6 ms·

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 distract

by 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
  [deleted]
- 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.
throwaway5486nv 5y ago
Distraction is for less focused and less ambitious people. We don't have to look at Einstein level genius. Take a look at the competitive programming the kids there solve puzzles at such speed who are grown in the era of all the distractions. If one can not be genius in this era, there is no way they could have been genius in the past. The other way is not true due to access to knowledge in the past is very much restricted to select few.
- lumost 5y ago
  Alternately, the markers of what makes one a "genius" have changed. In the past, being a genius meant having enough leisure time to spend learning what was a comparably small body of knowledge. Then spending more of that time expanding that knowledge, ultimately transmitting it through a written or spoken medium to a broad body of people. Today we often pay attention to raw skill in a field as a proxy for "genius". We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer. Are we missing the longer/deeper forms of work?
  - gridspy 5y ago
    > "We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer." Competitive coding is still quite creative, which you contrast with brick-laying where muscle memory instead plays a big part. Perhaps compare instead to middle ages masonry experts who used custom cut rocks to build various curved outer walls and arches. I agree that competitive coding is less creative generally than many other types of programming - often it is learned pattern matching combined with great quality execution.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  But without these distractions you might be forced to go and do something else. Even if you weren’t a genius, your hard work might pay off. It’s so easy to stream what you want to watch. Before, X-Files was only on once a week and video games were expensive and you had to go to the store.
77pt77 5y ago
Quite frankly it's not even what you wrote. It's the zero barrier access to porn.
kromem 5y ago
Ah yes, the "kids these days" line of reasoning. Some other things from the past which were argued to inevitably corrupt the younger generation from the "good old days:" * Reading silently * Ballroom Dancing * Chess As someone who leveraged playing and thinking about video games and emerging technology into a $300/hr consulting fee and being offered a "create your own role doing whatever you want" at a multi-billion dollar corporation after having been subpoenaed as an expert by the US government, advised cabinet nominees, consulted for about 10% of the Fortune 500s, and had CEOs flying in their oversees franchise management teams to hear me speak -- all before I was 30, I can acknowledge it was very corrupting indeed. I left that career not just to play video games, but because I realized there's diminishing returns on personal wealth but inversely increased value on personal time as the available supply runs out. If more kids these days figure that out earlier on, the world will be better off for it, not worse. Besides, I'm less concerned with the loss of potential in kids these days not becoming wage slaves for maximum productivity and far more regretful at the lost opportunities for our ancestors born without the right anatomy, skin color, or wealth to pursue their own potential. Even for those that did - given how much more interesting Da Vinci's notebooks were than his portraits - how much more interesting a world would we be living in were he and other geniuses to have not needed to finance their unfettered curiosity and interests with bullshit time wasting catering to the petty interests of the rich? We only have so many hours in life, and in my experience much of society spends far more time at far less value on things like "stay at your desk until 6pm" than "solve this puzzle in this dungeon." Video games are the least of the things holding back humanity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
twayt 5y ago
The fact that we have more compelling distractions than survival is because we have largely solved all the problems required for us to thrive. The genius of prehistoric times would have been to discover better ideas to survive or hunt. The genius of the previous generation was to improve computation. We are here being distracted by TikTok precisely because of that. The genius of the next generation would be something else important to the current time. No matter what the context of the time is, genius will emerge. The criteria of what genetics, skills and training you need to be a genius will definitely change to suit the time. Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Darwin are no longer going to be the geniuses of today the same way they wouldn't be the geniuses of the previous generation. TLDR; Genius is an emergent phenomenon that is rooted in the valuable contemporary problems that need to be solved.

by reddog 5y ago

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
[deleted]
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.

throwaway5486nv 5y ago

Distraction is for less focused and less ambitious people. We don't have to look at Einstein level genius. Take a look at the competitive programming the kids there solve puzzles at such speed who are grown in the era of all the distractions. If one can not be genius in this era, there is no way they could have been genius in the past. The other way is not true due to access to knowledge in the past is very much restricted to select few.

lumost 5y ago
Alternately, the markers of what makes one a "genius" have changed. In the past, being a genius meant having enough leisure time to spend learning what was a comparably small body of knowledge. Then spending more of that time expanding that knowledge, ultimately transmitting it through a written or spoken medium to a broad body of people. Today we often pay attention to raw skill in a field as a proxy for "genius". We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer. Are we missing the longer/deeper forms of work?
- gridspy 5y ago
  > "We applaud a competitive coder, but this may be the modern equivalent to applauding a fast brick layer." Competitive coding is still quite creative, which you contrast with brick-laying where muscle memory instead plays a big part. Perhaps compare instead to middle ages masonry experts who used custom cut rocks to build various curved outer walls and arches. I agree that competitive coding is less creative generally than many other types of programming - often it is learned pattern matching combined with great quality execution.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
But without these distractions you might be forced to go and do something else. Even if you weren’t a genius, your hard work might pay off. It’s so easy to stream what you want to watch. Before, X-Files was only on once a week and video games were expensive and you had to go to the store.

77pt77 5y ago

Quite frankly it's not even what you wrote. It's the zero barrier access to porn.

kromem 5y ago

Ah yes, the "kids these days" line of reasoning. Some other things from the past which were argued to inevitably corrupt the younger generation from the "good old days:" * Reading silently * Ballroom Dancing * Chess As someone who leveraged playing and thinking about video games and emerging technology into a $300/hr consulting fee and being offered a "create your own role doing whatever you want" at a multi-billion dollar corporation after having been subpoenaed as an expert by the US government, advised cabinet nominees, consulted for about 10% of the Fortune 500s, and had CEOs flying in their oversees franchise management teams to hear me speak -- all before I was 30, I can acknowledge it was very corrupting indeed. I left that career not just to play video games, but because I realized there's diminishing returns on personal wealth but inversely increased value on personal time as the available supply runs out. If more kids these days figure that out earlier on, the world will be better off for it, not worse. Besides, I'm less concerned with the loss of potential in kids these days not becoming wage slaves for maximum productivity and far more regretful at the lost opportunities for our ancestors born without the right anatomy, skin color, or wealth to pursue their own potential. Even for those that did - given how much more interesting Da Vinci's notebooks were than his portraits - how much more interesting a world would we be living in were he and other geniuses to have not needed to finance their unfettered curiosity and interests with bullshit time wasting catering to the petty interests of the rich? We only have so many hours in life, and in my experience much of society spends far more time at far less value on things like "stay at your desk until 6pm" than "solve this puzzle in this dungeon." Video games are the least of the things holding back humanity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

twayt 5y ago

The fact that we have more compelling distractions than survival is because we have largely solved all the problems required for us to thrive. The genius of prehistoric times would have been to discover better ideas to survive or hunt. The genius of the previous generation was to improve computation. We are here being distracted by TikTok precisely because of that. The genius of the next generation would be something else important to the current time. No matter what the context of the time is, genius will emerge. The criteria of what genetics, skills and training you need to be a genius will definitely change to suit the time. Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Darwin are no longer going to be the geniuses of today the same way they wouldn't be the geniuses of the previous generation. TLDR; Genius is an emergent phenomenon that is rooted in the valuable contemporary problems that need to be solved.