Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…Because you can go back like hundreds of years and the most learned people around. It's just incredible you look back on how many books Thomas Jefferson read. There's some story where Kennedy was hosting a bunch of Nobel laureates in the White House in 1963 or something. And he says, this is the greatest collection of genius and insight and wisdom that has been collected into this room ever since the time that Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Right. I think it's very hard to raise the ceiling. The ceiling has aristocratic tutors. The ceiling has whatever family dynamics and heritable propensities produce tremendous intellectual greatness. Early 20th century schools produced von Neumann. Right. And it's certainly not at all clear that they're now producing more von Neumanns or something like that. In fact, von Neumann's productions seem to have probably very little to do with any kind of mass schooling that we would recognize. As far as the very top, I think that's difficult. We're talking about an institution that was created for the masses. I guess there have always been people who have been using resources outside of those kinds of systems. So the mass system doesn't seem to help those people, I guess. That doesn't seem surprising. By the way, on the von Neumann thing. Okay, a mass system doesn't help them. What is the production function for a von Neumann?…

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