Idiocracy
Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
101–110 of 505 posts
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#102> most of the time life as a tutor was essentially a cushy patronage job, wherein you instilled a sense of intellectual discovery into a young child in return for a hefty salary that left most of your free time intact—surely that’s what the tutors living on the Tolstoy estate must have felt, whiling away the evening hours chasing the local peasant girls after educating the young writer in the morning.
SOLD!
WHERE DO I SIGN UP.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have tons of spare intellectual resources. I can't imagine a world where millions of people live in rich countries, who can code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops progressing. Of course the system we've built is constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not everything just gets be…
Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress. Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems…
>Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard.
I think of it differently: it already did. The old world is already dead. It will just take a couple of generations until that realization kicks in, or until the consequences of that realization are implemented in our cultures and systems. The political incentives in western democracies are not aligned with the interests of the following generations. The opposite is the case, current politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I think exactly that's what is conductive for progress.
Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction is essentially the product of people who hold on to concepts of the world that have already lost their meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost exclusively people born before 1990. The number is arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#104I've started thinking twice about clicking x.substack.com articles around here.
Why? Clickbait titles often filled with hot takes that at least in my experience don't have much signal vs noise and there's a tendency for it to just become a "this person is wrong on the internet" comment section.
Just a sign of the content mill cult of personality hot take times we live in and this one apparently got me go ahead and write the comment that's been on my mind
P.S. Not a critique of this article specifically and I'm sure there are decent substack publications. I mean I know they exist, I've read them. Just an observation
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#105This 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…
Where is my Flying Car, Where is my Space Tourism, Where is my Space Colony, Where is my Underwater Colony, Where is my Cheap Plentiful Environmentally friendly Energy Generation / Storage
it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design..
We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#106Is there be something to be said about how difficult notoriety is these days? People are so connected and the competition much greater to get noticed vs historically where publications were limited. Today it feels as though in order to become a famous genius, you would not only have to optimize for your field, but also the SEO required to get a high ranking on a google or youtube search. That in addition to the storytelling skills necessary to keep your readers and viewers engaged because there's a cat video next on the feed. Which makes me also think what's tech's responsibility in causing all this? Are we preventing people from attaining this genius state because we're sucking all their attention with social media?
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#107I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. With the benefit of hindsight, we only remember the greats (and the very worst villains) from past eras. While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books, just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics." Edit:…
Been reading Chuck Klosterman's book, But What If We're Wrong?. Which is partly that thought. The things that get remembered in the global consciousness are not always the people or things we'd expect. It's possible that we have a "genius" right now that will be remembered in 100 years. But due to all the local noise it's hard to see through that and remain objective.
Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#108This 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…
People who think there are no new great minds are looking for society to hand them socially approved "great minds." The thing about great minds is that your mind has to be at least not entirely eclipsed by them to recognize their greatness.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#109"Is there anyone who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?" Sure, Toni Morrison. Whitney Houston. Prince. Steve Jobs (slightly over a decade). I don't know, the list goes on? There are plenty of culture shifting geniuses among us. It just doesn't look the same as it did in the 19th and early 20th century.
None of those people are geniuses.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#110This 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…
I don't wholly disagree with your overall point, but I'm not entirely onboard, either. I feel like, as someone else mentioned, you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much. I also think that you're too narrowly focused on innovations within tech, while genius can occur in countless other fields and the article itself doesn't even keep it's focus on "genius" so narrow. >... all th…
>you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much
you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...].
Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated.
>This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.
Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording.
>Ah, yes! Advertising technology!
Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.