Comment by sabas123
6 months ago
> Today we have a huge oversupply of scientists, however there's too many of them to allow judging for potential, and many are not actually capable of dramatic impact.
Realistically speaking it's also much harder to achieve the same level of impact back then as most, not just low-hanging, fruits have been plucked.
> not just low-hanging, fruits have been plucked.
Won't this always be the case?
I mean, if you look back 50 years, they look like low-hanging fruits, but at the time, they weren't, only with the benefit of hindsight do they look like low-hanging fruits.
Similarly people in 50 years will say we had all the low-hanging fruits available today in subject/area/topic X, although we don't see them, as we don't have hindsight yet.
50 years? Nah
Like, these things seem obvious in hindsight even now.
You already have the whole Internet of data. You already have GPUs. All you need to do is just use the GPUs to feed the scraped (and maybe not-so-legally downloaded) data into some artificial neural network and you'll get a rather intelligent AI! How could one possibly think otherwise?
They look high hanging fruits when you haven't yet reached them.
They look low hanging fruits when you have risen above them.
This seems written to sound like a profound piece of wisdom, but I find it difficult to not interperet it as a very flowery way of saying "git gud." If that is indeed what you mean then that is fine, but it is still worth acknowledging that the greater competition for funding of today means scientists of today are not playing the same game as scientists of Bell Labs's time.
By definition the vast majority of scientists are mediocore… so isn’t it a tautology that almost all of them wouldn’t be “playing the same game” as the 99.9th+ percentile assembled anywhere?
Put another, I think more accurate way: hindsight is always 20/20.
Very often, the thing that seemed impossible that suddenly wasn't anymore looks "obvious" when looking back at the completed solution.