Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemBuilder | Hacker News Reader

I dont really believe this crazy tutoring theory AT ALL. What has changed is that education has become widespread. It is well known that standardized education destroys creativity. Ramanujen was largely self-taught! The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot!

If you were born in Oppenheimer's era you gained a huge advantage of parents wealthy enough to pay for undergrad school (perhaps a paltry 5%) AND graduate school (perhaps 0.01%) so the gulf in education and knowledge between these wealthy educrats and the average man on the street was far more enormous, and these educrats had a much bigger inside track to discovery ...

So to summarize, a genius is measured by their intellectual height above the AVERAGE person and the average has increased a lot. At the same time, standardized education is killing diversity and creativity...

View on HN

Stephen Jay Gould made a very similar argument about the disappeared .400 baseball hitter:

https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...

>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.

I think the improvement of pitchers has been understated. 30 years ago, a guy that could throw a 100 mph pitch 1 or 2 times a game was the Ace of the starting rotation. Now, pitchers that can throw 100+ come out of the bullpen in relief because just heat isn't enough.

Something like track and field sports might be best objective comparison. Excluding sports where equipment has been changed. The shoes might have gotten somewhat better, but still on top level it seems we have quite narrow band which is above previous record holders.

Not crazy at all. Even the most cursory application of individual tutoring in today's mass education settings comes with a 2-sigma disparity in outcomes compared to ordinary teaching. And that's disregarding everything else that might have been different about these elite tutoring practices - including, yes, a less standard and more creative education, compared to the modern focus on one-size-fits-all.

> The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot!

As the late, great Frank Zappa once said: "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."

Right, because John von Neumann, Alan Turing, etc. skipped college to play the guitar.

I think you've missed his point here. What he was saying is that the purpose of college is only partly to give an education. The main thing college gets you is credentials and socialization. If what you want is just a good, broad education and you don't care about those other things, then the library is provides that to you.

On the other hand, the collections (books, journals, etc.) of college libraries are typically vastly superior to those of public libraries.

I really miss the access now that I'm no longer in college.

In any public library (in the US, anyway), you can check out books from every library that is part of the inter-library loan service. This include all (I think) other public libraries as well as a healthy number of college libraries. You're not even limited to books!

Have a chat with your local librarian. You might be pleasantly surprised at how deep that resource goes.

I'm aware of that. Nonetheless, I can say definitively that the South Central Library System of Wisconsin (which includes Madison) does not include the University of Wisconsin libraries, and the holdings of the latter are vastly superior, at least in terms of academic-related material. I've not been pleasantly surprised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com