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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#141

Post by __s »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

Think your solution ends up being a lot more exploitable/costly than basic income

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#142

Post by pikwip »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

That's basically the thought process behind Tyler Cowen's 'Emergent Ventures' program. He secured a few million dollars that he can unilaterally give out to moonshot innovators, mainly to prove that traditional grant-making bureaucracies are inefficient.

Site here: https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures

Info about cohorts here: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#143

Post by Enginerrrd »

toasterlovin wrote: post #92
eaenki wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.

Corruption is not rampant everywhere. And perhaps that gets at the root of why some places have functioning modern economies and others do not.

I'd say it does. During a modeling project I worked on back when I was in school, my team found that beyond any other social or economic factor the value of the corruption index was the best correlated to how f'd up a country was. The next best was, I think, women's literacy or some other equality measure.

What was surprising to me was how uncorrelated other factors of economic health were. We found examples of countries with pretty poor indicators but very low corruption, and they had a lot of opportunity, future, and growth.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#145

Post by ozim »

criddell wrote: post #29
eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

If I had been given $1 million when I was 22 to build something, the world would have a pretty awesome Honda Civic with a flamethrower on the front, a 40" subwoofer in the hatch, and a dial to change the camber angle of the wheels on the fly.

Just like Casey Neistad spent budget for Nike commercial on doing stupid shit around the world. There was also a band of musicians that got loads of cash from music company and they wasted it on drugs in Berlin instead of production of an album (someone on Joe Rogan, don't remember name).

So those things happen in some people reality.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#146

Post by marcinzm »

eaenki wrote: post #129
marcinzm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y Ideas require good execution to be off any value and money doesn't buy that. Look at all the Kicks…

Well, the twist is those are far fetched and they have a prototype. e.g If you want to build a reusable rocket and you already have something 100 times smaller, kind of working but not really and one contract to be paid upon delivery, that's good enough, most likely, when there are 30 companies building reusable rockets and 29970 more a year doing other far fetched things, in theory

Many of those Kickstarters also had or claimed to have prototypes.

Let's use your example. I can buy a small reusable toy rocket at a hobby store. It will fly up a few hundred feet and come down by parachute in one piece. I can build a somewhat bigger one from pieces as well, there's college competitions around such things. That provides about 0.0001% of the work, skills, etc. needed to build one that can reach orbit and carry an actual payload. In other words, there is basically no relation between the small scale prototype and the actual useful product. A million is also a uselessly small amount of money for such a thing. SpaceX probably went through at least $200 million before it's first Falcon 1 flight.

edit: Btw, parachute approach doesn't scale but it works in a small scale prototype. So you gain little knowledge of full scale re-usability from such prototype. However, you've said minimal bureaucracy so no system for doing such in-depth due diligence.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#147

Post by ta1234567890 »

buboard wrote: post #124
ta1234567890 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the solution to corruption? It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better. Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)

Most of the west is not corrupt. You have to visit eastern europe, latin america, middle east and east asia to experience it The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example

So you are saying that free money is not a solution. Ok, then what is a solution?

Also, how do you measure and compare corruption?

The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies.

The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying.

So are you saying the west is not corrupt because it is more publicly/"legally" corrupt?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#148

Post by vinceguidry »

I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the realm of running as fast as they can to stay in place.

You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell?

Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture.

But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#149

Post by jzebedee »

vinceguidry wrote: post #148

I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the rea…

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawa...

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#150

Post by [deleted] »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

[deleted]
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