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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?

#221

Post by __john »

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

I noticed that reading "recommended content" (like from google news) always gets me to thinking like this, but remember 90% of startups fail[1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-star...

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

#222

Post by centimeter »

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…

Investors already did the work for those wages - you just don’t intuitively understand deferred consumption.

The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.

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

#223

Post by ska »

wobbly_bush wrote: post #185
bserge wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

Not really. I suspect this is because unlike medicine, lawyers as a collective organization don't benefit as much from an artificial scarcity. MD isn't really a common path to anything other than a career as a doctor, but JD has other practical career paths.

It also differentiates the bar vs. board exams. You can't practice medicine without certification, but there are plenty of lawyers doing law without a bar association, it only constrains you from doing certain types of work.

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

#224

Post by WhompingWindows »

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.

N=1; what about too many brains is dangerous in general?

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

#225

Post by joe_biden123 »

meekrohprocess wrote: post #117
dalbasal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you read turchin's paper his model has 3 parts. one accounts for elite competition, another for general/unskilled population wealth and a third one for the society's economy. elites aren't the only thing that produces instability those 2 other things

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

#226

Post by ska »

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…

  >  the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite.
For what it's worth, I have known a large number of people taking or having advanced degrees, only a small fraction of who would expect to be in "the elite" because of it.

Perhaps this is somewhat an issue of self identification though.

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

#227

Post by pksebben »

ben_w wrote: post #216
pksebben wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the "protect-my-pie-ism" that skilled labor unions engage in. We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes, but they're outlawed in a lot of places because of the pipefitters' lobbies. Same goes for a lot of other building codes under the guise of safety - the system is deliberately made inefficient to protect jobs. Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's mo…

> We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?

That is precisely what I am saying. It's not everywhere, but there are places (like NY) where it is illegal according to building codes to use pvc. Because any old schmo can work with pvc (although, the law is written as if it's a safety hazard)

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

#228

Post by pksebben »

jahaja wrote: post #217
pksebben wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the "protect-my-pie-ism" that skilled labor unions engage in. We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes, but they're outlawed in a lot of places because of the pipefitters' lobbies. Same goes for a lot of other building codes under the guise of safety - the system is deliberately made inefficient to protect jobs. Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's mo…

But that would just make it somewhat more expensive to build. The problem is that the supply is always kept insufficient. If, for example, the government would build good quality housing according to need, the housing market would implode. To build according to need was the default in here in Sweden before ~1990.

Making it more expensive translates to a lack of supply - the government has far more limited resources than huge real estate development firms. The pipes thing is just an example. Of course, this is one of a great many factors that make it nigh-impossible to get affordable government housing built. Not the least of which is the actual expense of land vs. cash-strapped local governments (who are broke because our tax system sucks and we spend what little money we do have on subsidies for businesses.)

It's a systemic issue - the incentives that we have lead to a governmental inability to function at all levels. Pick any random piece and you can find a reason that it's hard to do meaningful work.

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

#229

Post by sudosysgen »

bleepblorp wrote: post #205
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.

Pretty much. American ""intersectionalist"" (The first intersectionalists realized that in our society class is the major by far axis of discriminatio) is a repackaging of explicitly class-focused ideas and politics in order to serve the interests of Capital (in this case formulated as the VC/IPO class).

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

#230

Post by rmah »

pksebben wrote: post #209
DubiousPusher wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20622/watch-the... ...It doesn't look anywhere close to market-ready, but goddamn what a gamechanger once it is.

Building the load bearing structure is a quite small part of the cost of building a home these days. Probably less than 10%. I'm afraid robots laying bricks won't be a game changer in housing.
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