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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

#291

Post by shubb »

JackFr wrote: post #204
shubb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One really major innovation is that we have developed the capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and are just - with the big data revolution - developing the capability to understand these data volumes and translate them into findings. Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and comm…

> Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. And the median value of that reasearch is zero. There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse…

There is def an element of this. Replicability, perverse incentives, bad scientific cultures in specific fields, and all sorts of problems mean a lot of bad or pointless research is done.

It is very hard to say with basic research, what is pointless. For instance, there is little application for bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So hard to value.

But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only becomes valuable once we can do that.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#292

Post by mardifoufs »

Victerius wrote: post #54
ceejayoz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur? Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small,…

> kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth. Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him. > What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, d…

We could almost certainly get to human cloning very fast; the technology isn't really the botttleneck. It's just that no one does it and for very good reasons. The only way human cloning could be useful and help "solve" any problem would also involve going back to chatel slavery. Why would any research go towards that?

It's not like star wars, human clones would still be human.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#293

Post by Atlas667 »

It's liberalism that promotes this idea of individual merit. By liberalism i mean philosophical liberalism that most of the modern world has, be it in a conservative fashion, neo-liberal fashion or the modern sense of liberal and all their flavors.

The idea that people are "equal before the law and have individual rights" does not mean people are equal. But media keeps espousing this narrative to convince us that even rich people are equal, thereby saying that if you do not reach this level it is by your individual merit. It is the "humble" philosophy of a world run by the rich and powerful. And that has extended to anyone with success.

And i like that, while this article does not consciously critique liberalism, it still puts down its notions.

The idea that there are magical people who do things with their magic abilities makes talking about the material conditions of our development almost impossible and inconsequential. Not to take away from these genius' contributions, but to add to their condition.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#294

Post by tonguez »

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.

Why are there no more Einsteins, von Neumanns, etc, anymore? Is Terry Tao the closest thing we have? Does DARPA (or some TLA or foreign equivalent) just snatch these people up early on in life? Why isn't Srouji working for something like DARPA? Are there people even better than Srouji working for something like DARPA?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#296

Post by Gollapalli »

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…

Maybe, but back then you just had to be an interested party of some learning whose work was correct. Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one. It’s a status competition with real resources on the table rather than an aristocratic hobby for the few who were interested.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#297

Post by atq2119 »

toyg wrote: post #165
kosasbest wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books I think this is largely because modern geniuses don't market themselves well. I mean the world is undeniably rampant with genius, but if you can't market your genius via social media or other means, then you fade into the background. Consider that there are people on the spectrum who are bad at social interaction and…

It's not just that - it's that the competition is now the scale of the planet. Back in the day, if you made it in print somewhere, you were officially an intellectual of some prestige. Then it became about access to radio. Then it was all about reaching TV. All these channels were very limited, so just by getting there one could ensure they had a position among the officially recognised elite. Now one is competing wi…

> Now one is competing with a literally infinite amount of channels

I know this is a losing cause, but you either mean figuratively or you're wrong.

The more important part: what about the cited evidence that, correcting for other factors, "aristocratic tutoring" does make a difference in achievement?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#298

Post by mcguire »

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…

I'm not particularly impressed with the quality of the article. The first question that comes to my mind that the article doesn't address is, how many geniuses did humanity miss because education was very, very limited. Second thought: history shows that the vast majority of aristocratically tutored students were very much not geniuses; this article is full of cherry-picking.

Third, there's the "Where's Todays Beethoven" chart, "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)."

Note: "with the education and access to contribute to these fields". If you increase the denominator by many orders of magnitude, no matter what the numerator is the result will probably go down.

"Tutoring, one-on-one instruction, dramatically improves student’s abilities and scores. In education research this effect is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2-sigma problem” because in the 1980s the researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students '. . performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.”'"

The 2-sigma problem points to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem which has,

"Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"."

The "mastery learning" method "is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning), so there's that. (I'm a cynic; "my way produces much better results" with no further data tends to inspire distrust.)

"Consider the easy nature by which Darwin, at the age of only 16 and already in university,..."

And what proportion of university students were younger than 17 in the 1820s?

"Indeed, it’s remarkable how common aristocratic tutors were. Essentially universal."

One might suspect that where and when there is no more modern educational system that tutors would, in fact, be the only way to get any education.

One further note: the US pays roughly $15,000 per student per year as it is. Are you willing to work a full-time job for less than $30,000 per year? How's your Greek and Latin? Math? Science? Literature? (Assumptions: 2 half-time students per tutor. Some overhead will be necessary for the tutors.)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#299

Post by Henk0815 »

aunetx wrote: post #289
hhjinks wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gro…

i think its also a problem of funding. the problems of today are more resource intensive. i read that succesfull test to use mrna for medical treatment were done 20 years ago and nobody realy cared and knew about it. To realy develop into something viable took years to get the attention and funding.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#300

Post by mcguire »

hwillis wrote: post #178
glitchc wrote: post #159

All geniuses were a manufactured product, bar none. Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign. No different from Gaga or Beyonce in the present. Beyonce exists as an idea more so than a person. What is nominally a group of individuals working collectively to solve a problem became attributed to a single person purely for marketing purposes. It is easier for most people to rem…

> Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign. You managed to pick two of the most alone geniuses in history. Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked. Einstein's miracle year was done completely outside academia and the only two other people in the Olympia Academy said they had nothing to do with it.

"Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked."

He was more worried about being scooped. And he was the president of the Royal Society when that argument broke out.

Would Einstein still be more famous than Edsger Dijkstra if he hadn't become the media's face of science?

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