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James Maynard's avatar

Thanks, this was a great essay, and very compelling. Obviously there are more factors than the decline of personal tutoring (James Joyce, Johannes Kepler, Shakespeare-if-you-agree-Shakespeare-is-Shakespeare didn't have tutors). It had me thinking of another problem, also appearing around 1950, which for the glibness of this comment I'll call the Decline of Boredom. How much does boredom play into creative thought, and what does constant stimulus do to suppress that creative thought? Might it be that genius was created on a rainy day when the genius was thinking of something to do?

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Ted Wade's avatar

Perhaps the Internet has suppressing effects. A common SF trope is that a telepath’s life is misery, constantly swamped by unwanted input from random minds. We are all that telepath now. On the supply side a truly curious person gets pulled in too many directions. This can inhibit the focus needed for (and supplied by tutors in the past) development of genius-level contributions. On the demand side we need an intelligentsia that is able to find, understand and recognize genius. Finding fails in a thicket of drivel, shouting, and self-promotion by the ignorant. Good work is obscured by noise, by competition for attention, by opposing (and often inferior) ideas of many stripes. Maybe the Internet could someday stop magnifying all our worst motivations and cognitive biases.

To the importance of tutoring, I can attest that it is still a tradition at some elite institutions. My daughter is a grad student at Oxford, where it is common for her and her peers to be paid to have tutoring sessions with 2 or 3 less advanced students. This is not remedial. Tutoring so-defined is the primary teaching/learning method there.

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