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Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

erikhoel.substack.com

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Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#31

Post by mandmandam »

Some food for thought, for the people interested in this:

Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on-one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 textbook curricular politicized 'education'.

However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any broad genius decline.

I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of reasons:

* depleted soil

* pesticide residue

* fertiliser residue

* contaminated water

* dodgy preservatives

* corn and sugar subsidies

* poorly understood food additives

* selection for looks over nutritional quality

* ocean pollution - mercury in fish, for example

* Over-processing

There's environmental factors to consider:

* air pollution

* water pollution

* forever chemicals

* lingering lead and the like

* noise pollution

* distractions - ie; porn, gaming, porn, movies, porn, TV, tinder, phones, porn, etc.

Cultural and societal factors:

* All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves to satisfy publishers.

* Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly emphasized in many ways.

* Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of fear.

* Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism.

* Scientism

* Media priorities

All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#32

Post by zozbot234 »

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-ge... is about essentially a very similar style of intensive individualized tutoring. (This SSC review links to a new English translation iof this work.)

I'm not sure that intensive tutoring ever "went out of style" though, so much as gradually becoming infeasible because of (1) the amount of high-skill effort involved, which became more and more costly due to the expanding alternate employments of similarly skilled work; and (2) general progress meaning that even with intensive tutoring you could not reach the research frontier any more effectively than others, so making "genius"-level contributions would still be hard.

It's an interesting argument regardless, and intensive "tiger mom/dad" parenting, while generally less effective, still derives much of its general orientation from these 'aristocratic' norms.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#34

Post by PaulHoule »

ceejayoz wrote: post #4
mtkhaos wrote: post #3

This one one of those granular issues where there is no single right answer. Given the forum, the best answer would be why has our given technology been shaped to act as aristocratic tutors to us all? Further, is there enough room for any given Einstein in this dogmatic landscape?

It maybe less about dogma and more about the size of the remaining problems. A single Einstein can't go find the Higgs boson; you need a multi-national consortium willing to build a city-sized machine for it. You see the same in all sorts of fields. Inventing the telescope is neat. Inventing the JWST isn't something a single contributor is capable of.

One reason Einstein seems like such a genius was that this happened in his lifetime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

We have a much bigger physics community today but the closest thing to the above happening are these two events

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons#Discovery

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson#Dis...

with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation#Observati...

as a distant third that has played out very slowly which is attributed to a very strange theorist character

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo

There is public fascination with Steven Hawking, but Hawking's work has been confined to questions where the answers are unobservable (what's inside a black hole? what do you see in 10⁶⁴ years when stellar origin black holes start to pop?)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#35

Post by candiddevmike »

rustybolt wrote: post #25
mschuster91 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like…

> The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. So what does create real progress to the masses?

Crisis (recently lead to the general availability of mRNA treatments) and war (starlink recently showed how easy it is to reconnect a country during wartime)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#36

Post by drewcoo »

hans1729 wrote: post #5

This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care…

If we live in an age when we're all outlier Einsteins, then none of us are outlier Einsteins.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#37

Post by snarf21 »

hans1729 wrote: post #5

This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care…

Agreed, this article's premise is nonsense, while well written with some interesting history. The geniuses are making things that are now so common place that we've lost our wonder. Nanometer computer chips? That sounds like genius to me. Editing the human genome with CRISPR (et.al.)? That sounds like genius to me. It is true that some of our smartest minds are now focused on ads and exploiting complex derivatives but we also rolled out a vaccine to a world of billions in 9 months. There is plenty of genius, but the bar is higher and the easy things are done. This author seems to miss the genius required to let me watch live streamed video from the other side of the world on a watch as I "drive" 70 mph down the highway while the car keeps me in my lane if I stop paying attention.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#38

Post by beiller »

mschuster91 wrote: post #20
hans1729 wrote: post #5

This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care…

The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like…

Keep in mind some of the best and brightest minds in the past, some cutting edge medical experts, were highly paid to perform lobotomies. And that is just one example. I was reading recently about cutting edge "medicine" back in the day, that was literally just radioactive water made from radium. Killed lots of rich people because of how expensive it was as a treatment.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#39

Post by ceejayoz »

Victerius wrote: post #22
hans1729 wrote: post #5

This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care…

Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp…

> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.

That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur?

Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?

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