> Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents<p>Pretty much all kids are a lot smarter than we acknowledge<p>Lazlo Polgar believed geniuses are made, not born, and raised his daughters to become chess grandmasters <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r</a><p>The school system is more of an industrial childcare operation for working parents, than an actual education system for the kids<p>It’s also easy to criticize, and it is very hard for parents to provide good resources and enough attention for the kids to fully develop their potential
>"Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would read the classics in his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father’s desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics"<p>I've noticed this as well, but took a different lesson from it: they were rich. They were <i>all</i> rich. Of course there's the odd rags to riches story here and there. But almost uniformly as a rule, anyone you've ever read about or heard of who was notable in any way as an intellectual in history was born and raised rich. There was nothing genetic or cultural about it. They were just afforded a thousand opportunities at every turn that the rest of us never were. That's really all there is to it.
I was incessantly mobbed, physically and psychologically, throughout early school with no escape and all cries for rescue rendered impotent... and all I got was this lousy +4 z-score IQ!<p>I didn't choose the genius life, the genius life chose me. *sob*
<i>> What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.</i><p>Not limited to the living, i.e. we have centuries of potential human influencers whose contributions have been tested by time.
> And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat.<p>I don't even want to ask
> The milieu around you—which shapes you, and which you shape in turn—we can model as a directed graph. The nodes are people and objects and ideas connected to each other. And the graph is directed because you have nodes that send you input and nodes you send output to.<p>Then shows a figure of a weirdly symmetric undirected graph that looks nothing like a social or complex network!
"Your culture shapes who you become". Agree. Culture molds individuals' identities, influences their values and behaviors in so many ways