11–20 of 41 posts
One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of…
One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of…
The diffuse mode is the one that gives us creativity.
The author has a recency bias. I think the real burst of genius was from 800BC to 300BC.
During that time you had Homer, Archimedes, Pythagorus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Confucius, Zeno of Citium. You had the Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita. Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism all have their foundational writings/teachings written down during this time.
Way more people have read and studied and learned from Homer than from Tolstoy. Aristotle is way more influential than William James.
Or maybe, different historical periods produce different types of genius, and many times it is apparent only looking backwards in time who the geniuses were and what was their true impact.
I dont really believe this crazy tutoring theory AT ALL. What has changed is that education has become widespread. It is well known that standardized education destroys creativity. Ramanujen was largely self-taught! The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot! If you were born in Oppenheimer's era you gained a huge advantage of…
Stephen Jay Gould made a very similar argument about the disappeared .400 baseball hitter: https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo... >Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choo…
I dont really believe this crazy tutoring theory AT ALL. What has changed is that education has become widespread. It is well known that standardized education destroys creativity. Ramanujen was largely self-taught! The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot! If you were born in Oppenheimer's era you gained a huge advantage of…
One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of…
One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of…
One very different answer to this: we've lost a lot of "boring but living wage" jobs with little to no supervision. Einstein had a lot of time to think and sketch and write formulas at jobs like the Swiss Patent Office. How many jobs do you see around you that you can do that and survive? We've seen an incredible rise in "bullshit jobs" but we've also elevated corporate surveillance to incredible heights and much of…
Aren't you describing most office jobs? Don't a lot of people in our industry say they do "1, maybe 2 hours of real work each day"?