I always struggle with these kinds of studies/essays when we do not study people who also got a similar environment and freedom as these kids but did not accomplish much. I think inner drive, raw intelligence, and luck makes a huge difference in the life outcome. In the US, it is advertised a lot that going to a top college makes a huge difference in life’s outcome but as we all know several kids who have gone to other colleges are also successful. I know of a study that looked at individuals who got admission to a top college but decided to attend something else and still ended up accomplishing a lot in life. Can we say the same thing about this scenario? These individuals would have accomplished almost the same amount of success if they would have encountered a different environment. I look forward to your thought on this topic.
Below are my comments to Eric’s essay using my other email Id:
I agree with you that one-on-one education was probably the cause of a lot of inventions in the 18th, 19th, and early part of 20 centuries.
The invention has become much harder as most of the low-hanging fruits have already been picked and future invention requires collaboration with people from multiple fields and requires a very high level of specialization even in a particular subfield. As you see people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job being only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield like you get during your bachelor’s degrees.
I also believe that two world wars from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years after that led to a time when we saw inventions in certain areas but a lot of basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and/or a lot of folks have to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars and millions of them dying in their peak years and another factor was Europe took a long time to recover from the wars.
However, I think that there is another factor playing a role, especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by
Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolise the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets. In fact, we would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between financial markets in London and New York in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point though, these taxes would make all of us richer. Not only would they give everyone a more equal share of the pie, but the whole pie would be bigger. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could go back to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
When our best and brightest are applying their knowledge in a zero sum games like Wall Street and trying to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page something will suffer and I think that is another factor playing a big role. I know several of my friends' kids went to an Ivy League/MIT etc schools and the majority of their classmates went to either Wall Street, consulting, or a tech company like those mentioned above because of much higher pay. The incentive to go thru the pain of inventing which takes decades and the chance that you may be a complete failure is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So to summarize, I think the priorities have changed we still produce several geniuses but they are very specialized and/or are focused on industries that do not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is probably the best way to produce a lot more geniuses than the current education system can produce. However, it is highly unlikely that most of the new geniuses will accomplish anything close to what was accomplished by geniuses in the 18th and 19th centuries due to above mentioned reasons.
Childhoods of exceptional people
I always struggle with these kinds of studies/essays when we do not study people who also got a similar environment and freedom as these kids but did not accomplish much. I think inner drive, raw intelligence, and luck makes a huge difference in the life outcome. In the US, it is advertised a lot that going to a top college makes a huge difference in life’s outcome but as we all know several kids who have gone to other colleges are also successful. I know of a study that looked at individuals who got admission to a top college but decided to attend something else and still ended up accomplishing a lot in life. Can we say the same thing about this scenario? These individuals would have accomplished almost the same amount of success if they would have encountered a different environment. I look forward to your thought on this topic.
Below are my comments to Eric’s essay using my other email Id:
I agree with you that one-on-one education was probably the cause of a lot of inventions in the 18th, 19th, and early part of 20 centuries.
The invention has become much harder as most of the low-hanging fruits have already been picked and future invention requires collaboration with people from multiple fields and requires a very high level of specialization even in a particular subfield. As you see people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job being only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield like you get during your bachelor’s degrees.
I also believe that two world wars from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years after that led to a time when we saw inventions in certain areas but a lot of basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and/or a lot of folks have to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars and millions of them dying in their peak years and another factor was Europe took a long time to recover from the wars.
However, I think that there is another factor playing a role, especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by
Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolise the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets. In fact, we would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between financial markets in London and New York in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point though, these taxes would make all of us richer. Not only would they give everyone a more equal share of the pie, but the whole pie would be bigger. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could go back to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
When our best and brightest are applying their knowledge in a zero sum games like Wall Street and trying to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page something will suffer and I think that is another factor playing a big role. I know several of my friends' kids went to an Ivy League/MIT etc schools and the majority of their classmates went to either Wall Street, consulting, or a tech company like those mentioned above because of much higher pay. The incentive to go thru the pain of inventing which takes decades and the chance that you may be a complete failure is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So to summarize, I think the priorities have changed we still produce several geniuses but they are very specialized and/or are focused on industries that do not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is probably the best way to produce a lot more geniuses than the current education system can produce. However, it is highly unlikely that most of the new geniuses will accomplish anything close to what was accomplished by geniuses in the 18th and 19th centuries due to above mentioned reasons.