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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Euler's wikipedia page has one of the most casually jawdropping sentences I've ever read about a human being: "Euler's work averages 800 pages a year from 1725 to 1783. He also wrote over 4500 letters and hundreds of manuscripts. It has been estimated that Leonard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century."

A quarter of all the output in so many fields. For a whole century. When you think about everyone else who was contributing to science at that time. It's just completely staggering.

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I always stress how our public education is broken since it can't handle extreme talent very good. Important breakthroughs that advance one or more fields extremely or shifting paradigms completely, were done or prepared by whizzkids.

In these times, we need every whizzkid we can get.

Education is a cog/mandarin factory in most countries.

Whizzkids will educate themselves, what's needed is giving people idle time in order to pursue things. Most influential thinkers found themselves with this in some fashion.

How much talent is wasted making people jump through hoops in academia/finance/ad-tech?

A lot of pre-industrial thinkers were associated with the clergy because they received tax money from peasants.

Reading Leo Szilard biography right now. School was easy and he just read all the time on his own. Which is pretty much (I’m no Szilard) how it was for me too. School boredom as a recipe for success?

Alternatively, school boredom as a recipe for being the class clown.

The issue I see these days is that every industry is getting more and more competitive, and leaves less and less time to think more broadly or creatively. Can't go off reading about differential geometry when you need a guaranteed perfect SAT, a great entrance essay (i.e. a strong personal story), and easy-to-gauge extracurriculars ("placed X in Y", not "read some smart books and had some interesting thoughts that don't impress the admissions officer"). Same goes for the industry and academia as well.

I think top schools are much more likely to accept that kid with a 1550 on the SAT who spent his downtime studying differential geometry instead of the SAT.

One thing (in retrospect) that I love about the xUSSR school system, is its focus on competitive math and physics.

There's a robust multi-level system of "Olympiads", starting from the neighborhood level, and going all the way up to the national level. Every student knows about them, and more importantly, "magnet schools" scoop up students who do well in competitions.

This works really well for math, and so pretty much every Fields medal award ceremony has awardees from the xUSSR countries.

I'm really surprised that this kind of system is not more widespread, especially in the US. After all, sports and competition is kinda a thing here?

> Whizzkids will educate themselves

Only those you see becoming one.

You never hear of all the "Einsteins" who never leave the patents office because they never got inspired for some passion or various other stupid reasons.

No system will handle an Euler well. It’s best to recognize them and move them out of the system.

You're basically saying the system is obsolete when society reaches a point, where it needs no more mediocre generalists and only excellent specialists.

I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

That's the least charitable interpretation, I think. A more charitable read is that no system should be one-size-fits-all, so move outliers to specialized subsystems.

Not sure. In Germany there's an ongoing debate for extending conprehensive schools [1] across all ages. It's a complex topic but the general gist of supporters is, that pupils profit from each other. (e.g. Bad ones get help from the good while those practice how to cooperate and explain etc.).

I don't think it's that complex. My personal premises are

* if the kid doesn't like to get up and go to school or is too tired over longer periods, the school is doing something wrong, not the kid. * if there are A LOT of kids like this, the school authority is doing something wrong (and so on, up to government) * an older kid needs support on every topic at any time when interest arises. It's the kids' choice not the schools'. * learning at school must be fun, at least 90% of the time.

That way whizzkids are easily detected, will be less frustrated and thus perform better.

I got some good example anecdotes but better won't "textwall" here :-)

Just imagine a world, where Einstein would get optimum support from young age so he would start professional physics years earlier.

Or one where he didn't go to the patent office but one where he worked in some factory or other place, not finding the spare time he needed to do physics.

Way too much luck involved if you ask me.

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

If you're an Einstein-class talent, luck doesn't have much to do with it. You'll find a way to do your thing.

One example: someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned John Carmack. Carmack's not a thief, or at least it would be a grotesque oversimplification to label him as one. But he stole an Apple II when his parents wouldn't buy him one.

What's critical is that once talent is identified, it's nurtured to the greatest extent possible.

This a classic "post hoc ergo procter hoc" fallacy.

You just can't know, how much more Einsteins there would be. People that would never steal an Apple II or would never even get that opportunity.

Heck, if Einstein became a younger father, there's a good chance he never looked deeper into physics despite talent and interest without someone (like a teacher) pushing him.

I claim that it's pure coincidence. Carmack didn't make it because of public education but despite of it. We can't afford this anymore.

IMO the risk is not that Einsteins (and Carmacks) won't have the educational opportunities they need. That may have been a showstopper in the past but it certainly isn't today, not with the resources we have now from YouTube to ChatGPT.

And the world is full of parents who are neglectful with no excuse at all. I don't think early fatherhood would stop an Einstein.

Instead, the risk is that talented people will die of starvation, disease, or warfare before they have the chance to become who they are. Or that their career will be cut short by similar circumstances. See Ramanujan, or the even more-tragic but lesser-known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev .

That's where the luck factor really comes into play... the luck to be born someplace peaceful. The luck to be born male, if you have to be born into a culture driven by social or religious biases. The luck to receive the nutrition (never mind the Apples) you need as a growing child. The luck that just plain keeps other people the fuck out of your way.

And that's what we have to work on as a civilization. It's a bigger problem than simply arguing over how public education should work, or whether scientist X or inventor Y would have benefited from policy Z.

That sounds like a good system.

Let's hope education indivualizes to the need and talents of the individual partially via software. ChatGPT is my hope here.

15% failure rate is optimal for learning

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4

Seriously? Oh god, please no. We need less of all that BS. People are thinking that are being "tutored" by AI, when in fact is just the output of a number crunching program. Reading books will get you way way closer to solid knowledge than the output crap of this so called "AI".

I don't think such an attitude is warranted. While I'm skeptical about the potential of LLMs as AGI (whatever that means), being able to summarize subjects and even come up with test questions can be very valuable for learning. I am concerned about the confabulation aspect, though. I wonder if there could be a uncertainty metric for that.

Happy to disagree here. I am hopeful that students get apps which provide them with - fast feedback loops - better adjustment to their learning speed - more patience - gamification - oppurtunity to ask endless questions

Of course, only as an addition to the current mix. For math problems, this will be easier than for other contexts.

I like text books for pop science or really hard things - like university level education. But I am surprised to see them as an option for basic education.

You're making a serious mistake. If you're trying to learn something new, even in math or science, GPT4 is nothing less than a superpower.

The process of learning when to trust it and when not to is learning.

Yep. But to be really scared of the man you can consider that during the later years of his life he lost eyesight, first in one eye, then went completely blind. All without slowing down.

The anecdote goes that with his eyesight already severely deteriorated, he would dictate papers with a grandkid or two in his lap and a cat on his shoulder.

There's a reason so many things are named after the second person to discover something after Euler: mf died in 1783 and is still publishing papers today.

Wait until you find out he was totally blind the last 15ish years of his life _and wrote more during that period than any other_. Scribes would just sit and he would talk while they wrote. He literally died while doing a calculation in this manner dealing with the hot new invention of Ballooning.

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