Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • EXAMPLE OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT SPREADING Now, I think most of us know that hi

    EXAMPLE OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT SPREADING

    Now, I think most of us know that history is a complex interaction of societies and technologies. I think most of us know that ‘white folk’ had a much wider territory after we developed the chariot, horse and bronze. I think we know that our ancestors interbred and were eventually subsumed by the civilizations that surrounded them.

    I’m just more interested in what happens to western identity once our omnipotence is erased by technological equivalency and declining relative population. We’ve exported our way of thinking to the rest of the world. And our way of thinking (technological) is, in other than islam, the way of the world.

    But what will happen to our identity?

    —quote—

    “After recent advances and discoveries the only reason people aren’t laughing and pointing at historians is because The Silence covers the total idiocy that they preached just a generation back.

    We are taught that our forefathers never bathed and lingered in caves all through the Middle Ages, and then came The Renaissance.

    We are taught that during this glorious Renaissance scholars discovered Classical Writers and, reading Aristotle and Galen and so forth, we began to emerge from the Caves of Darkness into the glorious New World that existed in the Middle East.

    At the very moment they are recoloring the Egyptians, the whole history they are reciting, all came from Egypt, has been so discredited that The Silence cowers even mentioning it.

    The historical …revision… will come .. when the full implications of the Renaissance Myth are put together.

    Not only did Western Civilization NOT come from discovering Classical Writings, but every single advance in our thought, from medicine to math to engineering, has had to beat down a solid wall of Galen’s Medicine and Aristotle’s …nonsense….”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 11:18:00 UTC

  • CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON THE “ASPERGERY”: (More in my series on SOLIPSISM VS AUTIS

    CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON THE “ASPERGERY”:

    (More in my series on SOLIPSISM VS AUTISM: Political correctness vs unloaded contrarian facts.)

    Solipsistic – Autistic Spectrum

    SOLIPSISTIC-SENSITIVE-SOCIAL-BALANCED-NERDY-ASPIE-AUTISTIC

    “In general, we’re seeing an ongoing convergence between the bad intellectual habits of two groups that are powerfully represented in Internet discussions: the politically correct and the Aspergery. The former dislike pattern recognition and the latter love mechanistic computer-programming style reasoning. And they increasingly come together to try to shut down probabilistic thinking about human behavior.” – iSteve

    Now, this is a really interesting topic: The Economics of Subjective Experience vs Objective Truth.

    NOTES:

    1) Notice how the commenters confuse relying upon intuition as ‘reason’.

    2) There is a definite anti-intellectual trend in conservatism that is not present in libertarianism. This is probably another artifact of IQ distributions, as well as Solipsistic-Autistic distributions.

    3) The aspie learning model is to observe, take a position, argue and learn from it. This is different from an emotionally laden dialog between individuals which would be ‘muddy’ to aspies. The autistic model is to adhere to a particular idea regardless. As is the Solipsistic (Politically correct) model.

    4) Yes, the Dark Enlightenment is the product of Aspies. As are a lot of innovations. Normal people don’t obsess over details like we do. It is extermely expensive and difficult to obsess on causal relations.

    5) There are plenty of Aspies that place infinite discount on emotional constructs just as there are plenty of Sensitives that place infinite premiums on experiences (emotions). There are plenty of normals who are oblivious. 🙂

    6) Yes, Autists are often mechanistic, just as solipsists are politically correct. After all, to be politically correct is to place a premium on experience and a discount on truth. To be mechanistic is to place a premium on truth and a discount on experience.

    7) Aspies are leery of emotional motivation and express incentives and require incentives be expressed as rational actions. This troubles conservatives who rely on emotional activation resulting from intuition.

    SELECTED COMMENTS (Fascinating Thread)

    ——————————

    For me, the most interesting part of this post is the last paragraph. I’ve been looking for a way to describe this for a while but without luck. Steve, I think you nailed it with the “convergence between the bad intellectual habits of…the politically correct and the Aspergery.”

    In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.

    ——-

    …The Aspergery are subject to computer-thinking; in the digital world, everything is a 1 or a 0, it is on or it is off. As for the politically correct, John Derbyshire got it right when he called them “Totalists”. There is no room, for example, to not like homosexuals (or blacks, or immigrants) very much, but to neither wish them any harm – one must either gush endlessly about them, or one clearly wishes to destroy them. No room for subtlety in either worldview.

    …

    Understanding this point – that something that is generally true has some circumstances in which it is not – is something that PCs and Aspys have trouble with for three reasons. First, it is not Totalist. Second, it is not binary. Third, it takes genuine intelligence to understand, and PCs and Aspys tend to substitute snark and smarm for genuine intelligence, in their own version of “fake it till you make it”.

    ——-

    We live in an age in which the darling of the world economy is the tech business. This is a business in which success comes from having a certain kind of smartness that is different from intelligence in general – that borderline autistic, unsubtle, binary-oriented, goal-obsessive, kind of smart that’s most often seen in high-performance geeks. This seems to go hand-in-hand not only with bad social skills, but with some mild level of genuine sociopathy – ask anyone who ever knew Steve Jobs personally about how he treated people close to him for an example of that.

    In truth, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, and a lot of other tech-industry titans, are almost certainly high-functioning autistics who are too successful for anyone to dare call them dysfunctional.

    And -this is key – because the tech sector is so important, these people are the ones who have become heroes and role models, with people brought up to believe that their kind of smart was the best – maybe the only genuine – kind of smart. People love to copy a winner, and when a certain skill set or kind of smartness of way of thinking seems to be successful, people aspire to it and try to emulate it (or at least put on an affectation of it).

    This is one major reason why the internet – and life – is infested with tinhorn Aspys and dime-store Dawkinses.

    ——–

    CURT: Actually, it’s because aspies are infovores. They require high amounts of stimulation via information that they cannot obtain by interaction.

    What I find interesting is that this person isn’t terribly bright and he’s just railing against others with envy. When his real objection is that he can’t use moralistic argument to convince shame or guilt people into agreeing with him. How do I know that? Praxeology. The economy of persuasion.

    ——–

    this is silly….. i dont expect this sort of intellectual sloppiness from someone of your calibre. Half the commenters here are probably aspergery, I am more than certain most of the “Dark Englightenment” is a product of Aspergery thinking. PC and Asperger’s are poles apart on any spectrum of intellectual functioning. One refuses to see patterns, one sees patterns all the time. One is feminine thinking to the extreme, one is masculine thinking to the extreme.

    ——–

    “In addition to not being solid on probabilistic reasoning, software types are not trained to reason about causation.”

    Not so, just the opposite. Software types live in a world where one debugs complex systems by probabilistic reasoning. Debugging programming logic, in programs of any size, is all about reasoning about causation.

    Though some variation of what you say might be true if you modify it to be probabilistic reasoning or causation about human “systems” (society), in particular if the reasoning needs to take into account current, historical, and political social conditions at all scales. Many programming types, particularly those locked in “deathmarch” race-to-deadlines, simply don’t have time to keep up with these things. Something has to give, the task becomes all-consuming, stress and pressure wonderfully concentrates the mind. A hard problem that takes months to solve does warp the human personality trying to solve it. Don’t overlook the simple lack of time in producing aspy-type behavior.

    ——–

    Anonymous said…

    “…the politically correct and the Aspergery. In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.”

    I disagree… the PCs aren’t smart enough to be Aspies.

    ——–

    Anonymous said…

    Some people with Aspergers are aware that neurotypicals exist and that they think is some really weird ways.

    Those people come around to the Dark Enlightenment once they become sufficiently disillusioned.

    Other people with Aspergers seem to be unable to grasp the simple fact that neurotypicals exist, even when it is explained to them over and over.

    When those people become economists, watch out.

    ———

    Anonymous NOTA said…

    Reasoning about probabilities and statistics is really unnatural and hard for most people to do. Reasoning toward an unwanted conclusion is also unnatural and hard for people to do well. The combination is presumably still harder, and I suspect this is one reason why statistical reasoning dealing with some unwanted conclusion is super hard for even most smart people to think through.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 08:30:00 UTC

  • A QUICK REWRITE OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT PRINCIPLES (Comment: Steve Sailor like

    A QUICK REWRITE OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT PRINCIPLES

    (Comment: Steve Sailor likes to pick on libertarians and “Aspergys” as socially clueless. I kind of reject that. The Rothbardians are just ‘wrong’. But the Rothardian movement is moral and ideological, not ratio-scientific. It’s a rebellion movement. And there are good uses for rebellion movements. The protestant movement is the best example. Fundamentalism is an exceptionally effective means of resistance in no small part, because like ideology, religion can be counter to reason and therefore uncriticizable.

    LACK OF ECONOMIC CONTENT

    Libertarians place economic capital ahead of moral capital. Conservatives place moral capital ahead of economic capital. And, as I’ve been arguing, I think that the conservatives are right. We may not have been able to prove that a century ago, but I think we can now. We have enough evidence from a multitude of studies of morality, trust and corruption around the world. And it’s pretty hard to argue with. Without the right institutions you cannot have the right norms. Without the right norms you cannot produce the right economy. Without the right economy you cannot MAINTAIN the right institutions. The circle is pretty challenging to maintain across generations, which themselves are cyclical.

    So again, we see the illustration of the differences between the libertarians and conservatives, as placing different weights on different moral criterial.

    THE CURRENT PRINCIPLES OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT

    This list is evolving. Conservatives are notoriously challenged because their arguments are even more morally loaded than libertarians. I’ve tried to improve it a bit.

    And I’m reluctant for a few reasons. THe first is that conservatives are very leery of our rather analytical language. If we express their morals in propertarian terms they seem to feel like all meaning is lost.

    That is the most interesting part of the problem of bringing conservatives into the rational fold.

    LIST

    – Rejection of The Cathedral. A rejection of The Cathedral in all it’s guises: Totalitarian Humanism, Universalism, Political Correctness, (or whatever other names it goes by, such as Universalism or Political Correctness).

    – Particularism.

    A rejection of sociological universalism, egalitarianism, equalitarianism, diversity as regressive, and destructive. And a preference for particularism, innovation, and excellence.

    – Science.

    The use of science and reason as compatible with particularism, as a contrast to the irrationalism of postmodernism that is necessary to provide cover for, and distract from, universalism.

    – Evolution.

    An acceptance of Darwinian evolution, shunning egalitarian political correctness both from the left and from the Trotskyite right.

    – Biodiversity.

    An acceptance of human biodiversity.

    – BioPolitics.

    Particular people’s have varied biological and demographic interests and imperatives.

    – Incompatibility:

    That human populations are not fungible. They are unique. And therefore, skepticism about mass Third World immigration.

    – Political Institutions.

    The recognition that there is no single best political order. As Aristotle notes in the Politics, some ethnicities are better suited for totalitarianism, some monarchy; some for aristocracy; others, for participatory forms of government such as the city state.

    – Aristocracy:

    Freedom and Democracy are Incompatible. Liberty is incompatible with democracy, and democracy leads to mediocrity.

    – Uneven Progress: An acceptance of science and futurism as a means to improve at least some peoples’ lives. And a recognition that ‘progress’ will be available only to some, and not the entire human population.

    – Religion: Atheistic, Agnostic and with a preference for Ancestral Neopaganism or a form of Christianity that is ethnocentric and particularist.

    – Introspection:

    The end of ‘White Man’s Burden’ as well as ‘Colonial Guilt’ and ‘White Guilt’. We dragged humanity out of ignorance and poverty kicking and screaming. And, they will never thank us for it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-05 10:05:00 UTC

  • CULTURE OR GENES: IT’S A MUTUALLY DEPENDENT PROCESS (from elsewhere) I study coo

    CULTURE OR GENES: IT’S A MUTUALLY DEPENDENT PROCESS

    (from elsewhere)

    I study cooperative institutions they way hbd_chick studies familial institutions. And as such I’m sure that my bias in determining causality is toward cultural rather than genetic factors.

    I’ve always been suspicious of suggestions of genetic transmission of those biases that can be transmitted by habits, norms, traditions, myths, institutions, and those that are the product of organizations: family or extended family. Maternal or Paternal. Hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial as well as Ritual, temple, church, voluntary civic order.

    But the universalist bias in indo-europeans seems to transcend those external forces. We can tell now that we have an interesting combination of :

    1) Lower testosterone and therefore lower impulsivity.

    2) Lower Impulsivity and therefore longer (lower) time preference.

    3) Higher verbal intelligence and therefore hIgher median intelligence.

    4) Higher energy levels and higher rates of burning calories, so more action oriented.

    This means that our activity is more evenly distributed than more impulsive gene pools.

    And our vision of man, as represented in our art, is as beautiful. And our metaphysical objective is to transform nature to our will.

    The east asians have much lower testosterone and impulsivity than we do, but lower verbal intelligence intelligence. I can’t find data on their energy levels, but it appears that they are more even-tempered laborers than ‘whites’. Although their vision of ‘man’, as represented in their art is as evil in contrast to nature, which we must submit to.

    These factors are not cultural transmissions. They are genetic transmissions. Just how much of that genetic transmission is caused by cultural necessity, and how much it produced that cultural necessity is very hard to determine.

    But regardless of FIRST cause, there is certainly a relationship between the two, such that genetic and cultural factors are self reinforcing over time.

    As far as I can tell, Gimbutas was right, and the structure of military tactics is the cause of western, northern european, (white) cultural differences. And those differences have been gradually encoded in our genes over the centuries as biases.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-05 05:14:00 UTC

  • ENGLISH EXCEPTIONALISM: THE NUCLEAR FAMILY, COMMON LAW, CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS, PROT

    ENGLISH EXCEPTIONALISM: THE NUCLEAR FAMILY, COMMON LAW, CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS, PROTESTANTISM, WIDESPREAD LAND OWNERSHIP.

    Emmanuel Todd is getting mainstream attention.

    “That English, later Anglosphere, exceptionalism, is very real. That the rise of our language and culture to their current unprecedented dominance – what one commentator terms “Anglobalisation” – is based on a series of properties that are either unique to the English-speaking peoples, or shared only with a handful of kindred cultures in northwestern Europe. Among these properties are the common law, representative government, Protestantism, dispersed landownership, civil associations separate from the state and – of particular interest to these authors – the unusual nature of the family.

    “They show that the Anglosphere dispenses with the extended family structures which, in most places, have legal as well as cultural force. In many societies, the peasant family has traditionally been treated as a kind of collective landowner, within which there are reciprocal responsibilities. Children, even in adulthood, have been expected to work on the family plot, receiving board and lodging. Marriages are typically arranged, and daughters-in-law come under the authority of the head of their new household. Even when the law recognizes individual autonomy, custom is often slow to follow.

    “The Anglosphere scarcely resembles the Eurasian landmass in its family structures. Our notion of the family is limited and nuclear. Most English-speakers in most centuries wanted to set up home on their own, independently, with just their spouse and children – although economic circumstances did not always allow that aspiration to be fulfilled.

    “The notion that the limited family underpins Anglosphere exceptionalism – which draws heavily on the work of the French anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd – is intriguing. I see the cultural difference all around me in the European Parliament. In most Continental states, your social life is largely taken up with your extended family: you have an endless stream of weddings and christenings to go to, sometimes of very distant cousins. Britons and Americans, by contrast, expect to leave their parental home in their teens, either to go to university or to work. We make friends away from home, and they become the core of our social life. Indeed, the word “friend” carries more force in English than in many European languages, in which it is bestowed quickly and generously, but often means little more than what we mean by a Facebook friend. When a Spaniard says of someone “es muy amigo mío”, he simply means that he gets on with the chap.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 16:15:00 UTC

  • (ON OUR PRODUCT) THE BUSINESS PRINCIPLE OF EMPLOYEE SOVEREIGNTY I’m working on b

    (ON OUR PRODUCT) THE BUSINESS PRINCIPLE OF EMPLOYEE SOVEREIGNTY

    I’m working on business rules today. And in reviewing competing products again, I’m still struck by the employee-as-liar-and-thief nature of most products. Now, I don’t make products for the lower half of society. The upper half wants its sovereignty.

    What does that mean?

    Basically, we each learn and function by different rules, but those rules describe a spectrum from those who need the MOST supervision and training-by-doing, to those who need the LEAS training-by-doing and supervision, to those who need NO supervision and engage entirely in INDEPENDENT problem solving. The first group has production responsibilities, and a short time horizon, and the last have profit, revenue or cost responsibilities and a long time horizon.

    Society is organized, because production is organized, by our ability to rapidly and independently adapt to changing circumstances, given abstract information in the form of prices. THis is why capitalism rewards those who ORGANIZE PRODUCTION not those who PRODUCE. Organization is difficult. Production can be replaced quickly and easily and has little or no differential value.

    We are building Oversing for those people who work in organization s where one of the rewards of working there is Sovereignty, sure. But we are trying to push sovereignty down into the organization as far as possible. Because EVERYONE wants to be sovereign if at all possible. And if you give the upper third sovereignty they will act as sovereign individuals on behalf of the organization (family, and team) rather than as exploited serfs.

    And I am intentionally leaving out features that deprive people of sovereignty. Because I don’t want customers, or users, who are not sovereign. Because it’s immoral in my view. It’s and immorality is bad business.

    It’s not only bad for society. It’s not only bad for the employee. It’s bad business.

    Happy, fulfilled, empowered people, make happy customers.

    it’s infectious.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 06:44:00 UTC

  • OF *COURSE* THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT IS TAKING PLACE OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA. Academia

    OF *COURSE* THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT IS TAKING PLACE OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA.

    Academia is part of the state. It’s the church of the state. And Academia’s bureaucratic and commercial incentives are to foster the fantasy of upper middle class universalism so that they can sell their over-priced,defective, non-performing wares, without warranty or right of suit, to a highly motivated, ignorant and idealistically motivated consumer, who will do nothing more than blame himself, society or the government, for his or her failure to obtain upper middle class status, despite being sold ‘the promise’ by universities.

    Not that academics aren’t involved in our movement. They are. It’s just interesting that the taboo of empirical work on ‘differences’ and ‘incompatibilities’ is as dominant in state-sponsored-academia as it was under the pre-reformation church.

    TOTALITARIAN HUMANISM, CULTURAL MARXISM, POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIALISM ARE THE RELIGION OF THE STATE

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 06:10:00 UTC

  • COMPARING WESTERN WITH SINIC CULTURE Confucianism is a high-opporunity-cost soci

    COMPARING WESTERN WITH SINIC CULTURE

    Confucianism is a high-opporunity-cost social order. It is very conservative. It requires respect for hierarchy and authority (opportunity costs). It requires consensus (opportunity costs but with risk reduction). It is an almost entirely shareholder-property society with low rates of creativity, low risk, slow moving social and economic model. But if it is BIG enough that people cannot sense external competition from OTHER social orders then internal status symbols can be preserved by way of nationalism or culturalism and the social order can work. (it doesn’t: the south is a competitor with the north of china, which is their whole cultural problem – that’s what Mao did. He destroyed the country economically to keep the south from outpacing the north.) This is not necessarily ‘bad’ in confucian society.

    It may bear understanding that Confucius failed to solve the political problem (it is somewhat evident that he understands this) and directed everyone to hierarchy and family. So the confucian model is not republican at it’s base. It is not tribal. It is hierarchical, and familial. The entire nation operates as a family. This is not a bad strategy unless you are competing with a group of high-risk, highly-innovative, fast moving westerners, for whom individual heroism, innovation and achievement are viewed as ‘keeping the group strong’. Competition and individualism are a ‘group good’ in the west. They are not in the asian societies. we are free to copy the innovators, and in doing so, everyone has the opportunity to be ‘better’. The west is an innovation and adaptation society.

    Freedom as we understand it, is not possible, and probably not necessary under Confucianism.

    Economically speaking, a nation that does NOT participate in heavy research and development will eventually fall behind, and governments can concentrate more wealth than the private sector on Research and Development. (What would the impact be of 200 new nuclear power plants in the USA? We have people feeling good about not wasting energy but manufacturing is the greatest energy consumer, and we need more manufacturing. Economizing is a spiritual act, not a material one.) China is making productive investments. We are making redistributive expenses, and spending trillions defending oil and trade routes, and our primary export – the dollar.

    And we will not get anywhere thinking that some very small minority of a Confucian population, or our odd obsession with the religion of Universal Democratic Secular Humanism will have any long term effect on the Sinic culture. The rest of the world is clearly condemning it. There isn’t even any evidence yet that our UDSH values will persist in the west without the Militial and Commercial balance to it, that is the foundation of western civilization.

    The calculative institutions of capitalism, which provide incentives in the form of pricing, sensory information in the form of objects defined as property, expressed and manipulated quantitatively, and the technologies of intertemporal collaboration and coordination in the form of money, interest, banking, fiat money and the technologies of dispute resolution in the form of contract and law, have little or nothing to do with the technologies of redistribution, and the methods of capital concentration, as well as the ‘forgone opportunity costs’ which citizens pay for participation in society and market’. Political freedom is not economic freedom. Political freedom exists either to defend ones self against a predatory state, or to use the violence of the state to put extra-market pressure on competing groups with competing interests.

    The reason for the western matrix of freedoms is to promote innovation, competition and wealth, so that the nobility, the upper middle class, and therefore prosperity will be maintained, and management elites, will rotate keeping the society competitive. At least, that’s the implied theory: meritocratic rotation of the elites – a thematic value system inherited from western heroic competitive militarism. ie: it’s a knowledge production engine.

    China values stability and security, not change and innovation. It is a culture where conflict is a sin. Where the individual is subordinate to the state. Where virtue is not heroic excellence, but duty. (At least, until the middle class is large enough.)

    Conservatives are in large part, whether knowingly or not, subscribers to ‘natural law’ theory, which states that human behavior is what it is, always has been and always will be. They do not subscribe to the philosophy that all men would work happily for the common good, nor, if given the opportunity, that they would do some common good in political power, or even know what such a good would be, simply because of the number of trade offs and secondary causes. Nor, that we are capable of implementing any designed change in our social orders without horrific consequences.

    And under that view, they would say that you are making a moral equivalency where there is none.

    Moral statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Ethical statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Manners are economic demonstrations, contributions, and payments. But these payments are made against a vast, habitual, rather than written set of legal, cultural and class body of accounts – and vastly different concepts of property definition, and they exist largely to ‘pay for the social order’ by reducing opportunity for friction and conflict.

    In the west, we have a very different payment system. We are all trying to be noblemen or priests. In the east, they are all trying to be Confucian – to hold their place. More like the German model prior to ww1. Our anglo model, is very rare. And it may simply be the artifact of a thousand years of wealth generated by expansion under the reformation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-02 06:16:00 UTC

  • How Long Before We Have Another Einstein?

    EINSTEIN LIKE MOST GENIUS IS A PRODUCT OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO COALESCE DISPARATE INSIGHTS IN A PARTICULAR BODY OF TIME.

    1) It certainly appears that Einstein merely provided mathematical tests for work of Poincare. (Almost everything else he said, did, and wrote was really.. quite silly.). The genius was provided by Maxwell and Poincare. Einstein’s elegance was in his method of communication.

    2) The evidence suggests (see Murray) that we obtain a genius in a field because two prior generations of intellectuals concentrate efforts in that field for status seeking reasons. (Mozart).

    3) It also appears that a certain rate of wealth creation is necessary over a sustained period of two generations before genius is ‘affordable’ and therefore emerges because a sufficient number of people have the time and resources to specialize in what is essentially non productive labor. 

    4). We have argued for a few generations now that it appears to take five to seven hundred years for a civilization to ‘cook’ a philosopher.  And that civilizations appear to go thru phases that produce different categories of thinkers in each season.

    5) These factors suggest a causal relation that other commenters attribute to sheer temporal correlation.  That is: it’s very expensive to get enough IQ available and working on intellectual production, over enough generations, that minor insights can accumulate in sufficient numbers that someone from a following generation can synthesize and articulate the common causal relations between those insights and articulate that common causal relation as a new “idea”.

    I’d recommend Murray’s tome Human Accomplishment and Joel Mokyr’s various works including The Gifts of Athena.

    https://www.quora.com/How-long-before-we-have-another-Einstein

  • How Long Before We Have Another Einstein?

    EINSTEIN LIKE MOST GENIUS IS A PRODUCT OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO COALESCE DISPARATE INSIGHTS IN A PARTICULAR BODY OF TIME.

    1) It certainly appears that Einstein merely provided mathematical tests for work of Poincare. (Almost everything else he said, did, and wrote was really.. quite silly.). The genius was provided by Maxwell and Poincare. Einstein’s elegance was in his method of communication.

    2) The evidence suggests (see Murray) that we obtain a genius in a field because two prior generations of intellectuals concentrate efforts in that field for status seeking reasons. (Mozart).

    3) It also appears that a certain rate of wealth creation is necessary over a sustained period of two generations before genius is ‘affordable’ and therefore emerges because a sufficient number of people have the time and resources to specialize in what is essentially non productive labor. 

    4). We have argued for a few generations now that it appears to take five to seven hundred years for a civilization to ‘cook’ a philosopher.  And that civilizations appear to go thru phases that produce different categories of thinkers in each season.

    5) These factors suggest a causal relation that other commenters attribute to sheer temporal correlation.  That is: it’s very expensive to get enough IQ available and working on intellectual production, over enough generations, that minor insights can accumulate in sufficient numbers that someone from a following generation can synthesize and articulate the common causal relations between those insights and articulate that common causal relation as a new “idea”.

    I’d recommend Murray’s tome Human Accomplishment and Joel Mokyr’s various works including The Gifts of Athena.

    https://www.quora.com/How-long-before-we-have-another-Einstein