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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?

#101

Post by xenocratus »

moosey wrote: post #84
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…

> 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.

But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot.

If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?

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

#102

Post by tonyedgecombe »

sparkie wrote: post #66
Hokusai wrote: 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…

Try to look from another lens.

Climate change deniers want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their polluting 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 oil burning agenda? ...

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

#103

Post by leetcrew »

jmeister wrote: post #10

Turchin uses the term “elites”, which is not the same as “brainy”. Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them. “Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games. There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-eli…

> Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them.

"brainy" people can only contribute more than their non-brainy counterparts when they can leverage meaningful amounts of resources. a really clever person working a register in mcdonalds is not a whole lot more productive than a barely competent employee. even if they have some brilliant idea to streamline things in the store, no one will care.

it's entirely possible to have more "brainy" people than there are opportunities available for them to leverage their intelligence. if resources are diverted to develop "brainy" people, then this would be a case where there are too many of them.

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

#105

Post by TuringNYC »

simonh wrote: post #60
xenocratus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I studies CS back in the 80s and back then every student I knew was genuinely interested in the subject and motivated to learn. In my last job at a bank I regularly interviewed recent CS graduates and candidates able to demonstrate a genuine passion for the subject were few and far between. I know, I know, get off my lawn.

>> I studies CS back in the 80s and back then every student I knew was genuinely interested in the subject and motivated to learn. In my last job at a bank I regularly interviewed recent CS graduates and candidates able to demonstrate a genuine passion for the subject were few and far between.

You are comparing college students from the 1980s to those from 20xx. I'll tell you what is on the mind of the new students: how the heck do I pay my student loans and save up for a $2M starter home

It is easy to have passion when you barely have student loans and can buy a home with a year or two of earnings.

In case you point out that salaries were also lower back then, i'll give you that, but the ratio of salary/debt and salary/homeprice was far more reasonable back then than now.

EDIT: This is a US-centric view, not necessarily a global view. Further, it is a SF/SV/NYC centric view since that is where a majority of tech+banking jobs are.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by jcranmer »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #51
paganel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also personally think that France's demographic situation in the early 1300s was a perfect example of Malthus's law, there were too many people compared to what the land could provide at that time (given the available technology). Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that.

> Some areas in the Southern Alps (Alpes-Maritimes) were never to be inhabited again after that. But that might also be due to the end of the warm period and the start of the little ice age. For reference: Its about now that the norse have to abandon their Greenland settlement.

Note that most historians do not believe that the end of the Medieval warm period was the trigger of the collapse of the Greenland settlement, but rather that was the abandonment of trade routes to Greenland that caused its collapse.

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

#108

Post by malwrar »

Haul4ss wrote: post #38
slfnflctd wrote: post #29

I'm not sure how brainy I am. Perhaps the main reason I came across that way in school is because my mom taught me to read early. In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/cha…

> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.

Wanted to +1 this, if you’re talking about technical problems that aren’t prohibitively expensive to work on, I garuntee you the world has room for your work. I swear, once you enter a tech company it’s like any given task suddenly takes 10x longer than it would if you pursued it as a personal project.

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

#109

Post by C1sc0cat »

dusted wrote: post #22

Stupid people who think they're smart because they have a fancy education and are rewarded with high salary, that's probably a dangerous "brainy elite". Along with stupid people who just so happened to get a ton of money by no merit of their own, but don't realize this.

In the UK I think having to many politicians who only have a PPE is a problem

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

#110

Post by JamesBarney »

rmrfstar wrote: post #92
simonh wrote: 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…

> 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 r…

There seems to be weird dynamic where there are a ton of lawyers, there is not enough work, and many aren't being paid much.

But it's still hard to find a lawyer that charges less than 250/hr.

My hypothesis is that law school is not preparing lawyers well enough to be useful right after school. So many can't find a job to get the experience to compete with senior attorneys who charge 250/hr.

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