This system is very much alive in academia: a graduate student (apprentice) trains under a professor (master) to become a member of the guild (academia), after which they can go off and find their own work as a postdoc (journeyman) and eventually start their own lab (shop) to have their own trainees.
Holy crap. The links from these couple posts incline me to believe the guy's fallen into "safe to ignore for the rest of his life" territory, whatever decent work he may have done earlier.
I don't get what's with folks getting stuff related to covid very wrong—which is fine! Practically everyone was wrong about it at one point or another!—but then doubling down on their position when it's crystal clear they were wrong, instead of owning up to it and moving on. They do it to the point of completely wrecking their reputations and making having-been-wrong-about-covid-but-being-in-denial their entire public persona, as in this case. Why? Why do that?
The bit where he was insulting the appearance of a grad student, at length, in a goddamn peer reviewed paper—I mean, damn dude, how do you not realize you're fucking up when you start heading down that path? What must be going wrong with someone for them to look back at that writing and go, "yep, nailed it, time to submit, this is definitely gonna convince people"?
Do we no longer have the attention span to just read text? Do we need 'multiple entry points'? Do we have to convince the reader that each chunk of text will provide 'value' separate from others? How sad.
But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system. This is confusing correlation for causation. Indeed, Bertrand Russell wrote:
> The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.
I have a strong suspicion that aristocrat homeschooling would still beat out public education system in many ways..
For example, public education system doesn't particularly touch on social skills, etiquette, rulership/leadership, Machiavellianism, business, investing, property management, etc.
no because that's the skills of a political and economic oligarchy. If you want to see successful education systems look at the Soviet Union, India, China and also France.
A boatload of testing, rigorous learning combined with high formal standards, that's to say an actual meritocracy is how you can quite literally churn out geniuses. Chess is a good example.
Took me a while to realize you are actually being serious. Those systems are terrible examples - just look at the state of those countries themselves. That kind of highly standardized, high pressure exam school culture drives all the creativity and joy out of learning. The ones who survive are the calculators who can't think for themselves. Great for communist dictatorships, yes.
>just look at the state of those countries themselves
three out of four of them are doing alright, and the one that didn't failed because it endorsed an economic system that engaged exactly in the kind of cronyism and bizarre political machinations that the OP actually wants on a school curriculum.
>The ones who survive are the calculators who can't think for themselves
Well neither can your average Ivy league humanity's graduate at this point so at least they've got that in common. Thinking for yourself is overrated. if you manage to produce engineers at a rate ten times higher than everyone else and manage to not destroy your economy with central planning you'll surprised how far that can take you.
> A boatload of testing, rigorous learning combined with high formal standards, that's to say an actual meritocracy is how you can quite literally churn out geniuses. Chess is a good example.
Isn't the way chess was taught essentially a system of tutoring? As soon as a 'prodigy' is identified, they started playing against Grand Masters outside of tournaments.
Of course there was. There was a nationwide infrastructure of chess clubs, tournaments, state financing and training that no other country had. This created the large base from which gifted players could be recruited
"But the real basis of the Soviet school was its colossal infrastructure, creating a pool of millions. As the huge Soviet training campaign bore fruit, and literally hundreds of players achieved master or grandmaster strength between the 1940s and 1960s, a vast system of rewards and punishments was built up, with endless in-fighting and denunciations. The life of a chess professional was a privileged one: stipends were much higher than average wages, and foreign travel allowed. Botvinnik and his successor Vassily Smyslov were awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian Soviet honour—no British professional has received so much as a knighthood."
we have chess clubs in pretty much every village here in Germany. My ~10000 people birthplace had one. Doesn't make chess hugely popular tho. It's still a niche activity and I would argue that interest is the dmoniating factor here.
Also Russia isn't dominting chess anymore. They have a single player in the world top10 and 3 in the top20. [1]
Have you lived in an ex-Soviet state? Have you seen the USSR from the inside with your own eyes? I have, and I am so much tired from people glorifying it.
Sure, but we don't make judgements on individual data points. The Soviet Union with the short Fischer interlude dominated chess entirely. Today Russia still averages the strongest top 10 players, India and China have risen to become the third and fourth strongest chess nations within a generation or two, and looking at immigrant engineering talent in the US paints a pretty clear picture as well.
And the educational divide globally and development of science excellence pretty much only grows. How is this even a discussion given the evidence, any countries around that run on 'aristocratic homeschooling'? Saudi royal family kids in Swiss private schools?
> Sure, but we don't make judgements on individual data points.
And yet here you are making a judgement on the effectiveness of a method of education purely based on the single datapoint chess.
But leaving the hypocrisy aside, I don't think chess is a good example to begin with. The reason why Russia dominated chess is because chess was there a lot more popular compared to other countries. That this theroy likely makes sense is supported by the rise of China and India with their massive population compared to other countries. Having a high amount of interest and good education are components that often reinforce eachother. More opportunities to learn and compete with strong players improves ones own skill level.
Why was there a higher interest in chess in Russia? I can only guess, but I would say the long and cold winters that make outside activites impossible most of the year play an important role.
On top of that the world chess rankings are actually quite diverse since the rise of internet chess. Russia only has a single spot in the top 10 strongest players. [1] The rise of video gaming that competes with chess for indoor mental activity has probably something to do with that.
> But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system.
By definition no public school can be as good as anything Russell got. Russell had the privilege of his brother teaching him geometry and hence set him on his path to mathematical greatness. He came from a distinguished family. No public education can replicate the personal 1 to 1 knowledge transfer/education.
> None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious
Yes. It's why people like Russell, Darwin, Turing, etc had the time to work on non-industrious subjects. If darwin, russell or turing were industrious, nobody would be talking about them today.
Public education system was created firstly to produce obedient soldiers for the state and secondly to provide drones for factories.
Isn't the important thing whether or not tutoring produces a higher percentage of Darwins compared to our current model of schooling? If it does, then shouldn't we expend some effort on identifying students that are more likely to become a Darwin and then provide them with high quality, publicly funded tutoring? We all benefit from the discoveries of geniuses like Darwin so it is in our common interest to make sure that we produce figures of that stature as often as possible.
What are you talking about? There is no shortage of geniuses who advance sciences today. If anything, the scientist class is wider than ever. Also, you're proposing segregation based on vague attributes which would be horrible for children and harm society.
I currently use bookdown and have dabbled with Jupyterbook. Why should I use this instead? I don't see any advantages, esp. for scientific and technical books / websites.
So, why should one use the next generation? Because it is not tied to R or Python? We're all using one or the other so that doesn't sound like a convincing reason to completely change my workflow.
I think if you are happy with the workflow/output you have there is no reason at all to change. w/r/t to websites and books we have put a lot of investment into features for both (https://quarto.org/docs/websites/, https://quarto.org/docs/books/). If you compare books with Bookdown vs. Quarto vs. JupyterBook I think you'll find that each does some things better than the others (so again if you are happy w/ your existing tools no reason to change).
Thanks for the response. Is there any plan for Quarto to support live code, e.g. the reader can change the code and update the output? Or a feature that makes it easy to have a comment section for each page? I think these things are either not supported or not trivial to do with Bookdown or JupyterBook.
There are a few, one of the popular ones on this site, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1705 shows the results are pretty similar in different fields [[a search for "replication" on hackernews will bring up some others]]
> In support of his skepticism [about the soundness of scientific explanations of nature], Nagel writes: “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos.
Nagel doesn't seem to give science credit where credit is due.
I find Daniel Dennett a much more interesting read because he actually wrestles with the philosophical implications of the scientific revolution, rather than rejecting scientific naturalism basically because it doesn't "feel right".
From Dennett's work I recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea, especially the discussion of "cranes" and "skyhooks". Dennett says that, according to evolutionary theory, the complex structure of the world is built from the bottom up by a sequence of cranes (upon cranes upon cranes...) rather than being dropped from the mysterious, omnipotent heavens by "skyhooks".
