Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored • Hacker News Board

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#391

Post by scaramanga » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #16

Giroux is a bit too left for me, but the prognosis and message for hope in this video is spot-on in my opinion. [1] According to this narrative we stopped making Einsteins because it's simply no longer in the interests of the "elites" to have smart people around. Education became a liability to those cheering for cybernetic governance and social control media. Similar explanations are proffered by John Taylor-Gatto,…

In other words "prepare them for adulthood" where those skills will serve them well. It's hardly like those guys have discovered a deep secret.

They tell you to develop a deep, spiritually enriching knowledge of a field and faculty for critical thinking that you can use to solve social problems. But none of that is going to help you when you are alone, taking the exam, so you just memorize crap for the exam because you need that to get hired at the job.

Your boss tells you to write fewer bugs, but it's clear that they reward shipping features fast so you sling code fast instead because it's your job to anticipate your bosses desires, not listen to what he says.. When the bugs blow up, you roll up your sleeves and do some heroic debugging, especially working long hours, and win a medal and a 21 gun salute at your funeral.

Developing that instinctive understanding of who is in charge and what they really want and then dedicating yourself to the task is the primary adaptive strategy you can have as an adult.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#392

Post by sleightofmind » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

s-lambert wrote: post #380

betwixthewires wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's still not anywhere near the same though, a tutor is able to figure out what the student is missing through observation and also teach in a way that the student will learn fastest. Whereas any internet resource relies on the student being able to figure out what they themselves don't know and isn't tailor-made for them.

Ramanujan.

Edit: Apologies to user gilleain below who mentioned this first. Should have read a bit more before commenting.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#393

Post by HyperrealityZed » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:48 AM UTC

carapace wrote: post #360

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…

Norbert Wiener, famous child prodigy in his own time, founded Cybernetics among other things.

Same with Stafford Beer, a brilliant, incredibly radical beauty of a human being.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#394

Post by pier25 » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:56 AM UTC

I could be totally wrong, but my hunch is that this is more related to the lowest hanging fruit rather than human capacity. Maybe scientific discoveries simply get exponentially harder.

In painting, it's very rare for someone to make anything original these days. We won't have any more Picassos, etc, simply because they were the first to explore a new terrain. It's really not a matter of education, genetics, or talent. The more explored a terrain is, the less there is to discover.

So the matter is really discovering new terrains, like the internet has been in the past decades.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#395

Post by alfor » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:57 AM 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…

It is quite common in homeschooling to develop exceptional abilities.

The education system is generic and with a ratio of 10-25 kids per teacher following the same pace there is a lot of time wasted on waiting and on discipline.

Kids don’t learn to self manage their interests, to follow their curiosity, they learn to follow the teacher.

It’s not all negative, they learn to interact with different personalities, to defend themselves verbally and physically, they make friends, they learn from other kids.

With homeschooling it can also be hard to find like minded parents and kids who are not at school in the week to meet.

Another way to think about it would be: imagine that most grocery store where run by the government, what would be the impact?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#396

Post by majormajor » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:03 AM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #372

fakethenews2022 wrote: post #354

If 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…

This is survivorship bias. I've played pick-up basketball with a ton of dudes whose parents sunk hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into training and coaching, and they're generally stunningly mediocre. 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…

Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages?

I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10.

I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#397

Post by Gatsky » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

My two comments are that firstly, some fields don’t support the genius narrative. Consider the eradication of small pox. This is definitely in the top 5 best things humans have ever done, and may ever do. But there are no geniuses associated with this, it was a lot of small contributions over time.

Secondly, I think it is very obvious that there are some (not all!) potential geniuses who never achieve anything because they don’t get the right encouragement, support and coaching. Geoffrey Tozer snd Walter Pitts are two examples that come to mind, plus the no doubt many nameless female geniuses who never had any chance.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#398

Post by majormajor » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #203

wcarron wrote: post #192

I think the author has got it mainly correct. There exists a perfect analog to this 'genius problem' in plain sight: Architecture. Back in the day, especially the art-deco era, buildings were adorned with beautiful facades and friezes and carvings. They had style and substance and actual design. Today, all you get are construction companies shitting out glass-paned bricks with shoddy materials, poor usability conside…

Back in 2010, I was invited to a party in a building down at the south end of Manhattan. We were 4 blocks from Wall Street. It was a new building, my friend had just moved in. The building was for the "$400,000 a year working stiffs" of Wall Street, but that line is from 1987 (the movie Wall Street) and nowadays they all make a few million a year. I was surprised by the relatively poor quality of the building. All th…

The vast majority of people buying expensive houses and condos are paying for prestige, location, and square footage, not quality of fit and finish. You can get stuff done better, it just costs even more, since the skills are rarer (as they are no longer needed for many projects, thanks to mass production and power tools).

Unless you're self-managing your project, the people actually doing the work for your contractors are generally coming from pretty similar places/skillsets for multi-million dollar places as for "basic" ones.

There's a reason "want something done right, do it yourself" is hardly a new aphorism.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#399

Post by avani » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:10 AM UTC

Gatsky wrote: post #397

My two comments are that firstly, some fields don’t support the genius narrative. Consider the eradication of small pox. This is definitely in the top 5 best things humans have ever done, and may ever do. But there are no geniuses associated with this, it was a lot of small contributions over time. Secondly, I think it is very obvious that there are some (not all!) potential geniuses who never achieve anything becaus…

There is an argument that without Pitts, you'd never have seen a Von Neumann architecture. Not nothing.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#400

Post by ekimekim » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #367

amusedcyclist wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our understanding of the world is so advanced that revolutionary changes are bound to be rarer and when they do happen they're understood by a tiny fraction of the population. In fact most people have absolutely no idea what Einstein did. He was indeed a great scientist, but to the average person Einstein is a just an idea of a genius, they were never touched by his work. I studied physics in undergrad and I barely u…

In fact most people have absolutely no idea what Einstein did He invented the atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard [1] is generally credited as coming up with the concept of a fission bomb. He enlisted the help of Einstein, who had political clout, to bring it to the attention of the US government [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...