Childhoods of Exceptional People
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.
We sent them to various sports but my youngest found football via watching the World Cup, my eldest found swimming as we went surfing and he wanted to be better.
Their choices. We just facilitate.
I don't think providing them stimulus and opportunity is you finding it for them. Giving your child access to interesting people across various fields ensures they can learn about various intellectual pursuits. Treating them as a person with real ideas to consider ensures that they'll have the confidence to engage in the real-world as a peer. Giving them freedom and "down time" to explore their own ideas actually give them the time to find their own path.
Think of it as a vector, you can let them pick the direction, but you can ensure that they go far in that direction. They don't have to be a world-class mathematician, even being a well-respected local teacher is exceptional.
I think no matter what you do it will have a deterministic effect on your kid. If you're more responsive than deterministic they'll observe you for cues of who/what you have the most respect or adoration for and maybe seek to emulate it (or if they're rebellious, spite it). There's a fine line and moderation is important as with everything of course.
Personally I would have chosen this unflattering label for people who were pushed from birth into a particular career path and just followed along.
I understand the sentiment that chasing happiness without "purpose" or consideration to the world around you might make someone vain and hedonistic but I don't think that applies to being career driven. I do think a strong career drive (esp. external) will not make you happy, and may even be a source of discontentment.
I think the submitted article tried to make clear that just being a gifted child isn't sufficient to become a "genius", and favorable circumstances play a big role in turning giftedness into exceptional accomplishment.
Thus, wouldn't the same apply to happiness? Even if there were natural predilections toward happiness, circumstances can play a big role too in bringing the predilections to fruition.
Perhaps one needs to be "tutored" about how to become happy.
Those chasing happiness are usually unhappy https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/laurie-santos/
Are these people more satisfied with their lives? Do they feel their life is meaningful and worthwhile?
Victor Frankl might argue that meaning and purpose are more important and entirely orthogonal to "success".
I think this helps make it clear that any single goal can compromise overall health, even if along that dimension you're exceptional.
Some people would say that's very far.
You're creating a false dichotomy. People can be both exceptional and happy. Parents do sometimes create unhappiness by trying to force their children to be exceptional at something the child isn't interested in, but you don't have to do that. You can let the child develop and follow their natural interests and support them without trying to force them to be something they're not.
Depends what number cab he got!
However, tutoring your child intensely is obviously important and will result in good outcomes
The CEO of TurboTax makes the US worse by leading a company that lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can remain an expensive middle man. A line cook is doing infinitely more good for the world.
Also, you say:
> More like an optimization for a small set of people.
As if that's a bad thing or a not-as-worth-it thing. But this is what a lot of software is. I personally work with schools, and one of the things I do is create tools to make teachers and school administrators more efficient and effective at their jobs. It's a fairly small subset of people that I'm helping, but I believe I make their lives a little bit better by providing them better tools that are time-saving.
Is what I'm creating less valuable than a line-cook? I don't think so.
I've often wondered why 'the market' doesn't understand that if garbage men disappeared, my city would look like a hellscape in a week. Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the market. I didn't understand this either until I (self-) studied a bit of economics.
The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
The answer to this led us eventually to the theory of supply and demand. Sure, without garbage workers, the city would be terrible. That's why we pay them. But the supply of garbage workers is apparently much larger than the supply of e.g. software engineers. If you have 100 people who can do one job, vs. person who can do the other job, that 1 person has a lot more leverage and you have to pay them more. Even if both jobs are equally important.
That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
> My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it. I think it's really true that one Einstein contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. One software engineer contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. And so on. It's mostly due to scale effects - one garbage worker can only do so much. One software engineer does a lot more because their work is easily duplicated and scaled and affects a lot more people.
> The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
Would people pay more for diamonds if they were dying of thirst? People pay more for diamonds vs. water only if the water problem is already handled. The economy is such a complex model of every interaction that I find it disingenuous to base the assumption that market rate == usefulness on pure theory.
> That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
In this particular circumstance, no. He's a lot harder to replace in terms of quality and knowledge than I am in my current team. We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
> It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play? If we'd be designing for the real world like we study physics in high school (no friction, perfect spheres...) there'd be a lot of difference between the theory and practice. I'm not sure why people suggest economy is otherwise.
> That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it.
Likewise. We can agree to disagree. But taking politics aside, I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
I believe it is simply useful for many people to be able to state textbook economic orthodoxy as "a fact", even if it is almost trivially broken (as the supply and demand curve story is on many levels) or historically wrong (as the fable of money arising from barter). This lets people justify all weaknesses of the current economic system by simply saying "It may suck, but this is what it is, a law of nature. We can change it about as well as we can reverse gravity. Conform, and propose no change."
Might be me which is just cynic though.
I agree, but I think this is also generally true. It really is true that a garbage worker is generally less valuable on a societal level than a software engineer (in terms of work output - they might be far more valuable for other things which are just as important!)
> We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
Look, that's true of a lot of software that gets written. There is a lot of waste. For sure if you look back and see that lots of code written was never used, that code in particular wasn't better for society than something more concrete.
But I look at it like with science. Lots of scientists are conducting research that won't ever pan out, doing experiments that end up going nowhere, etc. Was that value-less for society? I don't think so. If we could know ahead of time what would work and what wouldn't, then of course that wouldn't be valuable. But throwing out 100 bad ideas and ending up with a lightbulb is still worth it for society, and the markets react as such.
In your case - the reason VCs even have that money is because in the long run, given enough bets, they make money back, which for the most part translates into "they created enough value." Even if individual bets ended up not mattering.
> The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play?
Oh for sure there's a lot of distortions, both for good and ill. No argument there.
I just think that for the most part things are correct and adhere to the economic theory, and outliers are relatively rare. As opposed to
> I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
Ahah, funny but true. This btw is itself the result of regulations - if people were free to e.g. change countries as much as they wanted, fairly rapidly wage gaps like this would disappear, which would be good for the world IMO. At least economically speaking.
The VCs get the money from their limited partners. As a rule the VCs don't have meaningful skin in the game. They invest other people's money and get paid a percentage of the money they invest. They don't reinvest their winnings either, that money goes back to the LPs!
Most VCs are also pretty bad at their jobs. They're totally undifferentiated, are not able to recognize great startups, and don't have much to offer to founders. You wouldn't expect an industry with those characteristics to do very well. VC investment is much riskier than investment in some boring 60/40 stock bond portfolio, so venture as an industry has a high hurdle to clear if they want to deliver superior risk adjusted returns.
How many venture bets in the past 15 years have produced companies that will become the next Google or Microsoft or Apple or Facebook? Zero. It's those winners that make the venture business work on paper, and when they don't show up for a decade the entire industry is in the red.
You can postulate that venture must be profitable because otherwise how could it possibly exist. But if nobody is investing their own money (not the VCs, not the LPs, not the startup founders) you're not going to get an efficient market.
And so does one Putin. Your point about scale is valid but the implied value judgement of choosing Einstein is not (whether you intended that or not, choosing Einstein ensures everyone will read it that way).
One software developer or engineer working for a big nasty corporation like Shell or Facebook does create more change in the world than one garbage collector, undoubtedly. But it's fully possible for the change they create to be entirely negative. An engineer who creates a faster rainforest cutting machine, for example, or a better method of catching fish that results in destruction of an ecosystem, or a developer who writes ever more sneaky ways to invade your privacy. More change does not equal more value.
cf the ur-example of Thomas Midgely Jr[1] who developed leaded gasoline (bad) and then went onto CFCs (bad).
Maybe it's because "the market" believes you would be a garbage man if there weren't enough garbage men, because the price of garbage men would exceed what you were willing to pay for it.
That one doesn't trouble me as much as this one:
> Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
Now is it so much easier to hire people to electrify a country than to hire nerds to make cool shit?
Maybe so... Some of these big tech companies have massive headcounts and rarely (if ever) make anything cool after the first thing that made them rich. How big is your cousins' team and how many electricians are there in your country?
But one day, everyone will want to be a programmer... what will happen then?
I saw this in Toronto 15 years ago! It was not pretty.
Only in this case, why should we think the market value is the only thing to care about? Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
As I said somewhere else, water is far more valuable than diamonds. But selling water doesn't earn you nearly as much.
That's not a sign of the "market value" being different than "everyday value". That's a sign that water is plentiful, so however much you want and need water, me selling you water is not really helping you - you can just go get water yourself.
> Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
Of course. And it's sometimes wrong. We have lots of rules and regulations that try to make the market more in line with other things we care about.
But you do have to provide an alternative. And I know of no better mechanism than markets to, in general, give a price to something. Almost everything else is flawed and/or biased in some way.
And btw, parent comment wasn't providing a nice justification for why the pay of consultants is flawed - it was just quipping that they are clearly not worth the money. Which is offensive to me, I dislike just writing off a whole profession. That's why I asked for clarification!
About consultants (the MBB/B4 kind), all I can really say is that they tend to confess on their own that they don't provide much value. Everyone I know in the profession seems to say so. They find it utterly baffling that 23 year olds can be rented out at about 6x their salary to do presentations to managers with decades of experience. They often tell you that they are simply rubber stamping some internal decision with some nice slides, and that the slides have no real insights.
There doesn't have to be a contradiction either, it may well be that these guys are scarce like diamonds, but also like diamonds, they aren't really valuable in another sense.
OP specifically mentioned Mckinsey consultants, i.e. "advice givers" and PPT generators who mainly exist to provide cover for higher ups. I'm inclined to agree with them.
It’s merely an illustrative example to stoke the broader question of “are people who are more highly paid actually more useful to society?”
The market has really bad metrics when it comes to contributions. One can see it very well with entertainment for example. What do people like MrBeast exactly do other than simply specialise in creating viral videos and therefore wasting the time of millions on individuals?
People like MrBeast! That's why he's successful. What is he actually doing? Creating entertainment for people. It might not be your cup of tea, but there's no inherent difference between what he's doing and what Shakespeare did. One generation ago people lamented reality tv, before that tv in general, there was a time that books were considered bad, etc.
This is exactly why a market mechanism is good! Because I don't want your views, or mine, to be what decides whether something is "worth it". You and I have different tastes, and we have different tastes to millions of other people, we shouldn't get to decide what they find valuable - they should.
What's the principled difference except that you like one and don't like the other? Or that society considers one "valuable" and the other less so?
Do I think MrBeast is doing anything as deep and rich as Shakespeare? No, I don't. But I don't think I get to make that choice for other people. I love reading fantasy novels and think they are often every bit as deep as Shakespeare, sometimes more so. Many people in the world look down on that and think they're not as valuable as "real literature". Luckily, I get to decide what's good and what isn't, what's valuable and what isn't.
this is just obvious wrong allocation of resources in the market.
But assuming that's what parent was talking about (since that's the only thing they mentioned) - the market is sometimes wrong, for sure, but not as a general rule. If someone is earning a lot of money, they are giving some value that is worth it to the company that is paying them. More money = more value.
This doesn't always track with "contributions to society", because you can do things like e.g. stealing, which "gets you money" but doesn't contribute to society.
But consultancies as a general rule aren't stealing, they aren't as a general rule doing unethical things, etc. They are, for the most part, helping businesses. And that help is worth real money. This isn't theoretical either - if a consultant helps a business be more efficient in some process, that means real money to the company, which means real-world additional wealth is generated, which is a good thing.
The parent just made a quip because (I imagine) they think consultancies are a waste of money. And sometimes they are! But c'mon, I've known plenty of good, smart people working as consultants and I wouldn't want to jokingly quip that their job is meaningless. It's not worthy of a site like HN where we try to actually talk about things thoughtfully and critically.
In a capitalist society, these are basically competing entities seeking to maximise their own profits. This entails minimising expenses. That is, in capitalist society, businesses work to charge as much as possible, give back as little value as possible, and put as much pressure on their suppliers as possible to lower prices.
The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
The majority of societies that have tried anything different were/are significantly worse for the average person. That seems like more than a little substantiation.
Consider the extent of human societies that have existed, what it is that we know of them and through what lens we know of them. What do we mean by the words "significantly worse"? Where does this idea of "worse" stem from? And let's not forget the average person. How do we measure what's good for this average person?
Sorry for the random remarks your comment caught my eye for some reason. The point here isn't for some bogus relativism but merely to state the obvious, that the human condition can be far more complicated than we give it credit.
All the reasons you say businesses suck are also the reasons why they work well. They need to react instantly to market pressures. If someone is making something no one wants they will crumble, if a new demand springs up businesses will instantly be created to meet it. I can't think of another system that is instantly responsive to a changing world and doesn't require much oversight.
I can make the theoretical argument all day, but really, we've lived in a world that has done this experiment for us. I look at capitalist countries, I look at communist countries, and I think it's pretty clear which ones are better to live in.
Yeah the chasm is much bigger than that.
We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.
There’s a lot that goes into you being able to “do nothing” / be present / mindful / enjoy the moment.
Many exceptional people sacrificed their happiness to build the world that you can enjoy. And if you want that to continue, many more will have to do the same.
On the other hand, many exceptional people sacrificed your happiness to build the world they they can enjoy.
A way of being that constantly re-emphasizes that way of being. Super-linear growth that doesn't stall out or crumble when external motivation is absent.
If everyone a person cared about was taken away, I can’t convince myself that they’ll still have the motivation to perform the same way they did before
It seems to have emerged that way to drive evolution / progress.
In order for happiness to be sustained, you need economic / technological / societal growth. Who do you think is capable of producing that? Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?
This is the basic problem of what is our purpose. There's no definite answer. What if it's better to optimize towards having no unhappy people rather than average happiness?
There is a certain level of talent x struggle needed to get to the next frontier.
If everyone decided to not suffer in pursuit of excellence and simply work on iterating on what we have, the rate of growth needed to sustain our happiness will never come.
As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.
/mylife off
What are you left with when you are raised on one specific value system and reality proves you’re not going to excel in that system?
We need to teach our children to have a variety of value systems, and that, of all of those, their academic or professional performance is not the priority.
Have fall back in place, that's also where rich and supportive parents come : blow money on different endeavors without sacrifying school. Study end goals for what the kid wants to do, how to achieve these outcomes, what are the best paths, support the kids etc etc.
If we speak about sport at a professional level, an injury can kill a career, but still, if the "kid" is at a professional level, he has other means to be still successful in any cases, being resilient is also a skill.
(a) A lot of encouragemeent to explore things, and the benefit of family members in the sciences
(b) My family teaching me a healthy attitude of not caring what others think too much
I was never pushed. I was always told just to do whatever I wanted....so I think those two elements are crucial, since I grew up never caring whether I "succeeded" or "failed".
1) Wanting to be ultra-wealthy is arguably a vice rather than a virtue. A form of gluttony. It doesn't make you a better person.
2) Hardly anyone is prepared for the massive, sudden change in lifestyle brought by winning the lottery. Not to mention that everyone you ever knew, and also people you never knew, suddenly want a piece of you and your newfound money.
We talk a lot about big lottery winners, because it's fun to imagine, but it would honestly be better for most people to win $10K or $100K rather than winning $10M or $100M. You can improve their lives without radically changing their lives, which can be a curse rather than a blessing.
Unless you already have a very specific idea of what you would do with lottery winnings, e.g., start a business or foundation that required $X million in capital, a newfound giant pile of unanticipated money doesn't necessarily do you good. Money needs a purpose.
Tons of money alone is not a guarantee of happiness, there's a cutoff of income beyond which happiness maxes out. Getting seriously ill can of course induce depressive traits, however I've just seen a documentary about using psychedelics for cancer patients and it did improve their lives significantly, although not curing cancer itself.
If you were miserable before winning the lottery, the money probably won't change that. If you have a bright outcome on life before getting cancer, you're more likely to cope and stay happy.
If the form of education we receive today was not widespread or present in their lives, and their dominant form of education did not have any statistically significant benefit in cultivating people to be exceptional, we would still see the same phenomenon that the post author has observed, that exceptional people mostly emerged from the dominant form of education system that they had.
But what do I know. I’m not officially high IQ enough to blindly assert that my personal biases are valid a priori because I’m smart.
If you think he should have considered and controlled for something, say why explicitly.
"The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies."
No, dude, parents often have to go to work and don't have the means to hire a private tutor. Most don't have a grandparent around neither.
One colleague was arguing that the standard school system was very destructive to children and alternative schools were doing a much better job making them able to think. However, she also said she is sending her children to a standard school because of the cost and complexity. In other conversations, she mentioned that her neighbor complained about the noise of their private pool cleaning system, which is still an ongoing problem, or how going skydiving was a great experience.
There is a lack of self awareness in how "doing like normal people do" is influential to most people. People work for shit they don't need, and don't really think what is going to bring them happiness.
What do you even think "people like you" is? I would return the question but you seem to have already answered that in the 'about' of your profile.
The author made the case that history's geniuses practically all had private tutoring and that the lack of private tutoring may explain today's lack of apparent geniuses. What was the selection process that he ignored? And how does the lack of that selection process recognition hurt the author's argument?
To me it feels he wrote the conclusions first and then picked the people to support his theory.
Parents these days are stressed, two breadwinner families are the norm, adding child rearing to this is asking two people to do the work of three. Overworked parents would rather shoot the messenger proclaiming that they could / should have put more thought and energy into their kids' upbringing. It's an uncomfortable idea that the thing that has been sacrificed to maintain our two car lifestyle lies somewhere between our child's ears.
The hard part is of course finding people with roughly the same child raising values as you and your partner, but then again, is that that much harder than finding a life romantic partner with roughly the same child raising values as you? I think most people don't even do that, in my experience a lot of people and couples are totally winging it and marriages occur out of convenience or necessity.
But frankly in past generations for the vast majority investment in the education and development of children was almost non-existent. treating children seriously and investing in their development was a luxury only a few could afford, and only a tiny few of them bothered to do so.
Nowadays with universal public education the base level of education of most children is orders of magnitude better resourced, but of course still fairly generic. We just don't bother to add much on top of that, mostly.
While abundance has increased, so have the burdens on the parent. Both of them have to get jobs, there's no longer a grandmother in the house to help with the cooking and cleaning, the community is more individualistic so you can't just have someone watch out for your child for a couple hours.
And on top of that the constant app distractions that keep you from focusing on your children create a completely different set of challenges than what our grandparents had.
For example, do you think the US has an obesity problem and Japan doesn't because, by pure chance, there are far more people who "choose" to eat unhealthy in the US?
Reducing this to “choices” ignores the cultural reality surrounding those choices, and obscures that while they may not be bounded by hard imposed limits, they’re still effectively limits for many people.
On the other hand - a lot of the benefits of increased productivity from more women entering the workforce have gone to skyrocketing costs in the housing, healthcare and higher education sectors.
Imagine a game where every adult earns the same wage, there are 10 homes for rent and 11 families bidding on them. The equilibrium would be all adults in all families working, as they couldn't make rent without it.
The "resource" for raising multiple children in their grandparents' world was a stay-at-home mother
The resource for raising multiple children now is tons of cash
So did my wifes' and pretty much everyone in that generation that I know of.
They didn't travel or party much that's for sure.
FTFY
People with least resources breed most.
At least among the middle class income range, extra money don't cause extra children.
People choose "better life" in lieu of procreation.
All that aside, my family is doing something like you're describing. We do come out ahead but not by much. Some women genuinely want to work outside the home, and the kids are at school anyway.
A pretty decent example of motivated reasoning by someone complaining about someone else's motivated reasoning.
It may be true that a lot of exceptional people were taken seriously by their parents and given serious responsibilities, but I think that also may be due to the parents realizing that their children were exceptional. If you have a child who's closer to average intellect, you might not get the same outcome.
It's also possible that these approaches just increase the variance of outcomes. So it might be that they generate exceptional people 1% of the time, but generate miserable people who accomplish nothing 99% of the time.
I don't think that this is likely to be true to that magnitude, and I think a lot of the advice seems pretty good intuitively (I feel like being treated seriously by my parents when I was young was a big benefit), but am curious if there is any more data-driven approach to the question of how to best raise your kids.
1) wealthy family
2) motivated and involved parents
3) very bright kids
Some people are born with an innate gift for math (or music, or whatever else). And the location and circumstances these people are born into are not correlated to anything. As far as we can tell, they are as likely to be born in a slum in India as they are in Cambridge (UK or Massachusetts, take your pick).
Therefore, we should strive to make opportunities available to everyone as much as possible so anyone, anywhere, born with such gifts can make the fullest use of them possible (should they choose to).
I’m all for meritocracy, but we should strive so that most people can succeed in parallel to a good family life. So that the children are balanced and loved, and we have a second generation who’s even better.
But it seems, when asking if it can still be reproduced nowadays, no one here mentions the negative factors, the "inhibitors".
I think social medias, tv (less nowadays), an education system less focused on core knowledge and more on "social" trivia, without mentioning a society that just is/seems giving less praise to smart people or intellectual achievements is not a soil from where geniuses can grow.
People love to mention "low hanging fruits" but for music, philosophy or writing, there are no "low hanging fruits", yet I hope no one is gonna question the fact we don't see new Platos, Mozart or Hugos emerging...
So to answer your question let me ask you one : do you think the names you quoted will still be remembered (and influential) in 100yrs? 1000yrs ? Sam Harris hype already faded after a couple of years and he said nothing special than Mark Twain didn't already say in "what is Man?".
If by "culture" & "orders of magnitude bigger" you are referring to the amount of music,books, ... produced every year : I see it like noise or pollution, making it even more difficult to find potential gems.
But I can agree genius didn't leave the world : it is just that the people who would have been found by institutions or who would have had more incentives to show their work are "out of phase" with modern society and "gone underground".
First, it postulates that "if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field". I don't think this is obvious at all. Exceptional achievement is often attained through a unique combination of individual traits and random luck, which it is not necessarily useful to study or trying to replicate. As an example, people who have attained extreme wealth have often done so by being very lucky at very concentrated financial bets, and this is definitely not an approach that it is advisable to mimic. In the same vein, the article talks about home schooling and exposing children to exceptional circumstances, which sounds like it may increase the volatility more than the mean.
Second, it fails to run the reasoning through Bayes rule. The relevant question is not whether exceptional people have certain traits or experiences in common, per se. The more relevant question is whether these traits and experiences make you more or less likely to become exceptional than people who don't share those traits and experiences. For that, you also need a sense of the prevalence of these traits and experiences, and associated outcomes, in the broader population.
Currently, we are in Spain, the salaries we have are very good for here, but the economy is the worst in the EU by far, docs and lawyers earn barely more than 2300 Euro net after graduating, I really like Spain, but perhaps the kids chances for the future would be severly inhibited going to school here. We are solid upper middle class here.
The other option would be Switzerland, but we would be lower middle class or worse there. Switzerland does have what I think is the best education system, with some caveats, its very competitive and if youre slow, youll be delegated into a low performer segment which will prevent you from attending faculty(you can qualify for this later). University cost is cheap, actually, even at the renomated ETH Zurich.
The 3rd option would be Colombia, there we would be top tier class and the kid would have a privileged upbringing and education. The country is a bit dangerous and a private university costs more than the ETH. Jobs are scarce in Colombia, many people with masters and doctorates can be without a job for months or years and the pay is worse than Spain. Many dentists and such leave for Europe only to work in a fish fabric or some other no skill job.
4th option is UK, I only like London there, but it is definitelly too dear and we would get the worst bang for the buck, so to say. I consider the UK education as fantastic, if you make it to university.
I have lived and worked in all the places and I wonder if 15 to 20 years from now most jobs will be remote, or at least accessible to most.
Any feedback and input from you people would be greatly appreciated.
I do not want to make the kid exceptional, unconditional love and best possible upbringing is my goal.
Exceptional kids often come at a very heavy price.
The parallel is that I am aiming at something below excellence and how the world is changing.I think the paths of the past are npt necessarily as rigid any more, some things have changed and fully copying others success paths does not guarantee results, there should be some flexibility I think.
Looking back at the way its changed since I finished education, things are changing slow, only Covid made an artificial push forcing companies to start accepting remote intverviews from a to z and remote work.
I am just wondering if Paris and the suburbs would be as expensive as London, I will compare the relevant costs.
That probably removes the biggest barrier.
> I am just wondering if Paris and the suburbs would be as expensive as London, I will compare the relevant costs.
Why go to Paris? Southern France is much friendlier and the weather is great.
Housing is more expensive than Europe generally though and universities are more expensive, but you get massively more support generally in UK universities from my impression (my sister is doing a degree in Austria and the contrast is striking; I've worked quite a bit with academics at various European universities so my impression also comes from talking to them).
But you need to be happy too with wherever you are. Unhappy parents will probably have a bigger impact than anything else.
Choosing a school is important, but not as important as choosing a uni imo.
If I had to guess, the reason is much of the low hanging fruit has been picked. Progress is much more incremental and hard, building on a huge body of technical existing literature. Being the next Einstein means you have to learn everything Einstein knew, plus another 100 years on top of that. Tons of papers on arXiv to go through. Lots of dense math.
This would of course be uneven, depending on the maturity of the field.
That is, did he not also have to master the existing material of the day using the woeful tools of the late 19th and earliest 20th century?
He had neither the internet nor Anki cards to help him learn anything.
I do not think the problem is one of low-hanging fruit
The reason the Nobel committee did not just give him the award for relativity was because until 1919, there was no way to experimentally verify relativity theory, and then in 1919 when it was experimentally verified, there was a significant increase in anti-semitism following the end of the first World War and a great deal of hesitation to award it to Einstein for what was considered an incredibly complex theory that few people could understand.
Because of that, a compromise was reached, and Einstein would receive a deferred award for the photoelectric effect, which was much less contentious. But everyone understood that Einstein had won the award for his work on relativity.
Have we stopped though? Not to put living people on a pedestal but people like Terence Tao come to mind.
However, I have always thought that the answer to the question "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. The 'ease of discovery' for breakthroughs in science and math are on a some sort of a non-linear curve, and they aren't getting easier.
Influencers with no factual knowledge but a strong opinion gather eyeballs and sell ads much better than a scientist with a nuanced opinion and a difficult niche topic to talk about.
It also doesn't help that the general public in the west is somewhat hostile towards the idea that other people might be a lot more intelligent than they themselves. It's like the temporarily embarrassed billionaires, but for IQ.
And it's not what you know that matters for fame, it's how good you are at selling yourself. Well, either that, or you get very lucky and the media picks up your story.
You can see a possible example of a genius getting media coverage in a niche area by looking at Kaze Emanuar and his Super Mario 64 mods. He's basically the best programmer for the system in the world right now, and has almost singlehandedly moved the community forward on every technical level possible.
His works also get a ton of coverage.
Yet I had never heard about him before. And while I could find a hackaday article, I didn't find anything more mainstream. So I would estimate that 99.9% of the population will never hear about him.
Could the 'mainstream' media cover every genius or great creator? Probably not, there wouldn't be enough room. There are so many great people creating works and making discoveries that you likely won't ever know about more than 1% of them, at most.
...but I'm not convinced any of them are low-hanging fruit. Almost everything on this list would require sustained R&D across several fields of expertise, and many of them have the significant added challenge of overcoming entrenched interests / power structures.
That's not to say we shouldn't try! Solving even a small part of anything here would materially improve quality of life for a lot of people - but these are not "I could solve this in a weekend" problems; these are generational problems, towards which meaningful effort could easily be measured in thousands of person-years from entire teams / organisations / ecosystems of smart people, and where even a chance at success would require a steady supply of adequate resources that is durable across periodic economic shocks.
CERN is the closest thing I can think of as a useful mental model here: sustained cooperation across multiple nations, massive amounts of public investment, clear tangible outcomes over a period of decades.
Perhaps it requires genius?
But there don't seem to be as many, or as much of a percentage of, people wanting to do hard work either.
You've landed a great list of worthy causes though, respect.
The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense.
We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity.
I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths.
The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like.
The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).
That's what the idea is. Once someone has figured out the basics eg energy conservation, relativity, etc, what's the next guy going to do? Put a small wrinkle on it at best. So the detaily thing is actually not immense progress, it's some small modification or application to a niche area.
The closest equivalent I can think of these days is Satoshi Nakamoto - assuming it's one person. But even their discovery is in a subfield of a subfield.
Same thoughts. Even though we, as civilization, had less resources in the past to discover "the world", one person could "easily" study the whole body of knowledge accumulated over the years and try to come up with something new. Add to that that the person is a genius, and you get something remarkable. Nowadays it's, imho, impossible for a single person to learn the whole body of knowledge of any single branch of science or arts.
Probably the last, since no one has topped him yet... and physics departments have shrunk over time.
OTOH, to your specific point, research has become more directed; funding is in specific areas. Einstein himself had his initial insights outside a university context. Feynmann's diagrams developed when he decided to just "play" - i.e. outside his proper research.
I like to think there is gold just a step or two off the beaten path - but have no evidence for this.
Right now discovering a new phenomenon or topic in math or physics is virtually impossible.
Society back then was different and part of that was, that the gathering of knowledge, a nerdiness and enthusiasm for the new, was seen as something distinguished. Gentleman after the renessaince, bragged with book cases, private studies, curiosity cabinets and private museums.
Add to that the lack of enterntainments and distractions, against which a chemical experiment set or a rocket kit had to not compete against, and you are getting closer to the answer. Back then, you might read a lexica for entertainment, and think the whole day about it, while doing something else.
Or you have a specific example in mind that I could use?
It would be interesting to also look at biographies of “negatively exceptional” people (mass murders etc.)
If those two groups have things in common in their biographies, some caution would probably be warranted.
> A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within
I can easily imagine a child being left alone for long periods of time becoming disconnected from society, potentially to a destructive or anti-social point. Force-ably isolating your child for hours a day is probably not something that should be recommended lightly.
Even mildly, its possible that your child will seemly be socially awkward or feel disconnected from their peers, which could affect them growing up more than any exceptionalism.
i.e. "all positive geniuses were given X, but not all people given X became positive geniuses (some became mass murderers).
it might also point out things that might corrupt an exceptional person to become net-negative to society.
I do think 1:1 tutoring is especially helpful but it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school. Those are important skills as well.
Unfortunately, children in school only learn how to emotionally regulate with children of the same age, which is why so many find 'adulting' hard.
Being an adult is hard. Its so much harder than being a student living with your parents. It does require a dedicated skillset that isn't taught to minors anymore, and it requires owning a lot more responsibility, all at once. When I was in school there was no HomeEc, no woodshop, no financial literacy, and the closest thing to health info I learned was that men are gross and need deodorant while women should stay a virgin.
There is a real stress and challenge with maintaining a home, saving for retirement, etc as a young (and likely lower-income) person. And that's to say nothing about the growing income and affordability gap present across generations, making it harder for younger generations to achieve the life their parents had.
A generation ago most women didn't work and everyone got married at a young age. Consequently, most adults lived in a shared household where one person spent their entire day cooking and cleaning and preparing the household.
I think this is almost certainly a myth. There are a lot of ways that children can learn this.
I hadn't noticed this assumption in my thinking until you stated it so explicitly though!
But I agree that modern school system is problematic and clearly not optimal, just putting kids together due to their location and birthdate regardless of their interests and abilities.
We are just middle class with enough money to spare to support nicely our daughter, but I lack the ability to be able to work anywhere which would have helped her tremendously. (private school are bloody expensive in Switzerland and of dubious quality)
This is what it comes down to, unfortunately. Due to circumstances (which I'm sorry about) you couldn't provide what you felt was necessary for your daughter. This happens! But one can't make a general rule out of it. I would suggest looking into homeschooling societies, though. There are a lot of them. Homeschooling, at least in the US, doesn't necessarily mean the child is locked inside with their parent all day and isolated from their peers.
Here, from what I could see, most home-schooling parents are generally homeschooling their kids because school curriculum is too "difficult" :-/
No attempt from the author to distinguish the effects of childhood from other things that might impact genius. Did he even consider alternative hypotheses for 5 minutes? Or how to distinguish effects from one another.
Not even getting into that this is a study of a list of people the author has heard of.
For example, home tutoring might result in a greater number of exceptional people, but it might also lead to a higher incidence of those children going completely off the rails.
Perhaps the question might be which child-raising techniques have the strongest benefit/risk ratio.
That said, I bet most of the things in the list are largely upside.
I suppose in olden days of yore, labor was cheaper so people could afford some of the 1-1 instruction/tutoring/etc from the article.
Nowadays, the more common approach is to hustle/coach your kid so they get into highly selective K-12 programs, and/or pay up for the highly selective private school flavor. You then put your kids in the same dozen or so box-ticking exercise extracurriculars that all your social group are doing to their kids.
Little league baseball? LOL, that's for the poors. My kid does fencing. Camp? Sorry that's below my kid, he/she does summers abroad at Oxford. Summer job when they turn 16? My kid doesn't need the minimum wage cash, anyway they are staying with our friends in DC to volunteer at HQ of an NGO this summer.
By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity.
The real shock comes when they are up against 100,000 similarly coached kids. The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Most of these kids are also so busy on their all-rounder resume building for 17 years, they have no career aspirations or idea what to do for a living..
The exceedingly rarely mentioned elephant in the room here is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. It works for all polygenically heritable traits, including height and the g-factor.
To simplify it, first-generation children have to turn out more average than their parents, heredity-wise. And as their intelligence is often weaker than their parents', and our society hasn't really found any solid methods of raising it (the tutoring discussed in this thread helps surprisingly little in experiments), as you observe:
> The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so.
Of course the highly intelligent, professional parents notice this law and pattern as well - and in our history we very often see lesser children of greatest men and women. What real options do they see for themselves here?
1. They can go all in on test-prep and resume padding with the extracurriculars - this is common and unsophisticated path due to little available gain...
2. Or they might ensure they are influential enough, so their children get admitted into top universities by one of various legacy programs. As a bonus the parents might oversee the marriage preferences and ensure the children avoid the second regression to the mean by marrying within the self-selected group with similar heritage (not meant as a praise, but this behavior of self-selecting into a tribe associated with a profession became more common & obvious nowadays).
3. ... Or they might pursue such novel techniques as IVF with polygenic embryo selection to compensate for the expected decline. This already happens, with first children having been born.
In conflict with this historical model is that most modern high paying jobs these days are high skill PMC which leaves the highly paid without ownership in any particular enterprise they can hand down.
They are also afraid of trying anything since anything where there's a possibility of failing scares them. That's partly, why MIT went pass-or-fail for the first year.
> The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so.
Especially when their achievements are diminished by factors outside of their control (like race).
> By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity.
How would the wealthy children in the olden days mentioned in this post be any different with handling adversity?
How does one create an environment for their kids to learn independence, but also have academic rigor without being spoon fed and developing no deep curiosity/passion of their own?
You now have a sort of college prep industrial complex and mass affluent feeding into the same small number of prestigious school seats.. and thus more disappointment.
I got into schools with scholarship money 25 years ago with 1300 SAT and no resume that kids with 1550 can’t even get into now.
It’s quite an arms race.
Surround them with smart people, foster a culture of inquisitiveness, and encourage independence.
However, I realized that I myself is not a good tutor. I don't retain a lot of academic knowledge even as a Master graduate some 10 years ago. Neither do I have a lot of time or energy to sacrifice plus I'm reluctant to sacrifice all of that to him -- which will make me quite unhappy as depression already hits due to chronic sleep deprivation.
I'm not sure what's other people's plan, but I'm thinking about applying for the best local university to study Physics part-time in 5 years. I have always wanted to study General Relativity and this can kill the other bird of tutoring my son by just talking serious science and mathematics to him. I cam even invite say Doctorerate students to my home to freely discuss all kinds of topics so that my son can bath in that too.
I wish I had the fuck you $$$ to immediately start executing my plan. I could do that part-time if I'm struggling with depression and fear of jobless in this economy.
Anyway I wish you all good luck and your progeny having a bright future -- and more importantly have the freedom to pursuit his or her curiosoties instead of being a salary slave.
> Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc
So the author advocates that we learn from geniuses how to master something? I'm not sure if this premise is true to start with. Von Neumann could solve complex PDE systems in his mind in minutes if not seconds, can we no matter how hard we try? Poincare worked only four hours day, can we? Euler wrote faster than people could digest his writings, can we? Galois invented group theory when he was 19, yet how many people could really understand the simplest college-level abstract algebra after they graduate from a STEM field? Feynman (or Einstein?) self taught himself calculus by 12 or 14, yet how many students struggled with the concept of variables when they were at the same age no matter how hard they and their teachers tried? Those are extraordinary people with extraordinary capabilities. I'm not sure how much we can learn from them to master something.
Rather, I would learn from ordinary people who struggle from time to time yet somehow manage to master something.
I was interested in physics actually. So at 14 as a B student at a school district in the middle of nowhere, I went on to self-learn calculus up to what amounts to AP Calculus by 15, published a minor physics paper by 16 (when I started working in the particle physics lab at my state college), and graduated high school a year early at 17 and entered a top-tier public school. That was years ago, but I've done pretty well since, and I attribute a lot of it to constantly comparing myself to larger-than-life masters like these to be constantly paranoid about how I can move faster (this comes with a need to be self aware and to self-manage well, including giving yourself breaks and listening to your mental/physical health of course, you don't need to be a Terminator and I don't recommend it).
The big value for me I'd say was a replacement for the lack of role models in my surroundings and getting a sense for what a really high bar looks like. At least for myself, striving to be a flawed human that has also mastered something is a bad target (but inevitably where every human ends up).
If you actually want to land there, you have to aim even higher.
I hope everyone can think of how to raise their kids more like this.
> Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin,
Is one example
For starters, the confounding variable among many of these folks is being rich. Simply being rich increases one’s odds of doing something remarkable because one need devote less time to the daily work of being human.
But also, there is no explanatory power here. To say “Woolf grew up homeschooled and alone” does not explain why she was special and her sister was not. I too grew up homeschooled and was often alone and got to see many other children in the same situation. Many of them struggle in adulthood. Today, my capacity for aloneness is much higher than most, but I am probably not in danger of writing a classic novel.
Again, interesting questions; dubious answers.
Survivor bias?
How many other children had similar childhoods and didn't grow up to be exceptional?
Not so sure about tutoring.
We can be fairly sure that one important theme for the next 60 years will be the economy. The economy has two important sides: The producers and the consumers. The producers need to generate products/services that please the consumers. So we see two goals for education:
(1) Understand people, the consumers, how to please them.
(2) Understand automation, for the lower costs of high quality production of products/services.
So, net, understand people and automation.
This is not even wrong, never mind less.
I read it in a much less defeatist way: A big predictor of success for your kids is to deliberately surround yourself and family as much as possible with the best people you know according to the values and ethic you want to bestow upon your kids.
They're obviously in a great place in their life, but thats hardly "exceptionalism" like Van Neumann was. Tech exceptionals are a different and more selective cohort (you said CEOs).
Take Steve Jobs - he wasn't wealthy, but he spent time alone as a child, and his earlier teachers gave him extra personal attention. His parents would share their interests with him (eg carpentry), and gave him freedom to learn from them and also learn from the neighbors (who were Silicon Valley engineers). He cold-called Hewlett (H of HP) who gave him a job at 13. He was starting businesses in high school for money. Steve was given a long leash to learn, ample minds and talent to observe, and was treated like a self-directed adult as a child.
Someone else who commented on your post used the term “defeatist.” I’d guess it’s even more defeatist to realize if your child has average intelligence, maybe you shouldn’t focus on them being the next Einstein.
Or, from a positive perspective, encourage your child to be who they’re going to be and given them every opportunity you can, and hope they’ll be the happiest, most successful person they can be. Because in the end, there is no recipe for someone to be made into an exceptional person.
People are just people, society puts these labels on people and that shapes people to express / develop certain attributes and hide others.
The more interesting question is why certain attributes are highlighted over others. Think about that for a bit and the answers will probably surprise you. Some reasons are self-reinforcing / recursive but others are rooted in a functional reason or a flaw in thinking (also interesting to consider why some flaws are so common that they are grandfathered into the system).
My thinking abruptly stops once I get to the physical survival layer and I don’t think we have sufficient language to reason beyond that.
That seems to be the critical takeaway for me.
There are some maths olympiad medalists who have become great mathematicians though, so it's probably good.
That's the models, right?
With the Internet and modern connectedness, things are very different.
I see where you’re coming from but those numbers are way off. Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt weren’t the children of peasants but neither were they nobles. They were relatively privileged but well over 1% of the population were as well off. Notary’s or miller’s son in a pre industrial society is bourgeois not one in less than a million.
From what I recall, there was a singular time and place from which many exceptional people were born. They were Jewish Hungarians, born prior to WW2. He was an exceptional person that happened to be born at the right time and place for it to be fully realized.
But this aspect seems immediately achievable and costs little: "It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children."
Go out and take the biographies of a few hundred homeless people and compare.