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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?

#131

Post by musicale »

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.

Poorly managing your business seems less a sign of "too many brains" than "not enough management."

Consider also that a) most businesses fail b) many successful engineering companies were founded and/or staffed by professors, Ph.D. graduates, and Ph.D. students from Stanford and elsewhere, d) intel didn't do so great with VLIW (itanium) or low power/thermal (Atom lost to ARM - and intel seems to have squandered StrongARM/XSCale) either, e) intel probably had many more Ph.D.'s than Transmeta did, and they still hire tons of them.

Be that as it may, it's sad Transmeta died and its IP was sold to Intellectual Ventures, a company that has invented interesting things but also seems to make most of its money from lawsuits.

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

#132

Post by godelski »

Jtsummers wrote: post #114
foobarian wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The TA thing is pretty normal. I'm a TA this term as my new funding is being being worked out because it takes 6 months to do. So I'm TAing a class on assembly which I have no experience and don't even have a CS undergraduate degree. It sucks for us too as a have one class that expects 30hrs/wk of work (+another class), my research (what I want to spend all my time on), and TAing takes 18hrs/wk.

You're only going to get a good TA when that professor is teaching a class that's their focus and has a grad student that has that fucus AND that student isn't on other research funding. The system is far from optional for either undergrads or grads. Believe me, I'm not happy either

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

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:…

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by reader_mode »

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.

I mean isn't it the same with developers ?

If you're competent you have offers left and right and can command a very good salary. If you're out of a diploma mill with just the curriculum under your belt you're basically useless.

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

#135

Post by jahaja »

xenocratus wrote: post #101
moosey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.

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

#136

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

simonh wrote: post #45
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…

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…

Indeed.

Why is the US producing 25,000 more lawyers than it needs?

Why is this happening in a supposedly rational maximally efficient - or close offer - market economy?

The simple answer is because someone else profits hugely from the money they pay for training. Which in turn is a symptom of an extractive economy, not a productive economy.

A productive economy would do a much better job of allocating talent to social requirements. But an extractive economy is optimised for short-term gain of a small overclass - not the medium/long-term opportunity-growth of a strategically generative economy.

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

#138

Post by bserge »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #136
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…

Indeed. Why is the US producing 25,000 more lawyers than it needs? Why is this happening in a supposedly rational maximally efficient - or close offer - market economy? The simple answer is because someone else profits hugely from the money they pay for training. Which in turn is a symptom of an extractive economy, not a productive economy. A productive economy would do a much better job of allocating talent to socia…

I mean, the US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers because they think it's a good idea.

And generally, the choice of education seems to lag behind what's actually in demand, even worldwide.

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

#139

Post by ben_w »

xenocratus wrote: post #101
moosey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

From the perspective of someone living in 1400 A.D.? Yes, food gets to us by magic.

In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves.

Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population.

Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.

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

#140

Post by JamesBarney »

reader_mode wrote: post #134
JamesBarney wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean isn't it the same with developers ? If you're competent you have offers left and right and can command a very good salary. If you're out of a diploma mill with just the curriculum under your belt you're basically useless.

I don't think it is. I don't know any developers who have left the profession because of a lack of employability. But I know plenty of lawyers who have.

And a law degree is probably more comparable to a masters in CS than a bootcamp like flatiron.

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