i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
I guess I’m a bus ticket collector of HN facts.
That average does put things into perspective though.
As an aside, I recently feel at odds with the language many people are using. The mere word 'hate' seems to have grown weird political connotations, while is suddenly okay to hate 'hate'. Is this not fostering the very emotion you revile, under twisted pretense? I remember 'love thy enemy' to have been the twist of the knife in peaceful protest, not sinking to their level with 'justified hate'. It feels hollow. If we want a change, we need to reach out first. /rant
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.