last century. The modern physics revolution may lure us into a false sense of completion, but there's still lots of interesting things happening to understand the nature of space and time and gravity and relativity and the standard model. All we've really reached is a value ceiling - all the low hanging fruit that has low resource cost or an obvious economic benefit has been plucked, all the higher hanging fruit is still largely untouched. It requires either lots of resources (while providing little known economic value back)... or some combination of luck and genius to make a discovery.

The problem - from the perspective of public perception, is that it's all dispersed (across fields and experts) and highly abstracted now. It's hard to even understand what the fundamental problems are now without having spent a decade understanding the state of what we know in your particular field alone.

Many people are actively working on different parts of modern questions about so-called "fundamental" laws (for example topological approaches to understanding spacetime could be inspired and facilitated by Perelman's recent contributions to Ricci flow analysis that he used to solve the Poincare conjecture just 20 years ago - this was actually quite a huge step but it could take another century to make use of the tool and understand the implications).

 

[BWV]

I remember this being said not long before we discovered we had missed 95% of the universe - dark energy and dark matter.

Right, reinforcing the point that our models can explain most everything except at far extremes of scale and/or energy- which we may never have the tools to fully understand. Furthermore, back to the OP, new insights in these areas are unlikely to come from a lone genius, a ‘next Newton’ or ‘next Einstein’ - physics is way past line individuals being able to make contributions of that level

 

[BWV]

I'd definitely challenge this as a variant of human hubris. We've uncovered about 100 questions for every question we've answered - we've opened a pandora's box in the last century. The modern physics revolution may lure us into a false sense of completion, but there's still lots of interesting things happening to understand the nature of space and time and gravity and relativity and the standard model. All we've really reached is a value ceiling - all the low hanging fruit that has low resource cost or an obvious economic benefit has been plucked, all the higher hanging fruit is still largely untouched. It requires either lots of resources (while providing little known economic value back)... or some combination of luck and genius to make a discovery.

The problem - from the perspective of public perception, is that it's all dispersed (across fields and experts) and highly abstracted now. It's hard to even understand what the fundamental problems are now without having spent a decade understanding the state of what we know in your particular field alone.

Many people are actively working on different parts of modern questions about so-called "fundamental" laws (for example topological approaches to understanding spacetime could be inspired and facilitated by Perelman's recent contributions to Ricci flow analysis that he used to solve the Poincare conjecture just 20 years ago - this was actually quite a huge step but it could take another century to make use of the tool and understand the implications).

Interesting that you quote my post as hubris then list all thr reason why I am likely correct

 

[Pythagorean]

Interesting that you quote my post as hubris then list all thr reason why I am likely correct

I think we are interpreting things differently. To be clear, I'm only demonstrating why the book on the fundamental laws of physics is not largely closed. The game is changing, but it's more like a new chapter than a conclusion.