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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

#261

Post by bmhin »

p_j_w wrote: post #253
hexis wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yes, but the reality TV boom didn't hit for quite some time after. Maybe my memory is off, but it felt like a mid aughts thing.

Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me like when they found their "reality game show" formula that was then replicated off of those base archetypes into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does feel about right for when the explosion happened.

The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#262

Post by adamsmith143 »

hwillis wrote: post #173
jzellis wrote: post #27

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.

> We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy). From the beginning…

>Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?

Check out career fairs at "top" universities. Kids are clamoring to get into IB and Consulting and giant tech companies. Legions of the best and brightest are literally just chasing prestige and dollars. I mean the number of MIT Math/Physics/CS/etc PhDs alone that go on to do Quant finance is dizzying and should make people think twice about our current society and how it incentivizes work.

It's pretty simple, why go on the Academic Research Post-Doc -> Faculty grind to make relative peanuts when you can walk into a hedge fund and make 300k+ your first year out of your phd?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#264

Post by adamsmith143 »

samth wrote: post #215
toyg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tenured university members made pretty good money. As they do now, to be fair - it just got much harder to get there, because of larger and fiercer competition for a shrinking number of positions, so the effort/benefit ratio has fallen quite dramatically.

It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is harder now than in 1905.

>It is not in any sense true that becoming a professor is harder now than in 1905.

What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of tenure track positions available in any given year. Far more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes without any published work outside their dissertation.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#265

Post by waserwill »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #218
gmadsen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

do you have evidence for your claim? everything I can find suggests that literacy is about as high as ever, as are book sales.

I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, but the quantity of books sold says little about their quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make make profit rather than spreading good literature, and this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of unread books on my shelf, buying a book doesn't mean reading it. There is an aesthetic appeal to books, and though I want to read all I own, there will inevitably be books printed and sold but unread.

There are high literacy rates, but this says little about whether material has been grasped and digested. References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is surprising.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#266

Post by rm445 »

h2odragon wrote: post #147
karaterobot wrote: post #91

Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are…

Claude Shannon. Maybe rms. Its not that we don't have genius anymore; we simply built a new pantheon out of the geniuses of the day about 150 years ago and then haven't been keeping up with the work of canonizing new members. Dale Carnegie and Elon Musk get the "demi-god" status, somehow; we know their successes are the work of many others but who but the most obsessed know those names?

Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the industrialist Andrew Carnegie?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#267

Post by RC_ITR »

aqsalose wrote: post #224
RC_ITR wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am unsure if it tells more about any general attitude about "tools" or more about Broadway. Microphones are still not used in opera or classical music.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/arts/music/wearing-a-wire...

Microphones are still not used by purists in opera or classical music, exactly because of the point I made above.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#268

Post by mcguire »

"Here’s a chart from Cold Takes’ “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?” Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."

Headdesk.

"total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields"

Headdesk.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#269

Post by socialist_coder »

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…

I think the 1 easiest way to improve schools right now would be to differentiate kids by ability.

Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.

So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.

If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?

Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.

I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#270

Post by skrebbel »

mcguire wrote: post #268

" Here’s a chart from Cold Takes’ “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?” Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields). " Headdesk. "total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields" Headdesk.

You're not even trying to make an argument.
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