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How geniuses used to be raised

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

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This is a great yet very incomplete list. For starters children should be taught epistemology, cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

I strongly believe true rationalistic genius has a critical period and this is why it is so scarce worldwide.

My fantasy vanity project if my business projects work out to 90th+ percentile expectations in 10 years: I'd like to take a couple of rental properties my family owns in the immediate area of our home off the market, and offer them as an "artist in residence" deal to grads from my/mywife's alma mater. Want to take a year to write your novel or work on your portfolio? Free room and board, with minor responsibilities to tutor my kids in art and literature, and brighten up my dinner parties. Of course this fantasy would be an order of magnitude more expensive as I think it would, nor would any college artist actually be interested in doing it.

Homeschooling is more and more appealing these days, and I like to think i could raise really interesting kids this way. We'll see how I feel as they grow up though, I guess.

The homeschooling movement has gotten far more sophisticated than in the 90’s. They have guest lecturers, various socialization and group learning activities, and field trips. Check your local homeschooling group.

I see this scenario where weird homeschooled kids get surpassed repeatedly to the point where I think that your mindset is pretty common

Can you give examples?

If all of our knowledge has shown that people suffer in the absence of other people, particularly children, why would parents go to such lengths to do this very thing?

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.

incomprehensibly unlikely outcome that probably has nothing to do with the fact that your child goes to a public school.

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.

Aren't you also just implying that it's acceptable to shelter your child indefinitely from the bad parts of society?

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".

You say you don't like to read books, but if you were joking about that, some Bronte novels might do you good.

There's a very strong selection effect at play.

Fun, outgoing kids with passable executive function, from families that fit in well to mainstream society, in neighborhoods with decent schools will, of course, go to those schools.

Kids who are weird and anxious and bullied, who fit in poorly at their local school, who are horribly distracted by being in a room full of other kids all day, are much more likely to be homeschooled. Mothers who fit into their work environment and enjoy it have much less incentive to tighten their finances and stay home with 2-6 children all day every day. Being isolated isn't great, but it's better than being constantly bullied and judged with such assessments as "something really vital just hasn’t developed in them and probably never will."

Meanwhile, there are children who are bundles of relentless, socially oriented energy from the day they're born. They're always happy when there are new kids to talk to, they toddle up to stranger kids in the park at two and ask them to dance. They bounce back from being yelled at in a few seconds. They wear their parents out and grind them down if they try keeping their children home. The parents send them to school out of exhaustion, even if their philosophy suggests differently. They send them to public schools, both because it's cheaper, and because it's more work to get these kids to follow the rules.

  1. People who's version of homeschooling involves locking their children up indefinitely in their home should, indeed, not homeschool their kids.

  2. School quality varies widely. There are schools that foster community and good social skills. There are schools that foster anger and boredom. There are a lot of schools that are somewhere in the middle.

  3. Edit: To see if this idea makes sense, particulars are probably important. It's possible that we have two much kindergarten but not enough high school. Your intuition is that more school would help. My intuition is that more churches and clubs might help, it's hard to say, and that we have quite enough school, possibly two much. I'm not certain how I would frame that question to find out if there are any studies on it, and probably won't put the time into finding out.

The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.

This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:

Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.

I hit thirty this year. There's something special about that number: it cut through any internal narratives I may have had about stuff I want to do later. Well, good morning and happy birthday, we are later, later is today! You are on the downslope now, your cognitive and physical capacities are going to get monotonically worse until the day you expire. You're not going to have any more free time or energy or drive than you do right now. This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.

I've experienced this as a second childhood.

After a difficult first go-around, the primary enterprise of my adult life has been to surround myself with people who are capable, trustworthy, who will invest in me and who are worthy of investing in. And boy have I lucked out. I enter this phase of my life surrounded by brothers, and quite a few sisters, who elevate me and whom I can help elevate.

And though I am paying it forward already in some measure, I hope to go further, through the same kind of life journey that Hoel describes.

What you call raising a genius, to me seems to be merely honouring a child for who and what he is. Through this, even a phenotypically unexceptional child can be made exceptional by bringing him to recognize his own worth, and understanding the kinds of expectations it is reasonable to have of himself. Part and parcel of this is integration in a rich, multigenerational social, physical and intellectual life.

I like the Orthodox imagery of saints coifed in gold leaf halos. Surround yourself with gold-coifed men and women. Raise each other up, and your children as well.

As someone who also turned 30 this year and feels similarly, I just wanted to chime in.

I've been exposed to more and more people who had good liberal arts educations recently, mostly because of Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he always asks people how they grew up, but I also found myself jealous of Oppenheimer's education reading American Prometheus and I recently started watching old Firing Line episodes where education can come up and it resonates similarly for me there.

I think how year 30 cut through for me was in realizing how deeply rich the fruits of liberal intellectual pursuits can be, how on one hand you can offhandedly know Freud was flawed, but on the other you can read him, and other texts around him, and gain so much understanding in the process. I got a good math education because that institution seems to be doing fine, but liberal arts education failed to persuade me similarly.

I think the pernicious effect of losing out on a good liberal arts education is to invite "bad" liberal arts, which is to say, bad arts, bad media, bad values, to simplify. And I feel like my 20's were very much indulging in those things, while the media around me was saying this is good, this is fine, normal, etc. I think if you are a talented young person, "entertainment" can feed off that talent in a way, without giving much back in return.

I've landed somewhere a bit opposite from you, very much in solitude as I've removed most of the people from my life, but a few of them happened to be really toxic, and breaking from them left me with a pretty big wound I've been trying to recover from. So I've been trying to treat it as a Rilke-style isolation that I'll eventually be able to come out of stronger while I realign my values and pursue a wider and more fruitful liberal education to help me do so.

This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.

I've experienced this as a second childhood.

Cheers.

The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.

Specialization is a double edged sword. Since the proponents of Aristocratic Tutoring are pointing to successful cases, ignoring averages, and sweeping any complete basketcase failures under the rug, only the upside shows up. If you took 100 kids and specialized them as kids as anything, soccer players or biologists or politicians, and 100 kids and put them through a general education, it seems likely that the best ten kids from the specialized group would beat out the best 10 from the generalists. That certainly appears to be the case in any easily measured competitive field [sports]. But what about the other 90? What about the ten or twenty kids least suited to the specialization? What happened to them?

On the other hand, within sports, a lot of surgeons blame the rise in overuse injuries in younger and younger age groups on the specialization in a single sport earlier and earlier. And intuitively, you figure some kids who could have been great at a different sport miss out because they specialized in the wrong one. Messi is arguably the greatest athlete of the 21st century, if he tried to play almost literally any other sport you'd never have heard of him, he'd be a mechanic who happens to have a weird ability to do stuff with his feet. Jordan Mailata is literal Polynesian Goliath, but in Rugby he was a $5,000 a week player in the second division, while after the Eagles plucked him using a recently introduced international scouting plan he's a $16,000,000 a year NFL star; twenty years ago that system doesn't exist and he washes out of rugby and is just a huge bouncer at a Sydney nightclub.

So there ought to be specialization, but we ought to think in terms of generalizing skills, and providing off-ramps to kids who need them; and opportunities for kids who are late bloomers to break in.

This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:

Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.

It's admittedly a bit jarring for me to see this because I was in the very opposite situation. I was raised in a very unique manner, with a serious focus on achievement, and I do not feel it had a particularly positive effect on me. This is not to say necessarily that an attempt to raise kids for excellence is bad, but I think if done wrong it can absolutely mess with your kid. Especially when the parent(s) have a certain vision and expectation for what they want, and won't deviate from it regardless of the child's actual wishes.

It's not that I lacked a custom-tailored education. But I was intellectually starving, desperate for things to learn, for concepts to connect together. And adults just told me "just wait a couple more years, it'll come."

If I had another go I would want to change everything after kindergarten. I only skipped one year, and was held back from skipping several more for nebulous reasons having to do with social development - lot of good that did.

I have raised a genius. Other than genetics, the key is finding something intellectual the kid really likes (math and programming in my kid's case) and keeping the kid's education in flow meaning giving him material that is challenging but not too difficult.

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