>You can see this phenomenon when the media goes wild for any child who makes a significant scientific breakthrough. Onion thinks the pressure on kids to hit on a groundbreaking discovery is not only unrealistic but also contrary to how most advances in science happen.
“We tend to see science as this mystical beast living in the sky that, somehow, children see more clearly because they haven’t been clouded,” Onion says.
Does anyone really see science or children that way? Kids make the news for science because science has a reputation for being hard and children have a reputation for not being very organized or driven compared to adults.
“We tend to see science as this mystical beast living in the sky that, somehow, children see more clearly because they haven’t been clouded,” Onion says.
In tech you clearly see this. A lot of people believe that innovation can only come from people who are at max 30 years old because anyone with some years experience can't innovate anymore.
There is a selection bias - 'child prodigy discovers X' is a little more newsworthy than 'eccentric person discovers X after lifetime of mucking around'.
I expect that the average age is probably older than 30 [1]. But 35 year old scientists making discoveries about science doesn't make a very good story; neither does an entire field making slow steady progress. People like to have one genius to study.
Same as how history tends to remember heads of state, but all the actual work is often done by small, highly effective groups of people who nobody remembers (eg, parliaments - I can name a couple of European monarchs from the olden days, but nobody from the Dutch Republic or the East India Company leadership).
Besides science and math build and progress slowly. Sometimes there's a new discovery and suddenly there's a whole explosion of progress. Think calculus or the even the computer. Which we're living in right now. But look at quantum mechanics and computing, that's been progressing for the last the century or so but it's progressing through continued and shared effort built upon previous generations work.
> Does anyone really see science or children that way?
If a rough estimate of the count of people like my Mom gives any indication: yes. Millions.
That being said, my mom is wonderful. But still a sucker for stuff like that. Little prayer sticker on the car windshield for the Patron Saint of Vehicle Safety to grant her safe travel.
Yes, I would say that I perceive exactly the phenomenon described in the article. People want to believe in a outsider like a genius kid or autistic savant who has a special insight which escapes those trapped within the standard point of view.
Not that people really 'believe' this logically... It's more like a tabloid-quality news story trope.
Children making amazing discoveries was a constant theme of early science fiction.
Moreover, if Richard Feynman's biographical essays even slightly typical, mid 20th century kids actually did do a fair amount of experimentation.
Remember machinery in the mid 20th was simpler but less reliable, so a kid with the latest gadget, whether radio, hot rod or model rocket, had considerable incentive to tinker. In fact, I suspect tinkering/hacking is main story for boys of that era and science was more of an offshoot.
Very much related to the culture around the various framework hype machines, the “changing the world” startup (corporate) trope, and more distantly, FOSS mythology.
There’s something very central about the trope of technology-as-toy-cupboard. It’s been a huge influence on the Internet and on Internet startups, not just in terms of how offices are accessorised and cultures are defined, but in the kinds of stories developers and business owners tell themselves about what they do and why they do it.
You get some very curious blends when it cross-feetilises with mainstream corporate capitalist class values.
It's an interesting article, albeit somewhat incoherent. And much of it could be summarized as "America has always been fundamentally racist, sexist and borderline anti-intellectual". That's surely an exaggeration. And it's not as bad as it was some decades ago. Just maybe a little worse, just now.
But anyway, the Heinlein references remind me how much I love Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi.
> While researching her American Studies master’s thesis, Onion noticed that at the turn of the 20th century, children were portrayed as having a particular affinity for animals and the natural world in general, whether they’re catching fireflies, climbing trees, or digging in the dirt. At other times—say, 2017—children are thought to intuitively understand very unnatural modern technology like smartphones and laptops.
“At different times in our history, people were invested in the ideas of children as being modern or as being anti-modern, which is a weird paradox I find fascinating,” Onion says.
It may be that the 'paradox' in our ideas of children being modern or anti-modern at different times is just due to to the fact that at the turn of the 20th century children were often playing outside, and now they are often playing with technology. I think generally when an academic misses something as obvious as that, it's because they're straining to fit the data into a probably not very good theory.
> “And then it came to me: Science is the link that connects man-made technology and the primitive natural world.” After all, scientists have to use microscopes to view and fully understand organic cells and microbes.
I had to laugh out loud here. Someone for whom it's a revelation that science is the link between the natural world and technology is maybe not the best person to attempt making the grand characterizations put forth in the article.
> The vast social project of science is ignored in favor of celebrity scientists mythologized as stubborn individuals—similar to cowboys on the frontier—who strike out on their own and discover unexplored territory. We see Thomas Edison as a relentless, pioneering entrepreneur and Albert Einstein as an out-of-the-box thinker. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates were the swaggering “pirates of Silicon Valley” who created personal computing as we know it in their garages.
You could maybe say we focus on Edison, Einstein, et al over your typical scientist—but 1) It's obvious that we would do that—we admire the greats over the regulars in every field 2) The phrasing of 'We see X as Y' is implying that the attribution of Y to X is mistaken. But in all of those cases the attributes given are uncontroversially accurate. It makes more sense in the next sentence—but really, we only "see" Einstein as an "out-of-the-box thinker"?
> Upper-middle-class white Victorians started to view childhood as a sacred time instead of seeing their kids as little adults who were put to work as soon as they could walk. Wealthier adults became smitten with images of cute white kids and chubby-cheeked cherubs. Black children, meanwhile, were depicted in ads and pop culture as wild, innately criminal, and precociously sexual.
While that is very unfortunate, it also bears zero connection to the article.
It appears that the quality bar on that site is appallingly low.
“We tend to see science as this mystical beast living in the sky that, somehow, children see more clearly because they haven’t been clouded,” Onion says.
Does anyone really see science or children that way? Kids make the news for science because science has a reputation for being hard and children have a reputation for not being very organized or driven compared to adults.