Live data from Hacker News

Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?

economist.com

91–100 of 292 posts

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

#91

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!

On my CS course, the best professors were those who could also do the practical side. Two of them had created all the tools used by the students, including a minicomputer operating system.

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

#92
post #45
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…

I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite. If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of peo…

> If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem.

Drill down on that issue, and you'll see the real problem.

Non-corporate litigants are majority pro-se now. That's new. Most corporate-individual litigation takes placed in closed-door arbitration, where precedent cannot be established (e.g. to definitively decide that caste-based discrimination violates existing racial discrimination statutes).

"Indigent" criminal defendants do not receive anything resembling effective counsel.

The problem isn't "too many lawyers". The problem is "too many lawyers for oligarchs, and a population too poor to afford lawyers when harmed by oligarchs"

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

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Landed Gentry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landed_gentry

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

#95
post #12

The idea that there is some sort of magic cycle that links 1870s to 2020 is patent nonsense. No cycle could survive the technological and political disruptions of the last hundred years. The current problem is the same old one where available real resources are growing more slowly than the population. If real stuff is becoming available faster than the population, we have golden ages. When population grows faster tha…

>>And fire all the bankers. They aren't fulfilling their part of the social contract and investing in improving the future. We found that out in 2007 and the situation will keep getting worse until incompetent financiers start losing money. The state administers the largest corporate welfare program in the economy via government-guaranteed mortgages. It guarantees nearly $2 trillion worth every year, which the banks…

> The state administers the largest corporate welfare program in the economy via government-guaranteed mortgages.

It's easy to make an efficient economy, it's harder to make one that produces results that are morally acceptable. How do you propose making housing feasible to most people? I mean it's easy to make a society more efficient by eliminating those with special needs as well, we know that, we just don't want it.

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

#96
post #85
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One problem with the Jamestown colony seems to have been that the settlers were only this kind of people, not people who could do useful stuff.

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

#97
post #66
post #24

So, increased numbers of educated people relate to a rise of expectations on equality, wealth distribution, etc. Status quo fights back and instability grows. A good example is the fight on climate change. The status quo wants to avoid responsibility for past, current and future damage. A growing educated population wants accountability. That creates tension. I agree, as much as I think that to keep leaders accountab…

Try to look from another lens. Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society. They want accountability from others, but not themselves. How many have done the calculations to work out the second and third order effects of their zero fossil fuel agenda? Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even cli…

Picking this new world order climate hysterics cabal conspiracy theory malarkey apart a little bit....

> Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society.

Not a great start. I don't know of any clean energy policy advocates who _arent totally enthusiastic_ about an opportunity to take full responsibility (and credit) for migrating to a clean economy in the next 10 years. Who, at this point, is ignoring the economics of climate change? Nowhere in here are you even claiming that there is a specific, agree'd upon "consequence" of transitioning to renewable energy, you're just raising a vague spectre of economic collapse, which only implies that policy-makers haven't considered that possibility...which is provably false.

> Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even climate scientists, but merely offload their thought processing to the intellectuals who are.

Sounds like a how functioning, science based democratic society should operate, right?

> Almost without fail, neither them, nor the intellectual are educated in economics.

Absolutely right--scientists aren't politicians aren't economists. Multi-disciplinary public policy requires input from many kinds of 'intellectuals' (also, hn is a weird place to be calling people who trained in, and do, a science professionally 'intellectuals', as if its a bad thing).

The alternative is that we live in a fictional autocracy lead by a god-like genius who is singular, all-knowing, and benevolent.

> The reality is that nobody can work out the second and effects and so on for these drastic changes, because they have incomplete information.

Semi-valid criticism. Implies no one has _any_ idea, but its true no one an predict the future with absolute certainty.

> The intellectuals and 'thought leaders' themselves have a fraction of a percent of the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity. The knowledge is very widely distributed, which is why central planning is less efficient than the market almost all of the time.

Ah... here is the god you're alluding to--anarcho-capitalism? The distributed knowledge of the market economy knows best.

There is even an anarcho-capitalist case _for_ renewable energy. If you could just price in the cost of emissions and remove subsidies of oil and gas, we would be decades ahead of where we are today on this issue.

> it is misplaced fear due to grossly exaggerated climate scare claims, drummed up by the status-quo.

So "climate hysterics" are the powers that be, and oil and gas is punk-rock. I guess on a millenia scale this is true.

> They won't put their own money or action where their mouths are, but demand it of others - many of whom are not in such fortunate positions.

Waiting to hear about the "climate hysteric" who thinks the solution requires higher taxes (or even, significantly higher cost of living) for people who make under $30k/year. The only reason this would be part of a proposal by a reasonable person is because they know they are negotiating against cynical "ideologues" who personally benefit more from the status quo of an oil and gas dependent economy, who will require this provision for a vote, because they know it sabotages the underlying goals. Why vote no when you can pass intentionally hamstrung legislation?

An overarching criticism of parent's point of view: The general theme of their criticism is that "climate hysterical intellectuals" don't know better than the singular, all knowing free market. It barely leaves room for any public policy position at all--which ignores the fact that the current market status quo is driven massively by public policy that has been in effect now for several generations. To say the current place even approximates a "natural, optimal equilibrium" is a gross misunderstanding of 300 years of carbon policy and political and cultural entrenchment.

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

#98
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's right, Turchin himself pointed out the "overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The problem is the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite. If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of peo…

This. I'm lucky to have made it from a medium Eastern European city to a software engineer job in UK, but I can only imagine it would've been so much more difficult (if not impossible) if the pool of people with the same level of knowledge and interest was 10x bigger. Spending many years studying/working to end up in a job with no growth prospects would be a very bitter pill to swallow.

The inverse is true as well. Good luck getting a spot on the on the schedule for anyone in the skilled trades in the US. Plumbers and HVAC companies charge through the roof and never can fill vacancies (at least with anyone reliable)

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

#99

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 th…

I think that the critical skill which intelligent people don't have but which clever people have is simply knowing what is important.

Unfortunately, the best way to learn that skill is through struggle. Too many intelligent people these days haven't experienced struggle in their careers (aside from the artificial struggles of navigating company politics). Many went through university (often paid for by their parents), then as soon as they finished, they immediately got a huge salary at a big corporation.

Many were never in a situation such that their employer could go out of business and they would lose their job and livelihood if they failed to deliver high quality work in a reasonable time.

Also, the skills that you learn in dealing with company politics are counter-productive.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them. > And we should not expand our system of higher education beyond the ability of the economy to absorb university graduates. An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability in the past. I think he genuinely means that too many educated people (by too many meaning m…

I would think that would be an indicator not that the quantity of smart people is bad but that we live in a society built for stupid people (which implies it was built by stupid people).

If you simplify it: if you have a lot of architects but very few builders, you're not going to get a lot done. That doesn't mean that society was made for or by the builders. Since academics tend to want to eat as well, you still need somebody to provide the food. If all you have is educated people for whom food production is beneath their qualifications, you're going to end up with starving academics lamenting the cruelty of the universe not providing food to them.
Post reply on HN