> I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days.

If you read the history of major scientific discoveries, this has been the case for a long time. There are many things that were independently discovered by different people at nearly the same time. Once people know something is solved or solvable, it gets a relentless amount of focus.

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teiferer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe that shows how scientific discoveries come to be. It's not a genius sitting alone in their chamber for a decade and then suddenly they emerge with this huge thing. That's Hollywood fiction. Scientific progress is the colaborative effort of countless researchers over long periods of time, communicating, exchanging ideas, many of them wrong, tweaking, trying, thinking, arguing. When a breakthrough happens then it's the tip of a mountain of work that came before it. If two individuals stand on that mountain and feel there is something somewhere then it's not too strange that they take the last step at roughly the same time because conditions were right. The preconditions were in place at that time, the results required for this were available and the focus was on this specific thing.

I'd say it illustrates well that this last piece, the person celebrated for the achievement, is disproportionally overvalued and the rest of the work they are standing on is disproportionally ignored.

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a_bonobo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This ties back into AI, too, right?

I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

	▲	teiferer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them. Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.

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eru 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

On a tangent, the genius of people like eg Einstein is not so much that he came up with all these things: other people were close, but that he was a singular individual that did all of these discoveries, instead of five different guys all making some breakthrough here or there.