Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored • Hacker News Board

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#311

Post by ozim » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

humanistbot wrote: post #6

I think this is more of a version of the "why have we stopped making good music/movies, almost everything today is garbage?" issue. With the benefit of hindsight, we only remember the greats (and the very worst villains) from past eras. While if we look around today, we see all the people who will never make it into the history books, just like we see all the songs and movies that will never become "classics." Edit:…

So survivorship bias.

Second thing is that it was a lot easier to be a genius in 1900 than it is now.

Not saying that general relativity is well understood by general public but a lot more people has now some grasp on E=mc^2. While in 1900s it was something that most of people could not wrap their heads around.

Last point is that "geniuses" are overrated anyway. Because what we need as a species is that bell curve of knowledge moves up. So mediocre people get more intelligent and know more things and people from lower part of bell curve get to the level where mediocre people were before.

We achieved that because currently average Joe nowadays is much smarter than average Joe 100 years ago.

And we should strive to move forward with that.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#312

Post by N1H1L » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

I am a researcher at a national lab. I am pretty smart myself, and have worked with some exceptional people during my PhD and even now. Thing is, we have become so metrics and busy work obsessed that it's insane.

Fully 75% of my time is spent chasing money. Which means writing grants that have a 25% success rate (and I am told to be proud of that number, others have it worse), filling out monthly, quarterly and yearly reports for my grants and chasing the next grant. The science that I do is honestly now a break from all that bullshit.

And then the stupid obsession with metrics. I have technically more peer-reviewed journal papers than Einstein, and I am not even fit to touch that man's shoelaces - let alone tie them. If h-index is the only measure of scientific success, then don't be surprised if fools are what you get.

The system, all the way down from Congress is designed to fail - and we are acting surprised?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#313

Post by adamisom » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #298

defgeneric wrote: post #155

The quality of this thread is really disappointing. Conservatively, about 80% of the replies, criticisms, suggestions, re-framings, here are addressed in the article by the author. About 20% of the replies here are responding to the title alone (and therefore focused on Einstein/progress in hard science). The piece is about the kind of education the children of the aristocracy received and how it has disappeared enti…

I'm not particularly impressed with the quality of the article. The first question that comes to my mind that the article doesn't address is, how many geniuses did humanity miss because education was very, very limited. Second thought: history shows that the vast majority of aristocratically tutored students were very much not geniuses; this article is full of cherry-picking. Third, there's the "Where's Todays Beetho…

A two-sigma effect is mind blowing. You can say that makes it more suspect but the magnitude of the claim must be emphasized, that’s just so frickin high of an effect size. (Personally I assume the claim is at least mostly true: how could full-time, good tutoring not be incredibly better?)

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#314

Post by hereforphone » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

There are different levels of suitability for everything, including scientific and technical innovation. Combine advantageous intellectual predisposition with a "privileged" education, and you may get a "genius". I appreciate these people, but I'm more impressed by those who excelled (even if to a lesser extent than their aristocratically educated contemporaries) against all odds. Especially when the underdog is working actively against their disadvantages instead of lurking on forums pasting about the unfairness of society and the plight of the proletariat.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#315

Post by thfuran » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #306

lern_too_spel wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was also aristocratically tutored, learning mostly at home (first from his parents and then from a litany of professional mathematicians who tutored him in what they were interested in) and then speeding through classes all the way through undergrad.

And the next generation will be able to do the same thing at a whim even in poverty with a little device in their pocket, and not even have to pay for the classes.

Watching some videos on the internet is not the same thing as being tutored.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#316

Post by markdown » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

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…

Be interesting to see what the isolation does to them. After all, they'll eventually have to live and get along with all those "slow-learners".

We Live In A Society™

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#317

Post by recuter » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:49 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #300

hwillis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign. You managed to pick two of the most alone geniuses in history. Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked. Einstein's miracle year was done completely outside academia and the only two other people in the Olympia Academy said they had nothing to do with it.

" Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked. " He was more worried about being scooped. And he was the president of the Royal Society when that argument broke out. Would Einstein still be more famous than Edsger Dijkstra if he hadn't become the media's face of science?

Hindsight is 2020. Einstein had some help with the boring bits of math and the ideas were vaguely "in the air" at the time and being worked on by several individuals, fair enough.

Even still, I haven't met anyone who, for example, knows and understands the full derivation of his most famous equation that would say his fame is overstated.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#318

Post by boppo1 » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #175

hwillis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have Einsteins because the brightest people don't work on astrophysics because there's no money in it. Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy). From the beginning…

Einstein applied to higher institutions where he wanted to work, but he was not admitted. The patent office was the available job, so he took it.

Einstein got rejected? From where?

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#319

Post by sytelus » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

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…

Your general grandiose advice should come with plenty of warning labels. A lot of people try to do homeschooling but they neither have expertise, patience or discipline. For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself. Majority of people don't have these skills which is why there exist teacher degrees and training. That is why experienced teachers do much better than inexperienced. The 1:1 with incompetent teacher is not better than 20:1 with experienced teacher, IMO.

It is dangerous and false to say that just having 1:1 interactions and just igniting interest would make everything better. In your case, likely your kids are fairly gifted and even downgraded teaching won't matter. But that is not the case with everyone. Most people should also not be looking for raising next Einstein but rather a well rounded and functioning individual.

Re: Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

#320

Post by lamontcg » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

mettamage wrote: post #146

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but Elon gets all the credit, he could still be one of them, I don't know enough about their process. Maybe a few people in the biotech industry, I wouldn't know about them but the innovation there with crispr and mrna vaccines and other things seems quite crazy and cool

> There are probably a couple working at Tesla and SpaceX but Elon gets all the credit

Lars Blackmore, Behçet Açikmeşe, and probably a large cast of engineers.