There is woolly thinking going on here, I feel. I recommend a game of Rationalist’s Taboo. If we get rid of the word “Einstein”, we can more clearly see what we are talking about. I do not assign a high value to my probabilty of making Einstein-sized contributions to human knowledge, given that I have not made any yet and that ripe, important problems are harder to find than they used to be. Einstein’s intellectual accomplishments are formidable—according to my father’s assessment (and he has read far more of Einstein’s papers than I), Einstein deserved far more than one Nobel prize.
On the other hand, if we consider three strong claimants to the title of “highest-achieving thinker ever”, namely Einstein, Newton and Archimedes, we can see that their knowledge was very much less formidable. If the test was outside his area of expertise, I would consider a competition between Einstein and myself a reasonably fair fight—I can imagine either of us winning by a wide margin, given an appropriate subject. Newton would not be a fair fight, and I could completely crush Archimedes at pretty much anything. There are millions of people who could claim the same, millions who could claim more. Remember that there are no mysterious answers, and that most of the work is done in finding useful hypotheses—finding a new good idea is hard, learning someone else’s good idea is not. I do not need to claim to be cleverer than Newton to claim to understand pretty much everything better than he ever did, nor to consider it possible that I could make important contributions. If I had an important problem, useful ideas about it that had been simmering for years and was clearly well ahead of the field, I would consider it reasonably probable that I would make an important breakthrough—not highly probable, but not nearly as improbable as it might sound. It might clarify this point by saying that I would place high probability on an important breakthrough occuring—if there is anyone in such a position, I conclude that there are probably others (or there will be soon), and so the one will probably have at least met the people who end up making the breakthrough. It is useful to remember that for every hero who made a great scientific advance, there were probably several other people who were close to the same answer and who made significant contributions to finding it.
There is woolly thinking going on here, I feel. I recommend a game of Rationalist’s Taboo. If we get rid of the word “Einstein”, we can more clearly see what we are talking about. I do not assign a high value to my probabilty of making Einstein-sized contributions to human knowledge, given that I have not made any yet and that ripe, important problems are harder to find than they used to be. Einstein’s intellectual accomplishments are formidable—according to my father’s assessment (and he has read far more of Einstein’s papers than I), Einstein deserved far more than one Nobel prize.
On the other hand, if we consider three strong claimants to the title of “highest-achieving thinker ever”, namely Einstein, Newton and Archimedes, we can see that their knowledge was very much less formidable. If the test was outside his area of expertise, I would consider a competition between Einstein and myself a reasonably fair fight—I can imagine either of us winning by a wide margin, given an appropriate subject. Newton would not be a fair fight, and I could completely crush Archimedes at pretty much anything. There are millions of people who could claim the same, millions who could claim more. Remember that there are no mysterious answers, and that most of the work is done in finding useful hypotheses—finding a new good idea is hard, learning someone else’s good idea is not. I do not need to claim to be cleverer than Newton to claim to understand pretty much everything better than he ever did, nor to consider it possible that I could make important contributions. If I had an important problem, useful ideas about it that had been simmering for years and was clearly well ahead of the field, I would consider it reasonably probable that I would make an important breakthrough—not highly probable, but not nearly as improbable as it might sound. It might clarify this point by saying that I would place high probability on an important breakthrough occuring—if there is anyone in such a position, I conclude that there are probably others (or there will be soon), and so the one will probably have at least met the people who end up making the breakthrough. It is useful to remember that for every hero who made a great scientific advance, there were probably several other people who were close to the same answer and who made significant contributions to finding it.