Live data from Hacker News

Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

nytimes.com

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#41
post #30

My main problem with this article and associate research is using patents as an indicator of invention. Patents are only an indicator of money, sometimes innovation, but certainly not invention. For reference, innovation is taking existing ideas and implementing or combining them well, invention is creating wholly new works. Invention is still mostly the domain of academia. Some of the big corporations can afford to…

Patents are obviously a poor proxy, even inventions are a poor proxy for social impact. But there's no reason to believe that the data would look significantly different if we were able to measure it directly.

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#42
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure equal outcomes?

Keeping everyone equally poor and miserable is an easy way to achieve this

Communists have been consistently achieving this in the past 100 years, so at least we know it’s possible!

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#43
Well, given that most people in the world by far live outside the U.S.A, and that people that do not have opportunities are outside the US, in my opinion the low hanging fruit for innovation is in Africa, South America and China,and India not the USA.

In Africa you have kids that are not well fed and after 2 hours of intellectual work they can't continue because of the low nutrition of food!!

In equatorial Africa I can't even think clearly myself because of the intense heat all year long. In India and South Asia it is worse half a year because of humidity.

I seriously believe that climate has a lot to do with intellectual output, specially math is very sensitive to outside temperature.

China probably has the brightest near future, but for this it has to change their culture. Innovating is breaking and changing the rules, something China is very bad at.

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#44

How does this jive with the Silicon Valley trope that ideas aren't worth very much in and of themselves, but the people and teams who can execute on them are?

The value of some "life-changing for all" ideas is not always based in building a sellable product, as Alfred Wegener could tell us.

On the other hand, there is not point in being granted a patent unless you have a lot of money and can afford to hold it.

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#46
post #25

I didn’t even begin to understand the patent system or even the business side of innovation until I was in my late 30s. Yet, I have noticed that the most financially successful innovators that I know have had many family advisors and connections throughout their life. But, inequality is just a small piece. First, you need real education reform - educating kids on how the system operates. The current education system…

> It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system.

working as intended then ?

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.

Dying in the gutter because you can't afford health insurance seems pretty miserable to me. Working at Walmart for minimum wage to make Sam Walton's useless children richer seems pretty miserable to me. There are many well proven ways to make people more equal, strong government welfare programs being one. They are very straightforward. Culture doesn't make people winners and losers, a brutally enforced system of aut…

You are saying one thing, but describing another.

We want people to always have good opportunities to bootstrap themselves out of a terrible situation (your gutter and wallmart situations). But we don't want to remove all the rewards from turning time into value.

"brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism" think you have a few opinions there that are deeply rooted in feelings ...

When you are alone on an island, the world rewards you when you spend time changing things for the better (eg hunt for food). If in that situation you have the opportunity to trade you will be even better off.

Things only go south when free markets also create a free labor market. Then the power of markets pushes strongly on those wages. Even if there is no evil intent by anyone, companies not ignoring this push will not be around for long ...

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#48
I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc).

Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on "yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that).

Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe it's balanced out by that a bit.

I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for society.

And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly (Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#49
Good God this is infuriating. The single most anomalous figure in the whole article and not one word about it.

Surely, the over representation of people of Asian descent in this, and similar findings, is worthy of some analysis?

I appreciate it spoils the narrative but, if people actually cared, it must make sense to look at the systemic cases that buck the trend.

At the very least acknowledge it. Completely ignoring whole racial groups strikes me as somewhere between blatantly rude and racist.

Re: Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

#50

> We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet The number of kids who are trained in sports yet never reach the professional level is absolutely enormous, and it has far-reaching consequences for them. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-bi...

Those boys are all good, really. It is mostly that the number of top positions is very limited, not that they would be bad at football or lazy.
Post reply on HN