Where have all the geniuses gone? Or: what's the real replication crisis?

This chap has asked the eminently sensible question: why have we basically stopped producing geniuses? 

Let's be clear: we are indeed well on the way to having stopped. Which is a bit odd, given quite how many people there are. The world now has billions of well-fed, disease-free, literate people living in sufficient comfort to turn their minds and hands to creating the Big New Thing and yet we're horribly underperforming the fewer and worse-off people of the past. 

Below is the key graph from the link above. It shows the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the 'effective' population (i.e., the total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields).

Perhaps you doubt the methodology. Perhaps you don't find this graph as inuitively convincing as I do. If so, here's another experiment you can try. Take a decade of the 19th century at random and spend just a few of minutes on Wikipedia checking what things of note were created or discovered in those 10 years. 

I took the 1860s and this is what I found:

- The decade saw the publication of Les Misérables, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Das Kapital.
- In art, Monet painted Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Renoir exhibited at the Paris Salon and was painted by Sisley, William Morris set up a wallpaper company, Rossetti was being upset after the death of his wife and Gilbert Scott was hard at work on the Midland Hotel (at St Pancras station) and the Foreign Office, among many other projects.
- In science, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite (patented 1867), James Clerk Maxwell published his equations that quantify the relationship between electricity and magnetism and show that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, Lister developed the antiseptic methods for use in surgery in 1867, introducing carbolic acid as an antiseptic, turning it into the first widely used surgical antiseptic in surgery, and publishing Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, Gregor Mendel formulated his laws of inheritance, the basis for genetics, in a two-part paper written in 1865 and published in 1866, and Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic table.
- In music, the decade saw the composition of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Brahms' Requiem; Verdi's Requiem and Aida were both commissioned; Bruch wrote his violin concerto; Mussorgsky finished Night on Bald Mountain, Lizst wrote a coronation Mass, while Bruckner wrote three Masses and various motets including Locus Iste.

That's just a few minutes looking at Wikipedia. And it tells a story of creativity and advances across the full spectrum of intellectual and creative life that modern times simply cannot replicate. You can quibble all you want - you can doubt the significance of dynamite or the importance of Rossetti - but this is a hefty list: that science from just the years 1865-1867 was awesome - and that was at the same time as the world was creating two of its best ever requiems. Given that we are standing on the shoulders of such giants, we should be doing far, far more than we are. Or even just given the sheer number of human bodies, we should at least be producing 6 times as many ideas as the world of the 1860s: the population of the world in 1870 was in the region of 1.3bn, while its population now is getting close to 8bn. Forget about flying cars: where's my wallpaper with a better design than William Morris can do? Where are my 6 Bruch violin concertos?   

The author of the piece I linked to above, Erik Hoel, suggests that the reason for this catastrophe is the decline of what he calls aristocratic tutoring. (The word "aristocratic" is intended to refer to the kind of private tuition employed by the well-to-do for the general education of their children and to distinguish it from the kind of tutoring used by pushy parents nowadays to get children into competitive schools.)

That's just a very silly theory and we don't need to do more than look at the names in the list of achievements from the 1860s above to see that it's wrong: by and large, these people simply weren't aristocrats or people who had the education of aristocrats. And as for those people who did have the education of aristocrats, Grand Tour and all, what became of them? Not a lot, on the whole.

Sure, there's the odd Tolstoy on the list above, but he's very much the exception: at the same time, in Britain, Dickens (most definitely not an aristocrat raised by a succession of private tutors) was doing the heavy lifting in the big thick novels stakes. Or let's look at the education of George Eliot: "Thanks to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-education and breadth of learning". One can see how that helped her. But we all have the entire internet nowadays! Plus free public libraries! Plus ... I don't need to go on. Imagine what Eliot could have done with the resources available to, say, Zadie Smith today.

Scott Alexander agrees with me (or perhaps vice versa) that aristocratic tutoring is a red herring. But even his analysis is not quite right. He points out that aristocratic tutoring is still very common in the world of musical and chess prodigies and suggest that that is a counter-example to Hoel's thesis. But that fact is not really a counter-example. The standard of performance in classical music and chess today is superb. Musical virtuosity is really quite common: it is not difficult, or at least so it seems to me, to find people alive today who can play the hardest pieces ever written; and it is not really disputed that the best chess players ever are alive right now. I couldn't tell you whether the number of virtuosi or chess grandmasters has tracked or exceeded the growth in the world's population, but it doesn't matter: the fact is that this kind of performance is relatively easily and predictably achieved. We actually have pretty good ways of generating Williams sisters or Polgar sisters, Yuja Wangs and Hilary Hahns. What we can't do is replicate Einsteins, Beethovens or Leonardos. 

It seems to me that there is something about that word "replicate" that is important. We can accurately replicate or reproduce so much nowadays. There is a famous anecdote about Mozart hearing Allegri's Miserere which I won't bother repeating or verifying, but the essence of the story lies in Mozart not being able to record the music. Today, of course, it's available to anyone for free at the touch of a button. Just try to imagine on how few occasions anyone would ever have heard a Beethoven symphony in their life before recording came along: now you are limited only by your amount of free time. Or try to imagine what it was like knowing the Mona Lisa or the Birth of Venus, the Parthenon or the Colosseum, only from a black and white line drawing or perhaps one visit in a lifetime: now we are all familiar with these works even if we never ever actually see them. We live in an age of abundant perfect replication.

And, it seems to me, replication is what we are really good at doing. We produce, again and again, people who perform the great works of the past. We can consistently train people to the highest standards of doing that. And not only in the field of artistic performance. What is the most recent potential successor to Das Kapital? It's Piketty's Capital! Even in political economy, the greatest effort is a self-conscious performance in the shadow of a greater ancestor.

It strikes me as entirely symptomatic of our age that the worry that nags away at so much science - perhaps not a worry so much as an almost existential concern - is what we call the replication crisis. We spend so much of our time living among reproductions of the glories of the past - polishing the glass on the great old paintings and re-staging operas in different clothes, painstakingly teaching millions of children to re-perform the advances of Leibniz and Newton in maths classes and those of Mendel in biology classes - that we throw up our hands in abject horror when we find that some of the latest findings in the cutting edge of science can't be replicated. 

I don't dispute that it's a Bad Thing that lots of science is wrong. But: 'twas ever thus, guys! If you want a replication crisis, try replicating Isaac Newton's cure for the plague: "the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison". The latest scientific thinking has always included wrong ideas - but when we had geniuses to push it forward nonetheless then that wasn't the greatest worry. Even now, when someone comes up with something as good - something as clearly breakthrough-y - as mRNA vaccines then we don't worry about the replication of results. 

Is it possible that trying to replicate findings that various small things make various small differences in diverting attention from finding the big things? I don't know. There are all sorts of reasons why coming up with new ideas is hard. Scott Alexander recites the boring but probably correct ones in his piece, and here are some other interesting ideas.  

But I do know this: failure to replicate what has gone before is not our biggest challenge today. Our problem is not too many mistakes made or too many blind alleys explored. Our problem is not that music is being produced that the public can't understand, or buildings are built that shock or astound us. If we had a mass of brave new theories in physics then we would be seeing an almost equally large mass of brilliant demolitions of their flaws and misconceptions, exposing today's phlogiston and ether - but we aren't. No, our real replication crisis is that the successes of our past are too glibly and slickly replicated, repackaged and reproduced for us to re-consume. 

When recordings and reproductions were almost as good as they are today, they were described as "high fidelity". Perhaps, at least in the intellectual and creative fields, it is time for some promiscuity.

Less is more

I have seen this SNL sketch recommended by a couple of people. Given my lack of exposure to US TV comedy, I think it's fair to say that that means that it is regarded as a really good sketch. 

But it's not. It's on-the-nose, squirmy social commentary and it's ok as a comedy sketch. Fine. But it's just one joke and it's sooooo long. For 2.5 minutes of video, I want more than one joke. 30 seconds for one joke - boom! - then stop. Or else take it further. Why not have a cop come into the store and then things could escalate from there? Or have the customers leave the store and find themselves in an Amazon Go street where their interactions with everything else monitored too? It could have ended with someone nervous in their own home as they are watched by Amazon, thereby showing the depths to which racism has penetrated society. 

I stand by what I said before: US sketch comedy is not its finest export.

Ofsted - culture warrior?

Well, here's a thing. 

This is all about the American School in London (ASL), a lavishly funded school in St John's Wood that educates the children of the American great and good of London: diplomats, ex-pats, international businessmen - you can imagine the sort of thing. 

There are plenty of schools of this kind. London has some (not all of which start with the word "Lycée") and they are commonly found in other international cities such as Brussels, Geneva and New York. These schools offer children who reside in one country the chance to be educated in the curriculum of another country, typically their parents' country. 

Let's consider for a moment what this kind of school is for. It offers some practical benefits, such as allowing children to fit more easily into a new school, or into university, back in the 'home' country. But surely the core promise that these schools make to the people who pay their fees is this: if you send your children to us then they will be brought up in their own culture - they will be as steeped in it as is reasonably possible - so that, despite the distance from your homeland, and despite the peer pressure on them to fit in with the culture of your hosts, your children will be truly American (or French or British or whatever the case may be).

As the ASL is providing education in the UK, it is subject to British regulation. But that's not a problem: Ofsted inspected ASL and declared it 'Outstanding' in 2009, 2013 and 2018. If one were paying the fees of £30,000 a year (or even simply claiming them as part of one's ex-pat package), one would hope so too. I would imagine that keeping children in touch with American culture has not tended to present any difficulties for educational standards: perhaps Ofsted gave ASL a little leeway about the lack of "U"s in their spelling bees, and looked the other way when they taught the American War of Independence by calling it the Revolutionary War and getting the goodies and baddies confused, but I doubt that anything more than that was required.

Times change and cultures change, which means that the task of keeping children in touch with the culture of another country changes. What does it mean to keep children in touch with the culture of America nowadays? We know the answer to that: social justice. 

But, in an exciting twist to the story, Ofsted is having none of it. It inspected ASL again in December 2021 and has just issued a report rating it 'Requires Improvement', i.e. a demotion of two grades. 

Here are some quotations from Ofsted's report:

"In other areas of the curriculum, the approach is not as balanced. This is particularly where teaching places more emphasis on the school’s social justice programme than on the acquisition of specific subject content. In lower-school social studies, pupils spend much time repeatedly considering identity (including analysing their own characteristics) rather than learning, for example, geographical knowledge.  ...  

... ‘Affinity groups’ provide opportunities to discuss world issues. Memberships to most of these are open to all, but the school has limited some to under-represented groups in the belief that this represents positive action on behalf of these pupils. However, some parents and pupils feel that this approach is divisive when seen alongside some teachers’ stridently expressed views on social justice. 

Many aspects of pupils’ behaviour and attitudes are commendable. This makes a significant contribution to their learning. Pupils are diligent and serious-minded, and show remarkable levels of maturity. However, significant numbers in all parts of the school said that they feel uncomfortable giving their viewpoints in class. This is particularly the case when pupils’ views do not chime with opinions presented by teachers. ...

Workload is generally well considered by leaders and by trustees. Again, however, recent inschool training and required staff reading have been disproportionately dominated by social justice issues. ...

...

 While recognising the importance of promoting equalities, a significant minority of parents and pupils told inspectors that a culture has developed where alternative opinions are not felt welcome. In some classrooms, teaching has not allowed for questioning or for the balanced presentation of opposing views. Leaders and trustees should ensure that teaching does not preclude tolerance of those with different views, particularly where specific partisan or political views are presented."

A common source of comic effect is to create a contrast between the form or style of the text and its content. Perhaps the most common example is in news parodies like The Onion, where humour is extracted from the use of journalistic tropes to describe, for example, the mundane but relatable misadventures of "Area Man". But we see the same device used often: the heroic epic about something as everyday as mowing the lawn, for example, or a bureaucratic attempt to reduce some extraordinary event to the fit into the boxes prescribed by an official form. I'm sure you know the sort of thing. 

I was reminded of this kind of comic writing as I was reading Ofsted's report. It is written in the prose style of modern officialdom: the smooth and patronising euphemisms used by ombudsmen and councils keen to do the 'on the one hand, on the other hand' thing. One imagines the inspectors watching a geography lesson in which a teacher passionately deconstructs white privilege at length, and all the while the inspectors note that the students are not picking up on the chief exports of Nigeria or the main rivers of Venezuela.

But there is a passage in the report which leaves comedy behind and instead gives us a brief and occluded glimpse of something perhaps more like a quiet tragedy.

"Before this inspection, trustees had already acted in response to recent events at the school. ... Leaders and trustees had recognised that, in some cases, the academic freedoms allowed have been misused. ... The school is undergoing a significant change of leadership, and this provides opportunities for further action. Nevertheless, evidence from this inspection showed that opinions among parents, staff and pupils remain fractured. Much more work is needed to unite this school community."

The revolution will not be televised. But its fractures, divisions and "opportunities for further action" will be soberly recorded in the appropriate official forms.

The John Bercow report

Read it here. A truly extraordinary read, produced under the chairmanship of a retired Court of Appeal judge: the word "spittle" appears 7 times in the report, which is more than "Macbeth" (once) or "mercurial" (twice), but the same as the number of occurrences of the "f-word" or its variants. 

Below the break I have given some substantial extracts.

Ukraine: predictions

The BBC, which is doing impressive coverage of the fighting, has this piece setting out 5 possible scenarios for the war in Ukraine. They are:

(1) Short war ("Kyiv falls within days ... Ukraine joins Belarus as a client state");

(2) Long war ("... perhaps after many years, with maybe new leadership in Moscow, Russian forces eventually leave Ukraine, bowed and bloodied, just as their predecessors left Afghanistan in 1989 ...");

(3) European war ("Might it be possible this war could spill outside Ukraine's borders?");

(4) Diplomatic solution (the BBC's suggestion seems rather optimistic for Ukraine "Ukraine, say, accepts Russian sovereignty over Crimea and parts of the Donbas. In turn, Putin accepts Ukrainian independence and its right to deepen ties with Europe"); and

(5) Putin ousted (self-explanatory).

The BBC seems to regard the "long war" as the single most likely: it describes it as "Perhaps more likely" than the short war, and the remaining options are introduced with questions. This, I think, reflects the conventional wisdom as at the time of writing, which is what we should hope for from the BBC: it is a mainstream reporter of the news, not an opinionated columnist out to shock with contrarian views.

But I disagree: I think this will be a "short war". Russia seems to have faced stiffer resistance than it was expecting (the paratrooper attack on Hostomel Airport is a good example of this), and perhaps it has worse logistics than one would have expected, but it's only been a week and Russia is well on its way to taking control of the Black Sea coast and major cities are starting to fall. It has lost the propaganda war, but by the standard of short wars (the invasion of Iraq, the fall of France in WWII), this looks to me like a short war in military terms.

What about ongoing resistance/guerilla warfare/insurgency, perhaps fuelled by the West? I put the chances of this at comfortably below 50%, and I'll explain why. I have 4 reasons.

(1) Ukraine is a developed country. Not terribly rich or successful, but one with developed infrastructure, cities and all the rest of it. That means that the standard of life that is achievable by cooperating with the powers that be is very much higher than that achievable by living in the woods and attempting sabotage missions. Asymmetric warfare surely requires asymmetric living conditions: it's a first world vs third world, tribespeople vs regular infantry kind of thing. But Ukraine and Russia have symmetric living conditions. 

(2) Following on from (1), Ukraine has a very low birthrate. It is not a country which can afford the kind of high loss, "you have to be lucky every time" approach demanded by asymmetric warfare. Suicide missions, for example, are simply not going to happen.

(3) There's no chance of winning. There may well be some amazingly brave acts of resistance that will take place even after the government in Kyiv has thrown in the towel. There were heroic deeds done by the French Resistance, after all, despite the symmetric living conditions of the French and the Germans. (But note that the French Resistance, for all its valour, did not render the Battle of France a long war.) But it was plausible at all times, and likely from at least 1943, that France would one day be liberated by the Allies. Is there any prospect of Ukraine being liberated by force? Does Ukraine have any allies? No and no. Ukraine has well-wishers galore, but no country is sworn to protect it and there will be no NATO tanks crossing into Ukraine to push the Russians back. Resistance, as the Borg say, is futile. What would resistance be for? 

(4) Finally, and here I think I add something to the debate, consider for a moment who would do the fighting - and where they are likely to be. If there is one thing that unites the people of Europe and their various political leaders, it is a willingness to welcome Ukrainian refugees. The EU expects 4 million refugees (10% of the population), which it will welcome with open arms, and I suspect that is merely the latest underestimate of how willing East Europeans are to move westward. In the UK, the leaders of the devolved assemblies, keen to show that they are doing something, will try to attract as many refugees as possible, and the government in Westminster will only try to appear more welcoming. The well-intentioned peoples of the wider West, especially in North America, will encourage Ukrainians too, and anywhere that already has a Ukrainian community can expect to see many new arrivals. 

This is all well and good, of course, and we should certainly help refugees as much as we can. But it does mean that Ukraine will be rapidly denuded of a large chunk of its working-age (i.e., fighting-age) population. Women and children are leaving now, in their thousands and their husbands and fathers will want to follow. From the point of view of Ukrainians offered the choice between a warm welcome on generous terms in a rich country in the West - all the benefits of EU membership handed to them as an unexpected gift - or staying to fight a hopeless campaign of sabotage against an enemy renowned for ruthlessness ... well, let's just say that discretion - and the chance to earn big money - will be the better part of valour for most. I would not be at all surprised if, in years to come, we hear many Ukrainians tell us, after a few drinks, that they would have stayed to fight - in fact they did fight, quite a bit as it happens - but then their wife/girlfriend/mother told them to make a new life in the West, keep Ukrainian culture alive in exile, wait for things to improve etc etc. We should humour them; we wouldn't want to be in their position.

Won't the authorities want to keep people from leaving? I don't think so. Why would they? Once the official war is over and a new government installed in Kyiv, is there any reason that it - or its Russian controllers - will want to keep restive and resistant men of fighting age within its borders? On the contrary, not long ago, we saw migrants weaponised by Belarus: why not expect more of the same from a Russian-controlled Ukraine - thousands of migrants released to place burdens on Europe? After a while, of course, Ukraine will not want to be completely depopulated, and border controls will be reinstated, but, in the short term, getting rid of the rowdier and more patriotic elements, those men who are wholly opposed to becoming part of a greater Russia and who already have guns in their hands, will be a net positive for the new regime, and there are bound to be plenty of people content enough to live under it to make it work, just about. We should recall that Ukraine is valued for its geographical position and its raw materials, not its workforce. (There is also an historical precedent. When the USSR invaded Finland, apparently, "The people in occupied areas were given a choice to stay if they wanted. Something like a dozen stayed, about 420 000 chose to become refugees instead.") 

Won't the authorities be scared of exiles organising themselves for a counter-attack? I think not. If there is one thing that NATO doesn't want, it is to give Russia a casus belli, and arming bands of Ukrainians to launch Bay of Pigs-style attacks on Ukraine from Poland or Hungary looks very much like a casus belli. Much better - much safer for all concerned - if displaced Ukrainians are dispersed across Europe and beyond.

All of which leads me to conclude that this is going to be a horrible, short war. Moreover, it's depressing to say it, but starting from where we are, that might be for the best. 

Men and women - a reader

This post is in two parts. The first is a list of links to interesting articles whose general theme is the differences between men and women, specifically the different ways we have of arguing or settling our differences. The second is some countervailing thoughts from me. As you are bound to be more interested in the links, I have left my commentary until below the break.

Here are the links. You can start with Heather Heying, taking the scientific angle. Then Alastair's Adversaria, which is the oldest, I think the longest, and perhaps the most carefully expressed. Next, Mary Harrington, less on politics and more on society. Then Richard Hanania, not out to make friends of any sex. A couple of things from Noah Carl here and here. Finally, a more limited but I think relevant observations from Conor Fitzgerald (often worth reading - here's one of his on a completely different topic) and Psychology Today, of all places.

I would not recommend reading all of these in one go, but you might perhaps dip into one or two, and if you want more then I've given you the list.

I found it interesting to see the similarities in what these writers have to say on the subject despite the different angles from which they approach it. But it is also worth considering that many of the differences in argumentation style between men and women may be attributable to the situations or formats in which they argue rather than to underlying differences between them. (More on that topic from me below the break.)