Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored • Hacker News Board

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#481

Post by fooblessmooo » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:42 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…

Turing would be a better example, perhaps. See https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#482

Post by forum_ghost » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:56 PM UTC

hans1729 wrote: post #89

forum_ghost wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? status, hierarchy, etc, will be genetically edited out to turn our species into a faceless mass of obedient drones, ruled by the selected few? I see simply no other way out of very deeply the status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our species.

Because the feedback-loops that allow for notions as isolated material wealth will lose traction (or at least that's what I estimate will happen). Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs, how will this change the perspective on work/wealth/etc as…

>Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs

It will lead to physical elimination of that 50%, and probably more.

>I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.

Monkeys, from which we split off millions of years ago, have very strong hierarchies. It's great to believe we can fix everything with culture, but biology exists.

>The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources.

Resources will always be limited. Our wants, collectively, are infinite.

Just think about "thought influencers". It's nothing but status games, and that will not go away even if every single physical need has been taken care of. Why? Because the top influencer can program brains of millions, and some - even of BILLIONS of other humans.

How do you fix that with more resources, the competition over who gets to influence and brainwash everyone else?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#483

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

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…

It can very well be that we have individuals capable of doing that work but they hate academia. I'm no genius but the only thing I got out of public education is that I don't want to have anything to do with it.

I know an actual genius (recognised by various organisations) and, after doing 5 years of academic life (post graduation), he ended up being a software developer in a mediocre software agency in a country with incredibly low rates for developers.

Public education is just another example where the resource limits that any public solution intrinsically have turn out to invalidate the most useful part of that idea. Sure, we don't have geniuses anymore, scientific research is in shambles, everyone hates school but I'm so grateful that my barista has a degree in political science (which I paid with my taxes).

At the same time, when something public is mainstream and paid by everyone by default via taxes, the private sector has a much harder time. It sucks having to pay for public school even if I don't use it and the lack of choice in private schooling in my country is annoying.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#484

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 9:20 PM 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…

Rich people can buy nice things but they can be scammed like anyone else.

The way it works is that some developer bought the plot, built a condo and sold it in advance to wealthy people. After pocketing the money they delivered something and that's the end of their obligations. If the finish is crap, what can the rich people do? They likely don't have ground to sue and they were probably aware of whatever materials they were buying.

I've seen this happen with so many developers, I don't understand why people buy from developers at all.

Ok, they buy all the plots and normal people have a hard time buying plots, but I'd still pick an existing house I can inspect now compared to buying the idea of a finished product which doesn't exist.

I suspect the flow is something like:

1) Check real estate market

2) All the properties are crap

3) I don't want to deal with blue collars fixing my house!

4) This intriguing new developer with an ok track record is building something, we're going to have a new luxury home!

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#485

Post by fmvab » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

tynpeddler wrote: post #473

One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius. I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as…

I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted.

If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)

I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.

My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#486

Post by ineedasername » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

ekimekim wrote: post #400

ineedasername wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Sorry, I should have appended an "/s" to my comment. Einstein is associated in a loose fashion, and therefore by name recognition often credited by laypeople-- to creating the atom bomb, but has much less to do with it than many other people apart from theoretical groundwork related to the energies involved in mass. (to greatly simplify things)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#487

Post by fakethenews2022 » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 10:58 PM 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…

Tim Duncan is a bad example.

Tim Duncan is close to 7 feet tall. Supposedly roughly 20% of men 20-40 who are 7 feet tall are in the NBA. What percentage of men of average height are in the NBA?

When David Robinson was in high school, he was not considered an NBA talent. When he grew to over 7 feet, he was drafted first and is now in the Hall of Fame.

Height is a huge advantage in basketball. Larry Bird said that if he wasn't 6'9", then he wouldn't be in the NBA.

Tim Duncan was a great player, great mind, and great leader, but height was integral to how he played.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#488

Post by lupire » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 11:48 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #477

rurban wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

we have chess clubs in pretty much every village here in Germany. My ~10000 people birthplace had one. Doesn't make chess hugely popular tho. It's still a niche activity and I would argue that interest is the dmoniating factor here. Also Russia isn't dominting chess anymore. They have a single player in the world top10 and 3 in the top20. [1] [1] https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

They have a world championship contender, 6 in the top 24 and 22 in the top 100. (USA has 12, China and India have 8 each.) That's domination.

Except Magnus, the top 100 are 150pts apart, which is extremely close in ability. #100 could expect to beat #2 in 1 out of 3 games.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#489

Post by lupire » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 11:55 PM UTC

rm445 wrote: post #266

h2odragon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the industrialist Andrew Carnegie?

Dale Carnegey changed the spelling of his name to match Andrew's.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#490

Post by pas » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:42 AM UTC

fmvab wrote: post #485

tynpeddler wrote: post #473

One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius. I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as…

I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted. If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma resul…

I think people misunderstand the skills needed for progress nowadays (or maybe ever). We have clear avenues forward where we are basically just waiting for data to trickle in, then prune the falsified hypotheses, and repeat.

It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.

And even then we have the story of the quantization of blackbody radiation, when Planck was stuck and finally ended up using a formula that fot the data and called it a day.

As an addendum consider Paul Erdos. As far as I know everyone loved to work with him, he was basically running a big distributed institute in this regard. He did what organized workshops do nowadays, but in a slightly radical way, he basically changed "dorm rooms" every few weeks, and churned out papers like a machine on speed. Which in fact he was on all the time. And who can blame him? Stimulants are part of work culture anyway. Coffee, tea, anti-ADHD meds, etc. And with such drastically work focused "work-life balance" it's not surprising that he has results.