This is a really weird article. Of course VC people and bloggers are not going to have miracle years - the people with the potential to make amazing discoveries have much better things to do then talk about how to get other people to make amazing discoveries. The hope of an article like Miracle Years is that someone in power makes a change to a school policy or something like that and makes it more likely for someone else to have a miracle year.
A big theme of this essay is the author knowingly raging against things that he is well aware that he is complicit in. I don't know exactly how to describe the tone, but that line makes total sense as part of the "bit."
Yeah I wasn't sure how I felt about the line at the bottom that read "This is a good time to announce I'll be deleting my blog - just kidding, please like/subscribe/share."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The miracle year will be when we will stop obsessing about success so much. Must be a perceived lack of love. So: Love your kids better, that's how you produce future miracle years.
I thought raising kids in dysfunctional households was how you imbue them with an insatiable thirst for validation that leads them to found companies and become billionaires.
The claim that 'the miracle year' is some fundamental rule in scientific discovery and that people's best work is always done in some flurry of creativity in their younger years is the kind of claim that might sell magazine articles - it's simple to understand, you can cherry-pick a few examples, and that might get you some mass appeal.
However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:
Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:
> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."
Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.
Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.
As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.
> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).
Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.
Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)
I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers.
I have become convinced that inadequate public schooling is the reason why America has come to rely so much on college to make people "ready for society".
Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.
One of the things that is deeply ingrained in education curricula, yet which doesn’t seem remotely justified pedagogically, is the timetable. The idea of studying lots of subjects, all at once, via daily or weekly sub-hour-long bite-sized lessons.
If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.
The thing that makes public schooling so frustrating is how they lump everyone together and then teach to the lowest common level. If you're in a school system that can afford to offer AP courses, some students have a chance of not being bored. The rest of the students have to deal with that fact that some of the students are only there because they haven't dropped out yet and the state requires their presence.
That's amusing, you are doing exactly what the article talks about. But really though, I've relied very little on education institutions for much of my learning. Saying they held you back is just an excuse, it's likely you held yourself back. I know that in my case any failings are definitely largely my own.
One thing that the current education system has not managed to grasp yet is the paradigm shift in its role: until recently (maybe 15-20 years ago) the role of the school was to give you as much information as possible; now, it is exactly the opposite: to filter away the noise as much as possible and help you focus on what matters the most for you. But we are still information hoarders and it will take a while for this shift to sink in.
I learned most of it in libraries and later the Internet. Car repairs (to work in an auto service), audio technology (for building custom speakers and amps), computer hardware (for myself), programming (still shit at it), marketing (was fun), psychology (was kinda useless), English (very useful), lots of stuff. So kids these days have it easy :D
I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but who knows. My attention was trash and still getting worse.
Of course you're learning about others' crown achievements, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. And things got way more complicated, there's so much to know that it's hard to remember. Especially if you use social media, always some shit there that you'll shove in your memory instead of useful things heh.
Most new things are a spin on the old, it might've been easier to discover/stumble upon something genuinely new 100+ years ago.
Agree. Society basically introduces its newest members to society through something closer to a penal system than knowledge transfer.
Granted, children are not necessarily trustable to figure it all out on their own. It’s more the bullying, anti-intellectualism, and generally not considering their needs that needs checking.
I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human.
We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.
Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.
All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!
We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.
Einstein wasn’t that special, he wasn’t superhuman, if you transported the same person in time significantly he would have likely been entirely unremarkable. He had many contemporaries just as capable with complements equally as impressive.
He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture.
He was also simply primed with being a person of the right kind of potential being in the right place in the right time.
In short, it was very much luck that enabled him. He also worked hard, he was also quite capable, but the hero exceptional human narrative was overdone.
The point of the university was to give 20-somethings in their intellectual prime a socially respectable position where they have few obligations. Higher education was for weirdos to pursue their obsessive interests and society benefited from this arrangement. We've drifted far away from this when we decided, over the years, that everyone needs a degree.
There are various monied interests trying to "disrupt higher education". "Progress studies," "Thiel Fellowships," "University of Austin," whatever. I give them low odds but they're trying to do the right thing.
Readit News
Blog posts for me but not for thee?
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.
That is maybe the single most dubious statistic I've seen thrown out so offhandedly in my entire time on HN.
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.
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.
I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.
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.
What's the title? Sounds interesting.
by Richard White
However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:
https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-r...
Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equatio...
> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."
Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.
Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.
As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.
Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.
Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.
If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.
What?
I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but who knows. My attention was trash and still getting worse.
Of course you're learning about others' crown achievements, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. And things got way more complicated, there's so much to know that it's hard to remember. Especially if you use social media, always some shit there that you'll shove in your memory instead of useful things heh.
Most new things are a spin on the old, it might've been easier to discover/stumble upon something genuinely new 100+ years ago.
Without it folks might end up pigeonholed into whatever their family does or a narrow selection of trades within the local community.
Granted, children are not necessarily trustable to figure it all out on their own. It’s more the bullying, anti-intellectualism, and generally not considering their needs that needs checking.
We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.
Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.
All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!
We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.
I don’t have any particularly rare skills either, and I made peace with that long ago. It helps you like yourself for what you do have.
Notice how cynical the tone is of the parent comment. It’s usually a sign that something is wrong.
Dead Comment
He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture.
He was also simply primed with being a person of the right kind of potential being in the right place in the right time.
In short, it was very much luck that enabled him. He also worked hard, he was also quite capable, but the hero exceptional human narrative was overdone.
But to be fair: he was smarter than most people.
But since it's about science, and revolutioning it on too of that, claiming there was nothing special about Einstein make little sense.
Dead Comment
There are various monied interests trying to "disrupt higher education". "Progress studies," "Thiel Fellowships," "University of Austin," whatever. I give them low odds but they're trying to do the right thing.