Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored • Hacker News Board

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#231

Post by lordnacho » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

The article is mainly about educating children.

One issue I found was that there might be some personal quality required to get tutored effectively. Can everyone be tutored and benefit from it? For the geniuses listed, there must be an army of not so brilliant minds that we didn't hear about. How much worse off are they in a normal factory school?

Also, if you go to Oxbridge, you get a tutor several times a week. I am not sure I'm that much smarter than someone who didn't have this privilege. But of course I benefit from people thinking that tutoring is magic sauce. I wonder if anyone has checked.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#232

Post by bwestergard » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #187

paganel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when it comes to philosophy I think it holds true. Up into the 1930s Bergson was regarded as one of the most important philosophers in Europe while Wittgenstein was barely mentioned outside a few, select circles, even he had already published his Tractatus . Nowadays Bergson returns blank stares when you mention his name to an Anglo audience while Wittgenstein is seen as one of the most important philosophers of…

Which is profoundly sad since Wittgenstein is only saved by his prophetic beliefs about language - despite writing like a post-modernist while somehow being considered part of the "analytic tradition"... He is fashionable nonsense.

Have you read the Tractatus? After Frege, and Russell, it's difficult to think of a philosopher who contributed more to the analytic style of exposition.

There is some irony in dismissing him as "nonsensical", because he himself suggested the Tractatus was "nonsense". The point of writing it was to demonstrate that philosophy in his time (e.g. the logical atomism of Russell) had gone astray.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#233

Post by jacobedawson » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

You could probably argue that in the soft domains of music & literature, the explosion of widely available content might actually be a cause of the "decline" - it's not unlikely your undiscovered genius looks at everything out there, thinks "I guess it's all been done, and I probably won't be noticed in amongst all this noise anyway", and takes a well-paying job instead of creating the next great work of art.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#234

Post by mhh__ » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #88

Beltiras wrote: post #19

When Einstein proposed General Relativity it could be tested by nothing more complex than a camera. If anyone comes up with a theory of physics to explain further what we observe about the world the test usually entails a multi trillion dollar machine, a team of thousands of scientists and decades of engineering to bring about a test. Usually these things require novel engineering and for environments where we have n…

> plenty of very clever people working on hard problems and coming up with clever solutions this is not what this all talk is about Einstein is an (prime) example of conceptualist - man, who introduced revolutionary concept into our understanding of the world. There are a lot of Nobel laureates who are (hard) problem solvers. But in physics looks like we truly need a conceptualist, new Einstein so to speak

Nearly all physicists are conceptualists though. Fundamental physics pretty much relies upon an aggressive pursuit of information density rather than the classification of evidence. Theoretically at least.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#235

Post by tomp » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

jacobedawson wrote: post #233

You could probably argue that in the soft domains of music & literature, the explosion of widely available content might actually be a cause of the "decline" - it's not unlikely your undiscovered genius looks at everything out there, thinks "I guess it's all been done, and I probably won't be noticed in amongst all this noise anyway", and takes a well-paying job instead of creating the next great work of art.

Literature has been widely available for a while, but there’s still great works produced (well, probably great… needs some historical distance still) disproving your hypothesis.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#236

Post by freddex » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #231

The article is mainly about educating children. One issue I found was that there might be some personal quality required to get tutored effectively. Can everyone be tutored and benefit from it? For the geniuses listed, there must be an army of not so brilliant minds that we didn't hear about. How much worse off are they in a normal factory school? Also, if you go to Oxbridge, you get a tutor several times a week. I a…

There's some research about this. [1] It seems tutoring is very effective as a teaching method, but of course, not very scalable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#237

Post by mhh__ » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #62

I think most people here are missing the point. This is not about incremental progress but about breakthroughs. Religion was breakthrough. Electricity was a breakthrough. General Relativity was a breakthrough. The Internet was another breakthrough and now we are enjoying these things. A similar breakthrough today could be: Quantum mechanics, Fusion and a fully functional decentralized Internet (not to be confused wit…

Quantum mechanics was understood arguably before general relativity was properly worked out in detail.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#238

Post by mhh__ » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #28

I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. That's why we're not seeing "Einsteins" everywhere. In fact, there's an Asimov short story (I can't recall the name) where certain members of society exist only to make connections between unrelated fields because the knowledge of humanity has become so vast. In fact, I'd say we're not far from that now, as there are more and more stories along the line…

Also as things get older they get better and better explained.

Some things, like relativity are simple mind-blowing concepts, but other very important aspects of physics can feel like no one is doing such groundbreaking work because you're actually looking at a modern interpretation of something which has been condensed over a century e.g. a lot of papers from the early 1900s are very long winded, so the utterly beautiful ways they may be now treated (Noethers theorem may be an example) are not representative of how they burst onto the scene 100 years ago.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#239

Post by coffeecat » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

jacobedawson wrote: post #233

You could probably argue that in the soft domains of music & literature, the explosion of widely available content might actually be a cause of the "decline" - it's not unlikely your undiscovered genius looks at everything out there, thinks "I guess it's all been done, and I probably won't be noticed in amongst all this noise anyway", and takes a well-paying job instead of creating the next great work of art.

This seems about right. For most endeavors nowadays - music, art, science, technology, business - the process of reviewing what's already out there is just overwhelming. Then you actually review the existing stuff, and find that five other people have already pursued your great new idea. Over time, this cycle tends to erode your enthusiasm for pursuing new ideas.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#240

Post by mhh__ » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

phonescreen_man wrote: post #223

No mention of female genius. What about Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper …and on and on

What did Lovelace actually do to put her in that category?

Hopper I agree with (also Frances Allen!), Shelley is an obvious entry, but I've never really been sold on Lovelace as a genius versus merely interesting.