Arm-Waving or Drowning?

A friend sent me the URL of an arm-waving video full of such paradigm-shifting facts as: China and India have more honors kids than we have kids, the top ten jobs that'll be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in the year 2000, the world's eleventh biggest country by population is MySpace, there are five times as many words in English now as there were in Shakespeare's time, every day three thousand books are published, the amount of technical information in stock doubles every two years and will soon double every 72 hours, da dee da, da dee dee.

Well...as usual, I don't get it. Is this an inspirational or motivational presentation? If so, what's it supposed to inspire or motivate me to do? Commit suicide? Have more children?

There are a couple of fallacies in what I take to be its arguments. For one thing, people are atomic. Nobody is more than one person or less than one person. Being surrounded by a billion other people means little more than being surrounded by a million or a thousand, or however many you can see at one time. If I'm in water more than six feet deep, do I care whether it's sixty feet or six thousand feet deep?

No doubt there's a certain critical mass of people needed for certain things to happen or to be economically feasible or even physically possible. But that mass is smallish, unless you're talking about building a dam with your bare hands. The Egyptians and Greeks, among others, developed high civilizations and made big monuments (physical and rational) with populations in the low millions, of whom very few had the knowledge or the leisure to read and write. In Shakespeare's time I suppose there were fewer than a million literate people in the British Isles, but they produced...well, Shakespeare.

I can only read so many books or see so many movies or meet so many people. Shakespeare had it easy, since there were only a few dozen books in English from which he could steal his plots. Likewise the scientists of the year 1700 had it easy because there was so much low-hanging fruit, so many things to discover and describe. It was possible for any intelligent person to master the little that was known of biology and physics and chemistry.

So there are advantages, but also disadvantages, to large populations and large bodies of knowledge. I'm sure that in general larger is better (assuming you have good methods of access, which is why the Net is so important – hard copy has become very limiting, mainly because it can't easily be indexed and searched), but a billion isn't a thousand times better than a million, or anything like it.

All this talk about the Chinese and the Indians and such is rather nonsensical. People communicate. Any team of researchers, any school of any size, any discipline, is made up of people from lots of different places. Are the Chinese researchers, or Chinese engineers and architects, going to stay in China and keep foreigners from copying or even seeing their work? Seems unlikely. Will it really matter if the cure for AIDS comes out of China or India or England or America? I suppose it makes a difference in terms of local prestige, but it probably won't even make a difference in profits, since the company that owns the patents will be some multinational.

As for all those people with unmeasurably high IQ's, I'm not impressed. A reasonably high IQ is necessary but not sufficient for success even in fields like particle physics. Hey, who knows, maybe too much thinking hampers discovery. Einstein was notoriously slow in some ways, and Oppenheimer, who discovered almost nothing, notoriously smart. Many other talents are involved in the sciences, it seems. As for the arts...

At any given time the world has room for only a certain number of great-greats. I tend to think of it in terms of surface versus volume. Think of the number of people in the world as molecules in a drop of water. The drop forms a sphere, with only a small percentage of the molecules on the surface. Let's pretend that those surface molecules are the famous people, the ones who write famous books that make a difference, or who contribute to famous discoveries, or who are famous movie actors, or whatever. Good. Now suppose the number of molecules is multiplied a hundred times. Wow, much bigger population, right? But look you, the surface of the drop is only ten times bigger! And if you multiply by a thousand instead of a hundred, the discrepancy's even worse. There's more room at the top, but not much more room. Disappointing.

I don't say those are exact ratios or proportions, but I'll bet it's something along those lines. So look what happens. If I'm a literate citizen of Periclean Athens, I see Socrates wandering around town every few days, and if I want to I can stop him and talk philosophy. If I write a book, and have any talent at all, it'll literally be a classic. If I decide to study, I dunno, bees, and take the time to write down what I notice, I'll be the world's greatest authority on bees and the author of the seminal apiary text. But not now. Now, in order to make a deep and significant contribution to science, I need first of all to be freakishly smart, not smart like Phi Beta Kappa but smart like Oppenheimer. Then I need to have twenty years or so of serious education, just to come up to speed with what's already known in some tiny slice of science. Finally I have to have great luck, reading or seeing or meeting just the right things or the right people at just the right time to connect some dots. Odds are enormous that what I discover will be trivial, like hooray, here's a new subspecies of marine snail. Finding or making something marvelously new and important and fruitful is vanishingly unlikely.

When I realized this, yea many years ago (and the world was much smaller then, or bigger, if you like to think of it that way), I became depressed and stopped striving. Wouldn't you?

So tell me again just how that presentation is inspirational.