this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Eh. This kinda breezes over what made Einstein into Einstein.
Access to education, a network of peers doing cutting edge research, and a journal of record to publish into was what separated Einstein from the assorted Very Smart Guys around the world.
Consider, as a counterpoint Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius mathematician who pioneered whole fields of number theory before his death at the age of 32. He is remembered today primarily in his correspondence with a Cambridge University professor, G. H. Hardy. and the notebooks of mathematical proofs he had assembled in his spare time.
What made Ramanujan significant was not merely his genius but his access to the academic record. In the modern era, we have dramatically expanded the reach of academic institutions. So even if you are born in a small town to totally unknown parents living provincial existences, you can access universities more easily now than before.
I might say that the real question is how all this mental horsepower is being used. The modern Einstein likely isn't lost on a deserted road shuttling around firewood. S/he is more likely optimizing some algorithm to make the next great shitcoin or tunning the performance of the graphics rendering for the new Marvel movie.
It doesn't breeze over anything. Lack of access to educational resources is the central theme of the comic.
I'm not sure how the other poster interpreted this comic to be anything else.
It is an expansion on a Stephen Jay Gould quote:
Modern humanity’s biggest flaw is putting an entire generation’s most brilliant minds towards solving the problem of advertising optimization.
If those people had been working on carbon capture, for instance, we’d live in a VERY different world.
I would go back and reread the comic. It’s pretty explicitly stated!
I don't see what's wrong with intelligent people carrying wood in the desolate landscape of a web comic.
But I think the message is that brilliant people with the opportunity to do amazing things are denied the opportunity due to poverty and subsistence living. Raising people out of poverty has a dramatic knock-on benefit for us all. It isn't just some moralistic duty.
I feel the same. The comic seems to imply that Einstein and everyone else are just born Einstein or not, when it actually has more to do with the environment people grow in than where they are born.
Access to education is an important issue of course, but the real problem is not that it makes existing natural born Einsteins carry firewood, but that it stops a large number of children from having a chance of becoming future Einsteins and even worse, from not having to carry firewood for the rest of their lives.
The comic implies that a lack of access to educational opportunities combined with the requirement to do menial tasks is keeping them from reaching their potential.
By experience in academia in a rather theoretical field, for sure you'll struggle finding the new Einstein in academia. Most of the best people I know left at some point. System is at collapse.
In more applied field (lab-based) you still find good people, private competition is still not so better in terms of money and life balance. But for theoretical fields, it is a misery.
In Western countries, certainly. Not a coincidence that the Koreans cloned the first sheep and the Chinese accelerated through the 7nm chip fab barrier at a speed that made Moore's Law look like an underachievement.
There's definitely good money in engineering. Idk about private blue-sky research. I know a few guys who work at Tesla and Boston Dynamics doing the R&D work, and they have not been particularly happy.
About Srinivasa Ramanujan, they even made a movie about him, starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. I recommend it. Trailer.
In your point about the genius talent being wasted on dumb projects, if someone makes an amazing algorithm, people will notice no matter what it was initially used for. I agree that access to academic works is much better than it was and I think with the spread of satellite internet we’re entering a golden age of discovery