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That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know societ

That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A. Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only above average things. My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that because I’m certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so impressive and I’m glad he got his lucky break. People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms. Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break that boosted them.

nordsieck 2y ago
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
- energy123 2y ago
  The exposure to subjects isn't the problem, this is the problem: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
- Onavo 2y ago
  But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the eccentric geniuses?
  - coliveira 2y ago
    Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
    - clipsy 2y ago
      > I only see a little bit higher than average Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
  - theGnuMe 2y ago
    I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary. For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    The eccentric geniuses at these elite schools will end up doing stupid shit for a bank.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- brutal_true_101 2y ago
  Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
  - Arainach 2y ago
    College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
    - kiba 2y ago
      I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
    - esafak 2y ago
      Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?
      - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
        High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.
      - TimTheTinker 2y ago
        That is what high school is, for families where parents want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to teach.
- seiferteric 2y ago
  Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.
  - irjustin 2y ago
    > Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good. > Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
    - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
      > but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan. I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
- babyent 2y ago
  I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way. As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry. Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things. My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business. I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd. Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right? Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
  - jyunwai 2y ago
    Another student at a martial arts gym unexpectedly gave me some advice that is somewhat common, but had an impact because the words came at the right time and from the right person: he kindly told me to never judge myself based on the person that I might have been, and to instead compare myself now to how I was a month ago. I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've been doing. Software development can be complicated and frustrating, especially when things don't work as you expect them to (but then, you learn and become better). Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal requirements, accounting, and publicity). Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country where he began his undergraduate degree at a great university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent much of her early twenties managing physical disability, but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work at. You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas; several people I personally know would be very proud to one day experience just a small part of your successes so far.
- kiba 2y ago
  I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and engineering type and almost nothing else. I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
- oh_my_goodness 2y ago
  It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.
- trgn 2y ago
  > College is the place to specialize in a subject. In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    So what is high school for? Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
    - trgn 2y ago
      High school is preparing to be able to do a college education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the time. I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community colleges tend to be more like trade schools
      - bonzini 2y ago
        In Europe high school is when you get a generic education, and in college you choose your topic. So if you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on. I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide an English certification as a foreign language, but that was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one of economics and three of physics (which you could say is related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%. Having to study more history or biology would have been a huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and physics in high school.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it. Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for. I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Yeah that's a common result of forced learning by lets be polite mediocre folks. Utter hate of the whole topic for easily 2 decades too. Then finding slowly my own personal way back to them, despite school. If anything, current (and this is valid globally) school system is not designed at excellence at its core, its about raising an army of obedient but not too stupid citizens. And its not missed expectation, just look at what type of work they expect to fill in. Don't expect massive changes unless society changes itself. Some narrow excellence is not what our society at large values, those few that made it through made it despite their environment.
- db48x 2y ago
  Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
  - angled 2y ago
    One such school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
    - db48x 2y ago
      > In 1992, there was a proposal to fully integrate the AME school with the ACT Government school system. However the idea floundered after the ACT Teachers Union amongst other things, knocked the idea on the head, due to compatibility issues. It felt the idea of having a school principal having selection over teaching staff was outside the scope of the Unions control. It came out fighting against the proposal. Now there’s a depressing thing to read. Teacher’s unions are the worst.
  - kyawzazaw 2y ago
    A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of specialization to produce people like messi
- eviks 2y ago
  "Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
- paulpauper 2y ago
  It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
- echelon 2y ago
  > It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. While some exposure is probably better on average than none, in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on developing an interest. The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might otherwise come to love.
- TeeMassive 2y ago
  Is it "good", certainly, but I don't think most of the stuff is worth it in the technological world. Let kids follow their interests, keep the general stuff to a minimum and you will have a lot more of happy kids with who excel more.
- flockonus 2y ago
  To overemphasize in a complex topic as good | bad is overly simplistic and doesn't help at all. Hardly anything is complete good or completely bad, it's meaningless to make a black or white point.
- bluecalm 2y ago
  The problem is that there is too much of this general exposure and specialization happens way too late once the brain is not as good at learning anymore. People peak in competitive fields when they are in early 20s or even before that. In our education system we are not even allowed to do the job before we are like 25 or later. There is only so much you can learn sitting in a chair listening to a professor. It's a completely backwards system that limits potential of about anyone with average+ intelligence.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  It's good that schools expose children to many subjects. It's not good at all that school reward being OK in every subject more than being really good in a handful of them. The school system is a mediocrity factory.
- is_true 2y ago
  A subject "clicking" is strongly dependent on the teacher.
- DragonStrength 2y ago
  The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking kids out eventually who failed one subject but were succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.
- thr0waway001 2y ago
  Agreed. Given that most people are not exceptional at anything it makes more sense to give them a well rounded education by exposing them to a lot of subjects to see what takes. And all the exceptional people, well, they're just gonna have to use their gifts to push through the monotony of the things they don't like while still pursing their passion. Unless they are born wealthy or find a benefactor so they can go to private school or a gifted person school, that caters to their specific needs, it's the best we can do to serve everyone.
m463 2y ago
your thought reminded me of the radio program about Jean Shepherd getting his Class A radio license. https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Class-A-Amateur-Radio-License.htm https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Cla... on youtube as well
shitpostbot 2y ago
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p1necone 2y ago
I'm pretty sure I only have a successful career because I deeply enjoy programming and have a slightly neurotic obsession with code quality and ergonomics. I can't fathom giving enough of a shit about anything I don't enjoy for long enough to be successful otherwise.
barrettondricka 2y ago
The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist, chances are they won't know a few. Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing. You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one." Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it. Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.
- kiba 2y ago
  Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency. Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    > and do so with relative competency I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.
    - kiba 2y ago
      92% of adults know how to read to varying level.[1] The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
But if you notice the people who are in administrative positions are the people who are “well rounded” not those who are good at one thing. Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how to promote and speak and they have the most influence. I guess what I’m trying to say is the system is mostly selecting for what it wants.
rowanG077 2y ago
I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that smart person who is working a menial job.
- asciimov 2y ago
  In my experience it’s not talent but opportunity that is in short supply. One of the smartest people I know is an electrician, simply because he grew up in a rural area and couldn’t afford to leave for college.
vbezhenar 2y ago
Education is optimized for average citizen who must work through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably more like survive in school rather than being supported.
alnwlsn 2y ago
These people are still out there. When I was in high school we had the normal people, then people who took advanced placement stuff, then the "super nerds" who were at the top of all the advanced placement stuff with perfect grades, and then there was this one guy who was most of the way through all the advanced math classes at the nearby university. Same guy was in one of my English classes, and was failing. More or less he couldn't be bothered. Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.
readenough 2y ago
Everyone here seems to have missed the significance of L.J. Rogers in this story.
graycat 2y ago
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? The school I went to grades 1--12 tried to be especially good so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT came recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT. In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but powerful by in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn't like. Got sent to summer math/physics enrichment programs. So, for that example, for > But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject get a by in other subjects. Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her because he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible presentation of common reality? That by pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that I take their computer science course. My background in computing was already nicely above that course, and I'd already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with material they didn't know. The best case of by: Took a reading course; decided to address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all over the department, some profs angry that I had done well, others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general purpose by, a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and an unspoken, implicit, easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.
loveparade 2y ago
If you are optimizing for finding geniuses like R, you may be right. Many probably fall through the cracks of the educational system. But I don't think this is what we are or should be optimizing for. The vast majority of people would end up unemployable if they weren't "forced" to study things they don't enjoy because some skills are just more employable than others. You're lucky if you enjoy engineering/science, but not so lucky if you only care about art literature.
slibhb 2y ago
You're assuming it's luck. But maybe we're actually good at identifying boundary-pushing geniuses? There are huge, huge incentives for being good at that.
nurettin 2y ago
> I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A. Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle with advanced concepts all their lives.
- acka 2y ago
  It seems you are assuming that all child prodigies are polymaths (no pun intended). There are children with exceptional mental abilities in a limited range of topics or even a single topic, such as math, music or drawing, They may struggle to various degrees with subjects or life skills that don't correspond closely with their specific topics of interest and ability.
swayvil 2y ago
you can't serve two masters. How would you characterize R's master and the "normie" master?
ji_zai 2y ago
Agreed. It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
- kiba 2y ago
  We shouldn't need crazy people to push the boundary. Rather, the crazier you are, the more likely you will flame out. People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
geodel 2y ago
> People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms. Well norms were in place when R did his work. Even the most strict systems have made concessions for extraordinary people. It is just that mostly average people go around claiming they'd be genius, had system not smothered their creativity. > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework.. I think from not many to hardly any as I can't believe if kids who are really genius can just go on for more than a decade of primary schooling without ever finding outlet for their creativity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
yumraj 2y ago
Now think about the college admission process in the US, where kids are expected to take arbitrary number of AP courses and get 5 in all of them, and write world class essays about passion and solving world hunger while excelling at several extra curricular activities and showing leadership and so on and on…..
deleted 2y ago
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crystal_revenge 2y ago
You're applying the logic of "that someone" is "Ramanujan", but the system isn't designed around students at the extremes. Generally I think: "Unless you're Ramanujan, then you should probably have some breadth to your knowledge rather than pure depth" is not a terrible policy.
anonzzzies 2y ago
I have always been only interested in the 'exact' sciences since I was a little kid; I did not do other things even if I had to. I just didn't turn up; I was doing 'more important stuff'. I graduated with a special letter from the queen; all aces for exact sciences and the rest massive fail. It turned out that this made me a good programmer and employer, so I made a shitload of money (in eu terms; pocket change compared to what usa peers did). But it was a big mistake; now I really want to learn languages and history, but I never had the basics as a kid so I struggle far more than my peers. My ability to memorize things is not very good as I never needed to in school; formulas and code is not really memorizing as such I found. It is a massive regret. There are no do overs, but I guess even if I could time travel, I would've not be able to explain this to myself enough for me to listen.
- returnInfinity 2y ago
  What we need to do is, make the subjects interesting to learn with tech. It may now be possible with Videos, Games and VR.
  - NamTaf 2y ago
    Tech is not necessary. You just have to make the subjects interesting to learn. Good teachers are way more value than they are valued, and will make the classes interesting to learn.
  - PlattypusRex 2y ago
    No, the subjects are already interesting. What we need is to pay teachers a good, above-average wage, and to continuously invest in their professional development throughout their careers. Only a good, well-trained teacher can make a subject interesting and engaging.
js8 2y ago
Well, my solution would be this: Instead of giving kids grades with a ceiling, each subject would have (unlimited number of) levels of proficiency, and to attain a level, kids would have to pass a test (demonstrate certain skill). The choice of subjects and levels to attain would be up to each kid, but they would have to choose to do something (working at getting next level of something would be mandatory). (Although perhaps they should be encouraged to explore different subjects and attain some minimum of levels.) Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. So kids of slightly different levels would train together, and the higher level kids would be obligated to help kids on lower level to learn, while lower level kids were taught to be respectful of higher level kids.
- ddfs123 2y ago
  >Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. I would be cautious with this, they may have the same academic ability but a large gap in social skills.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Why is that worse than having large gaps in academic ability and social skills?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
philwelch 2y ago
Ramanujan was, what, a 1 in 100,000,000 level genius? The gap between Ramanujan and the average class valedictorian is much wider than the gap between the class valedictorian and the average student. I think if we optimize schooling for people like him, we are probably not going to do as well for the other 99,999,999 students. We probably aren’t going to get it quite right for that 1, either. Extreme outlier geniuses are extreme outliers and there’s no easily generalizable pattern around them. The ideal education for a young Ramanujan is probably different from the ideal education for a young Von Neumann. Of course in an ideal world we would give an extremely individualized education to every child, but that’s much easier said than done. Failing that maybe we could identify and then invest in the extreme geniuses, but that’s what we already try to do.
trueismywork 2y ago
I was this person, also from India. I am interested in most topics under the sun, but was never interested in being an excellent student, apart from math where I was ranked in top 30 in my national olympiads. I got mediocre marks in high school but thankfully did well in JEE. Now I have a decent PhD in math with an extremely mediocre school record.
keepamovin 2y ago
Unfortunately, the purpose of the education system at this stage of human civilization development is not the realization of individual potential or the creation of geniuses. Geniuses, however cool they may be, are not necessarily the most effective increase in unit production efficiency per person that you can create. The point of the education system is essentially to create workers that make the economy productive. I don’t think you can say, even all these years later, that Ramanujan, that mathematician, made the economy more productive, but he certainly increased the high watermark of human civilization and created an inspiring story for individual achievement, creative realization, and artistic and mathematical expression. There’s something sublime and transcendental—no pun intended—in the kind of truths that he was able to tease out and the unique, idiosyncratic way that he expressed them. Sort of like a Basquiat of mathematics, I suppose. Or probably better than that. That aside, I think it’s unfortunate that he died of cholera or something, isn’t it? I mean, he apparently didn’t think it was unfortunate that he was going to die. And certainly, the formal education system didn’t necessarily fail him, in that a professor at a university recognized his genius and sponsored him to the UK. But I think, in a sense that you identify, there is this general failure of the education systems in the human civilizations on this planet to foster perhaps the best thing that they could be fostering. They’re more like a manufacturing assembly line to produce cogs as part of the economic machine. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. I think it’s good that people can have a role to play in the larger economy and that there are pathways to bring people to the level of capability where they can contribute like that. But the lack of pathways that these systems provide—those that could contribute to the creation of the full realization and expression of individual potential—I think is sad. And I think that’s what you’re kind of identifying.
- nebben64 2y ago
  a very clear analysis, that's also very well written
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Thank you, kindly! I dictated it to ChatGPT which paragraphed but kept verbatim. I was on a roll! Hehehe :)
herodoturtle 2y ago
> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. You seem like someone who thinks things through, so I suspect you’ll know what I’m about to say, but given the sentiment of your comment, I think it’s worth explicitly sharing this: The fact that your class valedictorian went on to be a doctor is great. Not everyone needs to push the boundaries. Your classmate may end up saving/helping countless lives.
- silvestrov 2y ago
  He isn't saying that being a doctor isn't great. He is saying that the people who add most value to science isn't always the ones who are at the top of the hierarchy in the school system. Performing well in school is like a F1 racing car: very fast, but can only go on paths very well trodden already, i.e. paved road.
  - herodoturtle 2y ago
    Please excuse my misinterpreting OP’s comment, and thank you for clarifying.
kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
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ken47 2y ago
You’re absolutely right. The education system was meant to be a factory of production line workers, at the cost of missing out on geniuses who don’t care about other subjects. This system is meant for a worker that no longer exists. If someone wants to specialize at the age of 13 and has shown reasonable aptitude in that subject, then let them do it. Sure, give them a well rounded education, but don’t weight those grades anywhere close to equally.
de_elusive 2y ago
School is for training good test-takers, not finding geniuses.
dspillett 2y ago
> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the “average genius”, in comparison to those rare few who truly push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are at having a concept of the difference between thousands, millions, and billions. There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore & self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the truly exceptional geniuses¹ amongst them. ---- [1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are true geniuses!
moomin 2y ago
Honestly I suspect a lot of potentially able people get left by the wayside in our lowest cost educational system. It's particularly tough on neurodiverse people, which one has to suspect included Ramanujan.
slightwinder 2y ago
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? That doesn't matter. A student is unable to evaluate the value of unknown subjects and the synergy between subjects. People are often unmotivated to do important things, because we are just lazy s**. > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A. And how many lunatics making wrong decisions did we prevented by forcing them to learn necessary things? > Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics They are engraved in your mind. Even when you don't remember every little detail, they still helped you in forming your understanding of the world.
throw4847285 2y ago
There is an Isaiah Berlin essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it he divides artists/philosophers into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. It is inspired by a fragment of ancient Greek poetry which reads, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." In other words, some great thinkers looked at the world through the lens of one big idea, and others can't be easily reduced. Two major caveats. The first is that Berlin never wanted the essay to be taken all that seriously. To him, it was an intellectually parlor game. But if TvTropes is any indication, people are addicted to classifying things into simplistic categories, so the fox and hedgehog game took off. Second, the rest of the essay actually challenges the binary by focusing on Leo Tolstoy, an unimaginably creative thinker and writer who, according to Berlin, was a fox by nature but wanted to be a hedgehog. Why did I share all of that? Well, without taking the categories too seriously I do think some people are more foxy by nature and others are more hedgehog-esque. I've always thought of myself as a fox (which to be honest, might limit me), and I had no interest in focusing on a single subject in school. At worst, I'm a dilettante who can have a surface level conversation about any intellectual topic at a party. At best, I can muster up a real enthusiasm about trying something entirely new. I say all this not just because I'm running on 4 hours of sleep, but also because I think foxes get a bad rap. Not everybody should strive to be Ramanujan, because it isn't in everybody's temperament.
gaoshan 2y ago
"...they weren't interesting to him". That’s how I felt about mathematics. History, literature and language were the areas I was interested in, for example. It seems to me that an individual’s strengths aren’t necessarily indicative of an all-encompassing genius. Rather, they are often more focused, tied to specific subjects or fields in which that person naturally excels. That's not to say an individual can't have a wide range of strengths.
amunozo 2y ago
Exposing students to other subjects is what make them discover what they like. I think the optimal balance would be studying a wide number of subjects, but being able to select for an even larger set.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> every extraordinary person [was] 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break Being a genius is a phenomenon of the individual, but being able to pursue one's talent is a social aspect of the phenomenon of civilisation.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Meanwhile, I'd be working a backhoe in the middle of nowhere Louisiana if someone hadn't put books in my hands and forced me to read them under penalty of failure. Standards aren't standards because they're fun. They're standards because you need them to have fully functioning, working societies. The US political system is currently in a state of utter dysfunction because people have decided that facts "just aren't interesting."
redbell 2y ago
> People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms. I have a family member who scored perfectly in math on the final exam of middle school but failed other subjects so badly that he couldn't advance to high school. What frustrated us even more was that the next year, he achieved a perfect score in math again but still failed overall, leaving him no choice but to drop out of school. This story has stuck with me for years, highlighting how our education system focuses solely on maintaining an overall average score above a certain threshold without considering how individual subjects are mastered. I can’t help but think that if he had been allowed to pursue mathematics, he might have accomplished something great. It’s really disheartening.
hilux 2y ago
What better system do you propose to identify and nurture the one-in-a-million genius (the productive genius, not the crazy genius) while also serving tens of thousands of smart strivers, as well as the vast majority of the rest? I don't think we can or should design a system optimized for that one-in-a-million genius. It would be worse for everyone else, and ultimately for society.
skyde 2y ago
Thanks a lot for writing that. I agree 100% with you. But I always wondered how polymath like Leonard davinci and Isaac newton that are excellent in many area are possible.

nordsieck 2y ago

IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.

energy123 2y ago
The exposure to subjects isn't the problem, this is the problem: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Onavo 2y ago
But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the eccentric geniuses?
- coliveira 2y ago
  Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
  - clipsy 2y ago
    > I only see a little bit higher than average Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary. For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  The eccentric geniuses at these elite schools will end up doing stupid shit for a bank.
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brutal_true_101 2y ago
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
- Arainach 2y ago
  College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
  - kiba 2y ago
    I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
  - esafak 2y ago
    Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?
    - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
      High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.
    - TimTheTinker 2y ago
      That is what high school is, for families where parents want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to teach.
seiferteric 2y ago
Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.
- irjustin 2y ago
  > Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good. > Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
  - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
    > but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan. I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
babyent 2y ago
I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way. As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry. Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things. My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business. I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd. Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right? Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
- jyunwai 2y ago
  Another student at a martial arts gym unexpectedly gave me some advice that is somewhat common, but had an impact because the words came at the right time and from the right person: he kindly told me to never judge myself based on the person that I might have been, and to instead compare myself now to how I was a month ago. I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've been doing. Software development can be complicated and frustrating, especially when things don't work as you expect them to (but then, you learn and become better). Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal requirements, accounting, and publicity). Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country where he began his undergraduate degree at a great university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent much of her early twenties managing physical disability, but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work at. You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas; several people I personally know would be very proud to one day experience just a small part of your successes so far.
kiba 2y ago
I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and engineering type and almost nothing else. I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
oh_my_goodness 2y ago
It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.
trgn 2y ago
> College is the place to specialize in a subject. In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
- bonzini 2y ago
  So what is high school for? Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
  - trgn 2y ago
    High school is preparing to be able to do a college education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the time. I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community colleges tend to be more like trade schools
    - bonzini 2y ago
      In Europe high school is when you get a generic education, and in college you choose your topic. So if you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on. I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide an English certification as a foreign language, but that was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one of economics and three of physics (which you could say is related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%. Having to study more history or biology would have been a huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and physics in high school.
llm_trw 2y ago
To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it. Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for. I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
- jajko 2y ago
  Yeah that's a common result of forced learning by lets be polite mediocre folks. Utter hate of the whole topic for easily 2 decades too. Then finding slowly my own personal way back to them, despite school. If anything, current (and this is valid globally) school system is not designed at excellence at its core, its about raising an army of obedient but not too stupid citizens. And its not missed expectation, just look at what type of work they expect to fill in. Don't expect massive changes unless society changes itself. Some narrow excellence is not what our society at large values, those few that made it through made it despite their environment.
db48x 2y ago
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
- angled 2y ago
  One such school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
  - db48x 2y ago
    > In 1992, there was a proposal to fully integrate the AME school with the ACT Government school system. However the idea floundered after the ACT Teachers Union amongst other things, knocked the idea on the head, due to compatibility issues. It felt the idea of having a school principal having selection over teaching staff was outside the scope of the Unions control. It came out fighting against the proposal. Now there’s a depressing thing to read. Teacher’s unions are the worst.
- kyawzazaw 2y ago
  A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of specialization to produce people like messi
eviks 2y ago
"Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
paulpauper 2y ago
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
echelon 2y ago
> It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. While some exposure is probably better on average than none, in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on developing an interest. The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might otherwise come to love.
TeeMassive 2y ago
Is it "good", certainly, but I don't think most of the stuff is worth it in the technological world. Let kids follow their interests, keep the general stuff to a minimum and you will have a lot more of happy kids with who excel more.
flockonus 2y ago
To overemphasize in a complex topic as good | bad is overly simplistic and doesn't help at all. Hardly anything is complete good or completely bad, it's meaningless to make a black or white point.
bluecalm 2y ago
The problem is that there is too much of this general exposure and specialization happens way too late once the brain is not as good at learning anymore. People peak in competitive fields when they are in early 20s or even before that. In our education system we are not even allowed to do the job before we are like 25 or later. There is only so much you can learn sitting in a chair listening to a professor. It's a completely backwards system that limits potential of about anyone with average+ intelligence.
littlestymaar 2y ago
It's good that schools expose children to many subjects. It's not good at all that school reward being OK in every subject more than being really good in a handful of them. The school system is a mediocrity factory.
is_true 2y ago
A subject "clicking" is strongly dependent on the teacher.
DragonStrength 2y ago
The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking kids out eventually who failed one subject but were succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.
thr0waway001 2y ago
Agreed. Given that most people are not exceptional at anything it makes more sense to give them a well rounded education by exposing them to a lot of subjects to see what takes. And all the exceptional people, well, they're just gonna have to use their gifts to push through the monotony of the things they don't like while still pursing their passion. Unless they are born wealthy or find a benefactor so they can go to private school or a gifted person school, that caters to their specific needs, it's the best we can do to serve everyone.

m463 2y ago

your thought reminded me of the radio program about Jean Shepherd getting his Class A radio license. https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Class-A-Amateur-Radio-License.htm https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Cla... on youtube as well

shitpostbot 2y ago

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p1necone 2y ago

I'm pretty sure I only have a successful career because I deeply enjoy programming and have a slightly neurotic obsession with code quality and ergonomics. I can't fathom giving enough of a shit about anything I don't enjoy for long enough to be successful otherwise.

barrettondricka 2y ago

The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist, chances are they won't know a few. Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing. You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one." Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it. Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.

kiba 2y ago
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency. Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
- coliveira 2y ago
  > and do so with relative competency I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.
  - kiba 2y ago
    92% of adults know how to read to varying level.[1] The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

But if you notice the people who are in administrative positions are the people who are “well rounded” not those who are good at one thing. Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how to promote and speak and they have the most influence. I guess what I’m trying to say is the system is mostly selecting for what it wants.

rowanG077 2y ago

I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that smart person who is working a menial job.

asciimov 2y ago
In my experience it’s not talent but opportunity that is in short supply. One of the smartest people I know is an electrician, simply because he grew up in a rural area and couldn’t afford to leave for college.

vbezhenar 2y ago

Education is optimized for average citizen who must work through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably more like survive in school rather than being supported.

alnwlsn 2y ago

These people are still out there. When I was in high school we had the normal people, then people who took advanced placement stuff, then the "super nerds" who were at the top of all the advanced placement stuff with perfect grades, and then there was this one guy who was most of the way through all the advanced math classes at the nearby university. Same guy was in one of my English classes, and was failing. More or less he couldn't be bothered. Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.

readenough 2y ago

Everyone here seems to have missed the significance of L.J. Rogers in this story.

graycat 2y ago

> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? The school I went to grades 1--12 tried to be especially good so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT came recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT. In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but powerful by in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn't like. Got sent to summer math/physics enrichment programs. So, for that example, for > But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject get a by in other subjects. Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her because he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible presentation of common reality? That by pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that I take their computer science course. My background in computing was already nicely above that course, and I'd already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with material they didn't know. The best case of by: Took a reading course; decided to address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all over the department, some profs angry that I had done well, others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general purpose by, a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and an unspoken, implicit, easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.

loveparade 2y ago

If you are optimizing for finding geniuses like R, you may be right. Many probably fall through the cracks of the educational system. But I don't think this is what we are or should be optimizing for. The vast majority of people would end up unemployable if they weren't "forced" to study things they don't enjoy because some skills are just more employable than others. You're lucky if you enjoy engineering/science, but not so lucky if you only care about art literature.

slibhb 2y ago

You're assuming it's luck. But maybe we're actually good at identifying boundary-pushing geniuses? There are huge, huge incentives for being good at that.

nurettin 2y ago

> I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A. Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle with advanced concepts all their lives.

acka 2y ago
It seems you are assuming that all child prodigies are polymaths (no pun intended). There are children with exceptional mental abilities in a limited range of topics or even a single topic, such as math, music or drawing, They may struggle to various degrees with subjects or life skills that don't correspond closely with their specific topics of interest and ability.

swayvil 2y ago

you can't serve two masters. How would you characterize R's master and the "normie" master?

ji_zai 2y ago

Agreed. It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.

kiba 2y ago
We shouldn't need crazy people to push the boundary. Rather, the crazier you are, the more likely you will flame out. People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.

geodel 2y ago

> People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms. Well norms were in place when R did his work. Even the most strict systems have made concessions for extraordinary people. It is just that mostly average people go around claiming they'd be genius, had system not smothered their creativity. > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework.. I think from not many to hardly any as I can't believe if kids who are really genius can just go on for more than a decade of primary schooling without ever finding outlet for their creativity.

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yumraj 2y ago

Now think about the college admission process in the US, where kids are expected to take arbitrary number of AP courses and get 5 in all of them, and write world class essays about passion and solving world hunger while excelling at several extra curricular activities and showing leadership and so on and on…..

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crystal_revenge 2y ago

You're applying the logic of "that someone" is "Ramanujan", but the system isn't designed around students at the extremes. Generally I think: "Unless you're Ramanujan, then you should probably have some breadth to your knowledge rather than pure depth" is not a terrible policy.

anonzzzies 2y ago

I have always been only interested in the 'exact' sciences since I was a little kid; I did not do other things even if I had to. I just didn't turn up; I was doing 'more important stuff'. I graduated with a special letter from the queen; all aces for exact sciences and the rest massive fail. It turned out that this made me a good programmer and employer, so I made a shitload of money (in eu terms; pocket change compared to what usa peers did). But it was a big mistake; now I really want to learn languages and history, but I never had the basics as a kid so I struggle far more than my peers. My ability to memorize things is not very good as I never needed to in school; formulas and code is not really memorizing as such I found. It is a massive regret. There are no do overs, but I guess even if I could time travel, I would've not be able to explain this to myself enough for me to listen.

returnInfinity 2y ago
What we need to do is, make the subjects interesting to learn with tech. It may now be possible with Videos, Games and VR.
- NamTaf 2y ago
  Tech is not necessary. You just have to make the subjects interesting to learn. Good teachers are way more value than they are valued, and will make the classes interesting to learn.
- PlattypusRex 2y ago
  No, the subjects are already interesting. What we need is to pay teachers a good, above-average wage, and to continuously invest in their professional development throughout their careers. Only a good, well-trained teacher can make a subject interesting and engaging.

js8 2y ago

Well, my solution would be this: Instead of giving kids grades with a ceiling, each subject would have (unlimited number of) levels of proficiency, and to attain a level, kids would have to pass a test (demonstrate certain skill). The choice of subjects and levels to attain would be up to each kid, but they would have to choose to do something (working at getting next level of something would be mandatory). (Although perhaps they should be encouraged to explore different subjects and attain some minimum of levels.) Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. So kids of slightly different levels would train together, and the higher level kids would be obligated to help kids on lower level to learn, while lower level kids were taught to be respectful of higher level kids.

ddfs123 2y ago
>Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. I would be cautious with this, they may have the same academic ability but a large gap in social skills.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Why is that worse than having large gaps in academic ability and social skills?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

philwelch 2y ago

Ramanujan was, what, a 1 in 100,000,000 level genius? The gap between Ramanujan and the average class valedictorian is much wider than the gap between the class valedictorian and the average student. I think if we optimize schooling for people like him, we are probably not going to do as well for the other 99,999,999 students. We probably aren’t going to get it quite right for that 1, either. Extreme outlier geniuses are extreme outliers and there’s no easily generalizable pattern around them. The ideal education for a young Ramanujan is probably different from the ideal education for a young Von Neumann. Of course in an ideal world we would give an extremely individualized education to every child, but that’s much easier said than done. Failing that maybe we could identify and then invest in the extreme geniuses, but that’s what we already try to do.

trueismywork 2y ago

I was this person, also from India. I am interested in most topics under the sun, but was never interested in being an excellent student, apart from math where I was ranked in top 30 in my national olympiads. I got mediocre marks in high school but thankfully did well in JEE. Now I have a decent PhD in math with an extremely mediocre school record.

keepamovin 2y ago

Unfortunately, the purpose of the education system at this stage of human civilization development is not the realization of individual potential or the creation of geniuses. Geniuses, however cool they may be, are not necessarily the most effective increase in unit production efficiency per person that you can create. The point of the education system is essentially to create workers that make the economy productive. I don’t think you can say, even all these years later, that Ramanujan, that mathematician, made the economy more productive, but he certainly increased the high watermark of human civilization and created an inspiring story for individual achievement, creative realization, and artistic and mathematical expression. There’s something sublime and transcendental—no pun intended—in the kind of truths that he was able to tease out and the unique, idiosyncratic way that he expressed them. Sort of like a Basquiat of mathematics, I suppose. Or probably better than that. That aside, I think it’s unfortunate that he died of cholera or something, isn’t it? I mean, he apparently didn’t think it was unfortunate that he was going to die. And certainly, the formal education system didn’t necessarily fail him, in that a professor at a university recognized his genius and sponsored him to the UK. But I think, in a sense that you identify, there is this general failure of the education systems in the human civilizations on this planet to foster perhaps the best thing that they could be fostering. They’re more like a manufacturing assembly line to produce cogs as part of the economic machine. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. I think it’s good that people can have a role to play in the larger economy and that there are pathways to bring people to the level of capability where they can contribute like that. But the lack of pathways that these systems provide—those that could contribute to the creation of the full realization and expression of individual potential—I think is sad. And I think that’s what you’re kind of identifying.

nebben64 2y ago
a very clear analysis, that's also very well written
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Thank you, kindly! I dictated it to ChatGPT which paragraphed but kept verbatim. I was on a roll! Hehehe :)

herodoturtle 2y ago

> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. You seem like someone who thinks things through, so I suspect you’ll know what I’m about to say, but given the sentiment of your comment, I think it’s worth explicitly sharing this: The fact that your class valedictorian went on to be a doctor is great. Not everyone needs to push the boundaries. Your classmate may end up saving/helping countless lives.

silvestrov 2y ago
He isn't saying that being a doctor isn't great. He is saying that the people who add most value to science isn't always the ones who are at the top of the hierarchy in the school system. Performing well in school is like a F1 racing car: very fast, but can only go on paths very well trodden already, i.e. paved road.
- herodoturtle 2y ago
  Please excuse my misinterpreting OP’s comment, and thank you for clarifying.

kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago

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ken47 2y ago

You’re absolutely right. The education system was meant to be a factory of production line workers, at the cost of missing out on geniuses who don’t care about other subjects. This system is meant for a worker that no longer exists. If someone wants to specialize at the age of 13 and has shown reasonable aptitude in that subject, then let them do it. Sure, give them a well rounded education, but don’t weight those grades anywhere close to equally.

de_elusive 2y ago

School is for training good test-takers, not finding geniuses.

dspillett 2y ago

> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the “average genius”, in comparison to those rare few who truly push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are at having a concept of the difference between thousands, millions, and billions. There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore & self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the truly exceptional geniuses¹ amongst them. ---- [1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are true geniuses!

moomin 2y ago

Honestly I suspect a lot of potentially able people get left by the wayside in our lowest cost educational system. It's particularly tough on neurodiverse people, which one has to suspect included Ramanujan.

slightwinder 2y ago

> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? That doesn't matter. A student is unable to evaluate the value of unknown subjects and the synergy between subjects. People are often unmotivated to do important things, because we are just lazy s**. > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A. And how many lunatics making wrong decisions did we prevented by forcing them to learn necessary things? > Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics They are engraved in your mind. Even when you don't remember every little detail, they still helped you in forming your understanding of the world.

throw4847285 2y ago

There is an Isaiah Berlin essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it he divides artists/philosophers into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. It is inspired by a fragment of ancient Greek poetry which reads, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." In other words, some great thinkers looked at the world through the lens of one big idea, and others can't be easily reduced. Two major caveats. The first is that Berlin never wanted the essay to be taken all that seriously. To him, it was an intellectually parlor game. But if TvTropes is any indication, people are addicted to classifying things into simplistic categories, so the fox and hedgehog game took off. Second, the rest of the essay actually challenges the binary by focusing on Leo Tolstoy, an unimaginably creative thinker and writer who, according to Berlin, was a fox by nature but wanted to be a hedgehog. Why did I share all of that? Well, without taking the categories too seriously I do think some people are more foxy by nature and others are more hedgehog-esque. I've always thought of myself as a fox (which to be honest, might limit me), and I had no interest in focusing on a single subject in school. At worst, I'm a dilettante who can have a surface level conversation about any intellectual topic at a party. At best, I can muster up a real enthusiasm about trying something entirely new. I say all this not just because I'm running on 4 hours of sleep, but also because I think foxes get a bad rap. Not everybody should strive to be Ramanujan, because it isn't in everybody's temperament.

gaoshan 2y ago

"...they weren't interesting to him". That’s how I felt about mathematics. History, literature and language were the areas I was interested in, for example. It seems to me that an individual’s strengths aren’t necessarily indicative of an all-encompassing genius. Rather, they are often more focused, tied to specific subjects or fields in which that person naturally excels. That's not to say an individual can't have a wide range of strengths.

amunozo 2y ago

Exposing students to other subjects is what make them discover what they like. I think the optimal balance would be studying a wide number of subjects, but being able to select for an even larger set.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

> every extraordinary person [was] 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break Being a genius is a phenomenon of the individual, but being able to pursue one's talent is a social aspect of the phenomenon of civilisation.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Meanwhile, I'd be working a backhoe in the middle of nowhere Louisiana if someone hadn't put books in my hands and forced me to read them under penalty of failure. Standards aren't standards because they're fun. They're standards because you need them to have fully functioning, working societies. The US political system is currently in a state of utter dysfunction because people have decided that facts "just aren't interesting."

redbell 2y ago

> People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms. I have a family member who scored perfectly in math on the final exam of middle school but failed other subjects so badly that he couldn't advance to high school. What frustrated us even more was that the next year, he achieved a perfect score in math again but still failed overall, leaving him no choice but to drop out of school. This story has stuck with me for years, highlighting how our education system focuses solely on maintaining an overall average score above a certain threshold without considering how individual subjects are mastered. I can’t help but think that if he had been allowed to pursue mathematics, he might have accomplished something great. It’s really disheartening.

hilux 2y ago

What better system do you propose to identify and nurture the one-in-a-million genius (the productive genius, not the crazy genius) while also serving tens of thousands of smart strivers, as well as the vast majority of the rest? I don't think we can or should design a system optimized for that one-in-a-million genius. It would be worse for everyone else, and ultimately for society.

skyde 2y ago

Thanks a lot for writing that. I agree 100% with you. But I always wondered how polymath like Leonard davinci and Isaac newton that are excellent in many area are possible.