I was pretty struck by how per capita output isn’t obviously going down, and it’s only when you do the effective population estimates that it does.
Could this suggest a 4th hypothesis: the ‘innate genius’ theory: about 1 in 10 million people are geniuses, and at least since around 1400, talent spotting mechanisms were good enough to find them, so the fraction of the population that was educated or urbanised doesn’t make a difference to their chances of doing great work.
I think I’ve seen people suggest this idea—I’m curious why you didn’t include it in the post.
You’d need to think something like geniuses tend to come from families with genius potential, and these families also tend to be in the top couple of percent by income.
It would line up with claims made by Gregory Clark in The Son Also Rises.
To be clear, I’m not saying I agree with these claims or think this model is the most plausible one.
“Some of the people who have written the most detailed pieces about “innovation stagnation” seem to believe something like the “golden age” hypothesis—but they seem to say so only in interviews and casual discussions, not their main works.”
Just fyi—You mention Peter Thiel in a footnote here. It’s been a while since I read it but iirc Peter Thiel describes something you might consider a version of the golden age hypothesis in a bit of dusk in the “You are not a lottery ticket” chapter of zero to one.
This post lacks knowledge about western contemporary music (that’s how “classical” music is kind of called nowadays). A brief list of innovative composers on par with Beethoven: Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Varese, Messiaen, Ligeti, Berio, Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, Steve Reich, John Cage, Penderecki, Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Xenakis, Saariaho, John Adams, Elliot Carter, Manoury, Grisey, Murail, Haas, Kurtag, Davidovsky, Sciarrino, Alexander Schubert, Steen-Andersen, Ablinger, Oliveira, Mary, Kokoras… and of course there are a lot more.
A fun way to keep up on new composers is watching the ScoreFollower youtube channel videos. You can also look for composition contests and check out the winners and jury for names. Or… just google for contemporary music, read books about it or about music history, or even look for musicology research (the scientific study of music). Hope this helps.
[Disclaimer: Sheer idle speculation, not important or rigorous]
I am generally a fan of the innovation-as-mining hypothesis. However, even within the broad tent of that hypothesis, there is room to debate e.g. whether there has been a recent, temporary slowdown in progress due to cultural or genetic factors in addition to the usual ideas-getting-harder-to-find factor. I have two ideas here that I’d be interested to see explored:
1. You say
Finally, this hypothesis implies that a literal duplicate of Beethoven, transplanted to today’s society, would be a lot less impressive. My own best guesses at what Beethoven and Shakespeare duplicates would accomplish today might show up in a future short post that will make lots of people mad.
What about a duplicate of John von Neumann? Maybe our modern geniuses like Terry Tao are his equal, but I sometimes wonder if he was a class above even them.
2. One argument you make against the Golden Age hypothesis is that typically the golden age is also the first age, which is a suspicious coincidence. IIRC, I read somewhere that average human brain size has shrunk over the last ten thousand years or so. I dunno if that’s true but suppose it is. Given the correlation between brain size and IQ, one might wonder whether selection pressure for intelligence—or some important component of it—has also diminished in the last ten thousand years or so. If that were true, a version of the Golden Age hypothesis would be more likely, and also would successfully predict that observed “golden ages” in various fields would happen at the beginning of said fields.
>the “golden age” hypothesis (people in the past were better at innovation), the “bad taste” hypothesis (Beethoven and others don’t deserve their reputations), and the “innovation as mining” hypothesis (ideas naturally get harder to find over time, and we should expect art and science to keep slowing down by default).
I think you’re missing what I consider the most likely explanation: There are a lot more people in these fields now, trying to be the best. What’s remarkable about these historical figures is not that they were better at what they did than people nowadays, but that they did it first. So I am not sure we’d notice a new Shakespeare. We’d simply lump him in with all of the other really good playwrights we have. Nothing would make him stand out as the best.
So it’s possible that our scientists, artists, etc. are better than these historical giants, but we just can’t tell.
The movie Yesterday sort of tackled this in an interesting way. Imagine a parallel universe where everything is the same but the Beatles never came together. Would someone releasing their exact music in 2021 still become highly successful and considered a musical icon? In the movie the answer is yes. In real life I imagine the answer would be no—the same exact music would no longer sound innovative and would thus not become particularly successful. This New-Beatles band might reach the level of a Top-100 artist but they’d never see the same level of admiration as the Beatles did and still do.
So I believe we’re simply not judging more recent art works by the same standards, resulting in a huge bias towards older works. Beethoven is only noteworthy because his works are a cultural meme at this point—he was a great musician for his time, sure, but right now there’s probably tens of thousands of musicians who could make music of the same caliber straight on their laptops. Today’s Beethoven publishes his amazing tracks on SoundCloud and toils in obscurity.
So I believe we’re simply not judging more recent art works by the same standards, resulting in a huge bias towards older works.
Why is it wrong to credit past art for innovations that have since become commonplace? If a musician’s innovations became widespread, I would count that as evidence of the musician’s skill. Similarly, Euclid was a big deal even though there are millions of people who know more math today than he did.
Beethoven is only noteworthy because his works are a cultural meme at this point—he was a great musician for his time, sure, but right now there’s probably tens of thousands of musicians who could make music of the same caliber straight on their laptops. Today’s Beethoven publishes his amazing tracks on SoundCloud and toils in obscurity.
This sounds like an extreme overstatement, at least if applied to classical music. Some modern classical music it is pretty good, and better than Beethoven’s less-acclaimed works. And the best of it is probably on par with Beethoven’s greatest hits. But much of it is unmemorable—premiered, then mercifully forgotten. The catalog of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project is representative of modern classical orchestral music, and I think most of it falls far short of Beethoven’s best symphonies. The concertgoing public strongly prefers the old stuff, to the consternation of adventurous conductors.
The thesis that recent (50 year) declines in innovation productivity are best explained by innovation generally getting structurally harder over time does, I think, somewhat overfit the data.
Sketched argument below:
Innovation is cumulative. And in particular new tools create new possibilities for innovation as much as the reverse. So no astronomy without the telescope, no modern medicine without organic chemistry, no Beethoven without the invention of the piano, no early mathematics without Hindu-Arabic numerals, etc.
When the right tool arrives, there is a subsequent explosion of innovation, followed by a slow down.
There is a degree of randomness in these bursts, and the 70 years around the turn of the 19th/20th century was a particularly strong cluster (from the publication of Maxwell’s equations in 1865 to the Trinity nuclear test in 1945). Humanity went from candles and horses to nuclear power, jet engines, eradication of most communicable diseases, electrification, relativity and quantum mechanics, the telephone, early computers, and many others. Art and culture also shifted abruptly and in a very interesting way.
Note that this was an acceleration from the 19th century—innovation doesn’t always get harder.
If the limiting factor is the right tool, rather than people or money, then huge investment in research will lead to drops in productivity in producing fundamental breakthroughs. And the people we call geniuses are just those that get their hands on the tool first (bit like Bill Gates being one of a handful of people to globally able play with computers in their teens).
Post 1970 (?) slowdown in innovation is to some extent a contrast with an exceptional cluster, and and in itself a relative trough.
The big question, it seems to me, is whether AI and ~CRISPR the sorts of fundamental tools that can spark a new acceleration?
It may be hard to compare art from different periods, but it is direct to compare science and engineering from different periods because the same thing was discovered or invented multiple times.
Knowledge is not a ratchet. Sometimes knowledge is lost. But it is not only catastrophes like burning libraries and riots against scholars. There are Leaden Ages where scientific knowledge is lost century after century, such as Alexandria for about five centuries starting 150AD. Any period of progress is a Golden Age compared to that. Do people know that they are in a Leaden Age? I don’t think the Alexandrians knew. The first task is not to fool yourself.
If a second age reconstructs the knowledge of the first age faster, it might be because they are better, or it might be because they are supported by the notes of the pioneers. But what if they are slower? This is strong evidence that the first age really was Golden. In particular, the Hellenistic Age, 330-130BC, subsumed virtually all scientific progress for thousands of years, at least to 1600, and maybe to 1700.
One possibility (which may or not have been mentioned) is that an overflow of information/stimulation as a result of technology and faster paced societies inhibits creativity. Part of the issue may arise from excessive entertainment: Beethoven may have created musical pieces in periods of boredom, which the modern day Beethoven spends scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.
I think another potential explanation relates to the way people think about the history of a given field when asked to reflect on it (e.g. to create a top 100 list). We tend to conceive of fields as progressions unfolding over time, and even if we don’t think this is always in a “better” direction, at least we conceive of the field as consisting of time periods characterized by a dominant paradigm or style. Certainly this is the way that “history of X” classes are usually taught.
If this is the case, it seems natural to me that, when asked to reflect on the “most important” individuals or contributions to a field in its history, we will tend to structure that reflection around our conception of these periods, and likely identify an emblematic individual for each period. Indeed, part of our conception of “greatest” might include a feature like “dominated their field for a decade or more,” and obviously the frequency of individuals characterized in this way cannot increase with greater population, education, or anything at all! To the extent that our thinking follows this approach, we will tend to see “best of” lists being pretty flat over time, and therefore, appearing to decline when normalized by anything that increases over time.
At risk of anticipating your follow-ups, I have two suggestions regarding art. I don’t think they apply as well to science.
If a work is considered to be among the greats, the older it is, the more foundational it has become. An enormous amount of great music since Beethoven is, often very deliberately, developing Beethoven’s ideas further, or introducing new ideas by tweaking what Beethoven (or Mozart or Bach) did. Thus, what the art is gets tied up with the foundational works. In mining terms, finding a motherlode also seems to mean shutting down (or, at best, reducing focus on) other mines. It’s impossible to imagine western classical music without Beethoven, in part because such a significant amount of it is Beethovian. Had some very talented and charismatic musician come along at the right time from the Balkans, maybe that foundational slot would be taken by someone/something else. If this is correct, there’s bound to be some historical figures that are considered head-and-shoulders above the rest, and they must be quite old. A contemporary person cannot fill this role, though it’s conceivable that a contemporary person would fill this role for people 200 years down the road.
The effectiveness of Beethoven’s and Shakespeare’s works relies on performance. While there are attempts at period authenticity, the most popular recording of the 5th symphony or performance of Hamlet is not that, and hasn’t been that for a long time. This relates to (1) in a couple of ways:
There have been centuries of “testing” to optimize the experience of these works, and it is ongoing. (This point is less relevant to, say, novelists, even if people are constantly re-interpreting Dickens.) Ranking Shakespeare #1 is really ranking centuries-of-optimizations-Shakespeare #1, which puts David Mamet at a pretty big disadvantage.
Foundational works impact performance practice. At risk of oversimplifying, teenage violinists go to conservatory to learn how to play Beethoven. Even in the unlikely event that they never play Beethoven, present-day composers write for musicians trained to play Beethoven, not Harry Partch. Not all music requires virtuosity (or violinists), but huge subfields of the arts involve creators devising works for performers who were trained for old stuff.
Thank you for a thought provoking post! I enjoyed it a lot.
I also find the “innovation as mining” hypothesis intuitive. I’d just add that innovation gets harder for humans, but we don’t know whether it holds in general (think AI). Our mental capacity has been roughly constant since ancient Greece, but there is more and more previous work to understand before one can come up with something new. This might not be true for AI, if their capacity scales.
On the other hand there is a combinatorial explosion of facts that you can combine to come up with an innovation and I don’t know what fraction of the combinations will actually be useful and judged as innovation. So overall, the difficulty might increase, stay roughly the same, or decrease, depending on how the number of useful combination scales with the number of all combinations.
I also suspect that subjective rankings of past accomplishments just tend, for whatever reason, to look overly favorably on the past.
One explanation of this would be that innovation needs time to collect its impact. Old innovations are well integrated into the society, so they have already collected most of its impact, while new innovations have most of their impact still in the future, so we don’t perceive them as transformative yet.
I would argue that John Williams fits the bill of a modern Beethoven, but he’s not much of an innovator. Jacob Collier innovates, but lacks mainstream appeal. Kanye West innovated hip hop quite a bit, but lacks appeal (in general) to a high-brow audience because he doesn’t sing well or play any instruments, he’s just really good at stitching together samples and surrounding himself with people that can refine his ideas.
I think much of it has to do with the volume of artists and scientists and the increased flow of information—so that one single person is responsible for much less of the progress, because much more information is circulating about what that person is doing among that particular community.
I think as far as academia is concerned you can also consider a sort of bureaucratic weight to things. It’s harder to get anything done when you have to spend much of that time applying for grants, doing relatively asinine trainings for the purpose of giving your institution liability shielding and federal government funding, etc.
Another thing is that there’s so many relevant people that the towering figures that used to exist are rarer. Many of the most relevant figures before the modern day were aristocrats, whereas today it’s much more of an open field in terms of who gets to do what—and so there are a lot of people competing for a relatively small amount of attention. If someone solved the riemann hypothesis tomorrow, I doubt the average person would hear much about it.
Comments for Where’s Today’s Beethoven? will go here.
I was pretty struck by how per capita output isn’t obviously going down, and it’s only when you do the effective population estimates that it does.
Could this suggest a 4th hypothesis: the ‘innate genius’ theory: about 1 in 10 million people are geniuses, and at least since around 1400, talent spotting mechanisms were good enough to find them, so the fraction of the population that was educated or urbanised doesn’t make a difference to their chances of doing great work.
I think I’ve seen people suggest this idea—I’m curious why you didn’t include it in the post.
This seems implausible to me, unless I’m misunderstanding something.
Are all such geniuses pre-1900 assumed to come from the aristocratic classes? Why?
If no, are there many counterexamples of geniuses in the lower classes being discovered in that time by existing talent spotting mechanisms?
If yes, why would this not be the case any more post-1900, or is the claim that it is still the case?
It’s not exactly a nice conclusion.
You’d need to think something like geniuses tend to come from families with genius potential, and these families also tend to be in the top couple of percent by income.
It would line up with claims made by Gregory Clark in The Son Also Rises.
To be clear, I’m not saying I agree with these claims or think this model is the most plausible one.
Understood, thanks. Yeah, this seems like a bit of an implausible just-so story to me.
“Some of the people who have written the most detailed pieces about “innovation stagnation” seem to believe something like the “golden age” hypothesis—but they seem to say so only in interviews and casual discussions, not their main works.”
Just fyi—You mention Peter Thiel in a footnote here. It’s been a while since I read it but iirc Peter Thiel describes something you might consider a version of the golden age hypothesis in a bit of dusk in the “You are not a lottery ticket” chapter of zero to one.
This post lacks knowledge about western contemporary music (that’s how “classical” music is kind of called nowadays). A brief list of innovative composers on par with Beethoven:
Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Varese, Messiaen, Ligeti, Berio, Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, Steve Reich, John Cage, Penderecki, Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Xenakis, Saariaho, John Adams, Elliot Carter, Manoury, Grisey, Murail, Haas, Kurtag, Davidovsky, Sciarrino, Alexander Schubert, Steen-Andersen, Ablinger, Oliveira, Mary, Kokoras… and of course there are a lot more.
A fun way to keep up on new composers is watching the ScoreFollower youtube channel videos. You can also look for composition contests and check out the winners and jury for names. Or… just google for contemporary music, read books about it or about music history, or even look for musicology research (the scientific study of music). Hope this helps.
[Disclaimer: Sheer idle speculation, not important or rigorous]
I am generally a fan of the innovation-as-mining hypothesis. However, even within the broad tent of that hypothesis, there is room to debate e.g. whether there has been a recent, temporary slowdown in progress due to cultural or genetic factors in addition to the usual ideas-getting-harder-to-find factor. I have two ideas here that I’d be interested to see explored:
1. You say
What about a duplicate of John von Neumann? Maybe our modern geniuses like Terry Tao are his equal, but I sometimes wonder if he was a class above even them.
2. One argument you make against the Golden Age hypothesis is that typically the golden age is also the first age, which is a suspicious coincidence. IIRC, I read somewhere that average human brain size has shrunk over the last ten thousand years or so. I dunno if that’s true but suppose it is. Given the correlation between brain size and IQ, one might wonder whether selection pressure for intelligence—or some important component of it—has also diminished in the last ten thousand years or so. If that were true, a version of the Golden Age hypothesis would be more likely, and also would successfully predict that observed “golden ages” in various fields would happen at the beginning of said fields.
>the “golden age” hypothesis (people in the past were better at innovation), the “bad taste” hypothesis (Beethoven and others don’t deserve their reputations), and the “innovation as mining” hypothesis (ideas naturally get harder to find over time, and we should expect art and science to keep slowing down by default).
I think you’re missing what I consider the most likely explanation: There are a lot more people in these fields now, trying to be the best. What’s remarkable about these historical figures is not that they were better at what they did than people nowadays, but that they did it first. So I am not sure we’d notice a new Shakespeare. We’d simply lump him in with all of the other really good playwrights we have. Nothing would make him stand out as the best.
So it’s possible that our scientists, artists, etc. are better than these historical giants, but we just can’t tell.
The movie Yesterday sort of tackled this in an interesting way. Imagine a parallel universe where everything is the same but the Beatles never came together. Would someone releasing their exact music in 2021 still become highly successful and considered a musical icon? In the movie the answer is yes. In real life I imagine the answer would be no—the same exact music would no longer sound innovative and would thus not become particularly successful. This New-Beatles band might reach the level of a Top-100 artist but they’d never see the same level of admiration as the Beatles did and still do.
So I believe we’re simply not judging more recent art works by the same standards, resulting in a huge bias towards older works. Beethoven is only noteworthy because his works are a cultural meme at this point—he was a great musician for his time, sure, but right now there’s probably tens of thousands of musicians who could make music of the same caliber straight on their laptops. Today’s Beethoven publishes his amazing tracks on SoundCloud and toils in obscurity.
Why is it wrong to credit past art for innovations that have since become commonplace? If a musician’s innovations became widespread, I would count that as evidence of the musician’s skill. Similarly, Euclid was a big deal even though there are millions of people who know more math today than he did.
This sounds like an extreme overstatement, at least if applied to classical music. Some modern classical music it is pretty good, and better than Beethoven’s less-acclaimed works. And the best of it is probably on par with Beethoven’s greatest hits. But much of it is unmemorable—premiered, then mercifully forgotten. The catalog of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project is representative of modern classical orchestral music, and I think most of it falls far short of Beethoven’s best symphonies. The concertgoing public strongly prefers the old stuff, to the consternation of adventurous conductors.
Very much enjoyed the post.
The thesis that recent (50 year) declines in innovation productivity are best explained by innovation generally getting structurally harder over time does, I think, somewhat overfit the data.
Sketched argument below:
Innovation is cumulative. And in particular new tools create new possibilities for innovation as much as the reverse. So no astronomy without the telescope, no modern medicine without organic chemistry, no Beethoven without the invention of the piano, no early mathematics without Hindu-Arabic numerals, etc.
When the right tool arrives, there is a subsequent explosion of innovation, followed by a slow down.
There is a degree of randomness in these bursts, and the 70 years around the turn of the 19th/20th century was a particularly strong cluster (from the publication of Maxwell’s equations in 1865 to the Trinity nuclear test in 1945). Humanity went from candles and horses to nuclear power, jet engines, eradication of most communicable diseases, electrification, relativity and quantum mechanics, the telephone, early computers, and many others. Art and culture also shifted abruptly and in a very interesting way.
Note that this was an acceleration from the 19th century—innovation doesn’t always get harder.
If the limiting factor is the right tool, rather than people or money, then huge investment in research will lead to drops in productivity in producing fundamental breakthroughs. And the people we call geniuses are just those that get their hands on the tool first (bit like Bill Gates being one of a handful of people to globally able play with computers in their teens).
Post 1970 (?) slowdown in innovation is to some extent a contrast with an exceptional cluster, and and in itself a relative trough.
The big question, it seems to me, is whether AI and ~CRISPR the sorts of fundamental tools that can spark a new acceleration?
It may be hard to compare art from different periods, but it is direct to compare science and engineering from different periods because the same thing was discovered or invented multiple times.
Knowledge is not a ratchet. Sometimes knowledge is lost. But it is not only catastrophes like burning libraries and riots against scholars. There are Leaden Ages where scientific knowledge is lost century after century, such as Alexandria for about five centuries starting 150AD. Any period of progress is a Golden Age compared to that. Do people know that they are in a Leaden Age? I don’t think the Alexandrians knew. The first task is not to fool yourself.
If a second age reconstructs the knowledge of the first age faster, it might be because they are better, or it might be because they are supported by the notes of the pioneers. But what if they are slower? This is strong evidence that the first age really was Golden. In particular, the Hellenistic Age, 330-130BC, subsumed virtually all scientific progress for thousands of years, at least to 1600, and maybe to 1700.
One possibility (which may or not have been mentioned) is that an overflow of information/stimulation as a result of technology and faster paced societies inhibits creativity. Part of the issue may arise from excessive entertainment: Beethoven may have created musical pieces in periods of boredom, which the modern day Beethoven spends scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.
I think another potential explanation relates to the way people think about the history of a given field when asked to reflect on it (e.g. to create a top 100 list). We tend to conceive of fields as progressions unfolding over time, and even if we don’t think this is always in a “better” direction, at least we conceive of the field as consisting of time periods characterized by a dominant paradigm or style. Certainly this is the way that “history of X” classes are usually taught.
If this is the case, it seems natural to me that, when asked to reflect on the “most important” individuals or contributions to a field in its history, we will tend to structure that reflection around our conception of these periods, and likely identify an emblematic individual for each period. Indeed, part of our conception of “greatest” might include a feature like “dominated their field for a decade or more,” and obviously the frequency of individuals characterized in this way cannot increase with greater population, education, or anything at all! To the extent that our thinking follows this approach, we will tend to see “best of” lists being pretty flat over time, and therefore, appearing to decline when normalized by anything that increases over time.
Thanks for this, it’s a fascinating subject.
At risk of anticipating your follow-ups, I have two suggestions regarding art. I don’t think they apply as well to science.
If a work is considered to be among the greats, the older it is, the more foundational it has become. An enormous amount of great music since Beethoven is, often very deliberately, developing Beethoven’s ideas further, or introducing new ideas by tweaking what Beethoven (or Mozart or Bach) did. Thus, what the art is gets tied up with the foundational works. In mining terms, finding a motherlode also seems to mean shutting down (or, at best, reducing focus on) other mines. It’s impossible to imagine western classical music without Beethoven, in part because such a significant amount of it is Beethovian. Had some very talented and charismatic musician come along at the right time from the Balkans, maybe that foundational slot would be taken by someone/something else. If this is correct, there’s bound to be some historical figures that are considered head-and-shoulders above the rest, and they must be quite old. A contemporary person cannot fill this role, though it’s conceivable that a contemporary person would fill this role for people 200 years down the road.
The effectiveness of Beethoven’s and Shakespeare’s works relies on performance. While there are attempts at period authenticity, the most popular recording of the 5th symphony or performance of Hamlet is not that, and hasn’t been that for a long time. This relates to (1) in a couple of ways:
There have been centuries of “testing” to optimize the experience of these works, and it is ongoing. (This point is less relevant to, say, novelists, even if people are constantly re-interpreting Dickens.) Ranking Shakespeare #1 is really ranking centuries-of-optimizations-Shakespeare #1, which puts David Mamet at a pretty big disadvantage.
Foundational works impact performance practice. At risk of oversimplifying, teenage violinists go to conservatory to learn how to play Beethoven. Even in the unlikely event that they never play Beethoven, present-day composers write for musicians trained to play Beethoven, not Harry Partch. Not all music requires virtuosity (or violinists), but huge subfields of the arts involve creators devising works for performers who were trained for old stuff.
Thank you for a thought provoking post! I enjoyed it a lot.
I also find the “innovation as mining” hypothesis intuitive. I’d just add that innovation gets harder for humans, but we don’t know whether it holds in general (think AI). Our mental capacity has been roughly constant since ancient Greece, but there is more and more previous work to understand before one can come up with something new. This might not be true for AI, if their capacity scales.
On the other hand there is a combinatorial explosion of facts that you can combine to come up with an innovation and I don’t know what fraction of the combinations will actually be useful and judged as innovation. So overall, the difficulty might increase, stay roughly the same, or decrease, depending on how the number of useful combination scales with the number of all combinations.
One explanation of this would be that innovation needs time to collect its impact. Old innovations are well integrated into the society, so they have already collected most of its impact, while new innovations have most of their impact still in the future, so we don’t perceive them as transformative yet.
I would argue that John Williams fits the bill of a modern Beethoven, but he’s not much of an innovator. Jacob Collier innovates, but lacks mainstream appeal. Kanye West innovated hip hop quite a bit, but lacks appeal (in general) to a high-brow audience because he doesn’t sing well or play any instruments, he’s just really good at stitching together samples and surrounding himself with people that can refine his ideas.
I think much of it has to do with the volume of artists and scientists and the increased flow of information—so that one single person is responsible for much less of the progress, because much more information is circulating about what that person is doing among that particular community.
I think as far as academia is concerned you can also consider a sort of bureaucratic weight to things. It’s harder to get anything done when you have to spend much of that time applying for grants, doing relatively asinine trainings for the purpose of giving your institution liability shielding and federal government funding, etc.
Another thing is that there’s so many relevant people that the towering figures that used to exist are rarer. Many of the most relevant figures before the modern day were aristocrats, whereas today it’s much more of an open field in terms of who gets to do what—and so there are a lot of people competing for a relatively small amount of attention. If someone solved the riemann hypothesis tomorrow, I doubt the average person would hear much about it.
Thoughts?