Progress Makes Genius Routine

We forget about one of the great advantages of intellectual progress, namely, that people of above-average intelligence can perform better than geniuses did a century earlier.
Think of a graduate of MIT or CalTech today. I do not mean somebody with a Ph. D. I mean somebody with a bachelor’s degree. He is better at physics than Sir Isaac Newton ever was. That is because he stands on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of Isaac Newton.
Furthermore, Newton was something of a gadfly. He spent a large percentage of his adult life studying alchemy, which was totally wasted time.
It is not just that we stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand on the shoulders of above-average practitioners, too. And we have better tools.
If someone with the intelligence of Newton were to get a degree out of CalTech or MIT, he would be phenomenal. He would make breakthroughs of all kinds. That is true of geniuses in all periods of time. You never know when they are going to show up. You do not know what they are going to accomplish. They will probably be opposed by conventional scholars. These people show up unexpectedly, and then they disappear, with no one comparable to them appearing for a generation or more.
What I am talking about is the above-average practitioner. Because of intellectual progress, and especially because of the division of intellectual labor, it is possible for above-average performers to perform at levels undreamed of by a genius a century or more in the past. What conventional people do as a matter of routine, some genius probably would have been unable to do a century earlier. In certain fields, such as chemistry and genetics, a practitioner prior to 1865 would not have been able to do the work at all.
This is why intellectual progress is such an extraordinary benefit to us. We live off of the moral capital that has been accumulated for over 20 centuries. Then there is the intellectual capital of the last 550 years: post-Gutenberg. Then there is the technological capital of the last 200 years: machines, highways, metallurgy, chemistry, electronics, and so forth. Technological progress is now increasing exponentially.
With a simple computer program that almost anybody can afford, people of above-average intelligence and a graduate school education can perform certain kinds of research and analyses beyond anything possible to a genius 40 years ago. It does not even take much creativity. All it takes is the ability to make certain kinds of intellectual connections, and then the statistical tools to evaluate these connections.

This post was published at Gary North on May 16, 2015.