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It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the scale of the planet. Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intel

by toyg 5y ago

It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the scale of the planet. Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All these channels were very limited, so just by getting there one could ensure they had a position among the officially recognised elite. Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels, from all over the planet, unloading talent in any discipline 24/7. You can market the hell out of yourself and the world can still decide they are too busy caring about Korean singers and African memes. Which really is the beef I have with this article: genius is not recognised anymore because now we are a global village of billions, rather than an elite of a few hundreds of thousands, and we consume all sorts of radically different media rather than a handful of shared sources. So we simply don't agree on what is "genius" anymore, at a societal level; geniuses do their work in smaller groups, where they get some recognition, and that's it.

atq2119 5y ago
> Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong. The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?
- toyg 5y ago
  For all practical purposes, it is literally infinite. You won't be able to go through the entirety of YouTube in a single lifetime, and that's just one channel of distributed knowledge. And new channels appear every day, somewhere on the global network. The firehose will never stop, the network is effectively an infinite source of content. > what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to resources, networking chances, free time etc etc, the aristocrats of the past would have been effectively unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose opinion determined everybody else's view of them, effectively unchallenged.

by toyg 5y ago

atq2119 5y ago

> Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong. The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?

toyg 5y ago
For all practical purposes, it is literally infinite. You won't be able to go through the entirety of YouTube in a single lifetime, and that's just one channel of distributed knowledge. And new channels appear every day, somewhere on the global network. The firehose will never stop, the network is effectively an infinite source of content. > what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors I think the evidence is flimsy that "the other factors" can realistically be corrected for. In terms of access to resources, networking chances, free time etc etc, the aristocrats of the past would have been effectively unbeatable regardless of education methods. They could have powered through the infamous 10,000 hours in a couple of years, without any tutoring, to then spend the rest of their lives getting recognised as geniuses by a minuscule audience of a few hundred individuals - whose opinion determined everybody else's view of them, effectively unchallenged.