Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

ourworldindata.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 350 posts

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#251

Post by SkyBelow »

jlokier wrote: post #181
kortilla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted. Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life. This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is…

This is only if you outright ignore the second+ order effects of doing such and the incentives created.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#252

Post by SkyBelow »

danenania wrote: post #220
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 you offer millions of dollars to anyone with a far fetched idea and a prototype, everyone will have a far fetched idea and a prototype, and you'll need some way to filter millions of applicants down to the 30k you can afford to give the money. It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult. This doesn't mean that having some public subsidie…

>It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult.

Except that it would likely become corrupted like much of government contracting already is. At least VC are tossing their own money and don't have the same perverse incentive for corruption when you have government employees handing out bids to taxpayer money.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#253

Post by z3t4 »

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…

Just give everyone enough to cover food, rent and health. So that you can work forever on something, or maybe not work at all. With less people working employment wages would go up alot especially in sectors no one wants to work in.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#254

Post by jodrellblank »

threeisoneis wrote: post #74

Once again, an article related to utilitarian altruism that doesn't seem to draw a defensible conclusion from the arguments given. This particular type of article, and the works of the effective altruism movement more broadly, always creep up to the edge of demanding meaningful change but, in their conclusions, shrink away from it. They make the case that the world has a lot of issues, that a lot of people have bad l…

The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system.

.. then what?

Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world.

Who am I to think I know what’s good for the world?

Something is wrong!

“It feels that X is true, therefore X is true” is a logical fallacy.

Ok everything is terrible but I quite like bread and circuses, at least compared to rationing and curfew.

Breaking everything is the easy bit, what would be a better replacement and how do you propose we build it?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#255

Post by QualityReboot »

benjohnson wrote: post #242
8note wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it really the tax payers? and is it really being taken by force? the government also gets funding by taking on debt, or can print more currency; not everything comes from a tax payer. you're not exactly forced to be taxed either. it's an agreement in exchange for citizenship. if you don't want to be taxed, go make and spend your money somewhere that doesn't have taxes

Do you have an unspoken premise that this nation belongs to the government? If so, I would say that this nation belongs to the citizens instead.

Found the libertarian!

I kid, but I think most people do have the view that the government really owns everything. In practice, control means ownership, so it's not an unreasonable view.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#256

Post by jodrellblank »

threeisoneis wrote: post #200
aisengard wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system. Ah yes, violent revolution, where the lower class gets killed en masse (a "noble sacrifice") and autocracy takes even greater hold as a result. The wheels of the revolution larpers are always greased with the blood of the downtrodden.

I didn't advocate violence once. I did advocate democracy. I did advocate solidarity. I did advocate protest. Revolution is not always violent and in fact is often not violent. Your reading of my comment as advocating violence is just your own projection.

There is no way to switch off oil dependency right now without many people dying as a consequence. Climate change protest encouraging regulatory and subsidy movements towards renewables doesn’t sound like revolution and tearing down anything.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#257

Post by whatshisface »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #132
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…

I don't think just giving the money to whoever has a prototype is a good idea. Some culturally relevant projects aren't the sort of thing you can make a prototype of, but I like where you're going. I'd amend it like so: Once I've been a citizen long enough (i.e. paid enough taxes) I get to invoke my free year, which is a year where the government pays me enough to cover my bills and maybe a bit extra for projects and…

Playing along with your idea, I propose that we let people sign up to withdraw early from their social security, but at the expense of having to keep working longer before they get it when they retire.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#258

Post by BoiledCabbage »

rayiner wrote: post #139
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A handful of far-fetched ideas have added more economic value to the world than every diploma combined. If you really believe this, it is shocking to me. It is almost impossible to overstate how incredibly wrong this is. This is probably the single most false yet honestly put forward statement I've read on HN. The fact that anyone believes this shows both how much a slice of society lives in a complete echo-chamber…

That's a lot of rhetoric, but I don't know if your response is any more substantive. At least if we're talking about college degrees rather than high school diplomas, OP may be correct: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-American-adults-had... We sent a man to the moon in 1969. At the time, half of Americans didn't have a high school diploma, and just 10% had a college degree. In the 1940s and early 1950s, when…

> Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook?

Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did. As was almost every notable invention and discovery of the past 80 years.

This is not controversial.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#259

Post by fuzzfactor »

burntoutfire wrote: post #197
NHQ wrote: post #188

I have tech talents that maybe a few thousand people in the world have, and research ability to move the needle (maybe even novel ideas in the field, if you ask me). I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks). I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my…

> obviously talented The only "obvious" proof of talent that will convince anyone is having impressive accomplishments in a given field. Do you have any?

Exactly.

A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not.

But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x.

Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way.

It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself.

If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand.

Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not.

In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost.

PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it.

And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#260

Post by ci5er »

eaenki wrote: post #42
chii wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is far fetched in your opinion?

Anything that’s meant to bring a x10 improvement in how fast or far humans move, how fast humans can learn and communicate, how long humans live, any creature’s freedom, environment cleanliness

Any human that is driven to solve these problems will not need the government to fund them to do so. They will solve these problems with the very gumption necessary to bring their solutions to market (which $1M wouldn't help them do anyway, if they didn't have it).
Post reply on HN