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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#331

Post by kortilla »

jlokier wrote: post #181
kortilla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted. Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life. This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is…

Making the middle class poor by taking away their ability to own a home, etc is absolutely not a “poor people don’t matter” argument. It’s a “let’s not destroy a stable part of society in a ham-fisted attempt to help the poor”.

Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#332

Post by haihaibye »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #315
thrower123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not socialist, necessarily, but it's definitely blank-slatist, and the two are often stablemates.

I’m far from a blank slatist or a socialist, but as someone who is generally considered “untalented” on the HN scale of things please continue. What is objectionable about this viewpoint?

It's not true.

Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones.

This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore.

Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#333

Post by akhilcacharya »

haihaibye wrote: post #332
akhilcacharya wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m far from a blank slatist or a socialist, but as someone who is generally considered “untalented” on the HN scale of things please continue. What is objectionable about this viewpoint?

It's not true. Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones. This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore. Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.

> Some countries have higher IQ populations than others.

Are you saying I'm inherently inferior due to the country my parents were born in?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#334

Post by akhilcacharya »

thrower123 wrote: post #323
akhilcacharya wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m far from a blank slatist or a socialist, but as someone who is generally considered “untalented” on the HN scale of things please continue. What is objectionable about this viewpoint?

To be honest, I find the blank slate model just cruel, because it shifts blame for failure to achieve results onto either a personal failure to work hard enough, or some ill-defined societal boogieman of oppression or structural isms. Which tends to need massive amounts of money or power in the hands of someone to try to rectify. In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no matter how hard yo…

> In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit

This is one of the most disgusting things I've seen on this website. Am I "chicken shit" to you?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#335

Post by abakker »

jhayward wrote: post #327
thrower123 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's really, really not. It would be nice if we could have a discussion of acceptable levels of risk versus inefficiency without immediately taking a left turn into "Soylent Green is People!" territory.

The "lefty" epithet, how handy. You could start by telling us why the statements aren't the same, using examples and facts. You seem to want to have an abstract, bloodless, clinical discussion of when it is acceptable to kill people in the name of "efficiency" (I will interpret this as "profit"). I can tell you that is a dishonest discussion, if that's what is intended. If you want to have it honestly you will have t…

Evil and blame free do not necessarily follow from acknowledging that some level of risk is acceptable.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#336

Post by dahart »

jrandm wrote: post #159
dahart wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy ideas you cite as examples came from people with diplomas.

Can substitute airplanes[0] and computer games/graphics[1], though if we have to be that pedantic I found a couple names[2] in the history of satellites section of wikipedia that don't seem to have formal education beyond a military technical school. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Early_career_a... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_T…

Of course you can find examples of people who didn't get a diploma and had significant inventions, there are a few truly smart and totally self-motivated people in the world! Using Carmack & the Wright Brothers doesn't actually support what @elliekelly claimed above, nor contradict my comment. The claim made above that inventions outweigh education economically is a false proposition for starters, but it's also a claim that is going to be extremely tough to back up because (my claim is) inventions are statistically correlated with education, and not just a little. I think if you stack up all the important inventions, you'll find a vast, vast majority of the inventors have diplomas, and that major inventions by people with little to no formal education beyond childhood are relatively rare.

I'll back up my claim with a little bit of data...

"Beyond R&D spending, a crucial input into producing patents is education. Contrary to the stereotype of the college-dropout entrepreneur, innovation—at least as measured by high-quality patent activity—is almost exclusively accomplished by people with advanced degrees. Most often, this entails some amount of education beyond an undergraduate degree: 45 percent of triadic patent holders hold a PhD, MD, or equivalent degree, and 70 percent have at least a master’s degree. Only 23 percent completed only a bachelor’s degree, and 7 percent have not completed a four-year degree.

"Patent holders are substantially more educated than the rest of the population. Only 3 percent of the adult U.S. population has a professional or doctoral degree, but 45 percent of patent holders hold a degree at that level. And, while more than 90 percent of patent holders have at least a bachelor’s degree, just 27 percent of the overall population does. The importance of education in innovative activity highlights some of the broader spillovers to the economy from an educated workforce." [1]

(emphasis mine)

[1] https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...

https://voxeu.org/article/does-education-lead-more-innovatio...

http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#337

Post by haihaibye »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #333
haihaibye wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not true. Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones. This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore. Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.

> Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Are you saying I'm inherently inferior due to the country my parents were born in?

No, these things work in distributions.

It's perfectly possible for very smart people to come from very low average IQ populations, it's just less likely than from higher average IQ ones.

Many countries also have very high IQ subpopulations eg India, Nigeria and Iran off the top of my head.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#338

Post by jacquesm »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #275
ta1234567890 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, millions might be an exaggeration, I was going off of numbers read elsewhere online. Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20... That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq. By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more imp…

I'm limiting it to U.S. citizens (soldiers) because I can with some confidence say that U.S. policy at least can be traced as a cause of their death. No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record. Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prov…

> but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.

On the off chance of you having some plausible explanation for this outrageous statement I invite you to expand on this.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#339

Post by kirso »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #26

I feel like this is stating the obvious and putting the emphasis on the exact wrong end of it. "Oh no! Think about all the potential geniuses we are missing out on! We must be doing something wrong!" Ok, thought about it. My conclusion is: "Wow, the rate of genius production has never been higher, we must really be doing something right." Could it be better? Sure. Is it getting better? According to Factfulness: sure.…

I think you missed the point that the opportunity is not equal, as a person if you grew up in rural Georgia and not knowing what to do with your life because you didn't get the memo kinda screws your future. It's about giving the opportunity for the smart minds to work on impactful things and frankly, if I would have that chance of a privileged kid, I would take it. Basically there are ways how to fix it, the question is what is the most effective way... Think about cheating on dropping the dice based on a pattern that always grants you two threes.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#340

Post by thrower123 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #334
thrower123 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I find the blank slate model just cruel, because it shifts blame for failure to achieve results onto either a personal failure to work hard enough, or some ill-defined societal boogieman of oppression or structural isms. Which tends to need massive amounts of money or power in the hands of someone to try to rectify. In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no matter how hard yo…

> In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit This is one of the most disgusting things I've seen on this website. Am I "chicken shit" to you?

I don't know anything about you. Who are you again?

I grew up in bumfuck Appalachia, and there's a lot of people there that are so inbred and unfortunate that they can barely chew gum and walk at the same time. You can put people through years and years of education and spend all the money in the world on them, but you're not going to ever get them to understand calculus or read on grade-level.

Acknowledging people's individual abilities and limits is far more humane than pie-in-the-sky optimism.

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