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Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

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Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#31

Post by MichaelZuo »

JohnFen wrote: post #26
bluedino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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? 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"?

> Don't a lot of people in our industry say they do "1, maybe 2 hours of real work each day"? Yes, but that doesn't mean people have 6 or 7 hours of free time every day. It means that 6 or 7 hours of the day is absorbed by work activities that don't contribute to the actual work.

Not from my understanding, it's very rare for peripheral activities to take up multiple hours every day on average, in a well oiled team at least.

Of course there will always be Dilbert esque situations but the vast majority of actual or potential super-geniuses I imagine would have at least a few hours of actual free time per day, on average.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#32

Post by btrettel »

WorldMaker wrote: post #8

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…

I was a USPTO patent examiner twice before. The job today is not as you describe, and I doubt it was as you describe in Einstein's day either.

By Einstein's own words, being a patent examiner was a lot of work [1, pp. 102--103]:

> he complained about the workload: "I have a frightful lot of work. Eight hours at the office each day and at least one private lesson, and then I have my scientific work." [26] Once he had settled in, though, he found his forty-eight hours per week at the office tolerable. When his friend Habicht was not entirely satisfied with the school service, in which he had landed after completing his studies, Einstein suggested that one day he would smuggle Habicht in among the "patent slaves" and tried to commend the work to him by observing that "along with the eight hours of work there are also eight hours of fun in the day, and then there is also Sunday." [27]

As a former patent examiner, I know precisely what he meant when he described himself as a "patent slave". I basically had a quota to meet, and it was quite challenging to do and meet any reasonable quality standard.

You can find sources like [2, p. 4] that indicate he did do some research at the Swiss patent office, but it's a secondary source:

> Rudolf Kayser, Einstein's son-in-law writes in his biography on Einstein, "He soon discovered that he could find time to devote to his own scientific studies if he did his work in less time. But discretion was necessary, for though authorities may find slow work satisfactory, the saving of time for personal pursuits is officially forbidden. Worried, Einstein saw to it that the small sheets of paper on which he wrote and figured vanished into his desk-drawer as soon as he heard footsteps approaching behind his door.

I don't doubt that he did some research there, but it probably wasn't much judging by Einstein's own words and my own time as a patent examiner over 100 years later.

[1] A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein: a biography. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1997.

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.3904

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#33

Post by JohnFen »

cafard wrote: post #28
JohnFen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot! As the late, great Frank Zappa once said: "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."

Right, because John von Neumann, Alan Turing, etc. skipped college to play the guitar.

I think you've missed his point here. What he was saying is that the purpose of college is only partly to give an education. The main thing college gets you is credentials and socialization. If what you want is just a good, broad education and you don't care about those other things, then the library is provides that to you.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#34

Post by JohnFen »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #31
JohnFen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't a lot of people in our industry say they do "1, maybe 2 hours of real work each day"? Yes, but that doesn't mean people have 6 or 7 hours of free time every day. It means that 6 or 7 hours of the day is absorbed by work activities that don't contribute to the actual work.

Not from my understanding, it's very rare for peripheral activities to take up multiple hours every day on average, in a well oiled team at least. Of course there will always be Dilbert esque situations but the vast majority of actual or potential super-geniuses I imagine would have at least a few hours of actual free time per day, on average.

It's true that if you just add up the minutes, then peripheral activities don't take up the majority of the time. But you also have to take into account the cost of context-switching. An hour-long meeting costs more than an hour of time because you have to ramp back up to speed afterwards. On average, this takes about 20 minutes. When you add in all of the distractions through the day -- meetings, people talking in the next cube, people stopping by for a "quick question", that sort of thing, that ramping-up can absorb a ton of time.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#35

Post by MichaelZuo »

JohnFen wrote: post #34
MichaelZuo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not from my understanding, it's very rare for peripheral activities to take up multiple hours every day on average, in a well oiled team at least. Of course there will always be Dilbert esque situations but the vast majority of actual or potential super-geniuses I imagine would have at least a few hours of actual free time per day, on average.

It's true that if you just add up the minutes, then peripheral activities don't take up the majority of the time. But you also have to take into account the cost of context-switching. An hour-long meeting costs more than an hour of time because you have to ramp back up to speed afterwards. On average, this takes about 20 minutes. When you add in all of the distractions through the day -- meetings, people talking in t…

Not for actual or potential super geniuses similar in situation to Einstein at the Swiss patent office.

By definition they spend very little time and effort on 'context-switching'.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#36

Post by lapcat »

JohnFen wrote: post #33
cafard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because John von Neumann, Alan Turing, etc. skipped college to play the guitar.

I think you've missed his point here. What he was saying is that the purpose of college is only partly to give an education. The main thing college gets you is credentials and socialization. If what you want is just a good, broad education and you don't care about those other things, then the library is provides that to you.

On the other hand, the collections (books, journals, etc.) of college libraries are typically vastly superior to those of public libraries.

I really miss the access now that I'm no longer in college.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#37

Post by JohnFen »

lapcat wrote: post #36
JohnFen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed his point here. What he was saying is that the purpose of college is only partly to give an education. The main thing college gets you is credentials and socialization. If what you want is just a good, broad education and you don't care about those other things, then the library is provides that to you.

On the other hand, the collections (books, journals, etc.) of college libraries are typically vastly superior to those of public libraries. I really miss the access now that I'm no longer in college.

In any public library (in the US, anyway), you can check out books from every library that is part of the inter-library loan service. This include all (I think) other public libraries as well as a healthy number of college libraries. You're not even limited to books!

Have a chat with your local librarian. You might be pleasantly surprised at how deep that resource goes.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#38

Post by keiferski »

jbandela1 wrote: post #14

> Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengler, the original chronicler of the decline of genius back in 1914, to point out our current genius downturn. 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. Juda…

Karl Jaspers, is that you?

Axial Age (also Axis Age,[1] from the German Achsenzeit) is a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#39

Post by lapcat »

JohnFen wrote: post #37
lapcat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the collections (books, journals, etc.) of college libraries are typically vastly superior to those of public libraries. I really miss the access now that I'm no longer in college.

In any public library (in the US, anyway), you can check out books from every library that is part of the inter-library loan service. This include all (I think) other public libraries as well as a healthy number of college libraries. You're not even limited to books! Have a chat with your local librarian. You might be pleasantly surprised at how deep that resource goes.

I'm aware of that. Nonetheless, I can say definitively that the South Central Library System of Wisconsin (which includes Madison) does not include the University of Wisconsin libraries, and the holdings of the latter are vastly superior, at least in terms of academic-related material. I've not been pleasantly surprised.

Re: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

#40

Post by southernplaces7 »

btrettel wrote: post #32
WorldMaker wrote: post #8

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…

I was a USPTO patent examiner twice before. The job today is not as you describe, and I doubt it was as you describe in Einstein's day either. By Einstein's own words, being a patent examiner was a lot of work [1, pp. 102--103]: > he complained about the workload: "I have a frightful lot of work. Eight hours at the office each day and at least one private lesson, and then I have my scientific work." [26] Once he had…

Thank you. A comment that puts some half-invented "factual" opinion into perspective with genuine and sourced details is always appreciated. If anything, most people today have more leisure time than was remotely the case in Einstein's youth, but they often fill it with a complete surfeit of blandly trivial distractions, and in some cases, evade responsibility for this detail by claiming that they're somehow suffering excessively under corporate wage slavery.
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