91–100 of 169 posts
The miracle year will be when we will stop obsessing about success so much. Must be a perceived lack of love. So: Love your kids better, that's how you produce future miracle years.
I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human. We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures o…
He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture.
He was also simply primed with being a person of the right kind of potential being in the right place in the right time.
In short, it was very much luck that enabled him. He also worked hard, he was also quite capable, but the hero exceptional human narrative was overdone.
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It's... a joke. Yikes.
What’s the punchline?
Relax stranger, there's no weird Freudian argument to be found here.
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I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.
That seems worthless if they find their own way to knowledge outside of the schools. I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.
The current system is terrible for genius kids' emotional and social development, and in some important ways it hobbles them. (Particularly when it comes to encouraging them to develop resiliency, accept that sometimes they need help, and develop their own sense of self-worth rather than derive it from the accolades of the adults around them).
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What’s the punchline?
You're projecting a lot of weird insecurities onto a throwaway joke about Einstein being an alien because his achievements were Out Of This World. Clearly no one thinks Einstein was an actual alien. It's remarkable that I'm actually having to type this out. Relax stranger, there's no weird Freudian argument to be found here.
If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine. But it’s not up to everyone else.
I think joining a YC startup to disrupt the food industry is a pretty interesting thing. Most people spend their lives not disrupting anything at all. It doesn’t make them worse people, but it would be nice if they’d not snipe at people who do those things.
I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human. We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures o…
Einstein wasn’t that special, he wasn’t superhuman, if you transported the same person in time significantly he would have likely been entirely unremarkable. He had many contemporaries just as capable with complements equally as impressive. He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture. He was also simply primed with being a…
> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me. > Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. I'm readi…
I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.
Being smart certainly helps, but you also need the right opportunities, environment, and colleagues to “produce” science. These all feed back onto each other in complicated ways: funding gives you time and space to work on tough problems, which attracts talented colleagues, who can make you yourself smarter and thus able to attract more funding and more colleagues…and so on. This works the other way too: a funding squeeze limits what you can work on (if anything), etc.
I can certainly believe that it looks like a power law, but I doubt “intrinsic ability”, insofar as that’s even a thing, has a similar distribution.
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I’m talking specifically about stuff like the discovery of gravity or electricity, not the very important and significant inventions that aren’t really a step change. The number of people who make these discoveries may even be hundreds or thousands but that is vanishingly small on a planet of billions of people.
Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.
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You're projecting a lot of weird insecurities onto a throwaway joke about Einstein being an alien because his achievements were Out Of This World. Clearly no one thinks Einstein was an actual alien. It's remarkable that I'm actually having to type this out. Relax stranger, there's no weird Freudian argument to be found here.
I wasn’t talking about your Einstein portion. Your whole comment was cynical. If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine. But it’s not up to everyone else. I think joining a YC startup to disrupt the food industry is a pretty interesting thing. Most people spend their lives not disrupting anything at all. It doesn’t make them worse people, but it would be nice if they’d not snipe at people who do those things.
You have nothing to discuss which is why there isn't a discussion to be had here. You attacked me with an incredibly weird reaction to joking about Einstein being an alien, then doubled down and demanded I explain humor to you.
Both articles are devoid of any actual substance, I'm sorry to have brought this to your attention.
> Delete the draft of that blog post you were writing. The post sucks and no one was going to read it anyways. Blog posts for me but not for thee?