Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work.

2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.

    Ponder that! Spengler began writing Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years deceased. But Spengler could state, with the full expectation that his audience would not question him, that these men belonged in global pantheon of humanity’s greatest figures.

No mention of CRISPR-Cas9, the explosion of deep learning and "AI," the James Webb Space Telescope, detection of gravitational waves...?

My god. Are people really that myopically spellbound by computing these days?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Scott Alexander makes the not-politically-correct but plausible case for genetics having a significant component. And that the grim events of the 20th century may have significantly thinned that genetic reserve.

The first couple paragraphs are a pretty good hook:

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A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

But that's not really what is the article is about. It's about the loss of a value system, one in which education was valued in its own right, and not as a means for credentialing. Many examples of the superiority of personal tutelage over classroom education in it. The author draws parallels with a loss of quality in other domains (art, clothing, artisanship, ...).

The author is at the vanguard. There is a spiritual shift happening this century. It is the rejection of modernism, the progressive ideology that life and society can (nay, must!) be completely mediated through technology, in order for it to be efficient, equitable, predictable, bureaucratic. In other words, modernism turned a person into a widget, that can be jiggered and manipulated to be useful. It is modernism that gave us pedagogics, the science on how to teach children useful skills with the least amount of money (which is not the same as education). It is modernism that razed our cities, so we can rebuild them for cars, because cars are high technology that moves things fast, and fast is better than slow. Modernism gave us the chronically medicated, because our bodies needs to be supplemented.

The intuitive sense that modernism is a failure has existed for a long time, first real criticism were in the 70s. The difference now is we're seeing "regular" people making real changes now, it's not just the new age weirdos. Homeschooling is taking off, because it is better full stop for a child (as explained in the article). Walkable neighborhoods are the most expensive to live, clearly showing a preference. Fine arts and architecture are seeing a return to more classical ideals.

These are individual families now, but this movement is in opposition to the current bureaucratic interests. It is also inherently elitist, since it's families with means making these choices. Curious how this will go, but it is a positive evolution, because it puts the human individual central again.