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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

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 the Einstein-level geniuses? Someone in the thread said Whitney Houston, but... uhh, anyone else?

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I believe at least part of the answer is that many of the would be geniuses went into financial services. Ed Thorp and Jim Simons come to mind as examples of people who made important contributions in mathematics, but spent a substantial chunk of their lives figuring out how to take money from people who are dumber than they are.

Our understanding of the world is so advanced that revolutionary changes are bound to be rarer and when they do happen they're understood by a tiny fraction of the population. In fact most people have absolutely no idea what Einstein did. He was indeed a great scientist, but to the average person Einstein is a just an idea of a genius, they were never touched by his work. I studied physics in undergrad and I barely understand anything about GR, though i have some understanding of the historical context so i guess that gives me a bit of appreciation for what he did

> Our understanding of the world is so advanced that revolutionary changes are bound to be rarer

Didn't physicists say exactly the same thing before Einstein?

In fact most people have absolutely no idea what Einstein did

He invented the atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard [1] is generally credited as coming up with the concept of a fission bomb. He enlisted the help of Einstein, who had political clout, to bring it to the attention of the US government [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

Sorry, I should have appended an "/s" to my comment. Einstein is associated in a loose fashion, and therefore by name recognition often credited by laypeople-- to creating the atom bomb, but has much less to do with it than many other people apart from theoretical groundwork related to the energies involved in mass. (to greatly simplify things)

Definitely John von Neumann was one. Argument could be made that he was even smarter

Thelonious Monk said that a genius is someone who is most like himself

It can very well be that we have individuals capable of doing that work but they hate academia. I'm no genius but the only thing I got out of public education is that I don't want to have anything to do with it.

I know an actual genius (recognised by various organisations) and, after doing 5 years of academic life (post graduation), he ended up being a software developer in a mediocre software agency in a country with incredibly low rates for developers.

Public education is just another example where the resource limits that any public solution intrinsically have turn out to invalidate the most useful part of that idea. Sure, we don't have geniuses anymore, scientific research is in shambles, everyone hates school but I'm so grateful that my barista has a degree in political science (which I paid with my taxes).

At the same time, when something public is mainstream and paid by everyone by default via taxes, the private sector has a much harder time. It sucks having to pay for public school even if I don't use it and the lack of choice in private schooling in my country is annoying.

That was me that mentioned Whitney, and I stand by it even more if the definition is "...whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking". It's hard to overstate how important Whitney Houston was for the culture, particularly for black women. I mean just read her wikipedia [1]. Contemporary music just doesn't sound the same without her. She's not often in my personal rotation, but there's just no denying how much she changed, both in music and in the culture in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston

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

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.

I'm not talking about watching videos on the internet. I'm talking about libgen, scihub, MITs entire curriculum for free on the internet, forums and chatrooms to discuss topics with others, and some videos on the internet. And that's just the free ones.

That's still not anywhere near the same though, a tutor is able to figure out what the student is missing through observation and also teach in a way that the student will learn fastest. Whereas any internet resource relies on the student being able to figure out what they themselves don't know and isn't tailor-made for them.

Ramanujan.

Edit: Apologies to user gilleain below who mentioned this first. Should have read a bit more before commenting.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Having a person sit down with you and walk you through everything one on one is great. Having swathes of useful information available to everyone that's interested and determined is a sure way to create a much more highly educated society at a low cost. And as a bonus, geniuses are more able to hone their gifts so you get more of them.

The argument is that 1:1 instruction, or tutoring, is a superior way to acquire knowledge. Having lots of information available is great, but not a substitute.

The discussion here is about an argument that says basically without tutoring you can't create Einsteins. My only point is that we can now make them easier and cheaper than ever because they can make themselves.

On this specific topic, I must admit I do believe 1:1 tutoring is overrated. I've taught myself most of what I know, and the rest I learned in a classroom. I have never had one on one tutoring. I may not be representative of the population, but I bet most people don't need near as much tutoring as a tutor would have you believe, they just need access to accurate and well organized information.

Having a tutor is superior to simply having access to all of the information in the world. The tutor acts as a guide to that information, they structure the presentation of that information to you based on your individual needs which means you can quickly speed through parts that you pick up easily while spending enough time and having a ready source of answers and guidance on problems that you have difficulty with allowing you to master them faster. Sure, someone could reach the same level of understanding with nothing but the internet and motivation but they will arrive there much, much later than someone who is actively tutored from a young age. Think of it as like acceleration to some maximum speed, the one that reaches that speed earlier will be able to go much further during the time allotted. You could see that allotted time as the lifespan of the person but age also affects performance and could result in a drop off in ability over time.

An intelligent person who is privately tutored can be performing at a college level or above when they are in their early teens. They can be at a doctoral level when they hit their twenties and then spend the entirety of their most productive years making use of their education. Compare that to our current educational track which has most people achieving their doctorate in their 30s. Performance for the average autodidact would likely be much worse.

The article isn't about high performers. It is about world-changing genius. If you had a competent tutor, you would progress much faster and much further than you have by yourself.

developments in education technology is actually driving to to do exactly that, personalized learning curriculum designed to expose the user at their own pace and using heuristics to create learning schedules

Except they will fritter their time on fb and tiktok and the other countless distractions online.

Yeah 90% of them will. It's still exceptional, just not limited to those with connections. That still leaves an order of magnitude more people motivated to learn that didn't have the option to before.

> 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.

Claude Shannon. Maybe rms.

Its not that we don't have genius anymore; we simply built a new pantheon out of the geniuses of the day about 150 years ago and then haven't been keeping up with the work of canonizing new members.

Dale Carnegie and Elon Musk get the "demi-god" status, somehow; we know their successes are the work of many others but who but the most obsessed know those names?

Andrew Carnegie drowned half a town before he started building libraries. Drowned as in a lot of people died. For a country club for his rich friends. This still ranks among the top civil engineering disasters in history, over a century later. Don't scrimp on earthen dams, folks.

(the Carnegie library in my old neighborhood is a bar. I don't know if the town lowered the main roads or they built the library on a hill in town on purpose, but it sticks out like a pretentious, sore thumb now.)

Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the industrialist Andrew Carnegie?

Dale Carnegey changed the spelling of his name to match Andrew's.

Yes, thank you. Shows which is more important I guess.

Is there a reason no one is talking about Hawking? If I had to pull a recently deceased genius off the top of my head, he would be it.

I've thought about this a lot. There are really only a few names that come to mind that I would call world class geniuses, but generally Jim Simons of Renaissance [0] tops the list for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

Was he tutored? I also thought of Ed Thorp. But he was NOT tutored. He was kind of an autodidact according to his memoir. He had good teachers too, but not aristocratic tutoring by any stretch.

Norbert Wiener, famous child prodigy in his own time, founded Cybernetics among other things.

> Leo (Norbert's Father) had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener#Youth

Same with Stafford Beer, a brilliant, incredibly radical beauty of a human being.

In the arts there are plenty of "geniuses", Miles Davis is one.

The arts is also one area where one on one tutoring is still extremely common if not the defacto method of education. e.g. music lessons, "musical families", mentorship from fellow band members.

Bob Dylan

Elon Musk in the niche field of government contracting for space flight is the closest I can think of.

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