This system is very much alive in academia: a graduate student (apprentice) trains under a professor (master) to become a member of the guild (academia), after which they can go off and find their own work as a postdoc (journeyman) and eventually start their own lab (shop) to have their own trainees.
Do we no longer have the attention span to just read text? Do we need 'multiple entry points'? Do we have to convince the reader that each chunk of text will provide 'value' separate from others? How sad.
But the reason why so many historical figures were tutored or homeschooled is because there was no adequate public education system. This is confusing correlation for causation. Indeed, Bertrand Russell wrote:
> The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.
Thanks for the response. Is there any plan for Quarto to support live code, e.g. the reader can change the code and update the output? Or a feature that makes it easy to have a comment section for each page? I think these things are either not supported or not trivial to do with Bookdown or JupyterBook.
So, why should one use the next generation? Because it is not tied to R or Python? We're all using one or the other so that doesn't sound like a convincing reason to completely change my workflow.
I currently use bookdown and have dabbled with Jupyterbook. Why should I use this instead? I don't see any advantages, esp. for scientific and technical books / websites.
I was vaguely aware of the 'feud', was more curious about your judgment that "Wilson has proved to be correct in every particular" (because I don't think this is true). Is there a reason to believe that the objections by Lewontin and Gould were 'ideological'? Personally I care more about whether the criticisms were valid than what motivated them. Seems to me that Wilson's idea about the genetic origin of social behavior is quite speculative, and naive about the enormous complexity of both genetics and behavior. Wilson also remains a widely celebrated scientist, perhaps more so than Lewontin, so clearly the persecutions didn't amount to much (though I admit that I know little about how L and G treated W in private).
Here is another heuristic: if the paper is published in Nature/Science/Cell (for bio-related applications), then highly likely to be wrong/not generalizable.
Sorry, but "back of the napkin" calculations are quick order-of-magnitude type estimates based on reasonable guesses or first principles, not by looking up numbers on the web (napkin not big enough to write out URLs; maybe use envelope)
It seems most commenters here think that the results can be explained by bias (e.g. on the part of teachers), or cultural factors / environment (e.g. schools are set up for women to do better), or personality differences (e.g. girls are more obedient etc), and so on. But isn't the most straightforward explanation that women are simpler smarter than men on average?
Let's not jump to conclusions. Yes, there have been numerous cases of "misses." But to evaluate the value of peer review for science, we need to know the "correct rejection" rates as well. Also note that we now know of these cases because science self-corrected, presumably via peer-reviewed replication / validation.