Comment by r3trohack3r

Comment by r3trohack3r 4 days ago

I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.

Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.

The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.

I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:

* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human

* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that

I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.

A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.

Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.

philipwhiuk 4 days ago

> But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.

And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.

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programjames 3 days ago

It is impossible for an individual to do this search themself, so you have to have some global sorting. Top-down approaches include math competitions and national testing. More federated approaches include just... moving to communities where the average is closer to you.

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svnt 4 days ago

I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:

Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.

Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.

If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.

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philipwhiuk 4 days ago

> you can optimize for that

I think that this is the core problem - you can't.

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r3trohack3r 7 hours ago

Pretty sure you can.
You try your thesis. I’ll try mine.
We will see where the other’s grand kids end up.

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