Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing? • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by TuringNYC » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

krisroadruck wrote: post #168

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:…

$2M is not a starter home. The national median home price is $230K. It's only that high because 4-5 states are dragging it up. Keep in mind that is the median. There are homes that can be had for less. Nice homes. Buying a house in one of the most expensive markets in the entire nation (SF, NYC) as your first home is a choice, and perhaps not a particularly wise one. Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million h…

I think some of the context is lost here. The GP was talking about banking jobs with CS applicants not really passionate about CS. The majority of banking jobs are in NYC, so there really isn't really a huge choice. If you're applying for a CS job (not IT) in banking, almost the entire job market is in NYC.

My argument was that of course students are not passionate, they are worried about student loans, homes, rents. (Fun exercise go to the same Zillow link and try to find homes in NYC max $250k. Then, on what you find, look at the transportation options are into NYC.)

I'm glad you brought up NC because it has a decent sized banking sector but also offers great QoL. I actually left NYC and took a super-interesting job a bit north of you in Virginia. Homes are affordable, QoL is great.

There is a catch though: there arent all that many other interesting jobs in tech (as there were in NY/SF). The startup scene is tiny. There are few FAANG jobs here though Amazon is supposed to come soon. There are some awesome CS research-type jobs, in govnt labs.

There are lots of interesting consulting jobs to be fair, as well as FAANG SE jobs. There are lots of interesting data-type jobs in Intelligence. There are also tens of thousands of totally dead-end tech jobs where you do nothing all day at government offices. A friend told me he's been waiting two months to get approval to install a pip library on a government machine. Another friend works on ancient systems.

Good QoL - absolutely.

Good home prices - absolutely.

Jobs i'd be passionate about - some, hopefully more coming with remote.

Am I obsessively passionate about the work here? No, i'm mostly enjoying the outdoors.

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

#202

Post by 127 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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 pretty eye-opening interview for me. Certainly gives a lot of food for thought. About kleptocracy and how that particular (parasitic) economy survives and even thrives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZdx9eDetw

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

#203

Post by 127 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

How many failed businesses did you try before coming to that conclusion?

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

#204

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by bleepblorp » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

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…

I generally take the view that the SJW identity politics plague was born due to nominally left-leaning people striking it rich in SV and wanting some way to feel 'woke' without feeling guilty over all the money they've acquired.

SJW identity politics is left politics made safe for the California startup equity/VC/IPO crowd because it pays utterly no attention to economic inequality at all.

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

#206

Post by lotsofpulp » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #200

lotsofpulp wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving the schools a blank check (via giving students a blank check as long as it’s spent on schools), the US government is effectively producing the lawyers. If there was no free money sloshing around, people would have to do a proper cash flow analysis and look at supply and demand before being able to invest their time in degrees that don’t have ROI. Same thing happened with pharmacy school, and now there’s ton…

The problem is that it's also not free money. The students who get their degree but can't use it have to pay the money back just the same as students who got the degree and get the high-paying entry level job. So getting a degree is a gamble, because you either come out ahead or you get hobbled by it for the rest of your life. Whereas if you did indeed get free money to get a degree it would eliminate the hobble and…

It’s free money for the schools.

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

#207

Post by TuringNYC » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

undersuit wrote: post #191

wobbly_bush wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers Isn't there any regulatory body which controls the number of law degrees awarded annually, like there is for doctors?

Law Degrees in the US are not limited by some quota beside the size of the classes and the number of schools accredited. The real barrier is the Bar Exam, the ultimate decider if you are allowed to practice law, every state has there own admission process, there is some reciprocity and I think the Federal level has it's own separate Bar standards.

Not in the same way. IANAL and IANAD but I think:

IN LAW {bar exams + prestigious law firms} ~ IN MEDICINE {board exams + specialty board residency placements}

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

#208

Post by sumtechguy » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #201

krisroadruck wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2M is not a starter home. The national median home price is $230K. It's only that high because 4-5 states are dragging it up. Keep in mind that is the median. There are homes that can be had for less. Nice homes. Buying a house in one of the most expensive markets in the entire nation (SF, NYC) as your first home is a choice, and perhaps not a particularly wise one. Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million h…

I think some of the context is lost here. The GP was talking about banking jobs with CS applicants not really passionate about CS. The majority of banking jobs are in NYC, so there really isn't really a huge choice. If you're applying for a CS job (not IT) in banking, almost the entire job market is in NYC. My argument was that of course students are not passionate, they are worried about student loans, homes, rents.…

Charlotte is basically a one horse town with respect to jobs, banking.

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

#209

Post by pksebben » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #170

ben_w wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, in fact direct agricultural labor accounts for fewer than a million jobs in the U.S. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul... One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods. This is in part due to con…

I had to look up the link, but you reminded me of this:

...It doesn't look anywhere close to market-ready, but goddamn what a gamechanger once it is.

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

#210

Post by CryptoPunk » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

Pet_Ant wrote: post #95

CryptoPunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

Ceteris Paribus, efficiency is more morally acceptable than inefficiency. Not giving banks a huge unearned subsidy, and not destabilizing the financial sector with government-engineered bubbles, is more morally virtuous than the alternative, IMHO.

As for housing, plenty can be done to make it more affordable, without doing grievious economic harm by disrupting normal market activity on a massive scale.

For example, reverse the expansion of land-use restriction in high productivity metropolitan zones:

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/growth.pdf