I think there's something in this. The "where's today's Beethoven" chart would be completely explained either by an actual decline, or by it becoming harder to be rated a genius against contemporaries over time. And that itself is mostly a numbers game too: the human population now is 7 times larger than it was at Beethoven's death. Vienna's population (relevant since we're talking about Beethoven) was about 200,000 then, but it's 9 times that now. If part of the qualification to be remembered as a genius is notoriety and publicity, which it must be, then because it's much more crowded at the top it's more than likely that all the individuals currently of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't break away from the pack and individually dominate the field.
Re: "it's more than likely that all the individuals currently of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't break away from the pack and individually dominate the field". But doesn't that imply we should see individuals heads and shoulders above Beethoven? If we see a lot of Beethoven's at the merely "extremely good" level where is(are) the one(s) at the next "genius" level???
I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude.
As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference.
As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.
The human population isn't really important to that chart.
"Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."
The denominator has increased massively faster than the base population.
That's only true if acclaim scales with population. Or more specifically, if the "number of acclaimed scientists..." would scale with the total number of scientists in the absence of a falloff in rate of their creation. That's the point: I don't think it does. I think it's reasonable to assume that in a larger population, a given level of acclaim is harder to achieve for any given individual. Same fish, bigger pond.
