Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

erikhoel.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 505 posts

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#411

Post by vermilingua »

regpertom wrote: post #406

Feynman talks on names of birds being irrelevant. Also that there’s a hidden side to science not talked about and just assumed the student will pick up, that your weaknesses should be exposed. Also cargo culting. Bart Simpsons karate teacher says first we fill your head with knowledge then we break bricks with it. The article says tutors went on the grand tour. We’re full time live in always available. The Huxley quo…

Is this account just feeding the comment thread through GPT-3 and posting what it considers to be a suitable reply?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#412

Post by da39a3ee »

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…

Bob Dylan

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#413

Post by willhinsa »

Pxtl wrote: post #386
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…

Wayne Gretzky is another one who was famously trained by his father Walter Gretzky practically from birth on Hockey. At least most of the people mentioned loved the game, the heartbreaker is Agassi who famously admitted he loathed playing tennis but did it because that's all he ever knew and his father pushed him so hard on it.

Agassi's autobiography, "Open" is fantastic, by the way.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#414

Post by jonnybgood »

pier25 wrote: post #394

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 talen…

What do you mean by original?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#415

Post by pier25 »

jonnybgood wrote: post #414
pier25 wrote: post #394

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 talen…

What do you mean by original?

Unique?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#416

Post by riemannzeta »

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…

I believe at least part of the answer is that many of the would be geniuses went into financial services. Ed Thorp and Jim Simons come to mind as examples of people who made important contributions in mathematics, but spent a substantial chunk of their lives figuring out how to take money from people who are dumber than they are.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#417

Post by riemannzeta »

ramesh31 wrote: post #379
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…

I've thought about this a lot. There are really only a few names that come to mind that I would call world class geniuses, but generally Jim Simons of Renaissance [0] tops the list for me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

Was he tutored? I also thought of Ed Thorp. But he was NOT tutored. He was kind of an autodidact according to his memoir. He had good teachers too, but not aristocratic tutoring by any stretch.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#418

Post by divbzero »

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…

What are the best approaches for teaching homeschooled children how to work together in groups? Or does that just come naturally as children enter society as adults?

I’d be curious to hear the experience of those who homeschool as parents as well as those who were homeschooled as children.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#419

Post by twayt »

The term Genius is a marketing term, there is no value in discussing geniuses as a separate group of people.

A lot of the biggest breakthroughs were a combination of luck and intuition.

Everyone who stands the chance of making a breakthrough has to have access to state of the art or at least enough training to get to the frontier.

Even Ramanujan had to learn math from a book.

If you could tutor someone to make a world changing breakthrough it would be so much more common.

There is nothing else that needs to be said on this topic.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#420

Post by zrkrlc »

gilleain wrote: post #177
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…

Really? What about Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician whose solutions to problems were generally considered completely novel and unconnected to other's results. Eventually he worked with Hardy, but sadly died early. Or Alexander Grothendieck, who when given at university a choice of 14 open problems to pick one to work on one over a period of several years, solved several within months. Again he had a m…

Wasn't that Newton quote a swipe at Robert Hooke, who was known to be quite short?
Post reply on HN