Blog posts for me but not for thee?
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 reading this mega-tome about the guilded age right now and I promise you this is not true.
That is maybe the single most dubious statistic I've seen thrown out so offhandedly in my entire time on HN.
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.
Breakthroughs aren't made by lone geniuses anymore. We just have that superhero fetish eg. picture of black hole where credit was practically given to that one woman in the picture.
Bell labs was extremely successful (at least on the innovation front) not due to lone geniuses, but due to a large collection of very smart people all collaborating together.
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).
I think there is merit to this argument, but right now most US public education actively restrains geniuses via excessive busywork and limited to no access to accelerated programs.
Many/most of our geniuses are lost in the web of mediocrity that currently expends a ridiculous amount of resources on bringing the lowest performers up to a higher level of low (and imho still inadequate) performance.
Some folks don’t want to be educated. For anything beyond basic reading, writing, math, and civics knowledge and skills, that should be ok.
What's the title? Sounds interesting.
by Richard White
In the interview he said that there's no such thing as cycles in history (pace Spengler). Instead there are unresolved issues that keep bubbling up over generations. That completely describes America's problems with racism, starting with the original sin of slavery. States rights is another example. The gilded age illustrates many others.
I was sold on the book based on that 30 seconds of the interview alone.
However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:
https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-r...
Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equatio...
> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."
Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.
Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.
As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.
Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.
Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.
If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.
I hear some tech workers complain that their days are made ineffective by lots of pointless meetings.
What?
Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.
I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.
His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.
We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.
I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but who knows. My attention was trash and still getting worse.
Of course you're learning about others' crown achievements, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. And things got way more complicated, there's so much to know that it's hard to remember. Especially if you use social media, always some shit there that you'll shove in your memory instead of useful things heh.
Most new things are a spin on the old, it might've been easier to discover/stumble upon something genuinely new 100+ years ago.
Without it folks might end up pigeonholed into whatever their family does or a narrow selection of trades within the local community.
All of which is usually covered by 8th grade in the US.
HS is a waste for most people attending.
1) The baseline is extremely low, and getting lower by the year
I will take math as an example. High school, at the best possible setting, leaves you knowing single variable calculus.
Is this enough? no, it's nearly zero. To be able to understand anything about math in the modern age, you have to know :
- Formal logic
- Linear Algebra and Differential Equations at 4x courses or more level
- Probability and statistics, 2 or 3 courses.
So all in all, in order to even think intelligently about a field like math, in order to have any chance at all of even comprehending the slightest inkling of what all those scientists and engineers and ML practitioners who impact your life massively even do, you have to know easily 10x of what high school, in the best possible scenario, teaches you.
Then one year passes, science, math and engineering get more complex, and high school curriculum and budgets get lower and lower, and the race to the bottom continues.
You can repeat this exercise for any subject : Ask a specialist what's the bare, absolute minimum for anyone to think or reason effectively about their subject, compare their answer to the K12 curricula for that subject, and laugh at the sheer mismatch of the two.
2) The baseline is redundant and wasteful
The sheer waste is mind boggling, all of my K12 education could be easily compressed in 6 years of study. Lessons are repeated over and over again each year, irrelevant subjects like the agricultural policy of Brazil and Nigeria are stuffed in overweight geography curriculums for no apparent reason (my country is neither of those 2), the English language's way of annotating verbs with tenses is rehashed for the 7th time this year.
There is no concept of opportunity cost, there is no awareness of a notion of "What could I teach this kid this year instead of yet another rehashing of the names of the world's most popular rivers and mountains?".
3) The baseline is low quality, low relevance and low impact
Programming is memorizing visual basic's or php's basic syntax, math is learning a formula and repeatedly applying it over and over again to questions with parameters varied, biology is memorizing the reasons of why various phenomena happen.
It's not only that what gets teached is a pathetically small subset of what needs to be teached, and not only that it's teached in 2x the time needed with metric tons of mindless repetition and rehashing. It's that even this small subset that is teached and re-teached, is teached in the most boring, unmemorable, uninspiring, useless and actively harmful way possible.
It's not a good baseline, people leave it not knowing a single worthwhile thing about anything or - even worse - actively thinking those subjects are useless pontifications and navel-gazing. It does an awful lot of harm and virtually 0 good, when you divide by the time and resources it consume .
Granted, children are not necessarily trustable to figure it all out on their own. It’s more the bullying, anti-intellectualism, and generally not considering their needs that needs checking.
We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.
Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.
All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!
We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.
I don’t have any particularly rare skills either, and I made peace with that long ago. It helps you like yourself for what you do have.
Notice how cynical the tone is of the parent comment. It’s usually a sign that something is wrong.
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.
But to be fair: he was smarter than most people.
But since it's about science, and revolutioning it on too of that, claiming there was nothing special about Einstein make little sense.
There are various monied interests trying to "disrupt higher education". "Progress studies," "Thiel Fellowships," "University of Austin," whatever. I give them low odds but they're trying to do the right thing.
Potential for genuine innovation seems to be in improving collective intelligence. Coordination between institutions, disciplines, communication, and so forth. There's not a day that passes without complaints about how academia, the private sector, the economy and the government don't get along. Fix that and you'll improve innovations.
This Randian hero worship of the VC industry is masturbation and I don't mind the tone of the article because I don't think the message is understood if you'd say it in any other way.
Historically, it was sort of a given that a man's career was supported by the labor of a wife. This assumption is baked into how we design jobs and it's problematic in a world where that's less true than it once was.
If you don't count hidden contributions of that sort, you will never figure out some reproducible formula.
What’s the source for that claim? This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.
No, it doesn't link to a comment by me at all. It links to an HN discussion of the article about that very topic. It just so happens my comment is the top comment there which I didn't remember when I went looking for it.
Stop working at work and code what you want.
a good rule of thumb I like is to downplay the opinions of famous people who tweet more than 3 times a day
Read the article, wanting to hate it, found it to be a pleasant surprise. I didn’t love the style at first, but eventually I was able to look beyond that.
Also rants trigger reactions easily.
My general advice remains the same: raise good children.
I’d say Lex Fridman is in his equivalent of a miracle year, or was last year anyway. Keeping the body tuned is important for mental ability which is important if you’re trying to be productive at all, much more to achieve a miracle year.
We see echoes of this philosophy in our culture of belief in 10x engineers. I see it in Jeff Bezos' management philosophy of doubling down on success or in Google's philosophy of killing off under-performing projects. It is the mantra of VC capitalism where we'd rather kill middling projects that are limping along in the hopes or redirecting capital to the one 100x return behemoth.
I find Rand's ideas repugnant myself but I always admired that she plainly and unabashedly spoke them. Nowadays people who believe that kind of stuff are much more subtle.
And like all things capitalism tries to commoditise, to the extent it succeeds it will degrade the thing it’s trying to reproduce and destroy whatever is unique and special and wonder-worthy about the original. A genius had a super productive year for discoveries? It should be self-evident that such a thing can’t be made routine or predictable, but the real story here is the paucity of vision of our entrepeneurs. They can’t even appreciate miracles without thinking about turning them out on a production line.
