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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?

#111

Post by paradox242 »

powerapple wrote: post #27
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.

if a person wanted to accumulate wealth/knowledge and did it, he/she is smart. if a person wanted to accumulate wealth/knowledge and failed to so do, he/she is stupid.

Wow, this is just... wow this is wrong. This person is either a troll or their understanding of the world is so simplistic as to render any attempt to correct their misunderstanding pointless. After all, they've already figured everything out, everything is simple, black and white, what would they have to learn from you? One imagines that they are a decade or more away in life experience to even being in a place where they could see that their simple test here does not match reality and only then would they be ready to hear why that is.

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

#112

Post by silvestrov »

TuringNYC wrote: post #105
simonh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not valid for Scandinavia. In Denmark we get paid approx $1000 per month (like a wage) for studying and we pay $0 for attending university. You only have to pay for your own computer.

Some students have a part time job, some get extra money from parents.

So many students get by with zero loans.

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

#113

Post by watwut »

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.

Then again, banks are not exactly attracting people with "genuine passion for the subject".

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

#114

Post by Jtsummers »

foobarian wrote: post #78
simonh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've seen this as a teaching assistant. CS class size went from a few 10s to over a 100 in 1999-2001, then dropped again when the gold chasers went somewhere else. I did not find the boom period as bad as I expected. Many of the students in it for the money were still very smart and motivated and interesting to talk to. But I preferred the non-boom periods nonetheless :)

As a student starting at that time, it was actually very frustrating. Universities hadn't caught up on having enough lecturers/TAs (or they hired a lot of TAs but they were very inexperienced and your odds of getting a good one were not good). Class sizes soaring also meant reduced time with instructors in office hours, and reduced opportunities for working with researchers (that is, a decent but average student had a shot before, but suddenly had none due to the glut of candidates).

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

#115

Post by watwut »

sparkie wrote: post #54
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.

Thomas Sowell writes about this in depth in several of his works. In Intellectuals and Society , he notes that many "intellectual elite" have been cheerleaders for some of the worst (economic) disasters and human rights abuses of the 20th century. In 2020, we can see this vividly with the coronahysterics causing untold and immeasurable damage to societies with arbitrary and poorly calculated lockdown rules. Sowell ar…

You dont seem to know who made the lockdown rules and what lockdown rules even existed.

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

#116

Post by TuringNYC »

silvestrov wrote: post #112
TuringNYC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 Not valid for Scandinavia. In Denmark we get paid approx $1000 per month (like a wage) for studying and we pay $0 for attending university. You only have to pay for your own computer. Some students have a part time job, some get extra money from parents. So many students get by with zero loans.

My apologies. I was thinking of this comment with too much of a US-centric view.

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

#117

Post by meekrohprocess »

dalbasal wrote: post #53
learnstats2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class... Are these supposed to be different groups of people?

They're pretty tightly clustered, but each have their own connotations, rhetorically. Remember that the original liberals and republicans were (arguably) conducting conflicts within this overall cluster. In France it was the sans culotte vs the old nobility and clerics. You could argue that zuck or murdoch represents either side.

I don't think the sans culotte were part of the wealthy classes...doesn't it translate to something like, "without fancy pants"?

I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.

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

#118

Post by lwneal »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #28
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…

> this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400. I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event. It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and ev…

This is a great point. Maybe it would be more in line with the facts to say that elite overproduction was "a contributing factor to the famines of 1300-1350 and the wars of 1350-1400".

That doesn't seem to line up well with Turchin's secular cycle theory, though: 1300 is supposed to be the peak of the "integrative phase" and 1400 is supposed to be the trough of the "disintegrative phase". In fact, many of the "disintegrative phase" events happen well before 1350 (the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, the Flemish peasant revolts of 1323) and many of the events that happened after 1350 could be explained more simply as effects of the Black Death.

To be fair to Turchin, I think his thesis is that overpopulation and elite overproduction happens first, which then leads to famine/scarcity decreasing the non-elite population, which finally leads to a later period of warfare that kills off the excess elites as they fight for shares of the smaller pie. But I think the claim that this process happens for all societies on a 200-year sine wave warrants some skepticism.

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

#119

Post by pram »

JamesBarney wrote: post #110
rmrfstar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They just don't go into lawyering period. If you don't get into a biglaw firm after you get your JD you're usually permanently fucked. It's better to get a salaried position in an unrelated field than 'hang out your shingle' in pretty much all cases.

Law schools are making lots of lawyers, but the 'failed' ones just drop out. That is why there is no downward pressure on the fees from increased supply.

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

#120

Post by tartoran »

ploika wrote: post #30
powerapple wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if a person wanted to accumulate wealth/knowledge and did it, he/she is smart. if a person wanted to accumulate wealth/knowledge and failed to so do, he/she is stupid.

Trying and failing doesn't make you stupid.

Trying and failing indeed doesn’t make you stupid but in many circumstances, e.g. being poor, makes you stop trying or the feeling of inferiority seeps in. Also the people around you set a background that make it even harder to escape from.
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