Comment by beeflet
1 day ago
Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea?
I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity. It is a matter of motivation and exposure to new information. The vast majority of the population doesn't benefit from working in some niche field of physics in the first place.
Perhaps LLMs will never be at the right place and the right time because they are only trained on ideas that already exist.
>Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea?
It's not an "or" but an "and". Being at the right place and time is a necessary precondition, but it's not sufficient. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants like Kepler and Galileo, and Einstein built upon the work of Maxwell and Lorentz. The key question is, why did they see the next step when so many of their brilliant contemporaries, who had the exact same information and were in similar positions, did not? That's what separates the exceptional from the rest.
>I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity.
There is a pretty massive gap between understanding a revolutionary idea and originating it. It's the difference between being the first person to summit Everest without a map, and a tourist who takes a helicopter to the top to enjoy the view. One requires genius and immense effort; the other requires following instructions. Today, we have a century of explanations, analogies, and refined mathematics that make relativity understandable. Einstein had none of that.
It's entirely plausible that sometimes one genius sees the answer all alone -I'm sure it happens sometimes- but it's also definitely a common theme that many people/ a subset of society as a whole may start having similar ideas all around the same time. In many cases where a breakthrough is attributed to one person, if you look more closely you'll often see some sort of team effort or societal ground swell.