Can you offer any examples of generalists (and/or rationalists) who have produced significant insights besides Eliezer? When I look at history, I see subject specialists successfully branching out into new areas and making significant progress, whereas generalists/rationalists have failed to produce any significant work (look at philosophy).
Leibniz, Da Vinci, Pascal, Descartes, and John von Neumann spring immediately to mind for me.
There’s also Poincaré, often considered the last universalist. Kant is famous as a philosopher, but also worked in astronomy. Bertrand Russell did work in philosophy as well as mathematics, and was something of a generalist. Noam Chomsky is the linguist of the 20th century, and if you consider any of his political and media analysis outside of linguistics to be worthwhile, he’s another. Bucky Fuller. Charles Peirce. William James. Aristotle. Goethe. Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. Omar Khayyám.
Just thought of Gauss, who in addition to his work in mathematics did considerable work in physics.
Herbert Simon: psychology and computer science (got an economics Nobel).
Alan Turing: don’t know how I could have forgotten him.
Good answers. Also, Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the inventors of Bayesian statistics, was also an excellent astronomer and physicist (and briefly the French Minister of the Interior, of all things)
There’s probably a few in there. I won’t try to dispute them on a case by case basis. There are, on the other hand, literally thousands of specialists who have achieved more impressive feats in their fields than many of the people you cite. (I take straightforward exception to Chomsky who founded a school of linguistics that’s explicitly anti-empirical.)
Not to defend anything specific about Chomsky’s program, but “anti-empirical” is unfair. “Anti-empiricist” would be more reasonable (though still missing the point, in my opinion).
There’s probably a few in there. I won’t try to dispute them on a case by case basis. There are, on the other hand, literally thousands of specialists
I thought this would happen. The wisdom of my plan to list the top 10 academics first and then check whether they’re specialists or generalists is paying off…
Another method may be to list the top 10 achievements first and then check whether a specialist or a generalist. I imagine Prometheus was a generalist.
This is a good idea. But I think 10 is too few. It would be better to pick the top 100 or 200, and see how many people who contributed to multiple fields are on the list.
I’ve not created the list first, but have thought of which of those I listed above have done something that would belong on that list, so feel free to take possible confirmation bias into account on my part, but even after trying to account for that, I think many of the following accomplishments would be on the list:
Calculus: Leibniz, Newton
Physics: Newton [forgot about Newton originally, but he was a generalist]
Entscheidungsproblem, Turing machine: Turing
Too much important math to list: Gauss
Contributions to quantum mechanics, economics & game theory, computer science (we’re using a von Neumann-style computer), set theory, logic, and much else: von Neumann
It’s worth remembering that what we’re looking for is not just people who contributed to multiple fields but generalists/rationalists: people who took a “big picture” view. (I’m willing to set aside the matter of whether their specific achievements were related to their “big picture” view of things since it will probably just lead to argument without resolution.) Leibniz would definitely fall into that category, for example, but I’m not sure Newton would. He had interests outside of physics (religion/mysticism) but they weren’t really related to one another.
not just people who contributed to multiple fields but generalists/rationalists
what’s the difference between being a generalist and contributing to multiple fields?
I’m willing to set aside the matter of whether their specific achievements were related to their “big picture” view of things since it will probably just lead to argument without resolution.
No, no! This is the meat of the question. If it were the case that generalism correlated with but did not cause great insights (for example, in a world that forced all really clever people to study at least 3 subjects for their whole academic lives this would be the case), then my original argument would fail.
It should be noted that Turing and Shannon both studied with Norbert Wiener, and he might have come up with most of their interesting ideas (and possibly von Neumann’s as well). Also, Wiener founded the study of cybernetics, made notable contributions to gunnery, and made the first real contribution to the field of computer ethics.
ETA: not to discredit the work of Turing, Shannon, and von Neumann, but rather to note that Wiener is definitely someone who made major contributions and should be on the ‘generalists’ list.
Wiener is on the original list I gave a couple of posts up.
Do you have a reference for Turing studying with Wiener and Turing getting his ideas from him? I checked all pages in Hodges’s biography of Turing that mention Wiener, and none of them mention that he studied with Wiener.
Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem paper (which also introduced the Turing machine) was published in 1936. The only (in-person) connection between them I found (though I didn’t search other than checking the bio) is that Wiener spoke with Turing about cybernetics in 1947 while passing by on his way to Nancy.
Are there specific discoveries you believe are falsely attributed to Turing, von Neumann, or Shannon, and can you provide any evidence?
I like Eliezer’s writing, but I think he himself has described his work as “philosophy of AI”. He’s been a great popularizer (and kudos to folks like him and Dawkins), but that’s different from having “produced significant insights”. Or perhaps his insight is supposed to be “We are really screwed unless we resolve certain problems requiring significant insights!”.
Ok, the best way for me to answer this question is to list the 10 most important scientists/academics of all time, and then look them up on wikipedia. I’ll write down the list, and then comment again once I’ve ascertained how “generalist” they are. So, in order of importance:
Galileo
Darwin
Newton
Descartes
Socrates
Aristotle
Plato
Hume
Einstein
Francis Bacon
EDIT: I kind of picked these guys at random out of “famous important academics”. Berners-Lee is on my mind as I study the semantic web. The main point of the exercise is that I wrote down the names before I went and read their wikipedia articles to see how much they’re generalists. Do feel free to suggest changes to this list. Once some consensus is reached, I will post the analysis. I kicked pythagoras off in favor of Francis Bacon, since Bacon seems to be particularly relevant to this site’s interests, and the article on Pythagoras disputes the worth of his science. Strictly speaking, this is a bit naughty of me, but what the hell—I’ll allow this one indulgence. Note that I didn’t look at Francis Bacon’s article before I decided he was to go on the list; I was spurred into including him by scientism’s comment below.
Roko: rather than picking out of random, it’d be better to start with a survey of the historical literature. Fortunately, the search and statistical ranking has already been done in Human Accomplishment.
For the combined science index, we get:
Newton
Galileo
Aristotle
Kepler
Lavoisier
Descartes
Huygens
Laplace
Einstein
Faraday
It’s a list that seems reasonable to me, as surprising as Lavoisier, Huygens, and Faraday may be.
Of course, it misses out the philosophers, but they appear in the “western philosophy” list. Since aristotle, plato, descartes and hume all appear in the top ten of that list, it seems that the only odd ones out in my list are bacon, darwin and socrates.
But, a larger list will not hurt us. So I’ll throw in the top ten from combined sciences, and the top ten from philosophy. Corr, that’s going to be quite some work to do…
I think an important issue in this generalist/specialist debate and this attempt to create a list of the most important figures is that the historical time frame may be very relevant.
As the world becomes increasingly complex and fields of study, old and new, become increasingly specialized, would this not affect the ability of a generalist/specialist to produce a significant insight or make a significant contribution?
Perhaps it makes more sense to consider much more recent people as examples if we want to apply this to society as it stands now.
Darwin was almost preempted by Wallace. Newton and Leibniz arrived at the same calculus independently, and similar work was done by Seki Kowa at the same time. They were merely there first and most prominently, but not uniquely. I think to satisfy importance, we want cut vertex scientists and academics.
What constitutes a “cut vertex” here depends entirely on how far you want to take the counterfactual. Who do you shoot so that humanity makes no further progress, ever?
Socrates is an odd fellow to have on the list, since there aren’t any works by Socrates. If you think Plato should be on the list, feel free to kick Socrates off.
As a physicist, I’ve always been partial to Maxwell’s work—he deduced the induction of a curled magnetic field by a changing electric field solely from mathematical considerations, and from this, was able to guess the nature of light before any other human.
I’ve mixed feelings about Descartes. The pull of the Cartesian Theater has muddling effects in serious cognitive philosophy. On the other hand, by making the concept explicit, he did make it easier for others to point out that it was wrong.
Regarding the Cartesian Theater, I think it obviously had an impact on Global Workspace Theory, which actually seems to be going in the right direction.
And let’s not forget Decartes’s many other contributions. The coordinate grid and analytic geometry, anyone?
The top-ten list needs Galileo. Galileo > Newton. Galileo > Einstein.
And Berners-Lee? If he had never started the WWW, within 2 years of when he did start it, someone else would have started something very similar. (And his W3C does dumb things.) If you want a contributor to the internet on the list, I humbly suggest J.C.R. Licklider, his protogee Roberts, or one of the four authors of “The End-to-end Argument”.
Massive hindsight bias. Whether we, as a race, are proud of it or not, it wasn’t until Darwin, only 150 years ago, that someone seriously suggested and developed it.
Natural selection is the combination of two ideas: 1. Population characteristics change over time if members of the population are systematically disallowed reproduction. 2. Nature systematically disallows reproduction.
I’m willing to accept that I’m suffering from hindsight bias. But will you at least give me that his theory is much easier to understand than any of the others? And maybe a few guesses on the topic of why it was so hard to think of?
Also, even if an insight is rare, that doesn’t mean its bearer deserves credit. Many inventors made important accidental discoveries, and I imagine luck must have factored into Darwin’s discovery somehow as well. If 1% of biologists who had gone on the voyage Darwin went on also would have developed the theory, does he still deserve to be on the list of the top ten intellectuals?
Addendum: Here is an argument that ancient scientists and mathematicians don’t deserve as much credit as we give them: they were prolific. We have no modern equivalent of Euler or Gauss; John Von Neumann was called “the last of the great mathematicians”. There are two possibilities here: either the ancient thinkers were smarter than we were, or their accomplishments were more important and less difficult than those of modern thinkers. The Flynn effect suggests that IQs are rising over time, so I’m inclined to believe that their accomplishments were genuinely less difficult.
And even if making new contributions to these fields isn’t getting more difficult, surely you must grant that it must become more difficult at some point, assuming that to make a new contribution to a field you must understand all the concepts your contribution relies on, and all the concepts those concepts rely on, etc.
Natural selection is the combination of two ideas: 1. Population characteristics change over time if members of the population are systematically disallowed reproduction. 2. Nature systematically disallows reproduction.
I’m willing to accept that I’m suffering from hindsight bias. But will you at least give me that his theory is much easier to understand than any of the others? And maybe a few guesses on the topic of why it was so hard to think of?
Extraordinarily so, yes—it does astonish me that no one hit it before. Nonetheless, the empirical fact remains, so...
I suppose the sense of “mystery” people attached to life played into it somewhat.
People were breeding animals, people were selecting them, and...socially there was already some idea of genetic fitness. Men admired men who could father many children.The idea of heredity was there.
Honestly, the more I think of it, the more I share your confusion. It is deeply odd that we were blinded for so long. Perhaps we should work to figure out how this happened, and whether we can avoid it in the future.
I don’t think luck can factor in quite as much as you imagine though. We’re not attempting to award credit, so much as we are attempting to identify circumstances which tend to produce people who tend to produce important insights. Darwin’s insight was incredibly important, and had gone unseen for centuries. To me, that qualifies him.
Even if you put it at a remove, even if you say, well, Darwin was uniquely inspired by his voyage, another biologist could have done the same, then the voyage becomes important. Why didn’t another biologist wind up on a voyage like that? What can we do to ensure that inspiring experiences like that are available to future intellectuals? In this way, Darwin’s life remains an important data point, even if—especially if—we deny that there was anything innately superior about the man.
Addendum: Here is an argument that ancient scientists and mathematicians don’t deserve as much credit as we give them: they were prolific.
Agreed, completely—they pulled the low-hanging fruit from the search space.
I’m confused—do you mean that deism, specifically, made it hard to think of, or easy? And I’m not sure many were deists—I can’t find numbers, but I was under the impression deism was always a really small movement.
EDIT: nevermind, reference to deism was removed in an edit.
I meant that I thought the fact that so many took for granted the fact that God created the animals was one of the factors that made evolution hard to think of, and Darwin shouldn’t get genius status just because he overcame it. But then I remembered Lamarck and thought better of it. I still think it is a weak argument in favor of Darwin not being a genius, though.
Massive hindsight bias. Whether we, as a race, are proud of it or not, it wasn’t until Darwin, only 150 years ago, that someone seriously suggested and developed it.
I’d also suggest that Darwin’s insight was far less intuitive than the insights of Newton (although this may reflect just different degrees of hindsight bias).
(although this may reflect just different degrees of hindsight bias).
Indeed, I suspect it does. Imagine not having calculus… or mechanics, and then having to reinvent it. That formalism has been in my head for the last 10 years, so it’s really hard for me to let go of it. Are you a physical sciences guy too?
I think an important issue in this generalist/specialist debate and this attempt to create a list of the most important figures is that the historical time frame may be very relevant.
As the world becomes increasingly complex and fields of study, old and new, become increasingly specialized, would this not affect the ability of a generalist/specialist to produce a significant insight or make a significant contribution?
Perhaps it makes more sense to consider much more recent people as examples if we want to apply this to society as it stands now.
Aubrey De Grey hasn’t yet been proved right, so he’s a tentative example, but he is a rare biological theorist where most biologists are specialized experimenters.
I think philosophy is a good example. Philosophers are supposed to be more logical/rational than other people and have been generalists until recently (many still are). They have also failed to produce a single significant piece of work on par with anything found in science. Now, some people might disagree with that assessment, but I suspect their counterexamples would be chiefly in specialist sub-disciplines: formal logic, for example. I think to the degree that there has been “good philosophy” it’s found under the model of specialists working under the kind of robust institutional framework Robin alludes to rather than individual theorists taking a global perspective (philosophy as martial arts). I can’t think of any systematizers I’d credit with discovering truth. I do not think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes discovered any substantial truths (Descartes mathematical work aside) so we probably differ there. Regardless, I think there’s a good argument to be made that historically truth has come from robust institutions involving many specialists (such as science) rather than brilliant lone thinkers taking a global perspective.
I do not think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes discovered any substantial truths (Descartes mathematical work aside) so we probably differ there.
You seem to differ from the rest of the world, too. Wikipedia:
Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day.
René Descartes established the framework for a scientific method’s guiding principles in his treatise, Discourse on Method
There’s a huge difference between being considered historically important and having discovered substantial truth. The Bible is historically important. It helped lay the foundations of Western culture. This is hardly disputable. It does not, however, contain much in the way of truth. Nor do the works of Plato and Aristotle.
To take one example: Aristotle laid down the foundation of what became modern science. Modern science became modern science as we think of it by rebelling against Aristotle’s a priori assumptions; without Aristotle, what science we have today would be very different, indeed.
I don’t think you can so easily dismiss Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, et al: without them we we wouldn’t be where we are today.
This is part of the problem I often detected at OB and see again here at LW: people with little respect for intellectual history.
Can you offer any examples of generalists (and/or rationalists) who have produced significant insights besides Eliezer? When I look at history, I see subject specialists successfully branching out into new areas and making significant progress, whereas generalists/rationalists have failed to produce any significant work (look at philosophy).
Leibniz, Da Vinci, Pascal, Descartes, and John von Neumann spring immediately to mind for me.
There’s also Poincaré, often considered the last universalist. Kant is famous as a philosopher, but also worked in astronomy. Bertrand Russell did work in philosophy as well as mathematics, and was something of a generalist. Noam Chomsky is the linguist of the 20th century, and if you consider any of his political and media analysis outside of linguistics to be worthwhile, he’s another. Bucky Fuller. Charles Peirce. William James. Aristotle. Goethe. Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. Omar Khayyám.
Just thought of Gauss, who in addition to his work in mathematics did considerable work in physics.
Herbert Simon: psychology and computer science (got an economics Nobel).
Alan Turing: don’t know how I could have forgotten him.
Norbert Wiener.
Good answers. Also, Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the inventors of Bayesian statistics, was also an excellent astronomer and physicist (and briefly the French Minister of the Interior, of all things)
Yeah, Laplace certainly belongs close to the top of any such list.
There’s probably a few in there. I won’t try to dispute them on a case by case basis. There are, on the other hand, literally thousands of specialists who have achieved more impressive feats in their fields than many of the people you cite. (I take straightforward exception to Chomsky who founded a school of linguistics that’s explicitly anti-empirical.)
Not to defend anything specific about Chomsky’s program, but “anti-empirical” is unfair. “Anti-empiricist” would be more reasonable (though still missing the point, in my opinion).
I thought this would happen. The wisdom of my plan to list the top 10 academics first and then check whether they’re specialists or generalists is paying off…
Another method may be to list the top 10 achievements first and then check whether a specialist or a generalist. I imagine Prometheus was a generalist.
This is a good idea. But I think 10 is too few. It would be better to pick the top 100 or 200, and see how many people who contributed to multiple fields are on the list.
I’ve not created the list first, but have thought of which of those I listed above have done something that would belong on that list, so feel free to take possible confirmation bias into account on my part, but even after trying to account for that, I think many of the following accomplishments would be on the list:
Calculus: Leibniz, Newton
Physics: Newton [forgot about Newton originally, but he was a generalist]
Entscheidungsproblem, Turing machine: Turing
Too much important math to list: Gauss
Contributions to quantum mechanics, economics & game theory, computer science (we’re using a von Neumann-style computer), set theory, logic, and much else: von Neumann
It’s worth remembering that what we’re looking for is not just people who contributed to multiple fields but generalists/rationalists: people who took a “big picture” view. (I’m willing to set aside the matter of whether their specific achievements were related to their “big picture” view of things since it will probably just lead to argument without resolution.) Leibniz would definitely fall into that category, for example, but I’m not sure Newton would. He had interests outside of physics (religion/mysticism) but they weren’t really related to one another.
what’s the difference between being a generalist and contributing to multiple fields?
No, no! This is the meat of the question. If it were the case that generalism correlated with but did not cause great insights (for example, in a world that forced all really clever people to study at least 3 subjects for their whole academic lives this would be the case), then my original argument would fail.
It should be noted that Turing and Shannon both studied with Norbert Wiener, and he might have come up with most of their interesting ideas (and possibly von Neumann’s as well). Also, Wiener founded the study of cybernetics, made notable contributions to gunnery, and made the first real contribution to the field of computer ethics.
ETA: not to discredit the work of Turing, Shannon, and von Neumann, but rather to note that Wiener is definitely someone who made major contributions and should be on the ‘generalists’ list.
Wiener is on the original list I gave a couple of posts up.
Do you have a reference for Turing studying with Wiener and Turing getting his ideas from him? I checked all pages in Hodges’s biography of Turing that mention Wiener, and none of them mention that he studied with Wiener.
Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem paper (which also introduced the Turing machine) was published in 1936. The only (in-person) connection between them I found (though I didn’t search other than checking the bio) is that Wiener spoke with Turing about cybernetics in 1947 while passing by on his way to Nancy.
Are there specific discoveries you believe are falsely attributed to Turing, von Neumann, or Shannon, and can you provide any evidence?
I like Eliezer’s writing, but I think he himself has described his work as “philosophy of AI”. He’s been a great popularizer (and kudos to folks like him and Dawkins), but that’s different from having “produced significant insights”. Or perhaps his insight is supposed to be “We are really screwed unless we resolve certain problems requiring significant insights!”.
Ok, the best way for me to answer this question is to list the 10 most important scientists/academics of all time, and then look them up on wikipedia. I’ll write down the list, and then comment again once I’ve ascertained how “generalist” they are. So, in order of importance:
Galileo
Darwin
Newton
Descartes
Socrates
Aristotle
Plato
Hume
Einstein
Francis Bacon
EDIT: I kind of picked these guys at random out of “famous important academics”. Berners-Lee is on my mind as I study the semantic web. The main point of the exercise is that I wrote down the names before I went and read their wikipedia articles to see how much they’re generalists. Do feel free to suggest changes to this list. Once some consensus is reached, I will post the analysis. I kicked pythagoras off in favor of Francis Bacon, since Bacon seems to be particularly relevant to this site’s interests, and the article on Pythagoras disputes the worth of his science. Strictly speaking, this is a bit naughty of me, but what the hell—I’ll allow this one indulgence. Note that I didn’t look at Francis Bacon’s article before I decided he was to go on the list; I was spurred into including him by scientism’s comment below.
Roko: rather than picking out of random, it’d be better to start with a survey of the historical literature. Fortunately, the search and statistical ranking has already been done in Human Accomplishment.
For the combined science index, we get:
Newton
Galileo
Aristotle
Kepler
Lavoisier
Descartes
Huygens
Laplace
Einstein
Faraday
It’s a list that seems reasonable to me, as surprising as Lavoisier, Huygens, and Faraday may be.
OK, that’s an interesting list.
Of course, it misses out the philosophers, but they appear in the “western philosophy” list. Since aristotle, plato, descartes and hume all appear in the top ten of that list, it seems that the only odd ones out in my list are bacon, darwin and socrates.
But, a larger list will not hurt us. So I’ll throw in the top ten from combined sciences, and the top ten from philosophy. Corr, that’s going to be quite some work to do…
I think an important issue in this generalist/specialist debate and this attempt to create a list of the most important figures is that the historical time frame may be very relevant.
As the world becomes increasingly complex and fields of study, old and new, become increasingly specialized, would this not affect the ability of a generalist/specialist to produce a significant insight or make a significant contribution?
Perhaps it makes more sense to consider much more recent people as examples if we want to apply this to society as it stands now.
Darwin was almost preempted by Wallace. Newton and Leibniz arrived at the same calculus independently, and similar work was done by Seki Kowa at the same time. They were merely there first and most prominently, but not uniquely. I think to satisfy importance, we want cut vertex scientists and academics.
What constitutes a “cut vertex” here depends entirely on how far you want to take the counterfactual. Who do you shoot so that humanity makes no further progress, ever?
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov?
Socrates is an odd fellow to have on the list, since there aren’t any works by Socrates. If you think Plato should be on the list, feel free to kick Socrates off.
As a physicist, I’ve always been partial to Maxwell’s work—he deduced the induction of a curled magnetic field by a changing electric field solely from mathematical considerations, and from this, was able to guess the nature of light before any other human.
I’ve mixed feelings about Descartes. The pull of the Cartesian Theater has muddling effects in serious cognitive philosophy. On the other hand, by making the concept explicit, he did make it easier for others to point out that it was wrong.
Regarding the Cartesian Theater, I think it obviously had an impact on Global Workspace Theory, which actually seems to be going in the right direction.
And let’s not forget Decartes’s many other contributions. The coordinate grid and analytic geometry, anyone?
Exactly. Descartes laid the foundation for future progress.
The top-ten list needs Galileo. Galileo > Newton. Galileo > Einstein.
And Berners-Lee? If he had never started the WWW, within 2 years of when he did start it, someone else would have started something very similar. (And his W3C does dumb things.) If you want a contributor to the internet on the list, I humbly suggest J.C.R. Licklider, his protogee Roberts, or one of the four authors of “The End-to-end Argument”.
Berners-Lee? Recency effect much?
Darwin? Seriously? The essential kernel of his theory is so easy to understand that I’m reluctant to give him much credit for inventing it.
Most truly great insights feel obvious in retrospect.
Massive hindsight bias. Whether we, as a race, are proud of it or not, it wasn’t until Darwin, only 150 years ago, that someone seriously suggested and developed it.
Natural selection is the combination of two ideas: 1. Population characteristics change over time if members of the population are systematically disallowed reproduction. 2. Nature systematically disallows reproduction.
I’m willing to accept that I’m suffering from hindsight bias. But will you at least give me that his theory is much easier to understand than any of the others? And maybe a few guesses on the topic of why it was so hard to think of?
Also, even if an insight is rare, that doesn’t mean its bearer deserves credit. Many inventors made important accidental discoveries, and I imagine luck must have factored into Darwin’s discovery somehow as well. If 1% of biologists who had gone on the voyage Darwin went on also would have developed the theory, does he still deserve to be on the list of the top ten intellectuals?
Addendum: Here is an argument that ancient scientists and mathematicians don’t deserve as much credit as we give them: they were prolific. We have no modern equivalent of Euler or Gauss; John Von Neumann was called “the last of the great mathematicians”. There are two possibilities here: either the ancient thinkers were smarter than we were, or their accomplishments were more important and less difficult than those of modern thinkers. The Flynn effect suggests that IQs are rising over time, so I’m inclined to believe that their accomplishments were genuinely less difficult.
And even if making new contributions to these fields isn’t getting more difficult, surely you must grant that it must become more difficult at some point, assuming that to make a new contribution to a field you must understand all the concepts your contribution relies on, and all the concepts those concepts rely on, etc.
Extraordinarily so, yes—it does astonish me that no one hit it before. Nonetheless, the empirical fact remains, so...
I suppose the sense of “mystery” people attached to life played into it somewhat.
People were breeding animals, people were selecting them, and...socially there was already some idea of genetic fitness. Men admired men who could father many children.The idea of heredity was there.
Honestly, the more I think of it, the more I share your confusion. It is deeply odd that we were blinded for so long. Perhaps we should work to figure out how this happened, and whether we can avoid it in the future.
I don’t think luck can factor in quite as much as you imagine though. We’re not attempting to award credit, so much as we are attempting to identify circumstances which tend to produce people who tend to produce important insights. Darwin’s insight was incredibly important, and had gone unseen for centuries. To me, that qualifies him.
Even if you put it at a remove, even if you say, well, Darwin was uniquely inspired by his voyage, another biologist could have done the same, then the voyage becomes important. Why didn’t another biologist wind up on a voyage like that? What can we do to ensure that inspiring experiences like that are available to future intellectuals? In this way, Darwin’s life remains an important data point, even if—especially if—we deny that there was anything innately superior about the man.
Agreed, completely—they pulled the low-hanging fruit from the search space.
I’m confused—do you mean that deism, specifically, made it hard to think of, or easy? And I’m not sure many were deists—I can’t find numbers, but I was under the impression deism was always a really small movement.
EDIT: nevermind, reference to deism was removed in an edit.
I meant that I thought the fact that so many took for granted the fact that God created the animals was one of the factors that made evolution hard to think of, and Darwin shouldn’t get genius status just because he overcame it. But then I remembered Lamarck and thought better of it. I still think it is a weak argument in favor of Darwin not being a genius, though.
I’d also suggest that Darwin’s insight was far less intuitive than the insights of Newton (although this may reflect just different degrees of hindsight bias).
Indeed, I suspect it does. Imagine not having calculus… or mechanics, and then having to reinvent it. That formalism has been in my head for the last 10 years, so it’s really hard for me to let go of it. Are you a physical sciences guy too?
I think an important issue in this generalist/specialist debate and this attempt to create a list of the most important figures is that the historical time frame may be very relevant.
As the world becomes increasingly complex and fields of study, old and new, become increasingly specialized, would this not affect the ability of a generalist/specialist to produce a significant insight or make a significant contribution?
Perhaps it makes more sense to consider much more recent people as examples if we want to apply this to society as it stands now.
Aubrey De Grey hasn’t yet been proved right, so he’s a tentative example, but he is a rare biological theorist where most biologists are specialized experimenters.
Out of interest, when you said:
Who were you thinking of?
I think philosophy is a good example. Philosophers are supposed to be more logical/rational than other people and have been generalists until recently (many still are). They have also failed to produce a single significant piece of work on par with anything found in science. Now, some people might disagree with that assessment, but I suspect their counterexamples would be chiefly in specialist sub-disciplines: formal logic, for example. I think to the degree that there has been “good philosophy” it’s found under the model of specialists working under the kind of robust institutional framework Robin alludes to rather than individual theorists taking a global perspective (philosophy as martial arts). I can’t think of any systematizers I’d credit with discovering truth. I do not think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes discovered any substantial truths (Descartes mathematical work aside) so we probably differ there. Regardless, I think there’s a good argument to be made that historically truth has come from robust institutions involving many specialists (such as science) rather than brilliant lone thinkers taking a global perspective.
You seem to differ from the rest of the world, too. Wikipedia:
There’s a huge difference between being considered historically important and having discovered substantial truth. The Bible is historically important. It helped lay the foundations of Western culture. This is hardly disputable. It does not, however, contain much in the way of truth. Nor do the works of Plato and Aristotle.
To take one example: Aristotle laid down the foundation of what became modern science. Modern science became modern science as we think of it by rebelling against Aristotle’s a priori assumptions; without Aristotle, what science we have today would be very different, indeed.
I don’t think you can so easily dismiss Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, et al: without them we we wouldn’t be where we are today.
This is part of the problem I often detected at OB and see again here at LW: people with little respect for intellectual history.
Isaac Asimov was a generalist.
Make of that what you will.