Earlier quoted context omitted.
Distraction is for less focused and less ambitious people. We don't have to look at Einstein level genius. Take a look at the competitive programming the kids there solve puzzles at such speed who are grown in the era of all the distractions. If one can not be genius in this era, there is no way they could have been genius in the past. The other way is not true due to access to knowledge in the past is very much rest…
But without these distractions you might be forced to go and do something else. Even if you weren’t a genius, your hard work might pay off. It’s so easy to stream what you want to watch. Before, X-Files was only on once a week and video games were expensive and you had to go to the store.
Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
371–380 of 505 posts
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#372If you look at the sports world, you will see that its equivalent of tutoring is hugely beneficial and is alive and well. The Williams sisters and their father are one obvious example but if you dig deeper, you will see many more examples. Rafael Nadal was tutored by his uncle. Tiger Woods was tutored by his father. Also, look at coaches. They are often the sons and daughters of coaches. Tutoring allows exploring and…
Tim Duncan, widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time, held a basketball for the first time as a freshman in highschool when hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool and he had to pick a new sport to play.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#373I got to wonder how 11 year old Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Dawin would have turned out if they had been subjected to all the extremely compelling distractions that modern day kids encounter, aristocratic tutors and all. How much greek and latin would have been learned with a PS5 in the room? How much of Marcus Aurelius would have been read if young Russell had had a Instagram account and a magic glowing rectang…
Precisely as much as what today's kid are doing. Which means close to none for some, and quite a lot for others. And some discover it from books and some from wikipedia, reddit, YouTube etc. Some kids with use those new resources to create amazing things, and some without any true purpose at all. That was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow. There is no reason to believe that humans have fundamentally ch…
i.e. you assume a kind of "conservation of learning" without proof.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#374This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care…
https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rec…
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#376I got to wonder how 11 year old Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Dawin would have turned out if they had been subjected to all the extremely compelling distractions that modern day kids encounter, aristocratic tutors and all. How much greek and latin would have been learned with a PS5 in the room? How much of Marcus Aurelius would have been read if young Russell had had a Instagram account and a magic glowing rectang…
It's the zero barrier access to porn.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#377I got to wonder how 11 year old Einstein, Von Neuman, Russell or Dawin would have turned out if they had been subjected to all the extremely compelling distractions that modern day kids encounter, aristocratic tutors and all. How much greek and latin would have been learned with a PS5 in the room? How much of Marcus Aurelius would have been read if young Russell had had a Instagram account and a magic glowing rectang…
Some other things from the past which were argued to inevitably corrupt the younger generation from the "good old days:"
* Reading silently * Ballroom Dancing * Chess
As someone who leveraged playing and thinking about video games and emerging technology into a $300/hr consulting fee and being offered a "create your own role doing whatever you want" at a multi-billion dollar corporation after having been subpoenaed as an expert by the US government, advised cabinet nominees, consulted for about 10% of the Fortune 500s, and had CEOs flying in their oversees franchise management teams to hear me speak -- all before I was 30, I can acknowledge it was very corrupting indeed.
I left that career not just to play video games, but because I realized there's diminishing returns on personal wealth but inversely increased value on personal time as the available supply runs out.
If more kids these days figure that out earlier on, the world will be better off for it, not worse.
Besides, I'm less concerned with the loss of potential in kids these days not becoming wage slaves for maximum productivity and far more regretful at the lost opportunities for our ancestors born without the right anatomy, skin color, or wealth to pursue their own potential.
Even for those that did - given how much more interesting Da Vinci's notebooks were than his portraits - how much more interesting a world would we be living in were he and other geniuses to have not needed to finance their unfettered curiosity and interests with bullshit time wasting catering to the petty interests of the rich?
We only have so many hours in life, and in my experience much of society spends far more time at far less value on things like "stay at your desk until 6pm" than "solve this puzzle in this dungeon."
Video games are the least of the things holding back humanity.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely as much as what today's kid are doing. Which means close to none for some, and quite a lot for others. And some discover it from books and some from wikipedia, reddit, YouTube etc. Some kids with use those new resources to create amazing things, and some without any true purpose at all. That was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow. There is no reason to believe that humans have fundamentally ch…
your point implies that environment can have no effects and that you can dismiss them out of hand. Is that really true? surely some environments hamper learning? if you'll admit that, you should admit that you actually need to prove that we aren't in such an environment. i.e. you assume a kind of "conservation of learning" without proof.
It’s quite likely that a different background would have pushed him into studying something else. But, shuffling who is remembered for what isn’t inherently a good or bad thing.
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#379Most 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…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)
Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watching some videos on the internet is not the same thing as being tutored.
I'm not talking about watching videos on the internet. I'm talking about libgen, scihub, MITs entire curriculum for free on the internet, forums and chatrooms to discuss topics with others, and some videos on the internet. And that's just the free ones.