Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored • Hacker News Board

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#321

Post by shadowtree » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

The goal of the public school system is to free up working parents from schooling kids, so they can, well, work.

It became an even more pressing need once women entered the workforce in full.

This became very evident during the pandemic, when so many parents suddenly had their kids at home during working hours.

If you can afford home schooling, awesome. Most can't.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#322

Post by DantesKite » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

I read the article.

I disagree with the premise that there are fewer geniuses today. There are plenty of geniuses, if not more than ever.

They just don't all have a deep, cultural impact on the zeitgeist.

Take for example the resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem and Poincare's Conjecture. Or the work being done on the Twin Primes problem.

This article is probably better situated as an examination of culture. You could make a similar argument for why there isn't anything comparable to the Beatles at the moment.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#323

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #319

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

Your general grandiose advice should come with plenty of warning labels. A lot of people try to do homeschooling but they neither have expertise, patience or discipline. For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself. Majority of people don't have these skills which is why there ex…

>For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself.

Or buy one of those homeschooling curriculums.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#324

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

markdown wrote: post #316

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

Be interesting to see what the isolation does to them. After all, they'll eventually have to live and get along with all those "slow-learners". We Live In A Society™

Not if they go to college and then get a mentally difficult/highly filtered (not the same thing) job. They could be surrounded by peers for the rest of their lives.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#325

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

>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.

This is far from a foregone conclusion and could lead to some bad consequences if, for example, we made school run five times as fast for everyone without checking to see which students would keep up with it.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#326

Post by mrtksn » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

Homeschooling sounds too cruel to me, I would have hated it to spend my time with my parents instead of the friends at school.

Surely, the state sponsored education is also a formation but what I found was that teachers are people too(from all kind of backgrounds and ideologies). Therefore, you don't actually get your kids grown by the design of the government. The teachers do the magic.

In proper countries, where education is primarily education and not propaganda, they tend to appreciate that different kids have different learning pace and needs and you often have options for appropriate education.

There's this contrarian singer who famously homeschooled his daughter, later said it was a huge mistake to do it because she grew up to be too naive to function in the society. Who is going to break the heart of your kids? How they are going to learn to cope with it? Who is going to lie to them and how they are going to learn how to spot a lie? Who is going to be unfair to your kids and how they are going to learn to make it right?

I can't see homeschooling my kids unless the country I'm in turns into a crazy dictatorship with propaganda as a primary objective in the school.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#327

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#328

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

shadowtree wrote: post #321

alfor wrote: post #284

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…

The goal of the public school system is to free up working parents from schooling kids, so they can, well, work. It became an even more pressing need once women entered the workforce in full. This became very evident during the pandemic, when so many parents suddenly had their kids at home during working hours. If you can afford home schooling, awesome. Most can't.

I would hazard that families who could get by on a single income if they really wanted to are more common than highly gifted children.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#329

Post by djur » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #298

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 Beetho…

I was interested by the "Where's Beethoven" graph, and went to read the original article (which is better, and doesn't actually agree with the idea that it's measuring a decline of genius). I'm kind of astonished that neither article considers the possibility that the effect they're seeing is that opportunity for acclaim doesn't scale with population.

The absolute population has more than quadrupled since 1901. If I understand the data being used here, the "effective population" has increased over 100 fold in that time period. Yet the number of people receiving Nobel Prizes in any given field each year hasn't appreciably increased. And we would likely perceive the Nobel as less prestigious if they awarded 4 times as many a year -- certainly if they awarded 100 times as many. The same can be said of awards in art, music, and other fields.

Awards are obviously not the only way of measuring prestige. But the same could be said of coverage in prestigious journals, or by renowned critics. Nobody would reasonably expect there to be 100 times as many top-tier literary journals in 2021 as in 1901. It almost seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?

I think a limiting factor here is that acclaim is a matter of mass agreement. A single person can only watch so many films, listen to so many songs, read about so many scientific accomplishments in a day. A film critic in 2021 is probably not watching that many more movies a week than their counterpart in 1960. And it's not like movies are load-balanced between critics.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#330

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:11 PM UTC

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?

[deleted]