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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring

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Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins. It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education.

Hoel worries we\\u2019re running out of geniuses:

Consider how rare true world-historic geniuses are now-a-days, and how different it was in the past. In \\u201cWhere Have All the Great Books Gone?\\u201d Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengler, the original chronicler of the decline of genius back in 1914, to point out our current genius downturn [\\u2026]

There are a bunch of other analyses (really, laments) of a similar nature I could name, from Nature\\u2019s \\u201cScientific genius is extinct\\u201d to The New Statesman\\u2019s \\u201cThe fall of the intellectual\\u201d to The Chronicle of Higher Education\\u2019s \\u201cWhere have all the geniuses gone?\\u201d to Wired\\u2019s\\u201d \\u201cThe Difficulty of Discovery (Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?)\\u201d to philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel\\u2019s \\u201cWhere are all the Fodors?\\u201d to my own lamentation on the lack of leading fiction writers.

If you disagree, I\\u2019ll certainly admit that finding irrefutable evidence for a decline of genius is difficult\\u2014intellectual contributions are extremely hard to quantify, the definition of genius is always up for debate, and any discussion will necessarily elide all sorts of points and counterpoints. But the numbers, at least at first glance, seem to support the anecdotal. Here\\u2019s a chart from Cold Takes\\u2019 \\u201cWhere\\u2019s Today\\u2019s Beethoven?\\u201d Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields).