251–260 of 505 posts
Meaning we have people who are highly intelligent now but they lack the resources to create their vision.
While we have people who are one of the most richest individuals in the world trying to start a fist fight with Putin over the future of Ukraine.
> Yes I know Elon wasn't serious it was just him getting attention.
We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Instead, they're figuring out how to use AI to sell more dick pills and artfully distressed furniture to people devoid of erections and taste on the goddamn Internet, for more money in a year than Einstein saw in a decade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> During the reality TV phase I remember thinking "this is all garbage", and then shows like The Sopranos and The West Wing kicked off an era... The West Wing and The Sopranos l started in 1999. Jackass and Survivor started in 2000.
The Real World started in 1992. It was "credited with launching the modern reality TV genre" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series)
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> Who is the last person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi? Shrodinger, maybe? He is a really large part of the reason people study matrices before college, and then go and complain because nobody can show them a use for the thing.
Showing a use case for matrices is extremely easy : 3D graphics. At least 50% of school students will have a good understanding of that field.
But any demonstration requires modern knowledge, and matrices are one of the very few modern thing students see. If you want to show them 3D graphics, you will need to teach programing first. Yeah, some will know it by them, but schools also can't rely on that.
(As an aside, chemistry also has some weirdly modern knowledge on its curriculum. Also out of context, just thrown in there because it's important.)
The nearest application I can think of is for modeling stochastic processes, but students see so little statistics that I imagine that will only change the object on the "why am I even studying X?" complaint.
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…
I'm going to stop you right there and point out that there is an absolutely massive space outside of Top 40. If you're willing to actually expend some effort to go looking, there's undoubtedly music out there for you. And this is nothing to do with age. I'm 40 and there's more new music coming out that I like than I can keep up with. I was recently talking to my almost 60 year old uncle and he finds the same to be true.
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…
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…
What better motivation for a scientist to innovate than the threat of starvation and violence?
The author hasn't spent much time looking for counter-examples: * Paul Shannon * Paul Erdös * Donald Knuth * Richard Feynman * Harper Lee * Iain Banks * Leonard Bernstein And I think you can go on-and-on.
I think the author has got it mainly correct. There exists a perfect analog to this 'genius problem' in plain sight: Architecture. Back in the day, especially the art-deco era, buildings were adorned with beautiful facades and friezes and carvings. They had style and substance and actual design. Today, all you get are construction companies shitting out glass-paned bricks with shoddy materials, poor usability conside…
Potentially - but the quantity focus that you're talking about is a direct result of the construction and development that we allow. We basically prohibit people taking risks in architecture and design because it's impossible to build a lot of "interesting" stuff due to zoning (which is what you can build) and structure (which is how you can build) regulations. All of the pretty architecture that you're talking about…