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Comment by jhanschoo | Hacker News Reader

I like how this author's cursory research was so scientific that it fails to consider and control for all the other aristocratic children from those eras that his list is from who had tutors, connections, and apprenticeships and failed nevertheless to become "exceptional".

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Add.: to substantiate, and argue against replies mentioning that this is a sufficient but not necessary condition, my impression is that that was the dominant form education took back then. Over half of Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy, John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing, Bertrand Russell, René Descartes, Mozart, and Bach were children before standardized testing (and schooling I think?) became widespread.

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.

Typical “rationalist” stuff: a supposedly smart person makes bald faced assertions backed by sophistry. Bonus points if it’s asserting something contrarian.

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.

Double bonus points if the “contrarian” thing is the exact opposite of contrarian within the intended audience.

That could mean it is a necessary but not sufficient condition; I don't think your observation by itself invalidates anything the author said.

I just typed the same comment before reading this. I totally agree!

The point, one presumes, is to make it as likely as possible that your child will become exceptional if they have the potential to do so. If these things are necessary but not sufficient doing them takes the odds from non-existent to small. More likely it takes them from extremely small to very small.

Well if you consider that then he might have proven that having tutors, connections, and apprenticeships is a necessary but not a sufficient condition then.

It's covered in the last section: "They were gifted children"

He didn't fail to consider that, he just didn't consider that, because he had no reason to consider that, just like he didn't consider the orbit of Pluto or the phases of the moon.

If you think he should have considered and controlled for something, say why explicitly.

Because the whole thing has a certain survivor bias smell to it.

And even worse bias:

"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.

I assure you, people do. It's certainly not the case for lower-class people who are just scrambling to survive economically, but if you asked around people who are more affluent, they could definitely afford to reduce their workload to better care for their children.

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.

It's so good that we've got people like you to tell parents how they should live, what they should work for, and, most importantly, how to raise their children. But please lead by example.

In what part am I telling anyone how to live their life?

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.

Survivorship bias occurs when researchers focus on individuals, groups, or cases that have passed some sort of selection process while ignoring those who did not.

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?

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