I take your point, but I think it serves us to be reminded that formal education isn't the only place that one can learn things.
Like college education isn’t necessary as long as you have college professors for parents?
The absurdist continuation is something like: “I’d like to think if I was motivated enough I could retroactively convert my parents from city bus drivers to tenured professors in a lucrative field, then I wouldn’t need a college education”?
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AYakov+Perelm...
They are both challenging and entertaining and very simple - on the surface. Some were written in 1913 or so. Each American family can get such an “immersion” for their kids - total is less than $100 I guess. But you also should turn off TV and computers, so probably would not work.
Also my daughter took major in mathematics - and I like my parents had no time to immerse her in anything - adults work, children play with fun but impractical problems.
I would rather guess that it is some genetic defect in the brain causing a person to prefer playing with abstract problems to booze, smoke and sexual gratification. But I doubt that having such a guess is allowed.
Understandable given it's a comically elitist point of view.
Fun fact: Richard Feynman experimented with both LSD and Ketamine, among other things. Shame, imagine how much he could have achieved if he had this "genetic defect" you posit...
In elementary school - while my mother was on the field trips gathering data for her PhD thesis on methan gas distribution in coal mines of Donbass region I was living with my mathematician granddad. It was a small house shared by three families, no running water and amenities inside. My grandparents grew their own vegetables since you can’t buy vegetables on the market (since there were no market), and even bread was rationed - it was Khrushchev time. Elitist family, indeed.
Btw my ancestors were slaves, freed about the same time American slaves were freed. And then communists killed a brother of granddad, and a father of my stepfather, and then national-socialists killed the only brother of my mother, my uncle. My stepfather was never allowed to college, as a son of the “enemy of the people”.
If you want to see “elitist” - look at any American house.
I understand television may give a false impression of the American lifestyle, but there's a wide range of experience in a country approaching 400MM people.
Our company moved to San Francisco in late 90s to save money before IPO. The location was right near Tenderloin, the murder capital of the US. I walked through it from time to time. Nothing special, a city like a city. I remember thinking: how nice it is to walk through American streets - so less aggression in the air…
There was a huge homeless camp though near Civic Center. There was a homeless man sleeping near a back door to our office, he once saved a girl patronizing a local bar from rape. In Soviet Union these homeless would have been rounded up and moved to some rural location not near than 100 km to any big city. Some could have been criminally tried even, like “elitist” Soviet poet Brodsky who was tried and convicted for a lack of permanent job. “Elitist” who can be tried and convicted any time authorities do not like something he says? (I kinda worried that Americans do not feel that personal freedoms had much value, and are willing to trade them for some fashionable illusion).
But I can agree that there can be found some Americans who are materially worse than our family was. Still, calling us elitists - is a sign of laughable ignorance of the world at large.
Note that indulging in all these pleasant activities does not prevent you from being successful. A lot of my heavily drinking classmates became rather accomplished. We have a head of a regional KGB office (our region is about 2 mln people, a dozen counties or so), a head of regional sanitary office (a medic who checks business medical safety compliance), doctors, engineers…
And if I was born say a hundred years earlier there would be no such a crazy demand for computer specialists, and I would have probably landed a job of math teacher at high school, or if I was lucky - at community college like my granddad.
Math teacher at high school - only some brain defect can lead you to give up pleasures of booze to get such a job, no?
Do you find these condescending tactics work well when you're trying to change someone's view?
From: https://gizmodo.com/10-scientific-and-technological-visionar...
> Nevertheless, Feynman's curiosity got the best of him when he became acquainted with none other than John C. Lilly and his sensory deprivation tanks. Feynman experimented briefly with LSD, ketamine, and marijuana, which he used to bring on isolation-induced hallucinations more quickly than he could when sober.
As an aside, that page has a list of other notable scientists who also experimented with psychoactive drugs.
They may not be as mutually exclusive as you think. I remember reading some research years ago that investigated the positive correlation between alcohol abuse and IQ. Their theory was that high IQ personalities seek novelty and that can manifest in chasing novel mental states.
You see the same thing in, for example, sports dynasties (e.g. Earl Woods coaching Tiger from a very young age).
Also, being "privileged" in this way isn't a bad thing (not that you have said otherwsie).
Can you describe how you arrived at this conclusion?
>No amount of parent's help can instill that kind of talent.
Totally agree here, but the use of tallent can be shaped by parenting. I think it's fair to say that his upbringing allowed him to develop an interest in mathematics at an earlier age. Not to mention being able to discuss it all the time (making some assumptions here, I can only guess).
Even Terrance Tao didn't publish anything original of such noteworthiness until his 20s. This guy knows as much as he did without even going to college. mind-blowing x10.
The kind of tutoring these provide is nowhere near as immersive as the elite one-on-one education that was historically common in upper-class households.
The tutors for rich kids are likely to be local grad students who meet with the kids at most a few hours a week; you can’t exactly hire a fields medalist for tutoring. Perhaps more importantly, those rich kids are not getting singular training in math, they’re getting tutored in a gazillion things so they can be “well-rounded”. Also, those kids are not likely to develop the intrinsic motivation to do this stuff because their parents are still the ones instilling values in them. Those values are going to be “go to law school” or “start a business” or “pursue the arts” or some other avatar of “make as much money/social capital as possible”. Those values are likely not going to be “study math and prove theorems because it’s interesting”.