[DubiousPusher]

> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years

Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me.

> Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way.

I'm reading this mega-tome about the guilded age right now and I promise you this is not true.

[throwaway1777]

I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.

[DubiousPusher]

> 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs

That is maybe the single most dubious statistic I've seen thrown out so offhandedly in my entire time on HN.

[atq2119]

I mean it's bound to be true and actually more extreme than that if you're taking the entire population as your reference. If you take as reference the subset of people who are trying to get to scientific breakthroughs, then yeah, it's dubious.

[throwaway1777]

I’m talking specifically about stuff like the discovery of gravity or electricity, not the very important and significant inventions that aren’t really a step change. The number of people who make these discoveries may even be hundreds or thousands but that is vanishingly small on a planet of billions of people.

[DubiousPusher]

Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.

[xNeil]

Interesting! I'd appreciate any sources though.

[mattkrause]

Here's a nice example of the "contingency" of scientific success by Bol, de Vaan, and van de Rijt (2018). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115

Grants are reviewed and ranked by a panel of experts. While they often agree in the broad strokes, their scores also have random or subjective components: different reviewers might prefer different approaches; even the same reviewer might give slightly different scores if they re-reviewed a grant (e.g., due to their mood). However, someone eventually does need to set a payline, or threshold for funding.

As a result, you'd expect people who submitted the worst funded grants and the best unfunded grants, which have very similar scores, to have similar career trajectories. After all, their abilities--as measured by grant scores--are virtually indistinguishable. However, the winners go on to win nearly twice as much funding in the next eight years. This presumably reflects the fact that funding begets more funding (you can collect more and better data for subsequent work) and prestige begets more prestige (you've now got another thing to put in the "awards" category).

[DubiousPusher]

For the specific anecdote I mentioned you can read more here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow

and here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calcu...

[mattkrause]

I really doubt that.

Being smart certainly helps, but you also need the right opportunities, environment, and colleagues to “produce” science. These all feed back onto each other in complicated ways: funding gives you time and space to work on tough problems, which attracts talented colleagues, who can make you yourself smarter and thus able to attract more funding and more colleagues…and so on. This works the other way too: a funding squeeze limits what you can work on (if anything), etc.

I can certainly believe that it looks like a power law, but I doubt “intrinsic ability”, insofar as that’s even a thing, has a similar distribution.

[peepop6]

Sounds like a good way to create even more cults of personality and egotistical assholes who can't work in a team.

Breakthroughs aren't made by lone geniuses anymore. We just have that superhero fetish eg. picture of black hole where credit was practically given to that one woman in the picture.

[compiler-guy]

Breakthroughs were rarely made by lone geniuses even before. Sure, there are some, but even Edison had a huge lab full of people doing the work.

Bell labs was extremely successful (at least on the innovation front) not due to lone geniuses, but due to a large collection of very smart people all collaborating together.

[nyuszika7h]

Not everyone who dislikes working in a team is an "egotistical asshole". Some of us are just neurodivergent and have social anxiety.

[vsareto]

That seems worthless if they find their own way to knowledge outside of the schools.

I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.

[Mezzie]

Disagree, but I'm concerned about the geniuses as a group of neglected children, not whether or not we're extracting maximum financial/scientific benefit from them. I always sigh whenever the discussion treats these kids/young people as tools.

The current system is terrible for genius kids' emotional and social development, and in some important ways it hobbles them. (Particularly when it comes to encouraging them to develop resiliency, accept that sometimes they need help, and develop their own sense of self-worth rather than derive it from the accolades of the adults around them).

[DubiousPusher]

Yes. The "geniuses" will be alright.

[Natsu]

I feel like things are going to diverge further, between people floating around through the system and learning almost nothing vs. those self-learners who ignore that and learn on their own, not letting anything hold them back.

[csa]

> Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me.

I think there is merit to this argument, but right now most US public education actively restrains geniuses via excessive busywork and limited to no access to accelerated programs.

Many/most of our geniuses are lost in the web of mediocrity that currently expends a ridiculous amount of resources on bringing the lowest performers up to a higher level of low (and imho still inadequate) performance.

Some folks don’t want to be educated. For anything beyond basic reading, writing, math, and civics knowledge and skills, that should be ok.

[michaelcampbell]

> mega-tome about the guilded age

What's the title? Sounds interesting.

[DubiousPusher]

The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

by Richard White

[hodgesrm]

When I saw your initial comment I figured this was the tome. It's outstanding. I got onto it after hearing an interview with Richard White. He's opinionated and some of the opinions are very insightful.

In the interview he said that there's no such thing as cycles in history (pace Spengler). Instead there are unresolved issues that keep bubbling up over generations. That completely describes America's problems with racism, starting with the original sin of slavery. States rights is another example. The gilded age illustrates many others.

I was sold on the book based on that 30 seconds of the interview alone.

[DubiousPusher]

I am loving it. It's dryer due to its focus on economics but "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" covers a similar era and is worthwhile too.

[jriot]

Have you read the entire Oxford US History series? I have the entire series up to 1945, minus 1896-1929 as that hasn't been published yet. we homeschool our children and my plan is to read those over the next two years to base my teaching of US History to our children when they enter high school. Yes, I'm aware that only provides a one author perspective; multiple authors as each book has a different one. Though at 10,000 dense pages it seems sufficient.

[DubiousPusher]

I have not but they're ceetainly going on my reading list after this one. Considering that this is yet another history book which is de-programming me from my own awful public school/hollywood led history educatiom I would think it would make a very good basis for a realistic and practical understanding of American history.

[ianai]

What years does it cover?

Edit-looks like 1763 onward. Very much left out there.

[jriot]

Seven Years War (The Crucible of War, that is not actually an Oxford history book) - 1974. I don't have the volume from 1945-1974 yet. I have a few other history books covering that period to present. Penguin has a similar series on European history from the Romans to 2017; I currently have three volumes covering 1814-2017.

[dorchadas]

Do you have a link to the Penguin series? That seems interesting as well, especially given the time range.