Most of the scientific breakthroughs are achieved by select few super talented scientists. But since we have no way to tell ahead of time who will become such a genius, we should educate and employ large number of scientists even if only tiny few of them will become next Einsteins.
> In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.
> Most of the scientific breakthroughs are achieved by select few super talented scientists.
It isn't at all clear that this is true. A lot of real advances are made by a largish collection of people plugging away and sharing ideas. We really love the narrative around the archetype of a lone inventor, but it's rarely that clear cut. This is exacerbated by the incentive structures - we want to pick "winners".
This isn't to say that there aren't people who really stand out, far from it. But it's probably a mistake to account too much progress to them.
Education gets diluted the more people are educated. Think about how much you learn in university in a short time compared to how much you learn in school.
Now imagine you would have gone to school only with the ones who finished university. How much more would you have learned during that time?
Then imagine a fully equipped university that isn't filled with rich kids but with the brightest.
Think of Katalin Karikó[1]. We don't trust the degrees because everybody can get one nowadays. That's why established figures in a field decide what is worthwhile to research instead of giving that responsibility to the ones who have proven that they can think for themselves.
This already more or less exists in most countries. You have elite universities where some of the brightest tend to end up, in which the conditions to entry are quite harsh, and usually with institutionalized methods for different socio-economic classes to make it in. It's obviously not perfect, but it's an instinctive form of black swan farming that has emerged quite naturally.
I agree, but I'm not sure that's enough. "More people working on it" isn't always better.
I agree that have no way to tell ahead of time. That said, I don't think this works like buying a lot of lottery tickets. A breakthrough isn't random, even if it is unpredictable. It also isn't just a function of who the scientist inherently is. Circumstances may be the bigger half of the equation.
If a patent clerk shows up with relativity, there is no shortage of places that will provide him a desk and some pencils. Newton emerged out of aristocracy, as did Darwin and many others. Tenured professorships are/were an attempt to replicate those circumstances in many ways. Einstein came out of a patent clerk job. In today's terms this is a wfh with lots of bullshit time. We have a lot of math educated people today with these circumstances.
It's just a really hard question.. how do we get more "one offs." IIRC pg named it black swan farming. "Employ" is a broad term and I suspect how its defined matters here.
I also wonder how much access to material resources matter. For mathematical exercises, you don't need much and if you do a modern laptop and open source tools are probably fine for most subfields, but access to high-energy conditions, or wet-labs are harder to come by.
I think it's very unlikely they don't play a huge role. Accessibility of all kind is essential, and the bar can never be low enough. I think the age of the internet has taught us this much.
I'm not sure it's possible to educate such people. Newton's breakthroughs came during a temporary excursion from university. Einstein was considered a failure who would not do as he was told. Darwin dropped out of medical school.
These are not the sort of people you would give a job too, either, because they were basically unpleasant and unreliable in everyday life.
that's a super biased sampling, for every Einstein you're going to have 100 other impactful researchers who followed the traditional route of schooling
I think a better way of framing it is that people with some talent will emerge naturally no matter their circumstances
I had the same thought a while back on the "bullshit jobs" idea. We know that a large percentage of jobs are probably unnecessary. The problem is that we don't know which jobs those are, and finding out is surprisingly hard.
