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Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

economist.com

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Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#81

Post by rjsw »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #76

The company TransMeta was mostly PhDs. They fooled around so long, arguing and redesigning, not releasing, that Intel ate their lunch steadily improving scalar performance. My colleague who was worth $100M in TransMeta options at one point, is back to work with nothing. So yeah, too many brains are a dangerous thing.

For me, the most attractive feature of their chip was that it had a built-in PCI host controller, nothing else did at the time. They could have released anything that ran at a reasonable speed and had a market, they didn't need to beat Intel.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#82

Post by treeman79 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #69
treeman79 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple decades ago CS was dominated by people who wanted high income. Each class would 1-2 people in it that were genuinely interested in computers. Early web startup cultures were heavy on college drop outs who had passed the professors in “useful” skills.

Because the 'S' in CS is for 'science'. The degree is a study of the fundamental underpinnings of computer use. Not a tech-ed employment-training class. Sounds like folks who love the field but hate the job, should teach!

This is both true and false.

I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems.

So more engineer then scientist.

Choice for college path. Computer Management or Computer Science.

Once of those was about buying software and managing people.

Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#83

Post by the_only_law »

treeman79 wrote: post #82
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the 'S' in CS is for 'science'. The degree is a study of the fundamental underpinnings of computer use. Not a tech-ed employment-training class. Sounds like folks who love the field but hate the job, should teach!

This is both true and false. I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems. So more engineer then scientist. Choice for college path. Computer Management or Computer Science. Once of those was about buying software and managing people. Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.

The problem is I dont really feel like an engineer or a scientist. I'm definitely not a good engineer partly because I don't care enough, but I'm neither smart nor educated enough to be a scientist. I'd personally describe myself as more of a hacker, but thats not particularly useful for much.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#84

Post by moosey »

lwneal wrote: post #20

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility , individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nob…

There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid.

Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).

What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#85

Post by Balgair »

rjsw wrote: post #39
dalbasal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good context. Thanks for that. Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing…

Spain fixed the problem of too many landless knights by encouraging them to go off and invade South America.

Most of Europe did that with their 2nd and 3rd sons. I can't seem to find the source, but I have heard that the flag of South Carolina has a crescent moon on it due to all the minor sons that came there to find their riches (Crescent Moons were common on the heraldry of minor sons).

San Domingue, now Haiti, was also a place where these nobles went off to get rich.

The new world was filled with these kinds of guys.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#86

Post by Balgair »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #76

The company TransMeta was mostly PhDs. They fooled around so long, arguing and redesigning, not releasing, that Intel ate their lunch steadily improving scalar performance. My colleague who was worth $100M in TransMeta options at one point, is back to work with nothing. So yeah, too many brains are a dangerous thing.

Too many cooks, not enough waiters.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#87

Post by Pet_Ant »

rsynnott wrote: post #44
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody c…

I mean, the nobility were, by and large, people who derived income from capital (generally, and in many countries exclusively, land) but didn’t generally themselves do productive work (they sometimes had minor government or judiciary roles, but these were often very minor, at least as time went on). It’s a fairly obvious comparison (though it was worse; modern investment, except in land, does at least indirectly lead…

> the Downton Abbey class

All I find online is references online to some TV show. Is there another term for these people?

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#88

Post by JoeAltmaier »

the_only_law wrote: post #83
treeman79 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is both true and false. I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems. So more engineer then scientist. Choice for college path. Computer Management or Computer Science. Once of those was about buying software and managing people. Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.

The problem is I dont really feel like an engineer or a scientist. I'm definitely not a good engineer partly because I don't care enough, but I'm neither smart nor educated enough to be a scientist. I'd personally describe myself as more of a hacker, but thats not particularly useful for much.

To teach, you only have to be one lesson ahead of the students. And there's lots of teaching to be done, before the hard science kicks in. So plenty of room for everybody!

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#89

Post by cryptica »

There is a huge difference between people who are educated and people who are clever.

These days we have a huge number of educated people, many intelligent (high IQ) people but extremely few clever people. Clever people are those who have common sense and as Charlie Munger pointed out, 'common sense' ought to be called 'uncommon sense' because it's not common at all these days.

We have a problem now in our society that the task of capital allocation which used to be handled by clever people who had plenty of common sense has been artificially handed over to highly educated, intelligent people who in some cases completely lack common sense. They've been trying to design an elaborate, controlled economy from the top down... With an artificial government-controlled monetary system to support it.

Most intelligent people don't understand the importance of creative destruction; even though this process has proven itself to be the effective for millions of years and is the basis of natural evolution. It seems that most people in power have never heard of Leslie Orgel who once said that "Evolution is cleverer than you are".

You need to work with evolution, not against it. The system needs to allow creative destruction and natural selection.

Re: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

#90

Post by TuringNYC »

lwneal wrote: post #20

In Peter Turchin's book War and Peace and War [1], the term "elite overproduction" does not refer to an overproduction of smart people, education, or college degrees. Instead, it refers to an overproduction of nobility , individuals who extract income but who do not perform useful work. For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nob…

>>> For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.

Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers

Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)

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