Base Rates

From a statistical perspective, we can safely say that the probability that our hypothetical Sonic streamer would have been a noted entomologist is near zero, because the probability for any given person of becoming a noted anything is near zero.

Few people are remembered centuries later. Thousands of German men passed through academic life in that province of 1820s Germany without leaving any mark more notable than their payslips in the ledger-books. A major, successful video maker is a person who is one in millions; let’s say that our entomologist is merely one in tens of thousands, and there is in fact a strong correlation between ‘good at making Sonic videos’ and ‘good at cataloguing beetles’. Then the probability that our video maker would also have been the top entomologist would be… surprisingly close to one in tens of thousands. (Note how few Nobel Prize winners, out of the ~1,000 to date, manage to win two.)

Randomness in Success

Indeed, our video maker would not be so successful at videos either in another history of the world; the Salganik/Watts experimental results on randomizing media markets suggest that when an author like J. K. Rowling is #1 in our world, they might be thousands of rungs down in another world—or worse!¹ Random chance and network effects may elevate an ordinary, mediocre rival of little talent, and force him out of the video game, and the more randomness, the more likely the winners were ordinary people who are thus not ‘wasted’.

We can predict success for groups, but not individuals; forests, not trees. For individuals, “time and chance happen to them all”.

Regression to the Mean

Given that random chance often elevates individuals whose specific talents align perfectly (and perhaps luckily) with one narrow niche, it follows that these same individuals are unlikely to be exceptional across the board. This is why elite performers in one area so often disappoint in another.

Anyone who is world-class is closer to an idiot savant of their specialty than a Renaissance man. The skillsets, while they may seem similar from a distance, up close in detail, look different: ‘collecting beetles and rings’ may be written with the same verb, but finding a hidden beetle is nothing like having the lightning reflexes to execute memorized Sonic timings, and someone who is world-class at the former may be rubbish at the latter.

It can be shocking how narrowly specialized some expertise can be: no chess grandmaster has ever become an equally adept Go player, for example. When such people retire or turn over a new leaf, they are rarely heard from again.²

This is why highly successful people often turn out to have been good at a hobby like chess, but not great; and those who are great, aren’t great at anything else—the lightning did not strike twice, as they simply regress to their mean. So we might find that a notable scientist spent time as a teen trying to collect that last darn ring, or perhaps has a hobby after a long day of work of trying to perfect his Sonic speedrun… but there’s no problem with any of that. (And we can note that there are no cases of great researchers announcing that they are quitting their tenured positions at the peak of their careers to stream instead—to go into industry and especially Wall Street, or politics, or to become science popularizers, perhaps, but not into Sonic videos.)

Obsession As Key Input

From a closer view, we can see why. Great achievement is the final product of multiple factors: idiosyncratic talent, preferences, health, good luck—and particularly key is ‘motivation’, or more pointedly, obsession. Generally, someone who documents every kind of beetle, does not feel neutrally about them, and is not simply clocking in 9–5PM for the paycheck: he is obsessed. When we look at streamers or figures like MrBeast, they do not seem exceptionally smart or talented in general.³

Obsession cannot be predicted or learned, and you cannot just want what you want; it strikes out of nowhere (much like sexual fetishes, also often acquired in childhood for mysterious exogenous reasons). One child plays Sonic the Hedgehog for a few months and enjoys it and moves on with their life with some memories and a lingering nostalgia for the classic theme of “Green Hill Zone”; but another is transfixed by it, so 20 years later they are making videos on it… And no one can say why.⁴ If one becomes obsessed with something, one must hope that one wins the lottery of fascinations for a prize that the world will reward.

Reward-Structure Fit

Indeed, we might wonder if, rather than risking cannibalizing greatness, such people are less likely to achieve greatness. Does a willingness to become obsessed with a small, static, fixed problem in exchange for rapid social media-style gamified rewards bode well for their counterfactual career? (What should we think of someone who is both willing and able to spend all that time on ring collecting, but who never grows beyond that comfort zone of flow and eventually yearn to, eg. make their own ring collecting games, or at least level mods?)

Greatness often requires the ability to endure years or decades of anxiety and uncertainty with no sign of progress, flexibility and openness, an ability to redefine or exploit serendipity; the obsession should be with a broad topic or goal, rather than fixated. (And would such a person be able to collaborate on research, or be a good principal investigator managing a lab?)

Perhaps we should be glad that such individuals can find satisfying careers elsewhere—rather than wasting their time (and our resources) in STEM…?

STEM Supply versus Demand

Once we leave the individual anecdote, it is unclear if there is any group loss either. After all, we produce a vast amount of research these days, vastly more than 1820s Germany ever did (even allowing for the extreme plunge in per capita productivity), and produce far more researchers than we can gainfully employ; so there is no prima facie case that we are ‘wasting’ our scholarly potential.

Nor are there that many video makers: how many people in the USA could reasonably be said to make such things fulltime as a life-long career rather than as a hobby, or an experiment before they switch gears and get ‘a real job’? Sure, many people may dabble or aspire, but there just aren’t that many in total (who will watch the videos, or pay their bills?).

Video Value

Given the oversupply of R&D and diminishing returns (as seen in things like multiple discovery and a deluge of worthless papers being published), with Pareto distributions everywhere, perhaps we should not scoff too quickly at our video makers.

Such documentation is itself valuable. How historians would love to have similar ephemera from centuries or millennia ago! I daresay that a couple of such pop culture books would be of more value now that a catalogue of German beetles…

Nor can we just assume future historians will take care of this, when we live in a “digital dark age”. Knowledge is lost online all too quickly, and while perhaps for a classic Sonic console game we can assume that there will always be a working emulator & ROM somewhere, for many aspects of pop culture, this is not true: if it is not documented now, it never will be, because the websites won’t be archived (eg. Discord, TikTok) or the video game may be unavailable in any standalone form, or DRM blocks archiving. Such video-makers are our era’s folklorists & ethnographers & anthropologists.

(We might also hope that videos might be good demonstrations of how to do research, present information etc, in a more entertaining form than school, and that ‘honey helps make the medicine go down’. The alternatives may be worse.)

Perfect Conditions Never Come

Nor is it if the 1820s lacked for ways for people to waste their lives. Perhaps our entomologist could have instead been nerd-sniped by Christian theology (which was a large part of the reason 1820s Germany had a higher education system at all) and spent the rest of his life writing turgidly Teutonic tomes explaining how Calvinism was correct about everything and Catholicism a vulgarly corrupt transmontane heresy. And2020s America has little to be ashamed of compared to, say, the 1820s (pedestrianism, mummy-unrolling parties) or 1920s (literal stamp collecting, dance marathons, flag pole sitting, or goldfish swallowing); if we lived in any of those eras, we would find plenty to roll our eyes at. (At least no goldfish suffered in the making of a Sonic video…)

Net Impact: Nil

So, as cute as it is, I think Mr Cyclops is ultimately incorrect in his assertion: our would-be beetle-collector wasn’t lost—he’s just browsing a different section of the infinite library.

And if all those streamers and videos disappeared overnight and were replaced by other forms of recreation or entertainment, we would not observe any particular renaissance of science from all our beetle bros. We would simply observe an entire different batch of (relatively) ordinary people raised to prominence for their inherent idiosyncrasies happening to match some other peculiar niches; and those niches would, in the grand scheme of things, seem equally absurd.

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