Erik Hoel wrote a series of articles 1, 2, 3 on how aristocrats raised geniuses.
The series makes for an interesting comparison to Scott Alexander's articles such as Book Review: Raise A Genius!. Scott has also offered criticism of Erik's first article. I cite Scott here mostly due to his relevancy to the history of this site.
I don't have kids, but when I do I'd like to homeschool and maximize (with restraint and compassion) for producing genius.
What I found most interesting (in Hoel's third article) was his "key ingredients" for raising an aristocratic genius:
-
(a) the total amount of one-on-one time the child has with intellectually-engaged adults
-
(b) a strong overseer who guides the education at a high level with the clear intent of producing an exceptional mind
-
(c) plenty of free time, i.e., less tutoring hours in the day than traditional school
-
(d) teaching that avoids the standard lecture-based system of memorization and testing and instead encourages discussions, writing, debates, or simply overviewing the fundamentals together
-
(e) in these activities, it is often best to let the student lead (e.g., writing an essay or poetry, or learning a proof)
-
(f) intellectual life needs to be taken abnormally seriously by either the tutors or the family at large
-
(g) there is early specialization of geniuses, often into the very fields for which they would become notable
-
(h) at some point the tutoring transitions toward an apprenticeship model, often quite early, which takes the form of project-based collaboration, such as producing a scientific paper or monograph or book
-
(i) a final stage of becoming pupil to another genius at the height of their powers
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can you give examples?
That would be all our knowledge that when you do send kids to a public school, particularly an ahem urban one, they run the risk of becoming crackheads.
And that's worse than being a socially maladjusted loner.
Also, you sound like you're suffering from high time preference here. Becoming a socially maladjusted loner while he's a kid is a small price to pay for slightly increasing his chance of becoming a billionaire as an adult.
I'm saying that if you run the numbers in a Pascal's-wager sense, my suspicion is that "incomprehensibly unlikely that it works" * "positive utility of being incomprehensibly wealthy" actually does come out better in terms of expectation value.
Well, which kind of "acceptable" are you talking about?
If you're asking whether I think it's acceptable in terms of "rational cost-benefit analysis" (the same metric by which I considered homeschooling them into a billionaire above), then probably no. I think sending them to a highschool on the wrong side of the railroad tracks is particularly likely to be deteimental and therefore worth avoiding by homeschool. But other "bad parts of society", like, idk, waiting in line at the DMV? Learning Aurelian stoicism by firsthand experience of The Queue is probably a net good.
If you're asking whether I think it's morally acceptable to forcibly curate a child's experience of the world in pursuit of a bizarre human experiment in genius creation then: yes, I am very much in the paterfamilias camp of "They're my kid, I own them, I can do what I want".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link