Writing Prompt: How should we cultivate genius?

Let's talk about education and how we should advance the human mind.

We are currently studying 2000 years of utopian thought via the Utopian Collective.

I'm studying all the utopian novels this year

This month we are studying Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and his essays which were published in 1626.

Bacon was very concerned with education and the advancement of the human mind, but he was also thinking about these things circa the 1600s. That’s why I want to introduce some supplementary reading material that will allow us to think about where those ideas can go from here.

To do that, we’re going to start by reading

Erik Hoel

’s aristocratic tutoring series which he published for

The Intrinsic Perspective

. His series is an interesting complement to some of the ideas in The New Atlantis so I want to read them, discuss them in the comments, and write our own essays about them.

Here’s the series in full so far:

• Part I: “Why we stopped making einsteins”

  • Hacker News’ response

  • Astral Codex Ten’s response “Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring”

• Part II: “Objections to the importance of aristocratic tutoring”

• Part III: “How geniuses used to be raised”

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes

and I have both read the series and plan to continue it in a letter-writing campaign on genius and how and whether we should cultivate genius in the future. He’s going to share his response next week on

if not, Paris

, and I will share my response to his right here the following week!

Read the above articles and contribute your thoughts on how we should cultivate genius in the comments. Better yet: write your own essay in response to the prompt and share the link to it in the comments. I will cross-post my favorite essay responses to the Utopian Collective, as well as add them to The Index for Oblivion, my utopian project!!

Your turn: how should we cultivate genius?

P.S. Just a reminder that you can find my complete reading list for the year right here. It’s a constantly evolving thing!