461–470 of 505 posts
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It is the same in any other country. There are state-sponsored chess clubs everywhere.
no, there are not. only in the ex-soviet states. that's why they dominate chess forever. the talentpool is huge, and education is good. nobody else comes close, in infrastructure and level.
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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…
Musk started that school. They go to the school made by their father. I am sure they are getting quite an "aristocratic" education.
One theory is because the dole was ended. (Thank you Tatcher!) Aspiring pop stars generally started as struggling artists. Now they're just starving artists.
I assume that improving the safety net, eg UBI, will unlock amazing human potential. Give all those undiscovered geniuses a chance to follow their whim, vs grind away as fulfillment center wage slaves.
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…
Isaac Newton is on the short list of candidates for the most intelligent person who ever lived. "Marketing" is ancillary to that fact, at best.
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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 contracto…
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do you have evidence for your claim? everything I can find suggests that literacy is about as high as ever, as are book sales.
I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, but the quantity of books sold says little about their quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make make profit rather than spreading good literature, and this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of unread books on my shelf,…
If I don't make it a daily habit, it becomes difficult to read a novel, I am unable to maintain the attention required, which phone scrolling im sure has exacerbated.
But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system. This is confusing correlation for causation. Indeed, Bertrand Russell wrote: > The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptional…
By definition no public school can be as good as anything Russell got. Russell had the privilege of his brother teaching him geometry and hence set him on his path to mathematical greatness. He came from a distinguished family. No public education can replicate the personal 1 to 1 knowledge transfer/education.
> None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious
Yes. It's why people like Russell, Darwin, Turing, etc had the time to work on non-industrious subjects. If darwin, russell or turing were industrious, nobody would be talking about them today.
Public education system was created firstly to produce obedient soldiers for the state and secondly to provide drones for factories.
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I think there's something in this. The "where's today's Beethoven" chart would be completely explained either by an actual decline, or by it becoming harder to be rated a genius against contemporaries over time. And that itself is mostly a numbers game too: the human population now is 7 times larger than it was at Beethoven's death. Vienna's population (relevant since we're talking about Beethoven) was about 200,000…
The human population isn't really important to that 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). " The denominator has increased massively faster than the base population.
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?
(the Carnegie library in my old neighborhood is a bar. I don't know if the town lowered the main roads or they built the library on a hill in town on purpose, but it sticks out like a pretentious, sore thumb now.)