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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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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.

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