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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

#281

Post by gwern »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #246
defgeneric wrote: post #155

The quality of this thread is really disappointing. Conservatively, about 80% of the replies, criticisms, suggestions, re-framings, here are addressed in the article by the author. About 20% of the replies here are responding to the title alone (and therefore focused on Einstein/progress in hard science). The piece is about the kind of education the children of the aristocracy received and how it has disappeared enti…

Has it disappeared entirely? "The children of the aristocracy" were very few. Do a few people receive that kind of education today? Elon Musk's children? Bill Gates' children? Some Saudi prince's children? Note also that some of the people were "tutored" by their parents; homeschooling today could fill the same role. And, > So, where are all the Einsteins? > The answer must lie in education somewhere. That's a really…

Musk's kids don't. There's been some reporting on it. They go to 'Synthesis School'/'Ad Astra School'/'Astra Nova'. It seems vaguely like STEM Montessori in attitude from what I've read. Relatively small student:staff ratio, but doesn't appear to be anywhere close to a 1:1 ratio which is what tutoring is. I haven't seen any mentions of supplementary tutoring either.

(I can't think of any tech titans whose kids do receive exclusively tutoring either, instead of being sent to the local Palo Alto schools or private schools or something relatively middle-class.)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#282

Post by t_mann »

fwiw, I happen to know that there are companies specializing in finding these sort of tutors today (well rounded in the arts and sciences, ideally multilingual, can regularly spend with kids for longer time periods, be a sort of 'role model'...). I don't know what it would cost to use them, but I can imagine...

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#283

Post by mcguire »

dh2022 wrote: post #247
regularfry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's something in this. The "where's today's Beethoven" chart would be completely explained either by an actual decline, or by it becoming harder to be rated a genius against contemporaries over time. And that itself is mostly a numbers game too: the human population now is 7 times larger than it was at Beethoven's death. Vienna's population (relevant since we're talking about Beethoven) was about 200,000…

Re: "it's more than likely that all the individuals currently of Beethoven's absolute talent level are thought of as merely "extremely good", not "genius", precisely because they don't break away from the pack and individually dominate the field". But doesn't that imply we should see individuals heads and shoulders above Beethoven? If we see a lot of Beethoven's at the merely "extremely good" level where is(are) the…

I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude.

As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference.

As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#284

Post by alfor »

The goal of the education system is to flatten society.

Both of my kid have been homeschooled up until 5th grade. At home they used to do less than 20min per day of ’school’.

After a few month at school they now find the pace incredibly slow and they can’t stand the waiting they have to endure.

They both score 80-95% in all classes.

My son is learning programming and video editing and piano by himself, my daughter is writing small novels in a second language.

We didn’t teach them much at all, they mostly learn just by themselves.

They now want to go back to homeschooling so they don’t have to wait to learn nothing.

They might be a bit gifted, but I think that the main difference is that they didn’t go to school, they didn’t get used to waiting and learning at the same pace as everyone. I think that most kids a much more capable than we think.

Now I think that unschooling + a bit of tutoring would be incredibly powerful.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#285

Post by Talanes »

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.

Really depends where you define the starting line. Compare the two starting from birth, and definitely harder in 1905. Compare them as fully qualified individuals ready to apply, probably an edge in 1905.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#286

Post by lern_too_spel »

phonescreen_man wrote: post #225

Not much mention of female genius, Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Grace Hopper, etc

There are several mentions of female geniuses who were developed by aristocratic tutoring, including Émilie du Châtelet, Ada Lovelace, Hannah Arendt, and Virginia Woolf. It is certainly true that historically, girls were given this benefit less often than boys, so we should expect fewer historical female geniuses than male geniuses if we believe the author's hypothesis.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#287

Post by alfor »

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:…

The problem is that there's not much control group.

My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow.

School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#288

Post by lupire »

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…

It's because pops stars need to be gorgeous celebs and also dancers, so singing gets replaced by computer.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#289

Post by aunetx »

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 true, but in the same time... We still have so much to discover, no matter the subject -- I study physics and, even at my level (not very advanced), there are obviously entire domains that are not clearly understood even by the most brillant minds.

But the problem is maybe that: the amount of knowledge (and intelligence) needed in order to achieve something significant for science is bigger and bigger, and grow everytime a Einstein discovers something.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#290

Post by ViViDboarder »

alfor wrote: post #287
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:…

The problem is that there's not much control group. My kids were homeschooled, they did around 20 min per day of school, now at public school they find the pace way to slow. School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.

> School is 90% daycare so the parents can work, not really to teach kids.

That probably depends on each persons means to teach their own children.

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