From Designing Directed Graphs to Curating Them and Perhaps Creating a New One !?

Curating your personal milieu is an ongoing journey of self-discovery and adjustment. It’s about creating a harmonious environment in which every aspect—from your physical surroundings to your social interactions—resonates with who you are and who you aspire to be.This post is inspired by Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish author who I had the pleasure of interacting with on his essays featured in Escaping Flatland.

Directed graphs are your window to an ordered relationship.A directed graph, also known as a digraph, is a mathematical structure used to represent relationships that have a specific direction or order. It comprises vertices (or nodes) connected by arrows called directed edges (or arcs).Directed graphs are powerful tools for representing and analyzing relationships with inherent directionality. Their wide range of applications in computer science, engineering, and beyond showcases their versatility and importance in capturing complex relationships.

The environment around you – which influences you and which you also influence – can be modeled as a directed graph.In this graph, the nodes represent the people, objects, and ideas that are connected to each other.It is a directed graph because there are nodes that send input to you, and nodes that you send output to.The nodes sending input to you shape your perspectives and ideas. These could be friends, family, teachers, books, or social media.The nodes you send output to are those you influence. These could be your social network, colleagues, communities or causes you contribute to.By viewing your interactions as a graph, it helps illustrate how you both shape your environment and are shaped by it through reciprocal relationships. The connections surrounding you make up an ecosystem that impacts your personal development.

Exceptional people tend to grow up surrounded by other exceptional people, absorbed in rich intellectual and cultural milieus.Their parents or educators curate these environments deliberately, exposing children to complex ideas, integrating them into adult conversations, and having high expectations.Even those not born into privilege like Ramanujan and Faraday sought out books and lectures to immerse themselves in knowledge, eventually gaining access to top experts.Books and self-learning can compensate up to a point, but direct access to genius accelerates development tremendously.The common thread is surrounding children with the best role models available, integrating them into adult intellectual life, and signaling belief in their potential. This intense cultural immersion shapes nascent genius.biographies suggest lack of conformity pressure, boredom and large amounts of unstructured time drove many polymaths to develop their own passions and talents from a young age.Around 70% of exceptional individuals had significant tutoring, often 1-on-1, for over an hour daily in childhood.Exceptional individuals often benefited from 1-on-1 tutoring fitting learning to their level and interests, though impact depended on the tutor-student relationship.Nearly all exceptional people had cognitive apprenticeships where they produced real work under the guidance of field experts, accelerating their skills.

While exceptional education was important, these individuals were also exceptionally gifted from a young age.Their rapid progress can’t be attributed solely to tutoring – innate talent played a major role.Examples like von Neumann doing advanced math as a child, or Wagner’s early music skills, show extreme early ability.Cloning someone like von Neumann and giving them average education would not produce average outcomes – their genius would still shine through.That said, pairing strong innate gifts with personalized education and access to experts provided huge advantages in developing their talents.Nature and nurture worked together – exceptional innate abilities accelerated by exceptional learning environments.So while their education approaches are worth emulating, similar outcomes can’t be expected without comparably gifted children.In summary, these individuals combined extremely strong innate abilities with highly nurturing educational approaches, demonstrating the importance of both giftedness and environment in developing genius

Providing an exceptional environment and education like those described requires immense effort and sacrifice, especially of time.It’s understandable many parents do not have the capacity or desire to emulate this intensity.However, some aspects are adoptable without major sacrifice – mainly a mindset shift.Viewing children as capable, eager for meaningful work, and worthy of inclusion, as many of these families did, is a profound change.Reading these biographies and seeing how those families fostered genius expands our notions of what is possible.Even without dramatic actions, adjusting perceptions of children’s potential and adopting a respectful, intellectually engaged posture can provide some benefit.

In summary, while comprehensively providing such exceptional education entails major trade-offs, adopting the respectful, engaged mindset that views children as capable can be beneficial without requiring substantial sacrifice.The most enjoyable aspects of the internet are shaped by human curation rather than algorithms. To successfully navigate and contribute to this realm, it’s important to understand the flow of information. Information moves quickly from the periphery to the central hubs, and then more slowly disseminates back to the periphery. Understanding this pattern can help one effectively engage with and contribute to the internet landscape.

Being precise and niche in one’s online language can lead to more meaningful connections. This specificity is challenging for the author, who is accustomed to the mass-media model of broad, generalized communication. I aim to reach a general audience but rather a particular group interested in specific intellectual problems. I hope that writing serves as a targeted search query, designed to find like-minded individuals while filtering out the rest.In essence, powerful online writing has the capacity to summon new realities and cultures.