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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

#121

Post by glhaynes »

hans1729 wrote: post #110
jjulius wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

>>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.

One of the most significant applications of Einstein's work was to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#122

Post by jacobr1 »

Beltalowda wrote: post #93
hans1729 wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

The geopolitical situation in the 1800s and even the first half of the 1900s was much more volatile than today. Yet, industrialization caused massive changes. In fact that was a big part of the feedbackloop for the political instability. Neverless it certainly wasn't an impediment to innovation and sometime even spurred it (via war funding). I just don't buy that peace and social stability enables progress, I'd argue the very opposite.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#123

Post by mcculley »

I am annoyed every time I read a statement of this form: "most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge"

No. Only people who have never used a university library would believe this. Most of humanity's knowledge is locked behind paywalls.

Once Sci-Hub and related efforts are done breaking down the paywalls and we have a generation growing up expecting knowledge to be available, we might see a big difference.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#124

Post by mabub24 »

alx__ wrote: post #107
humanistbot wrote: post #6

I 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…

This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are much less stable than people think.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#125

Post by hans1729 »

bairrd wrote: post #90
hans1729 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me offer a diverging perspective: >we could be doing so much better as a species ...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the met…

"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and…

>Can you back that claim up?

Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?

The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.

Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#126

Post by RC_ITR »

mwcampbell wrote: post #83
humanistbot wrote: post #6

I 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:…

> I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enoug…

Autotune is a tool like any other. Generally those who consumed media before that tool was invented will be skeptical of it because “things I like didn’t need it.” Those who begin consuming media after the tool was invented don’t have the same biases.

A 50-years ago version of that would be microphones on broadway. It used to be a point of pride to fill a theater without amplification. Now we don’t really care.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#127

Post by fullshark »

ghotli wrote: post #104

I'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 wr…

Like any platform without (human) editors in control, the top 1% of content can be great but the bottom 99% mostly terrible.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#128

Post by gilbetron »

hhjinks wrote: post #118
gilbetron wrote: post #7

I completely disagree with the premise, that geniuses are vanishing - I think we have more than ever, it just takes a lot more to make notable progress these days. However, the article still ended up being a decent read, exploring how a lot of geniuses had tutors. I think our education system is messed up in a lot of ways, and we'd have a better society if kids got more adult attention. Saying this as a parent of a m…

Agreed. It's like complaining we don't make Leif Erikssons anymore. You can't discover a new continent every day.

That's a brilliant way of putting it! I'll save that for future use :)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#129

Post by gmadsen »

itslennysfault wrote: post #113
humanistbot wrote: post #6

I 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:…

This is addressed early on in the article. Maybe one of the problems with lack of genius is that we don't actually read anymore. 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…

not only "geniuses", I'm sure the widespread reduction in reading in the general population has had significant affects across all aspects of society

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#130

Post by barbecue_sauce »

mwcampbell wrote: post #83
humanistbot wrote: post #6

I 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:…

> I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. Tangentially, though, I think there's something to the complaints about music. Why does pop music have any noticeably autotuned singers at all, when anyone who regularly goes to karaoke bars knows that there are lots of good singers everywhere? In other words, why is being a good enoug…

Because the technical proficiency of a singer, or any musician/instrumentalist for that matter, is not what makes a song interesting or memorable.
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