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Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

• garbagetime 5y ago
  There is still room for genius in the most controversial areas of philosophy. There's room for great, era-defining theories in politics and in genetic engineering of humans.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  I see how "aristocratic tutoring" brings up people at the wrong end of the curve (like G. W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind") but I don't see it creating genius.
• mtkhaos 5y ago
  This one one of those granular issues where there is no single right answer. Given the forum, the best answer would be why has our given technology been shaped to act as aristocratic tutors to us all? Further, is there enough room for any given Einstein in this dogmatic landscape?
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    It maybe less about dogma and more about the size of the remaining problems. A single Einstein can't go find the Higgs boson; you need a multi-national consortium willing to build a city-sized machine for it. You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single contributor is capable of.
    • PaulHoule 5y ago
      One reason Einstein seems like such a genius was that this happened in his lifetime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment We have a much bigger physics community today but the closest thing to the above happening are these two events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons#Discovery and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson#Discovery_of_new_boson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson#Dis... with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation#Observations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation#Observati... as a distant third that has played out very slowly which is attributed to a very strange theorist character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo There is public fascination with Steven Hawking, but Hawking's work has been confined to questions where the answers are unobservable (what's inside a black hole? what do you see in 10⁶⁴ years when stellar origin black holes start to pop?)
• hans1729 5y ago
  This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care how minuscule the odds are that ONE coder changes the world. The numbers make it impossible for us to lose on all the fronts. Tech is basically matured to the point where all the questions of the 90s are now solved. Ad tech? Check. Search? Check. Mobile hq video and photo beyond the 90s imagination? Check. The list goes on. Computers ALREADY BEAT HUMANS AT GO, let that sink in. I don’t even care how pessimistic you are - if you fail to see how we are a) blooming right now and b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future, the wording is exactly right: YOU fail to see it. It’s there. It’s everywhere. The fact that you can read this message, that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing. If you lost that sense of wonder, maybe it’s time to reconsider your models.
  • mehphp 5y ago
    Yes, thank you. I’m tired of the constant negativity.
  • cushychicken 5y ago
    Yeah, I knew this article wasn't for me when I read the first sentence. Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.
    • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      What's your definition/bar for genius?
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress. This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.
• humanistbot 5y ago
  I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. With the benefit of hindsight, we only remember the greats (and the very worst villains) from past eras. While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books, just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics." Edit: And yes, the internet has brought about immense and immeasurable benefits to science and innovation. It can both be true that most people on Facebook are dunces and getting dumber because of Facebook, and that there has been massive developments in research and development that would not have happened without the internet.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    I agree. It's just that there is so much innovation everywhere, that those geniuses of old are not THAT outstanding. There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap. The same with music. You just need to search more. Youtube and spotify made this easier, I discover totally new astounding music authors and songs almost every month. Yeah, not everyone likes my music taste, but I see that many people also find new music they love. We just have so much variety now, that there is no single commonly recognisable genius.
    • armada651 5y ago
      > There are many geniuses, who make big contributions, but they don't work by themselves, so their contributions are not seen as advancing a field by one big leap. I think this hits the nail on the head. Because we now have access to an instant world-wide exchange of ideas scientists work more closely together on developing their respective fields than ever before. By the time a major breakthrough happens most experts in the field will have already seen it coming. Breakthroughs consist of many smaller leaps in knowledge and we are now hyper-aware of each small development, thus it doesn't seem like we're making big leaps anymore. Rather than creating new geniuses the Internet eliminated the need for the classic "genius" to make a breakthrough in a scientific field.
  • 5y ago
• gilbetron 5y ago
  I completely disagree with the premise, that geniuses are vanishing - I think we have more than ever, it just takes a lot more to make notable progress these days. However, the article still ended up being a decent read, exploring how a lot of geniuses had tutors. I think our education system is messed up in a lot of ways, and we'd have a better society if kids got more adult attention. Saying this as a parent of a middle schooler, I really feel the issues in staff-constrained pandemic years. It would be interesting to have past geniuses sit in today's world - I think we'd be dismayed that in the massive ocean of knowledge we have these days, they wouldn't seem so legendary anymore.
  • hhjinks 5y ago
    Agreed. It's like complaining we don't make Leif Erikssons anymore. You can't discover a new continent every day.
    • gilbetron 5y ago
      That's a brilliant way of putting it! I'll save that for future use :)
    • aunetx 5y ago
      That's true, but in the same time... We still have so much to discover, no matter the subject -- I study physics and, even at my level (not very advanced), there are obviously entire domains that are not clearly understood even by the most brillant minds. But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and intelligence) needed in order to achieve something significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow everytime a Einstein discovers something.
      • Henk0815 5y ago
        i think its also a problem of funding. the problems of today are more resource intensive. i read that succesfull test to use mrna for medical treatment were done 20 years ago and nobody realy cared and knew about it. To realy develop into something viable took years to get the attention and funding.
• SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Are they pointing out a lack of geniuses, or just a lack of pop culture geniuses? And are the silos in knowledge so stratified now that we as a culture just don't recognize those who are?
• genjipress 5y ago
  The idea that we "made" Einstein to begin with is risible anyway.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  Pinning an argument to "based on Wikipedia mentions" isn't scientific. Overlooking the lack of real data, it is a well written argument.
• jacknews 5y ago
  Perhaps the clue is "aristocratic tutors" Perhaps the problem is not a decline in genius, but that too many geniuses are now given the opportunity to fulfill their potential (whereas before they'd have lacked education, compared to aristocrats), making it difficult to stand out and receive popular acclaim.
  • yonaguska 5y ago
    Define fulfilling potential? If early childhood education was something that a "genius" could afford to focus on(in terms of opportunity cost), wouldn't the contributions of the students far outstrip the potential individual contributions of the single "genius"? My focus is on the availability of these tutors for individuals. You can kind of see this in sports in the US. Sports are only lucrative for the top performers, and those lucky enough as well. This leaves a wide swath of very high level athletes available to parents willing to pay. This also extends to competitive public funded sports depending on where you're at. On one hand, it would be amazing for gifted tutors to be widely available, on the other- the situations that would create such availability are probably not going to be good. I'm just thankful that my career will hopefully afford me the ability to be a single income household, with the time and resources to tutor my own child.
• deleted 5y ago
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• atty 5y ago
  I think the author answers half of the question in his post: at least in the hard sciences, it’s becoming massively harder to stand out because most, if not all, the low hanging fruit has been picked. The second half is that there are far more scientists/writers/artists/etc now than ever before, and more people have access to all their work, meaning no one/handful of individuals naturally rises to prominence. I think in general this is actually a good thing. The only problem is it becomes harder for the general population to follow what’s going on in certain fields, either in the present or as historical context, because they no longer have very easily identifiable figureheads. Edit: to be clear, I think the idea that somehow genius or general intelligence and deep expertise is declining is laughable. If anything we’re seeing an explosion of expertise in all the fields I work in.
• Ardon 5y ago
  The article seems to define genius by how socially popular the individual is? But that's a terrible metric. Is the difference between Einstein and a cutting edge quantum physicist today marketing? He might be right in his conjecture that one-on-one tutoring produces 'geniuses' but this article contains no evidence of it. I don't think it even contains evidence the top intellectuals are less common, just that they're less popular.
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Giroux is a bit too left for me, but the prognosis and message for hope in this video is spot-on in my opinion. [1] According to this narrative we stopped making Einsteins because it's simply no longer in the interests of the "elites" to have smart people around. Education became a liability to those cheering for cybernetic governance and social control media. Similar explanations are proffered by John Taylor-Gatto, Sir Ken Robinson, Noam Chomsky, and of course Paulo Friere. While I don't fully agree with the ideologies of these thinkers, frustratingly, from what I see inside higher education, everything is designed to produce narrow-minded, uncritical, docile people who will not ask too many questions or think too hard. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-3_DIi5HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-3_DIi5HM
  • scaramanga 5y ago
    In other words "prepare them for adulthood" where those skills will serve them well. It's hardly like those guys have discovered a deep secret. They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job. Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral. Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.
    • nonrandomstring 5y ago
      > understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult. You are in charge. That is the only thing you need to know about being an adult.
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I've got plenty of theories but nothing solid. Einstein and the other Big Name Scientists at the time seemed to be part of a small intellectual elite; it feels like this group of intellectuals has since then increased, but since the big discoveries had already been made, they spend their time iterating on them. Similar discoveries made back then about the nature of reality and physics were all made around that time, a good hundred years ago. But I think that, quite likely, that was it. There's no new Major Discovery that could propel one scientist into fame to be made anymore. At best we have e.g. Stephen Hawking who introduced some new concepts about space (building on top of e.g. Einstein) and who made theoretical physics more accessible to the masses. Or Oppenheimer who is credited (although by a long shot not the "inventor") with nukes. The other part is that Einstein and co - at least, reading their biography - were part of the elite, a small group of people, aristocrats, rich folk, who didn't have to work but could instead attend universities wherever they wanted, take long walks in the park to talk and think about the sciences, write long letters to colleagues, etc - people for who intellectual pursuits was what they could spend all their energy on. But, this is hindsight and idealisation based on biographies and surviving letters, so take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, I think there's plenty of Einsteins out there, but their work is in smaller, less revolutionary increments. That said, as a society we need to make sure there is enough room for intellectuals, that is, provide funding and livelihoods for them and universities they belong to, and provide budgets for the projects to put their theories into practice, e.g. nuclear fusion, the Large Hadron Collider, the James Webb space telescope, etc.
  • twayt 5y ago
    "but since the big discoveries had already been made". This is a tautology. At every point in history, all the big discoveries had already been made.
• Beltiras 5y ago
  When Einstein proposed General Relativity it could be tested by nothing more complex than a camera. If anyone comes up with a theory of physics to explain further what we observe about the world the test usually entails a multi trillion dollar machine, a team of thousands of scientists and decades of engineering to bring about a test. Usually these things require novel engineering and for environments where we have no experience. Just look at the JWST. Even then the theories being tested by the JWST are predictions traceable to Einstein. I think we need a better "standard candle" than Einstein to go by. We have plenty of very clever people working on hard problems and coming up with clever solutions. Einstein also wasn't infallible. He's treated like a singular genius that erred in no thing. Einstein rejected Plate Tectonics just to name one scientific area where he managed to blunder badly.
  • Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
    > plenty of very clever people working on hard problems and coming up with clever solutions this is not what this all talk is about Einstein is an (prime) example of conceptualist - man, who introduced revolutionary concept into our understanding of the world. There are a lot of Nobel laureates who are (hard) problem solvers. But in physics looks like we truly need a conceptualist, new Einstein so to speak
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      Nearly all physicists are conceptualists though. Fundamental physics pretty much relies upon an aggressive pursuit of information density rather than the classification of evidence. Theoretically at least.
      • Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
        Still, there are conceptualists and there are problems solvers. E.g. Bohr and Bohr. While father was conceptualist, son was clearly problem solver. Both got nobel prize
    • Beltiras 5y ago
      Those only come about every several generations. Many of them needed the entire thinking population of humans in the meantime to package up ideas in a different way so they could bring about their flash of insight.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  This is an interesting analysis. I see a number of factors in play: 1. Population size: the more people you have, the more likely you are to make "geniuses". The genius chart late in the piece maps with this hypothesis; 2. Baseline education: the idea here is that geniuses are less of a gap if the normal level of education and competency is higher; 3. Low-hanging fruit: things seem obvious in hindsight of course but it's also true that some of the big jumps in certain fields come down to what were fairly simple ideas. Those who come up with them are typically labelled "geniuses". That may or may not be the case. But the point is that progress in fields isn't smooth. We've now been in a period in physics where for decades now we've simply confirmed what we already suspected. Useful of course. As is disproving various theories (which is constantly happening). But the 20th century had 2 massive jumps forward in physics: namely relativity (obviously) and the various quantum mechanics related fields (QFT, QCD, etc). This isn't my area of expertise but my understanding is that a big part of this was realizing just how deeply tied physics and certain areas of mathematics are. Oh and for the record, I'm really talking about fundamental physics here. Other fields like condensed matter physics are a completely different beast. But is the 20th century typical? It's hard to say. I suspect it isn't. I once heard research described as spending years of your life working on a problem and your reward is you get to throw a few pebbles on a pile. Eventually that pebble pile becomes a mountain. Someone throwing more than a few pebbles on is realtively inrequent. I'm not sure how much "aristocratic teaching" really has to do with it.
• deleted 5y ago
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• jzellis 5y ago
  We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're figuring out how to use AI to sell more dick pills and artfully distressed furniture to people devoid of erections and taste on the goddamn Internet, for more money in a year than Einstein saw in a decade.
  • mettamage 5y ago
    IMO, the real smarties work in hft.
    • amusedcyclist 5y ago
      The smartest of them all teach math in universities
      • vajrabum 5y ago
        I'm not so sure. At VMware in the 2000s we had Marketing Executive who had been a tenured math professor at Stanford. He joined early probably following the primary technical founder at VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, but still.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • roywiggins 5y ago
    How much money was in physics when Einstein was working in it?
    • toyg 5y ago
      Tenured university members made pretty good money. As they do now, to be fair - it just got much harder to get there, because of larger and fiercer competition for a shrinking number of positions, so the effort/benefit ratio has fallen quite dramatically.
• DrBazza 5y ago
  I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. That's why we're not seeing "Einsteins" everywhere. In fact, there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast. In fact, I'd say we're not far from that now, as there are more and more stories along the lines of "an obscure corner of maths has been found to explain 'X' in physics".
  • sva_ 5y ago
    > I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from now will think the same about today's time. That's because hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with.
  • cf141q5325 5y ago
    I think much of it is caused by the way we work on problems. We work on individual problems that get more and more complex and demand an ever increasing entry hurdle to be able to have a meaningful conversation on the subject. We zoom into existing problems. Yet most of the fundamental breakthroughs were often in hindsight "trivial". Because very often what it needs is a new perspective that allows for the creation of much more efficient alternatives. True innovation. Add to that the ever increasing time pressure and funding problem. Remember, Einstein was a patent clerk. Most people simply cant afford to invest their time into allowing themselves to think freely. I am confident we could get the genius rate back up with something like UBI.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast. The story is "Sucker Bait": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Bait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Bait
  • mhh__ 5y ago
• XorNot 5y ago
  Technology is not a linear or even guaranteed path. Asking "why don't we have more Einstein's?" ignores that Einstein's great contributions could only have been made at the point in history he existed: without the Michelson-Morley experiment, a fixed speed of light was not a known problem in physics. Today in particle physics though we lack such an experiment - there are no substantial inconsistent results which can form the basis of new theory: no results which conclusively point to any of the myriad new theoretical approaches being right. If such a result is found, then it's likely a theoretical basis which has already been written will prove successful in helping explain and develop a new theory to extend our understanding, and some Nobel prizes will be given. Is it's developer an accomplished scientist? Yes. But were there peers and competitors somehow not as talented? Maybe, but more likely they simply weren't first - and weren't lucky enough.
• mandmandam 5y ago
  Some food for thought, for the people interested in this: Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on-one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 textbook curricular politicized 'education'. However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any broad genius decline. I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of reasons: * depleted soil * pesticide residue * fertiliser residue * contaminated water * dodgy preservatives * corn and sugar subsidies * poorly understood food additives * selection for looks over nutritional quality * ocean pollution - mercury in fish, for example * Over-processing There's environmental factors to consider: * air pollution * water pollution * forever chemicals * lingering lead and the like * noise pollution * distractions - ie; porn, gaming, porn, movies, porn, TV, tinder, phones, porn, etc. Cultural and societal factors: * All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves to satisfy publishers. * Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly emphasized in many ways. * Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of fear. * Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism. * Scientism * Media priorities All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo.
• zozbot234 5y ago
  https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-ge... is about essentially a very similar style of intensive individualized tutoring. (This SSC review links to a new English translation iof this work.) I'm not sure that intensive tutoring ever "went out of style" though, so much as gradually becoming infeasible because of (1) the amount of high-skill effort involved, which became more and more costly due to the expanding alternate employments of similarly skilled work; and (2) general progress meaning that even with intensive tutoring you could not reach the research frontier any more effectively than others, so making "genius"-level contributions would still be hard. It's an interesting argument regardless, and intensive "tiger mom/dad" parenting, while generally less effective, still derives much of its general orientation from these 'aristocratic' norms.
  • m0llusk 5y ago
    Is there proof that tiger parents are not effective? Many high achievers I have met have had parents that pushed them from early on. Casually dismissing this effect without any metrics seems an error.
    • gcthomas 5y ago
      Is economic 'high achievement' the key sign of success, or a sign that wider indicators of a successful upbringing have been ignored?
• kaetemi 5y ago
  Geniuses are hidden under the noise of that infinite information access we have now.
• Bjorkbat 5y ago
  I think a more convincing theory for me is that society abounds with "IQ shredders". Sure, we're now living in an era of abundant information, but we're also living in an era of abundant distractions and hazards.
  • jvsg_ 5y ago
    fyi, IQ shredder means social and technological innovation that keeps higher IQ people from reproducing, and hence lowering down of IQ over generations. Nothing to do with distractions and hazards.
• rvieira 5y ago
  If we consider Einstein as a "10x scientist", I for one, I'm glad that society is realising that it's better collectively to increase slightly the performance/achievements of 10 scientists than relying on a single "10x" one for innovation.
  • AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  • riskQtempAcc 5y ago
    Thats not obvious to me. Take optimization using Monte Carlo. What do you prefer, ten little innocuous steps or a single bold large leap over a barrier? I dont see human endeavor as linear. I see it as an infinite dimensional space that we are somewhat directed to explore. In this PoV little steps get me nowhere. Also, consider that ten little scientists will quickly dominate the institution and crowd out the genius who they cannot understand.
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Results are non-linear. A 10x-er will produce results that 10 1x-ers can't. It's only "better" in the sense it's more "fair", not that it produces better results.
• auggierose 5y ago
  Don't worry, they are around, but everybody is so busy with their own stuff, you will not spot them.
• jleyank 5y ago
  Perhaps the Genius-creation-rate is the same as it always was, but their marketing value has plummeted? Now, with people like the Kardashians, various populist politicians, ... and the general anti-science, anti-expert that seems to wander about the internet, who looks for or listens to them? Money, fame (err, notoriety), clicks - this is what matters now. Not sage discussion of physics, math or cosmology. Granted, very very very few people have a 1905 moment but people still publish and try to communicate. There are a number of effective, relatively popular science communicators but man, they're just lost in the noise.
• Yaina 5y ago
  What's distinctly lacking in this piece is a definition of a genius. This article seems to define it to be an individual that is globally lauded for their scientific/artistic achievements. I'm sure there is a plethora of reasons why this doesn't happen anymore, it seems to me that this is a good thing, but it's no reason to conclude that we don't have intelligent people anymore.
  • twayt 5y ago
    Genius is counterfactual: "If this person did not exist, this thing wouldn't have been discovered or created." Impossible to prove after the fact considering that in order for their discovery to be recognized, it has to be understood and somewhat built upon the ideas that are accepted today.
• alde 5y ago
  The article assumes there is an infinite linear pool of ideas that we can take from. This is not the case. All-encompassing models like general relativity, the standard model and quantum mechanics can only be discovered once, same goes for music and other old fields. Not to comment on minor errors in the article like quoting Olaf Spengler instead of Oswald Spengler.
• huetius 5y ago
  I humbly submit Einstein’s own words: “The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem.” The author rightly identifies the educational impotence of our society as a major problem, but his inability to address it as anything other than a question of technique leaves the problem unperturbed.
• csomar 5y ago
  I think most people here are missing the point. This is not about incremental progress but about breakthroughs. Religion was breakthrough. Electricity was a breakthrough. General Relativity was a breakthrough. The Internet was another breakthrough and now we are enjoying these things. A similar breakthrough today could be: Quantum mechanics, Fusion and a fully functional decentralized Internet (not to be confused with decentralized web). My theory is a little different: War. War is the thing that, in my opinion, enables all progress. The pandemic had some sort of war conditions, and this forces people to get creative and create new unusual paradigms. In the normal/usual day to day, people could not care less. They want incremental improvements but rarely want a full disruption of the status quo. They dream of remote work, but there aren't enough forces (government, society, corporate, workers, etc...) to make that happen. They just don't do fundamental changes.
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    Quantum mechanics was understood arguably before general relativity was properly worked out in detail.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    I kind of agree with your War theory. But obviously the war itself doesn't make things happen. Rather it is that it aligns a bunch of things - money, desperation/motivation, smart people. Maybe lack of a world war is a reason. Maybe intellectual property law becoming common. Maybe increasing awareness of the competing billions around us makes for different impulses IE Bezos-aspirations instead of scientific progress. If you have enough money, you can BUY the idea/smart person. Maybe the glorification of sports/fashion/music/movies/games rather than science/knowledge.
• duxup 5y ago
  >I’ll certainly admit that finding irrefutable evidence for a decline of genius is difficult—intellectual contributions are extremely hard to quantify, the definition of genius is always up for debate, and any discussion will necessarily elide all sorts of points and counterpoints I appreciate that they at least acknowledge my first thought. They try although I really don't know what they mean exactly when they mean by the title.
• haskellandchill 5y ago
  this is so insulating and misguided. we have the internet but the people have no time to flourish. we are crushed by the boot of our miserable economic systems.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  Apple launched a chip last week with 114 billion transistors. This person says humanity is run out of genius. Maybe some perspective is needed.
• mtalantikite 5y ago
  "Is there anyone who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?" Sure, Toni Morrison. Whitney Houston. Prince. Steve Jobs (slightly over a decade). I don't know, the list goes on? There are plenty of culture shifting geniuses among us. It just doesn't look the same as it did in the 19th and early 20th century.
  • johnNumen 5y ago
    None of those people are geniuses.
    • HotHotLava 5y ago
      According to whose definition? If Tolstoy, Marx and Beethoven count as geniuses, I don't see an argument for excluding Asimov, Musk or Eminem.
    • mtalantikite 5y ago
      If Beethoven is on that list, so is Prince. If Thomas Hardy is on that list, so is Toni Morrison. Mozart could write a 5 voice fugato, and Quincy Jones can score out an orchestration without even sitting at a piano. There is no shortage of exceptional people changing how we think about and interact with the world. Again, it just doesn't look the same as it did in the past. You might not like them -- I really don't care for Thomas Hardy's writing and Freud is largely cast aside these days -- but that doesn't mean they aren't geniuses.
• jpgvm 5y ago
  There are modern day geniuses, they just look different to the big name scientists he is lamenting. I would argue Fabrice Bellard should be in contention, DJ Bernstein, etc. There are geniuses all around us and that is what has changed. It's by no means normalized but extraordinary doesn't seem as extraordinary when the world is literally powered by tens of thousands of extraordinary people doing awesome things day in and day out. Those are just two public examples I can think of, imagine how many genius level brains are working at Intel, AMD, TSMC and ASML that make the physics of what we consider "normal" tick.
• AQuantized 5y ago
  I think the writer is so completely wrong in his characterization of the internet and all of its free information not even producing "some sort of bump." How could you fail to recognize the massive change and pace of technological innovation in the past 2 decades? I don't know what sort of obtuse measurement they're using, but it doesn't seem to correspond well to reality. However, I think I essentially agree with the importance of tutoring and 1-on-1 attention for nurturing potential 'genius'. John von Neumann is a fantastic example, but perhaps more obviously illustrative is Susan Polgar and her father's explicit attempt (and success) in creating a chess genius. Susan Polgar is the greatest female chess player of all time by a gigantic margin, and it would be hard to deny it's the result of Laszlo Polgar's efforts from her young age to make her so, especially given the success of her siblings. His teaching wasn't mind blowing. It stressed cultivating passion, presenting progressively more difficult problems to the student, but with everyday consistency for over a decade. However he was an excellent teacher (that being his main profession), and skilled at chess himself (although not as good as his daughters would be), something most parents aren't likely to be for a given field they wish to inculcate greatness for their child in. Accessibility of this simple yet difficult program is unlikely to be accessible to most people then. Perhaps we could structure education systems to offer as much of this tutorship exposure as possible? We already know the lecture format and inactive learning is quite ineffective, so perhaps refocusing resources as much as possible on a more effective method, even with mediocre implementation, would produce better results, especially for those with aptitude.
• bigbillheck 5y ago
  This article has a chart from and links to https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#books-the-longest-series-i-have https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#books-th... which is even less convincing than the original.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are the Einstein-level geniuses? Someone in the thread said Whitney Houston, but... uhh, anyone else?
  • torstenvl 5y ago
    Elon Musk in the niche field of government contracting for space flight is the closest I can think of.
  • mtalantikite 5y ago
    That was me that mentioned Whitney, and I stand by it even more if the definition is "...whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking". It's hard to overstate how important Whitney Houston was for the culture, particularly for black women. I mean just read her wikipedia [1]. Contemporary music just doesn't sound the same without her. She's not often in my personal rotation, but there's just no denying how much she changed, both in music and in the culture in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston
  • mettamage 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but Elon gets all the credit, he could still be one of them, I don't know enough about their process. Maybe a few people in the biotech industry, I wouldn't know about them but the innovation there with crispr and mrna vaccines and other things seems quite crazy and cool
    • lern_too_spel 5y ago
      He was also aristocratically tutored, learning mostly at home (first from his parents and then from a litany of professional mathematicians who tutored him in what they were interested in) and then speeding through classes all the way through undergrad.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• twsted 5y ago
  Idiocracy
  • myfavoritedog 5y ago
• FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  > most of the time life as a tutor was essentially a cushy patronage job, wherein you instilled a sense of intellectual discovery into a young child in return for a hefty salary that left most of your free time intact—surely that’s what the tutors living on the Tolstoy estate must have felt, whiling away the evening hours chasing the local peasant girls after educating the young writer in the morning. SOLD! WHERE DO I SIGN UP.
• ghotli 5y ago
  I've started thinking twice about clicking x.substack.com articles around here. Why? Clickbait titles often filled with hot takes that at least in my experience don't have much signal vs noise and there's a tendency for it to just become a "this person is wrong on the internet" comment section. Just a sign of the content mill cult of personality hot take times we live in and this one apparently got me go ahead and write the comment that's been on my mind P.S. Not a critique of this article specifically and I'm sure there are decent substack publications. I mean I know they exist, I've read them. Just an observation
  • fullshark 5y ago
    Like any platform without (human) editors in control, the top 1% of content can be great but the bottom 99% mostly terrible.
• darod 5y ago
  Is there be something to be said about how difficult notoriety is these days? People are so connected and the competition much greater to get noticed vs historically where publications were limited. Today it feels as though in order to become a famous genius, you would not only have to optimize for your field, but also the SEO required to get a high ranking on a google or youtube search. That in addition to the storytelling skills necessary to keep your readers and viewers engaged because there's a cat video next on the feed. Which makes me also think what's tech's responsibility in causing all this? Are we preventing people from attaining this genius state because we're sucking all their attention with social media?
• pesmhey 5y ago
  Privately would have been the better word choice.
• stickfigure 5y ago
  The slate star codex article directly on-topic is The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... Scott Alexander makes the not-politically-correct but plausible case for genetics having a significant component. And that the grim events of the 20th century may have significantly thinned that genetic reserve. The first couple paragraphs are a pretty good hook: ----- A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women. The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.
• trgn 5y ago
  It's too bad the author hinges the article on the perceived lack of genius today, it is too hard to quantify. Genius, it's one of those things, you know it when you see it. The incremental progress on the margins that characterizes science today is just not that, requires smart people maybe, but not genius. I think that's the author's intuition (which I share fwiw). The typical hacker news reader seeing the headline is immediately pushing up their glasses up their nose, going, well, ecksjuwally, computers bleep bloop self driving cars, space, space, space, how's that for genius etc. But that's not really what is the article is about. It's about the loss of a value system, one in which education was valued in its own right, and not as a means for credentialing. Many examples of the superiority of personal tutelage over classroom education in it. The author draws parallels with a loss of quality in other domains (art, clothing, artisanship, ...). The author is at the vanguard. There is a spiritual shift happening this century. It is the rejection of modernism, the progressive ideology that life and society can (nay, must!) be completely mediated through technology, in order for it to be efficient, equitable, predictable, bureaucratic. In other words, modernism turned a person into a widget, that can be jiggered and manipulated to be useful. It is modernism that gave us pedagogics, the science on how to teach children useful skills with the least amount of money (which is not the same as education). It is modernism that razed our cities, so we can rebuild them for cars, because cars are high technology that moves things fast, and fast is better than slow. Modernism gave us the chronically medicated, because our bodies needs to be supplemented. The intuitive sense that modernism is a failure has existed for a long time, first real criticism were in the 70s. The difference now is we're seeing "regular" people making real changes now, it's not just the new age weirdos. Homeschooling is taking off, because it is better full stop for a child (as explained in the article). Walkable neighborhoods are the most expensive to live, clearly showing a preference. Fine arts and architecture are seeing a return to more classical ideals. These are individual families now, but this movement is in opposition to the current bureaucratic interests. It is also inherently elitist, since it's families with means making these choices. Curious how this will go, but it is a positive evolution, because it puts the human individual central again.
• mcculley 5y ago
  I am annoyed every time I read a statement of this form: "most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge" No. Only people who have never used a university library would believe this. Most of humanity's knowledge is locked behind paywalls. Once Sci-Hub and related efforts are done breaking down the paywalls and we have a generation growing up expecting knowledge to be available, we might see a big difference.
• cosmiccatnap 5y ago
• ryanthedev 5y ago
  This is an article that was written to support a conclusion that todays education is bad. To support that conclusion the writer choose click bait evidence to support it. I don’t agree with this at all. Genius is a subjective. There is no absolute measurement to gauge it. The best approximation would be IQ.
• makz 5y ago
  Works for fictional characters as well, like Goku who is a genius martial artist.
• beowulfey 5y ago
  Thomas Kuhn has a model for characterizing the stages of science. One of these stages is the paradigm shift -- a completely new framework to represent theory replaces an old one. I would suspect that the major contributions of geniuses correlates with paradigm shifts. It may be possible (albeit difficult) to quantify when paradigm shifts have occurred in different fields over time. Perhaps that can be used to roughly determine whether genius output has decreased. My interpretation of this idea presented in the article is that these days most paradigm shifts are smaller, but they happen more frequently. So an individual brilliant person ends up having less of an impact themselves, relative to someone in the past. No one is individually remembered for being an incredible genius. But a huge number of very brilliant people makes smaller but faster incremental changes to science. This may also be happening in the arts, but I don't know if it applies the same way.
• defgeneric 5y ago
  The quality of this thread is really disappointing. Conservatively, about 80% of the replies, criticisms, suggestions, re-framings, here are addressed in the article by the author. About 20% of the replies here are responding to the title alone (and therefore focused on Einstein/progress in hard science). The piece is about the kind of education the children of the aristocracy received and how it has disappeared entirely.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Has it disappeared entirely? "The children of the aristocracy" were very few. Do a few people receive that kind of education today? Elon Musk's children? Bill Gates' children? Some Saudi prince's children? Note also that some of the people were "tutored" by their parents; homeschooling today could fill the same role. And, > So, where are all the Einsteins? > The answer must lie in education somewhere. That's a really glib dismissal of all other possible reasons, with almost no factual reason (or even argument) behind it.
    • gwern 5y ago
      Musk's kids don't. There's been some reporting on it. They go to 'Synthesis School'/'Ad Astra School'/'Astra Nova'. It seems vaguely like STEM Montessori in attitude from what I've read. Relatively small student:staff ratio, but doesn't appear to be anywhere close to a 1:1 ratio which is what tutoring is. I haven't seen any mentions of supplementary tutoring either. (I can't think of any tech titans whose kids do receive exclusively tutoring either, instead of being sent to the local Palo Alto schools or private schools or something relatively middle-class.)
      • ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
        Musk started that school. They go to the school made by their father. I am sure they are getting quite an "aristocratic" education.
        • gwern 5y ago
• sam-s 5y ago
  One might consider the fate of Salvator Lombardo at Cornell University... No "aristocratic tutoring", just a self-driven genius, who was denied a stipend because he has the wrong skin color and genitals.
  • balsam 5y ago
    are you serious. I know that guy.
• glitchc 5y ago
  All geniuses were a manufactured product, bar none. Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign. No different from Gaga or Beyonce in the present. Beyonce exists as an idea more so than a person. What is nominally a group of individuals working collectively to solve a problem became attributed to a single person purely for marketing purposes. It is easier for most people to remember one name, or attribute an effect to a singular cause (by extension causer). What we remember through the mists of time is not the best, but what garnered the most attention in that era. Those two are not the same, never have been. What you call genius mow was back then an influencer. Now modern technology has made it possible for anyone to become an influencer. And so, geniuses are everywhere and nowhere, all at once. The influencers that survive into the next era (I’m looking at Elon) will be the geniuses of our time.
  • frazbin 5y ago
    Nailed it. Also Terry exists.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    Product implies that we can reliably deliver via process. How does one reliably produce Beyonce?
  • gilleain 5y ago
    Really? What about Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician whose solutions to problems were generally considered completely novel and unconnected to other's results. Eventually he worked with Hardy, but sadly died early. Or Alexander Grothendieck, who when given at university a choice of 14 open problems to pick one to work on one over a period of several years, solved several within months. Again he had a mixed experience of early training, and worked independently at first. Of course, he later collaborated with many others. Newton literally said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" because he acknowledged that his work built on that of others. Indeed, if he had communicated his results earlier, maybe he would have worked with Leibniz on the calculus. While people do like to focus on a singular visionary - rather than a history of invention or scholarship - that does not mean that there were not extraordinary individuals in history. Yes, they also had to be in the right place and the right time. They also had to have the time (usually, enough money) and the connections.
• al2o3cr 5y ago
  LOL at the two sources of actual quantitative data in the article not having data past 1950 or for the entire twentieth century
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  That's got it backward. Among the tutored, the geniuses could thrive. There were likely uncounted geniuses that spent their short lives tilling fields.
• yboris 5y ago
  Reminds me of László Polgár - who wanted to show the world that if focused properly, any child can become stellar at something. He chose chess since it was an easy-to-measure-outcome mental activity. Two daughters become the best and second-best female chess players in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  The problem is not just the availability of information. The problem is the time that capitalism requires just to survive leaving very little extra time to do stuff even for a genius. It takes not just genius to do great things but a mountain of free time and resources, which the aristocrats had in spades back in the day. Elon Musk is one of the few people with the confluence of all of these factors and is doing great things.
  • gcthomas 5y ago
    Capitalist tech investor with piles of cash and political influence, yes. But is Musk a genius? That case really hasn't been made yet.
    • edmcnulty101 5y ago
      I'd say he has to be way above average at a minimum. He has to understand Rocket Science and Astrophysics to enough of a degree to communicate and make decisions with other Astrophysicists and Engineers at his space company. He has to understand chemistry and mechanical engineering to enough of a degree to communicate with the lead engineers and make decisions at his EV company. Not to mention how he got his start with Pay Pal and understanding computer technology and encryption. He may or may not be a 'genius genius'. But there's zero doubt in my mind that he 'ain't no dummy'. :)
• gumby 5y ago
  Full of bugs that obscure the point the author is trying to make. Just in the first couple of paragraphs they range from small (it's Oswald Spengler, not Olaf) to large (The compression/parallax of looking backwards in an informal way distorts her perception of "genius" and the speed of invention. The fact is it is a golden age in the way she wishes; it's just that the benefit is spread more widely around, like peanut butter. The ability to do work built upon the work of others has massively sped up -- as a startup in, for example, pharma we were able to rapidly search the literature, download relevant papers, and pass them around 15 years ago in a way that was unthinkable 15 years before that. The amount of information sharing (including, in Silicon Valley but much less so elsewhere, confidential info shared with winking approval of management) has spread technological and non-technological development massively.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  Worth examining what aristocratic means. Most people have a kind of critical cartoon anti-idea of it, but aristocracy and nobility essentially mean rule by the best and being actuated by principle. There is some kind of rhyming crossover to Aristotelian virtue as well, which is a pretty sound foundation for personal growth, and for the process of education as "drawing out," instead of "putting in." When you read the works of geniuses, it becomes clear that they haven't climbed an intellectual hill so much as related to the world in a particular way that allowed them to surmount them. To explore at all, you need confidence, which comes from exercising skills and ideas, making mistakes, and handling them with the aplomb of someone whose basic relationship to the world is that where it is there to be discovered, and there is a some force that wishes for you to thrive. Everything I have read on excecptional people involved this drawing out of brilliance and the liberating of a mind to explore. This is the opposite of the industrial cog education we have now. The aphorism that all things are shaped by the forces they oppose is a useful metaphor, where to develop fully, you can't be kept in a small intellectual tank, like a fish that only grows to the size of its bowl. This freedom from constraints is the necessary condition to grow brilliance, and coincidentally, that freedom happens to come with nobility and aristocratic ideals. Another simile I use is from working with animals, where without free committed forward motion, instructing or guiding them is meaningless and even harmful, because you aren't teaching them anything unless they are already committed to a direction that you augment. The way we educate kids today is like cornering an animal and then rewarding it only as it submits and compromises itself to avoid punishment, and then recognizing it as educated when it is finally so spiritually broken it no longer tries to escape. Without a kind of liberty, a mind will only be shaped by its constraints. Nobility and elevation in this sense can absolutely be acquired, but it has to originate from within, and it is not symbolic, it's the effect of techne and the exercise of freedom and competence, and not an artifact of the reflected approval of mediocre others. There is even a spiritual element to it, where belief in a divine intent provides that foundation for relating to your environment and the world with principle, and which deflects the constraints that would limit and mis-shape your development. This is why religious education is still considered valuable even by atheists, as it provides this foundation. Adapting these ideas to life in a modern city, which is essentially a closed tank of mental constraints that emphasizes navigating relationships with people without any sense of exploring something greater - would be a really interesting question. How do you liberate the mind of a kid who lives in a box, whose existence is moving from box to box, watching glowing boxes, with the only differences being symbolic in the context of relationships with other box people, and which is not rooted to any physical principle or objective notion of good or hope? It makes genius almost impossible. Thank you to the author for such an important essay. I hope it gets more traction.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• wcarron 5y ago
  I think the author has got it mainly correct. There exists a perfect analog to this 'genius problem' in plain sight: Architecture. Back in the day, especially the art-deco era, buildings were adorned with beautiful facades and friezes and carvings. They had style and substance and actual design. Today, all you get are construction companies shitting out glass-paned bricks with shoddy materials, poor usability considerations, zero design considerations, etc. "Luxury" apartments slapped together so poorly I'd sooner bet on the structural integrity of a literal popsicle-stick house, are now the norm for new construction. It's a classic case of quality-vs-quantity, and this too the author pointed out. Everything about America and its culture is tuned ferociously towards maximum effficiency, reproducability, and simplicity. There is next-to-no room in American for focused, well considered, small-scale solutions. Not unless you are the ultra-wealthy. Normal people cannot afford craftsmanship anymore, because quality itself is now a luxury. In the same way, "Geniuses" (in the way the author describes) aren't produced here anymore. The reason is simple: America has, for decades now, sacrificed quality (with brutal zeal) at the altar of quantity.
  • gr1zzlybe4r 5y ago
    Potentially - but the quantity focus that you're talking about is a direct result of the construction and development that we allow. We basically prohibit people taking risks in architecture and design because it's impossible to build a lot of "interesting" stuff due to zoning (which is what you can build) and structure (which is how you can build) regulations. All of the pretty architecture that you're talking about was built when the legal handcuffs for doing it didn't exist. Tl;dr - I get what you're saying but can't ignore the structure of what we've set up that encourages/enables it.
    • wcarron 5y ago
      Yes, the legal structure is dumb. We as a nation traded quality for standardization and accessibility. Poor choice, in my opinion. I'd rather have fewer, riskier, smaller, beautiful buildings than the mass-produced, nondurable, ugly, no-risk construction we have today; and same with education.
  • 5y ago
• tippytippytango 5y ago
  We need a definition of genius and a way to measure this. I see genius all around me. It doesn't get recognized because so much genius is getting actualized now we just expect it. People are upset with Apple because they don't come out with a new game changing innovation every 6 months.
• kkfx 5y ago
  Education is an important, but not unique, part of the puzzle: slowness and resources are the rest. In the past researches was made ALSO for profit, but also just as mere research, there was no management no "time-to-market" push like these days and things evolve slowly so there is time to produce valuable things. These days books are written and re-written with purposes like "publish-or-perish", "we need new ed. for profit" etc. the outcome is obviously mostly garbage. There is not much public research just done to research, with economic tranquility and slow thinking, again the outcome can't be mostly different than garbage.
• jyounker 5y ago
  The author hasn't spent much time looking for counter-examples: * Paul Shannon * Paul Erdös * Donald Knuth * Richard Feynman * Harper Lee * Iain Banks * Leonard Bernstein And I think you can go on-and-on.
  • r-zip 5y ago
    Claude Shannon*
• AcerbicZero 5y ago
  Upperclassmen should tutor lowerclassmen and perhaps they should even be graded on it. If you can't explain something, you probably don't actually understand that thing - and I really don't think school can get much worse, so perhaps adding a little self governance would give them a chance at being successful.
• Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  I've found similar line of thinking in the work of Polish writer, Jacek Dukaj. In his "Po Piśmie" ("After Writing") he had also remarked on the fact that education you would get in higher classes is not the education you get in lower. You're taught how to deal with boredom (as in you were not supposed to work), so you'd be more creative.
  • sologoub 5y ago
    While I have not read Jacek Dukaj (I’ll add to my list), I wonder if it’s less of not supposed to work vs had the option of indulging in less lucrative pursuits than even todays elite. Historically, wealth was largely land-driven and the elites did not work that land themselves. The historical “job” for the elites was war, which came in waves and left a lot of time for other things like poetry, philosophy and science. Todays upper middle classes are all wage workers with often longer and longer workweeks. Ideas like FIRE (financial independence retire early) are picking up steam, but are far from mainstream. This business of the parents combined with lack of tutoring or other one on one education has to be taking a negative effect on the quality of education.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• phonescreen_man 5y ago
  No mention of female genius. What about Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper …and on and on
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    What did Lovelace actually do to put her in that category? Hopper I agree with (also Frances Allen!), Shelley is an obvious entry, but I've never really been sold on Lovelace as a genius versus merely interesting.
• phonescreen_man 5y ago
  Not much mention of female genius, Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Grace Hopper, etc
  • lern_too_spel 5y ago
    There are several mentions of female geniuses who were developed by aristocratic tutoring, including Émilie du Châtelet, Ada Lovelace, Hannah Arendt, and Virginia Woolf. It is certainly true that historically, girls were given this benefit less often than boys, so we should expect fewer historical female geniuses than male geniuses if we believe the author's hypothesis.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  The article is mainly about educating children. One issue I found was that there might be some personal quality required to get tutored effectively. Can everyone be tutored and benefit from it? For the geniuses listed, there must be an army of not so brilliant minds that we didn't hear about. How much worse off are they in a normal factory school? Also, if you go to Oxbridge, you get a tutor several times a week. I am not sure I'm that much smarter than someone who didn't have this privilege. But of course I benefit from people thinking that tutoring is magic sauce. I wonder if anyone has checked.
  • freddex 5y ago
    There's some research about this. [1] It seems tutoring is very effective as a teaching method, but of course, not very scalable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
    • User23 5y ago
      Exactly. Tutoring is a huge advantage for your children if you can afford it. One area where you still see it is in music lessons. Any even moderately serious student of the piano or similar instruments learns in a tutoring type arrangement. Those individuals who have the potential for groundbreaking genius, say the 4+ sigma crowd, simply cannot practicably be adequately served by group instruction if they are to reach their potential. It's up to us as a society to decide whether we want to treat our intellectual superiors as precious gifts that should be cherished or as affronts to our notions of equality and fairness. I fear we're leaning ever more toward the latter. It's too bad, because humanity is facing a number of problems that will probably require geniuses to solve.
• jacobedawson 5y ago
  You could probably argue that in the soft domains of music & literature, the explosion of widely available content might actually be a cause of the "decline" - it's not unlikely your undiscovered genius looks at everything out there, thinks "I guess it's all been done, and I probably won't be noticed in amongst all this noise anyway", and takes a well-paying job instead of creating the next great work of art.
  • tomp 5y ago
    Literature has been widely available for a while, but there’s still great works produced (well, probably great… needs some historical distance still) disproving your hypothesis.
  • coffeecat 5y ago
    This seems about right. For most endeavors nowadays - music, art, science, technology, business - the process of reviewing what's already out there is just overwhelming. Then you actually review the existing stuff, and find that five other people have already pursued your great new idea. Over time, this cycle tends to erode your enthusiasm for pursuing new ideas.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Maxwell attended the Edinburgh Academy which wasn't even the best school in town <ducks>. Then he went on to attend the local university. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about his educational background. He did come from a wealthy family though.
• damm 5y ago
  It is difficult to be a Genius when you are poor. Meaning we have people who are highly intelligent now but they lack the resources to create their vision. While we have people who are one of the most richest individuals in the world trying to start a fist fight with Putin over the future of Ukraine. > Yes I know Elon wasn't serious it was just him getting attention.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  It’s wild that today’s zeitgeist says that we’re currently experiencing the greatest pace of change in human history, while also saying that we’ve stagnated.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    That was also the zeitgeist 100 years ago.
• mcguire 5y ago
  "Here’s a chart from Cold Takes’ “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?” 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)." Headdesk. "total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields" Headdesk.
  • skrebbel 5y ago
    You're not even trying to make an argument.
• t_mann 5y ago
  fwiw, I happen to know that there are companies specializing in finding these sort of tutors today (well rounded in the arts and sciences, ideally multilingual, can regularly spend with kids for longer time periods, be a sort of 'role model'...). I don't know what it would cost to use them, but I can imagine...
• alfor 5y ago
  The goal of the education system is to flatten society. Both of my kid have been homeschooled up until 5th grade. At home they used to do less than 20min per day of ’school’. After a few month at school they now find the pace incredibly slow and they can’t stand the waiting they have to endure. They both score 80-95% in all classes. My son is learning programming and video editing and piano by himself, my daughter is writing small novels in a second language. We didn’t teach them much at all, they mostly learn just by themselves. They now want to go back to homeschooling so they don’t have to wait to learn nothing. They might be a bit gifted, but I think that the main difference is that they didn’t go to school, they didn’t get used to waiting and learning at the same pace as everyone. I think that most kids a much more capable than we think. Now I think that unschooling + a bit of tutoring would be incredibly powerful.
  • markdown 5y ago
    Be interesting to see what the isolation does to them. After all, they'll eventually have to live and get along with all those "slow-learners". We Live In A Society™
    • whatshisface 5y ago
      Not if they go to college and then get a mentally difficult/highly filtered (not the same thing) job. They could be surrounded by peers for the rest of their lives.
  • sytelus 5y ago
    Your general grandiose advice should come with plenty of warning labels. A lot of people try to do homeschooling but they neither have expertise, patience or discipline. For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself. Majority of people don't have these skills which is why there exist teacher degrees and training. That is why experienced teachers do much better than inexperienced. The 1:1 with incompetent teacher is not better than 20:1 with experienced teacher, IMO. It is dangerous and false to say that just having 1:1 interactions and just igniting interest would make everything better. In your case, likely your kids are fairly gifted and even downgraded teaching won't matter. But that is not the case with everyone. Most people should also not be looking for raising next Einstein but rather a well rounded and functioning individual.
• Atlas667 5y ago
  It's liberalism that promotes this idea of individual merit. By liberalism i mean philosophical liberalism that most of the modern world has, be it in a conservative fashion, neo-liberal fashion or the modern sense of liberal and all their flavors. The idea that people are "equal before the law and have individual rights" does not mean people are equal. But media keeps espousing this narrative to convince us that even rich people are equal, thereby saying that if you do not reach this level it is by your individual merit. It is the "humble" philosophy of a world run by the rich and powerful. And that has extended to anyone with success. And i like that, while this article does not consciously critique liberalism, it still puts down its notions. The idea that there are magical people who do things with their magic abilities makes talking about the material conditions of our development almost impossible and inconsequential. Not to take away from these genius' contributions, but to add to their condition.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm not convinced. > I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age. We are living in a golden age. The beginning stages of one anyway. Where once a genius needed aristocratic tutoring, now genius is becoming so common that they're not the notable man of their time anymore. > Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how genius is produced. If genius were just a matter of genetic ability, then in the past century, as the world’s population increased dramatically, and as mass education skyrocketed, and as racial and gender barriers came thundering down across the globe, and particularly in the last few decades as free information saturated our society, we should have seen a genius boom—an efflorescence of the best mathematicians, the greatest scientists, the most awe-inspiring artists. This is 100% the case. There are so many brilliant people out of the ~7.5 billion of us that genius just isn't as notable anymore. And that genius, instead of resulting in household names like Einstein, results in the marvelous modern world we live in. We see the evidence of it every day in our day to day lives. It's easy to lose perspective on this because it's the every day world to us, but the way we live today is just not the way we did even 30 years ago, not to mention 70. I can name some great thinkers alive today, right now, and recently dead, in all sorts of fields from philosophy to mathematics to hard science. Peter Shor. Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, I'm sure anyone in this thread can name 10 more. There are unsung geniuses right now working for all sorts of companies, or just tinkering away anonymously in their bedrooms at their desktop computers. Just wait til the information availability afforded us by the internet breaks the institutional education system and begins producing scores of self taught polymaths and specialists at home. That's what the younger generation is going to live through. Art: you can right now find with simple internet searches art made by artists that is mind blowingly wonderful with infinite scrolling. Of course 90% of everything is crap, but I guarantee you can find excellent art of all kinds in seemingly endless supply by people you've never heard of within 5 minutes of reading this if you try. Its just good ol days nostalgia to me. A time when information availability was monopolized and bottlenecked of course will only produce a handful of notable people. When that bottleneck is gone as it is now they're just not as notable, and that is a good thing for them, us and everybody, except maybe the ones that controlled information flows before.
• tpoacher 5y ago
  Not necessarily the point the article is making, but it remind me of a quote I once heard, which I liked and jotted down. "There is often a mentality in the workplace that with sufficiently detailed protocols and procedures, the village idiot can perform theoretical physics just as well as Einstein. In fact, no amount of procedure will make that happen; quite the contrary, all that procedure ensures is that if you ever do hire Einstein, their output will closely resemble that of the village idiot." Paraphrased from a slashdot comment, originally in the context of agile programming (https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12210032&cid=56757666 https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12210032&cid=5675766...)
• datavirtue 5y ago
  This is why I want UBI for my fellow man. So that people can more easily persue academia and personally funded research and development. We need more minds at work to innovate our way out of many messes that are converging at the intersection of a burgeoning population.
• N1H1L 5y ago
  I am a researcher at a national lab. I am pretty smart myself, and have worked with some exceptional people during my PhD and even now. Thing is, we have become so metrics and busy work obsessed that it's insane. Fully 75% of my time is spent chasing money. Which means writing grants that have a 25% success rate (and I am told to be proud of that number, others have it worse), filling out monthly, quarterly and yearly reports for my grants and chasing the next grant. The science that I do is honestly now a break from all that bullshit. And then the stupid obsession with metrics. I have technically more peer-reviewed journal papers than Einstein, and I am not even fit to touch that man's shoelaces - let alone tie them. If h-index is the only measure of scientific success, then don't be surprised if fools are what you get. The system, all the way down from Congress is designed to fail - and we are acting surprised?
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    When I read the article I thought about this in terms of the school system as well. There is so much you need to do only to get to the next "level" in the system, which makes it difficult to innovate or explore outside of that. To me, it seems like the aristocratic tutoring gave those people the opportunity to work outside the system.
• hereforphone 5y ago
  There are different levels of suitability for everything, including scientific and technical innovation. Combine advantageous intellectual predisposition with a "privileged" education, and you may get a "genius". I appreciate these people, but I'm more impressed by those who excelled (even if to a lesser extent than their aristocratically educated contemporaries) against all odds. Especially when the underdog is working actively against their disadvantages instead of lurking on forums pasting about the unfairness of society and the plight of the proletariat.
• DantesKite 5y ago
  I read the article. I disagree with the premise that there are fewer geniuses today. There are plenty of geniuses, if not more than ever. They just don't all have a deep, cultural impact on the zeitgeist. Take for example the resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem and Poincare's Conjecture. Or the work being done on the Twin Primes problem. This article is probably better situated as an examination of culture. You could make a similar argument for why there isn't anything comparable to the Beatles at the moment.
  • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    The other thing is, that there is not much of basic math and physics left anymore for people to study and figure out something new. Archimedes' buoyancy, newtons laws, etc. are all something that we know and learn about in elementary and high schools, and we remember their names, because they were either first to figure it out or more realistically, first to put it in writing in a way, that we can now use in "math/physics". Since the elementary to highschool curriculum is limited, we learn only "basic" stuff there, and most of that was attributed to historical physicists/mathematicians. Now, in modern times, it is hard to invent anything "by yourself" (you need to work at a college and/or institute, to get access to proper equipment and mentors), and even when you discover something new, the discovery is so far away from "basic" math/physics, that the only ones who read the article and understand it are other mathetmaticians and physicists, kids will never learn about you, because the science is too advanced, and even when something attracts the mainstream media (to make you famous), the media then published that "scientists prove good exists" (the famous "god particle"), or worse.
    • cyberbanjo 5y ago
      Heres a counter example to both "math is finished" and "contributing to research needs heavy equipment", granted not sure how common that is. Christopher Havens, a convicted murderer serving a twenty-five-year sentence, made a world-class discovery in mathematics; from his prison cell. https://dr-younes-henni.medium.com/from-murderer-to-mathematician-the-incredible-conversion-of-inmate-chris-havens-dcce8187c93b https://dr-younes-henni.medium.com/from-murderer-to-mathemat...
• nathias 5y ago
  Classical education was incomparable to what we get today, we are all completely uncultured.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  There's a role for truly domain-expert tutors (who deeply understand the material, not "expert at teaching"), but who will pay the correct price to lure them from every other profession? It doesn't scale because necessarily personalized (to address the subtle misunderstandings particular to this student)... so probably isn't the best use of the tutor.
  • vlovich123 5y ago
    There is one use case which is pairing them with the most promising pupils.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• faangiq 5y ago
  Didn’t read but it’s true now also. Mostly passed down hereditarily though by academics. Our ruling class are scammers and crooks who have no use for genius.
• fakethenews2022 5y ago
  If you look at the sports world, you will see that its equivalent of tutoring is hugely beneficial and is alive and well. The Williams sisters and their father are one obvious example but if you dig deeper, you will see many more examples. Rafael Nadal was tutored by his uncle. Tiger Woods was tutored by his father. Also, look at coaches. They are often the sons and daughters of coaches. Tutoring allows exploring and independence of thought which is really how you improve your thinking whereas standardized education mostly does not. Tutoring is bidirectional and standardized education is most unidirectional.
  • exolymph 5y ago
    Upvoted, but genetics are a huge confounder here.
  • Godel_unicode 5y ago
    This is survivorship bias. I've played pick-up basketball with a ton of dudes whose parents sunk hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into training and coaching, and they're generally stunningly mediocre. Tim Duncan, widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time, held a basketball for the first time as a freshman in highschool when hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool and he had to pick a new sport to play.
    • majormajor 5y ago
      Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages? I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10. I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.
• reddog 5y ago
  I got to wonder how 11 year old Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Dawin would have turned out if they had been subjected to all the extremely compelling distractions that modern day kids encounter, aristocratic tutors and all. How much greek and latin would have been learned with a PS5 in the room? How much of Marcus Aurelius would have been read if young Russell had had a Instagram account and a magic glowing rectangle that streamed entertainment around the clock?
  • IMTDb 5y ago
    Precisely as much as what today's kid are doing. Which means close to none for some, and quite a lot for others. And some discover it from books and some from wikipedia, reddit, YouTube etc. Some kids with use those new resources to create amazing things, and some without any true purpose at all. That was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow. There is no reason to believe that humans have fundamentally changed in few hundreds years. So yesterdays kid - deep down - really are the same as todays kid, the environment changed but they didn't. > “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.” Socrates - talking about Plato's generation
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • epivosism 5y ago
      your point implies that environment can have no effects and that you can dismiss them out of hand. Is that really true? surely some environments hamper learning? if you'll admit that, you should admit that you actually need to prove that we aren't in such an environment. i.e. you assume a kind of "conservation of learning" without proof.
      • Retric 5y ago
        Not that environment has no effect, just that our current environment still produces you geniuses. It’s quite likely that a different background would have pushed him into studying something else. But, shuffling who is remembered for what isn’t inherently a good or bad thing.
• carapace 5y ago
  See also László Polgár and the upbringing of his daughters: > László Polgár (born 11 May 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women's World Chess Champion. > Polgár ... recalled that "when I looked at the life stories of geniuses" during his student years, "I found the same thing...They all started at a very young age and studied intensively."[3] He prepared for fatherhood prior to marriage, reported People Magazine in 1987, by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius."[4] In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained… When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r FWIW, I believe it's very much true: we are born geniuses (if healthy, normal) and converted into the "dangerous intellectuals" we see today through a careful and idiotic process of what-is-called education. To me the weirdest and saddest thing is the way that people will force their own children to endure what they did, just because society says it's the "done thing". People like Maria Montessori are some of the greatest heroes in all history, from this POV. I can barely imagine what it would be like to have a modern educational program that did things like teaching mnemonic techniques to radically improve memory, or hypnotic practice sessions where you can e.g. play imaginary musical instruments for imaginary hours (that take only a few minutes of real time) and improve. I experimented with a lot of this stuff when I was younger, and I can tell you we are barely scratching the surface of human capability.
• q3 5y ago
  "If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others." - Aldous Huxley
  • scaramanga 5y ago
    An aristocrat believes that you need a specialised social class to do the thinking and deciding while the great mass of people do the "doing as they're told" part. Quelle surprise :)
  • deleted 5y ago
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• scaramanga 5y ago
  The article assumes that we aren't living in a golden age. But in terms of pure science and technology you can argue that we pretty much are living in a golden age. Just look at physics, we're now in an age of gravity wave observatories, particle accelerators, and incredibly detailed surveys of the universe and a steady stream of high quality papers that would have drowned Einstein and the like. Not to mention that science, math, and tech have become even more social and collaborative enterprises with large, sometimes huge, teams involved in making major breakthroughs. So the article seems to be slightly lamenting that a single charismatic individual cannot corner an entire field in the public imagination any more? Or that they can, but they just do it for being an "entrepreneur"? Or maybe it's just that Elon Musk (for example) can only convince a small minority that he has expertise in any actually "real" field of endeavour (other than grift, PR, whatever) where in the past he may have been able to read a handful of books and sound a lot more convincing. Perhaps we just need to define genius more carefully. As for whether highly privileged people will again decide to spend their money on tutors (instead of yachts or Rolex watches or whatever else they spend it on) seems to be a question of very niche interest and almost no social consequence.
  • haihaibye 5y ago
    > Just look at physics The last change to the standard model was the prediction of the top quark in 1977. That was almost half a century ago.
• gre 5y ago
  Taking private lessons for trombone put me way ahead of everyone who didn't take lessons. In fact, talking to someone one on one in any depth will instantly reveal one side's mastery or misunderstading of a subject. One-on-ones for elementary through high school students would be an intersting experiment.
• haihaibye 5y ago
  A 90 year old is unlikely to make a mathematical breakthrough, so normalizing by total population is absurd. If you wanted to know whether people are breaking marathon records in 100 years time, would you rather know the population of the earth or the population of Kenyan and Ethiopian men 25-40?
• pier25 5y ago
  I could be totally wrong, but my hunch is that this is more related to the lowest hanging fruit rather than human capacity. Maybe scientific discoveries simply get exponentially harder. In painting, it's very rare for someone to make anything original these days. We won't have any more Picassos, etc, simply because they were the first to explore a new terrain. It's really not a matter of education, genetics, or talent. The more explored a terrain is, the less there is to discover. So the matter is really discovering new terrains, like the internet has been in the past decades.
  • WanderPanda 5y ago
    What about Banksy e.g.?
    • krnlpnc 5y ago
      You mean Robert Del Naja?
    • jollybean 5y ago
      Banksy's most iconic stuff is kind of ripped off.
  • jonnybgood 5y ago
    What do you mean by original?
    • pier25 5y ago
      Unique?
  • nwatson 5y ago
    Is useful, worthwhile knowledge in a "sparse" search space? If so it will take more and more effort to reach anything new, and we'll need generations-long moonshot efforts to force young kids to skip their childhoods to dedicate time to nothing more than making the next, say chemistry, discovery by the time they're 45. Many are accused of manufacturing B.S. search spaces to explore in English departments. If worthwhile knowledge is in a "fractal" search space maybe there's hope. Those kids can still have a childhood and discover something new by the time they're 30, something worthwhile. Another problem with modern genius might be that there are plenty of geniuses, but the proximity of their deep-in-the-fractal landscape is so far from what can be recognized and acknowledged by gatekeepers of genius sainthood that their work never comes to light. There also are probably lots of geniuses doing outsized work at relatively menial jobs in places where nobody can see it, and their work is taken for granted.
• Gatsky 5y ago
  My two comments are that firstly, some fields don’t support the genius narrative. Consider the eradication of small pox. This is definitely in the top 5 best things humans have ever done, and may ever do. But there are no geniuses associated with this, it was a lot of small contributions over time. Secondly, I think it is very obvious that there are some (not all!) potential geniuses who never achieve anything because they don’t get the right encouragement, support and coaching. Geoffrey Tozer snd Walter Pitts are two examples that come to mind, plus the no doubt many nameless female geniuses who never had any chance.
  • avani 5y ago
    There is an argument that without Pitts, you'd never have seen a Von Neumann architecture. Not nothing.
• acenes 5y ago
  But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system. This is confusing correlation for causation. Indeed, Bertrand Russell wrote: > The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.
  • fouc 5y ago
    I have a strong suspicion that aristocrat homeschooling would still beat out public education system in many ways.. For example, public education system doesn't particularly touch on social skills, etiquette, rulership/leadership, Machiavellianism, business, investing, property management, etc.
    • Barrin92 5y ago
      no because that's the skills of a political and economic oligarchy. If you want to see successful education systems look at the Soviet Union, India, China and also France. A boatload of testing, rigorous learning combined with high formal standards, that's to say an actual meritocracy is how you can quite literally churn out geniuses. Chess is a good example.
      • morberg 5y ago
        And yet Magnus Carlsen is from Norway.
        • Barrin92 5y ago
          Sure, but we don't make judgements on individual data points. The Soviet Union with the short Fischer interlude dominated chess entirely. Today Russia still averages the strongest top 10 players, India and China have risen to become the third and fourth strongest chess nations within a generation or two, and looking at immigrant engineering talent in the US paints a pretty clear picture as well. And the educational divide globally and development of science excellence pretty much only grows. How is this even a discussion given the evidence, any countries around that run on 'aristocratic homeschooling'? Saudi royal family kids in Swiss private schools?
• regpertom 5y ago
  Feynman talks on names of birds being irrelevant. Also that there’s a hidden side to science not talked about and just assumed the student will pick up, that your weaknesses should be exposed. Also cargo culting. Bart Simpsons karate teacher says first we fill your head with knowledge then we break bricks with it. The article says tutors went on the grand tour. We’re full time live in always available. The Huxley quote in this comment section. ————————— I wonder with SEO popularity marketing contests and polarised viscous populations, have people just learnt eyegouges? So now no one has eyes. How can a “naive academic” be produced in a trap filled landscape of litigious deconstruction? Example, Feynman has a go at the reporter about asking why magnets work. Russels soft speaking. Could “we” allow these things?
  • vermilingua 5y ago
    Is this account just feeding the comment thread through GPT-3 and posting what it considers to be a suitable reply?
    • regpertom 5y ago
      I think you’re calling me a bot. That’s a shame. I’ll reply literally: Feeding a comment thread, through regular reply box, with what I consider hopefully within the realm of suitability. And personally: I think I have trouble conveying complicated thoughts (to me) without spending lots of words on background and hedging information. I hope to get better with practice. I hope that at least I don’t get in the way too much so I posted as it’s own comment not a reply to someone. Is this what you mean?
  • regpertom 5y ago
    Hello, please excuse me for another post but I’ve been thinking about it since and I have more things that I’d like to add, I have updated by bot programming haha let me know if this is better formatting :) Consider, if you will, a perspective of the book Lord of the Flies, in which a group of school children who are stranded on an island descend into chaos and violence. At the end, the children are saved by a passing ship and it’s crew. Presumably, had the ship captain been there from the start things would have turned out very differently. Is an aristocratic education analogous to hiring a sea captain? In that vein, is sea captain an even better fit than educator? To put some flavour back into the story from before, viewed as a group, as the group got older, the trials and tribulations of the world were exasperated by the inexperience or lack of wisdom of the group. And so had the sea captain been there, they would have acted as guidance, direction, wisdom type roles. For roughly all of life’s things. The tutor would go on the grand tour and would live with them. They would often have multiple for different areas of interest, … Ok so flip it around and now we’ve got a single child instead of a group and a group of sea captains instead of 1. A group of sea captains of different specialities would approach total cultural transfer as the group got larger. For a definition of cultural that would be analogous to tesuji or clever reactions to the things that happen. Therefore it goes beyond “teacher” in a modern school way. So is it also therefore that the failure to produce geniuses is the difference between school in our context and life. Their context was closer or the difference smaller. I’m going far field into blindly assuming that book learning, what we might call academic knowledge mostly remains, some might argue watered down or perverted but they at least still exist, where as non academic things, like you’d discover on the grand tour with Jeremy Clarkson have completely vanished. If it could be shown that a focus on that version of academics has increased over time it might even be possible to say that more academia produces less geniuses, reword that into makes people dumber, smudge it a bit and: academics makes people dumber. Which would be quite funny. End. Ps. There would maybe be interesting things to find by looking specifically as the types of tutors and their life curriculum. Marcus Aurelius lists maaaaaaany things iirc. “and to Epiclitus I owe…” parts. Ps. People argue about, paraphrased by me, life skills lacking in home schooling being problem with this but maybe I’ve shown that’s not necessity correct. Ps. Similar themes to my preceding comment but I feel like it’s better. More of a statement than the beginning of a dialogue. More focussed and fleshed out even if relying on shorthand for some of it. Otoh I’ve introduced more of my own things and dropped threads for the sake of that focus. Still, I’ll think I’ll mark it positive progress. Good bot.
• jollybean 5y ago
  Everyone with an education was tutored in such a way. We don't lack 'geniuses' we have more brilliant and educated people than ever. It just so happens there are not a lot of low-hanging fruit of easy things to be discovered by 'gentleman astronomers with a telescope in their backyard'. The only thing we may be a bit short on, are people who have focussed extremely hard on one thing. Eddie Van Halen was nerding out in his bedroom for 10 years learning to spread before becoming famous. I think with Social Media, a lot of people are constantly distracted. But even with that said, the amount of talented kids with instruments is something else. Youtube is a source of inspiration and learning. Of course 'the greats' are going to be coached and 'at it' since a young age, there's nothing new there.
• twayt 5y ago
  The term Genius is a marketing term, there is no value in discussing geniuses as a separate group of people. A lot of the biggest breakthroughs were a combination of luck and intuition. Everyone who stands the chance of making a breakthrough has to have access to state of the art or at least enough training to get to the frontier. Even Ramanujan had to learn math from a book. If you could tutor someone to make a world changing breakthrough it would be so much more common. There is nothing else that needs to be said on this topic.
• deleted 5y ago
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• known 5y ago
• danieljacksonno 5y ago
  I think there are two things going on here, that explain satisfactory why we feel like we see fewer geniuses now: 1) There are now so many people who would be seen as geniuses 150 years ago that they drown each other out, leaving little space in the spotlight for someone to gain the culture defining attention a genius in 1850 might have gotten. 2) In addition, the culture that would be defined by such a genius is now several orders of magnitude more complex than it was in 1850. That means getting everyone to agree on anything is a much harder feat now, much less to get the zeitgeist to agree someone is a genius. (Just look at people like Gates, Jobs and Musk - just as quickly as they are seen as geniuses by one part of the culture, another part wants to drag them down again).
• bshanks 5y ago
  I think 1-on-1 tutoring is great and I agree that there should be more of it. But whether "genius" has declined seems unclear to me. In my life I've personally met a handful of astoundingly smart intellectuals who work across multiple disciplines -- I imagine these people are probably as smart as the geniuses of history. And I think there are still intellectuals and artists who impact the world at large in a big way. Imo what has changed is only that for some reason these people aren't canonized as "geniuses". I suspect that, like "top college", people are only considered a "genius" if everyone (or at least "every notable intellectual") knows about them, and there is only room in people's memories for several such people; but over time, the number of really smart people doing revolutionary work at any given time has grown from a handful to many thousands. As the ratio of "available genius spots" to "people who should be considered geniuses" has shrunk from near 1.0 in the distant past to a tiny fraction today, culture responded by giving up on canonizing geniuses.
• snikeris 5y ago
  > The answer must lie in education somewhere. Why? Our habitat is increasingly hazardous to our health. Einstein didn’t grow up breathing leaded air.
• iamsaitam 5y ago
  What is a genius? Not doubting the extent to which teaching practices are related to producing "geniuses", I think an issue with the topic is also framing (and therefore identifying) what defines a "genius". Taking into account the examples mentioned in the article, they all come from (understandably) "classical" (and broad) categories. I'd wager that there are more geniuses out there in the world, being that the landscape is much greater as there are far more niches to dive into. In my opinion the larger problem and why there's a decline in the "classical" genius is that it's being applied to a completely different frame, which are the present times. The definition of genius needs different criteria in order to make sense in today's world.
• thazework 5y ago
  >Is there anyone who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for? One day Dylan will die, we can preemptively add him to the list
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  The article is spot on. Liberal democracies should fund special schooling for a minority of smart kids; just try hard to make it as blind as possible to privileged home circumstances by picking kids up early into the program.
• specialist 5y ago
  Britain used to crank out popular music. Why that'd stop? One theory is because the dole was ended. (Thank you Tatcher!) Aspiring pop stars generally started as struggling artists. Now they're just starving artists. I assume that improving the safety net, eg UBI, will unlock amazing human potential. Give all those undiscovered geniuses a chance to follow their whim, vs grind away as fulfillment center wage slaves.
• tynpeddler 5y ago
  One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius. I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as a proxy for genius, are particularly great. Acclaim is a dubious proxy because because it's more influenced by popular attention than actual technical capability.
  • fmvab 5y ago
    I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted. If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!) I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison. My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.
    • pas 5y ago
      I think people misunderstand the skills needed for progress nowadays (or maybe ever). We have clear avenues forward where we are basically just waiting for data to trickle in, then prune the falsified hypotheses, and repeat. It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air. And even then we have the story of the quantization of blackbody radiation, when Planck was stuck and finally ended up using a formula that fot the data and called it a day. As an addendum consider Paul Erdos. As far as I know everyone loved to work with him, he was basically running a big distributed institute in this regard. He did what organized workshops do nowadays, but in a slightly radical way, he basically changed "dorm rooms" every few weeks, and churned out papers like a machine on speed. Which in fact he was on all the time. And who can blame him? Stimulants are part of work culture anyway. Coffee, tea, anti-ADHD meds, etc. And with such drastically work focused "work-life balance" it's not surprising that he has results.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  It seems obvious that mass produced education wouldn't produce geniuses. A mediocre education for everyone will never make potential geniuses fall in love with education. This generation's geniuses don't end up contributing to science and end up optimising advertisement click rate or finding the best way for banks and government to scam normies. On the plus side, they're probably doing better than they would have in the past.