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Roko comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong
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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).
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:
It's a list that seems reasonable to me, as surprising as Lavoisier, Huygens, and Faraday may be.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Most truly great insights feel obvious in retrospect.