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I absolutely agree that children should be exposed to interesting people and environments, be self-directed, be tutored, and have apprenticeships.

But given that thousands of people had these experiences contemporaneously with geniuses, and only dozens are geniuses, I think the genetics are the secret sauce.

Also, genetic geniuses with non-exceptional experiences may have been just as much a genius as the famous ones, but did not have a chance to become famous, so again the experiences help with the fame, not necessarily the base characteristic of genius.

The lesson then is if you have a child who is a genius, do these things.  Unfortunately, very few of us can take advantage of that advice.  Fortunately, we should all try to do these things regardless of whether our children are geniuses.

I loved this!
But I have a compulsion to point out that Cyprus is on the same end of the Mediterranean as Cairo.

Given the horrifically inefficient way we are using our current idea-creating resources (people), it seems a much better investment to improve our efficiency, rather than creating more underutilized resources at great expense.

In equatorial Africa, I assume it is quite dark for 10-11 hours every single night where there is no moon.

Generally interesting, but I have a quibble with this:

In the text here, you say

>>Walker outright fakes data to support his “sleep epidemic” argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the graph below simply does not exist:

I went to your link to see the proof that it does not exist.  Pretty extraordinary claim.  Difficult to prove a negative and all.  Figured I would find something solid.  Other than two studies with evidence that contradicts Walker's general claim with a few specific examples, here's what you had:

>>I have not been able to find any data that would support the sleep duration numbers Walker provides in the book and it appears that they were simply made up.

I think that speaks for itself.

Could you (or others) provide one or two particularly egregious examples where "Governments Most Places Are Lying Liars With No Ability To Plan or Physically Reason. They Can’t Even Stop Interfering and Killing People"?  Maybe just one or two weekly posts to look at?

Clearly these organizations made mistakes, some significant.  I think even if 50% of their decisions were mistakes, the wording here is not really supported. You claim these organizations "Can't Stop Killing People"  Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.

Other than that, great post.

I apologize if this is explained somewhere, but I have a question about this statement;

The key takeaway is that a 1% chance of having COVID, which is about the base rate of COVID in the US, costs older relatives a few days of life if you pass it on to them.

Is that an average loss of life over a large population of people exposed?

So in an oversimplified example, if the only effect of the behavior is 1 in 1000 older relatives would die 1000 days earlier than they would otherwise, the average loss is one day of life?

If that is the meaning, I am not sure I find that helpful. Nobody would notice the loss of one day.  But in reality, nobody is losing one day.  999 people lose nothing, and one person loses 3 years.  I do not want to be the cause of that, even if the odds are low.

Overall, I found this very informative.  One quibble:

Shorter hours, cleaner and safer factories, and the end of child labor are luxuries that could only happen after an increase in per-capita wealth. 

The per-capita wealth is at least one level removed as a cause.  The actual cause is increased profit for the factory that can be turned in to those benefits.  Do you have any evidence that early unsafe factories had insufficient profit for that to happen?  Is it safer to assume that the owners felt no pressure to give up their generous profits for the benefit of worker safety?