This scheme seems extremely ripe for corruption. Essentially you are promising someone millions on a few tests... So just paying 50 thousand to get your child this status would setup them for life...
Doesn't even need to be that explicit. It would be no surprise to find out that the those managing the program that identifies "genius" discovers that genius runs in their families (and friends' families).
I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12.
I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s.
My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated).
I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program.
I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time".
Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition.
I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
No, I manage a bunch of dev teams. I'm lucky to be where I am. I don't think gbi would have helped me, I already had a privileged existence. My family is not wealthy but we faced no really economic insecurity and were all decent people. I'd rather see money go to people who have potential but not all the advantages I had. I just think IQ is a terrible predictor of "will cure cancer and invent a warp drive".
I agree, the basic income should go elsewhere. Geniuses don't need it. Having a high IQ will guarantee you a privileged existence if you even apply yourself one little bit. Yeah, I know lots of high IQ people who are burn outs and do little-to-nothing for years on end... but that is also part of the privilege. They work when they want to.
Also, keep in mind debates about embryonic selection are going on even as it is being offered as a service for a fee right now.
There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
This idea is like telling the absolutist kings to try a bit of democracy for a while; it's contrary to all the social policies in the last 20 years and contrary to the central tenets of equity. It won't happen for the same reason orchestra auditions aren't blind anymore.
"Equity" is a concept in law: AIUI (IANAL) it mainly concerns trusts and contracts. The word is sometimes used as a synonym for "fairness", but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets.
And I don't think there's anything unfair about a UBI, any more than universal healthcare, or a universal police service.
> Eq"ui*ty (?), n.; pl. equities (#). [F. équité, L. aequitas, fr. aequus even, equal. See Equal.]
> 1. Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality.
The problem is the current systems are getting less efficient at supporting geniuses financially :
- The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines)
- The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know.
- The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.
Is the ChatGPT threat to knowledge workers an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one? I don't think at the current performance of ChatGPT and similar models are enough to displace genius knowledge workers. Although I could see the possibility of ChatGPT-like models allowing more work to be done by fewer knowledge workers. And in this scenario, there is no guarantee that an "unfound" genius makes it through the new system.
I was more referring to the genius that does routine employment work mostly to support himself (like for the cliche example: Einstein working in the patent office while preparing his theories).
> an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one?
This is a big question. chatGPT is pushing some buttons a lot faster than I thought. is it just a jolt? is there an AI winter on the horizon? The fact that these systems are still mostly magical black boxes does not help us predict. So, who knows?
I'm not sure the idea of genius is one we should rely on. Why is it that we think one or two great people are responsible for all progress?
I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment.
With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.
Genius is also loaded. It's a fact kids in poverty have lower test grades, so the ACT of giving them UBI will in fact RAISE test scores and maybe move them up to the 'genius' level, or at least give them a better shot.
It's hard to focus on schooling when you're tummy is growling, or there's a ton of stress at home, or abuse, etc.
We grew up poor in the US. We worked hard in school and had above average to excellent test scores. Being poor does not directly support bad test scores or whether society can or should bear the burden of UBI.
Conflating growing up poor with growing up with abuse is incorrect.
No, not when the correlation is used as an argument against such measures (see, e.g., this thread). Such arguments are perniciously classist, anti-meritocratic, and anti-poor.
The more obvious reason would be intelligence has zero correlation with motivation to contribute to society. Your stereotypical high school educated blue collar worker will still be better for society than a NEET Mensa member who spends all their time speed running videogames
I mean it seems like one could perhaps get some estimation of how much impact family wealth and a positive environment has one success in relation to intellectual abilities based on lots of studies over probably about half a century now.
Obviously it would be a wide range of stuff to argue about but still your example sounds more to me like something we won't have that much data on, relatively speaking.
If you pick "high IQ" as the definition of "genius", this isn't true. Right around the point where and individual would be considered a "genius", the correlation between income and IQ breaks down. So a super-genius makes about the same amount of money as a very smart, but within the bell curve, person.
I would imagine this holds true for other definitions of genius, but I haven't seen quantitative data on it.
I dislike the notion that some individuals are off the scale on cleverness.
It's easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that a person who is dimmer than us is cognitively challenged; it's much harder to assess the smarts of someone who is smarter than us. Is he 1% smarter than me? 10% smarter? Hell, 100% smarter? All I know is that he understands stuff that I don't, and solves crosswords faster. But I don't believe that anyone is so much smarter than the average that they need to be paid 100x what I could earn.
> I dislike the notion that some individuals are off the scale on cleverness.
Why not? You accept that some individuals are off the scale of various physical abilities. That try as you might, you'll never be the fastest or tallest or strongest.
What makes intelligence different? Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
If you are mediocre in obvious ways, what's left? Everyone wants to be good at something. Everyone wants to be better at something than others. But it is fairly obvious with anything with a physical component. I am a mediocre guitar player. I am not tall. I am not fast. I am not exceptionally strong. These are things that can be sussed out fairly quickly with some basic tests.
But intelligence. Well. That's not only fluid, but it's also abstract. What does it mean to have an IQ of 129 versus an IQ of 130. Especially when one could score both depending on how much sleep one has had. So you can just say IQ is bullshit. Intelligence don't real. Everyone is smart in their own way.
No. That's just simply not true. Yes, one could test differently based on conditions. However, it will fall within a range. Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range. If you score a 129, you'll be within the 125-135 group or something.
And it's just like with physical traits. Like right now, I will be much slower than normal because my quadriceps are fucking cooked. I overexerted myself and I'm sore as shit. Even though I am not normally fast, timing me now wouldn't give an accurate representation of my average speed.
And you can tell when someone has spent any time among the truly gifted. Because running into people like this is something else. They will come into a situation blind, get what you've already gotten, and then make a realization you'd never would have. They do process on a different level. And it's not about knowledge. It's not how much they know. It's about how fast they can acquire that knowledge, understand it, and then build upon it. It's how they can relate knowledge from different areas in new and novel ways. People who have spent time with the truly gifted know there's a such thing as intelligence. People who have only spent time with people who are average to above average have never actually seen intelligence at work.
> You accept that some individuals are off the scale of various physical abilities.
No I don't!
I'm getting on, and not very fit; I can run about 30 yards, slowly, before I run out of steam. But even Olympic runners can't run 100x faster than me. I know how fast Olympic runners can run.
> Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
Why, indeed. Why do you think that I believe that?
> Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range.
I have avoided mention of IQ; I don't think it's equivalent to intelligence.
> and then make a realization you'd never would have.
Yes, of course. I've met a lot of people that are quicker on the uptake than I am. But I'm sorry; "truly gifted" suggests there's some kind of magic going on. I don't believe in magic, and I don't believe in gifts from the gods. And I don't believe that there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; my observation was simply that average people like me aren't in a position to estimate the smarts of brighter people. So there is a tendency to assume there's magic occurring; that they aren't just brighter, but there's some other ingredient.
There's no magic ingredient; we're all made roughly the same way, from the same ingredients.
I think you believe that because you say basically that. Then you say that you don't believe there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average. There are.
There's no magic. Just like the fact Usain Bolt running the 100m dash in 9.58 seconds isn't magic. No one else has been capable of reproducing that feat. Including people who train to do exactly that.
And I don't suggest there is magic. You're forcing an argument on me that I am not making.
IQ is as good a measure of intelligence as there is. IQ is not a measure of human worth. IQ is not a measure of success. IQ is not a measure of a lot of things. IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
I am simply pointing out that intelligence is no different than any other attribute one can possess. And some people possess it at the extremes.
IQ isn't precise because like all of our physical attributes, there's wiggle room. Like how you may think you're a certain height, but you actually fluctuate throughout the day. Same with weight. Or strength. Or speed. IQ is a rough measure. It can really only tell us what you get when you take the test. But if you take it several times, it should fall within a range.
And a good IQ test shouldn't test knowledge. It should test reasoning, spatial ability, pattern matching, etc. You know, the factors that make up our raw processing power.
Are you saying it's "specific and vague" because it's an imprecise measure of a specific ability? That wouldn't be "specific and vague" in the way you mean. You could say it's a vague claim about a specific thing, but that's not mysterious.
> Then you say that you don't believe there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average. There are.
So you're stating that some people are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; but you've adduced no evidence. I don't agree; you're making the claim, so the burden is on you.
> IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
That's a very specific claim. I know what "raw processing power" means in the context of a CPU, and I know of various ways of measuring it. But a brain is not a CPU. It's not a processor; arguably what it does is not similar to information processing.
> And you can tell when someone has spent any time among the truly gifted. Because running into people like this is something else. They will come into a situation blind, get what you've already gotten, and then make a realization you'd never would have. They do process on a different level. And it's not about knowledge. It's not how much they know. It's about how fast they can acquire that knowledge, understand it, and then build upon it. It's how they can relate knowledge from different areas in new and novel ways. People who have spent time with the truly gifted know there's a such thing as intelligence. People who have only spent time with people who are average to above average have never actually seen intelligence at work.
I used to think this as well, having gone to a famous university. Some people just seemed to get it much faster than others.
With some hindsight I no longer believe it. I think it was all hard work, and very much influenced by environment.
One guy I knew seemed really quite bright, always seemed to know everything. Ended up getting a PhD as well. But I realized that he basically just studied a lot. I wanted to think he was smarter than me, but I also knew inside I wasn't putting in the same amount of practice he was.
I brought the same fellow into a business to work with me, and he was ordinary. Couldn't have known that he was one of the top grads of two world famous universities, just one among a sea of reasonably competent quants. I'm fairly sure a lot of firms make this mistake as well, they think they need the people who did best at uni, but actually it has a lot to do with what you do with people, who you stick them with, what training they get, and so on.
The thing about highly productive creatives is they seem to have special motivation. They ome into some field, they see connections, they are more motivated to read more, talk to more people, study more. That seems to be the driver. I never saw anyone good that was just smart but not engaged as well.
Distributions of human skill that we can measure tend to be on long-tailed power scale distributions. Chess is one of the most obvious examples of this. Chess world champions tend to be just dramatically better than the 2nd best players in the world. One early 20th century world champion (Emanuel Lasker) retained (and actively defended) his title for 27 years! And he was also a research mathematician (who made some significant discoveries) and more 'on the side'.
And while that exact stretch remains unbroken, similar levels of dominance in the game are typical. Kasparov was world champion for 15 years. And in current times Magnus Carlsen has been world champion for about a decade, and #1 in the world (by a wide margin) for years beyond that.
On things we can't measure, one can observe facts like the open problem that Einstein would go on to solve (in his twenties, while working at a patent office) was being dug into by countless brilliant minds, to no avail, since Einstein was 8 years old! And his work after that point makes it clear it wasn't just a freak coincidence.
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I definitely do think there are plenty who are "that much" smarter than average, but I don't think they need to be paid to succeed. Nor do I think one having an official affirmation that he is a "genius" is conducive to clear-headedness. It naturally drives a sense of entitlement, and can be detrimental to actually putting in the work necessary to make things happen. All the potential in the world is irrelevant without a corresponding work ethic.
Chess is an interesting example. I learned to play chess as a kid. I never got even slightly good; people that were dimmer than me could beat me easily.
But how many chess grandmasters are also fabulously wealthy CEOs? They tend to stay chess-players.
I'm curious about what skill in chess consists of. It seems to correspond to general cognitive capacity; but that's certainly not all of it.
It's difficult to explain if you've never really gotten seriously into chess, but the game is, by far, one of the most satisfying and rewarding activities in existence. You can put infinite mental energy into the game and continue to get ever more out of it. It is extremely addictive, especially once one reaches a certain level in the game. If I had the choice of retiring to a life endless beaches and scantily clad ladies delivering me all the drinks and pleasures of life one could imagine, or retiring to a [safe] ghetto full of nothing but old highly skilled chess players - I would pick #2 in a heart beat.
There are plenty of chess player anecdotes along the lines of Gata Kamsky. He became frustrated with his progress in chess at some point (as one of the best in the world, but not the best in the world) and just casually decided to become a lawyer. So he did that and breezed through law school and set himself to a traditional path of money and even power. But, as is always the end of these stories, the game called him back. Today he streams himself playing chess for hours a day (on Twitch) to an audience of tens and is clearly more content and satisfied than ever.
Except it is true! That is precisely what I was getting at with chess. Right now the #1 player in the world is rated 48 points higher than the #2 player, and this difference is typical and often even more extreme. And the #2 is rated almost 20 points higher than the #3 player!
I could try to explain what those numbers mean mathematically, but I think there's an even easier way to get the gist of it. There are hundreds of of thousands of FIDE rated players. That #1 player's rating is 2859. For him to be 50 points higher than the #2 player is insane in terms of any notion of broad-level approximate human equality, but perfectly normal in the not-even-remotely-equal reality of what we see in chess.
And this is mirrored everywhere, even in sports where the physical limitations on the body are presumably more limiting than the cognitive ones. Running is nice because it's a field where we are going to miss close to 0 outliers, and you can fairly compare generations regardless of time.
Imagine we take Usain Bolt at his peak, and have him run a 200m race against the 200th fastest human to have ever lived at his peak. People might expect this to be a pretty close race. In reality? He'd finish about 9.8 meters, more than 32 feet ahead of the other guy. It would look like 'fast' guy vs 'meh, more or less average' guy. When in reality that 'more or less average' guy is one of the fastest humans to have ever lived!
A true power law would say that there's a diminishing number of chess-players the further out you go along the long tail. But in practice, there are zero chess-players better than the world champion. It may look like a power law within some window, but power laws don't have a cutoff point.
That is what I'm saying about smart people; I don't accept that there are people arbitrarily smarter than the average. My guess is that the cutoff is somewhere around double the average (modulo your method for measuring smartness).
It is a textbook power law. There are only 2 humans better than 2800, and one is pushing near 2900. Then there are only 37 humans from 2700-2799, 168 from 2600-2699 and so on with an increasingly exponential gain in brackets near the median. And each bracket tends to be exceptionally dominant of brackets just one below, let alone more.
A finite sample means any distribution will have a min and a max. If the odds of a Magnus are 1 in 10 billion, then we can expect to see one person of a roughly proportional skill every generation or two. But if the odds of the next tier of exponentially dominating outlier out are 1 in 500 billion then any given generation of humanity would be unlikely to see one, at least not until we start dramatically increasing our population sizes.
But none of those examples gives a reason why it had to be that particular person. Someone is gonna be the first person to solve an unsolved problem, or the new best chess player. It might well be that longevity comes from reaching the top?
The point with chess is to illustrate that relative ability follows a power law. If humanity was relatively normally distributed then of course there'd still be a top, but people in this top would all be roughly equal. And so, like you're implicitly stating, any sort of achievement would largely come down to throwing darts and seeing who, largely by chance, ends up being the first to hit the bullseye.
But in reality the top is not approximately equal. In chess there are hundreds of thousands of rated players. The #1 player is rated 50 points higher than the #2 player. The #1 player is rated 2859. Think about the implications of those three facts! And this is likely precisely the case with Einstein, and also the reason for his success.
Back to current times/domain I'd also argue this is why having exponentially more scientists than ever before has not really led to what somebody who assumed a normal distribution would expect to see.
The examples illustrate that relative outcomes seem to follow that kind of law. How do we know that the outcomes are strongly tied to some sort of potential, and not just self-perpetuating?
You get picked for the team because you're a little bit better than number 2, you feel motivated, you get more training... down the road you are a lot better.
Sports especially is filled with these kinds of stories.
In general it's pretty difficult to prove a negative. How do you know you don't have a friendly little goblin named Rakinichu, made of dark matter, floating just above your shoulder? You can't really prove that you don't, so the onus is on me to prove that you do. That said, in this specific case, I think there's even reasonably strong evidence against your hypothesis. For instance Einstein's "miracle year" would come while he was working as a low level inspector at a patent office. And he was working there because he applied to numerous universities, but none were interested in taking him on board!
Even in the chess world, "prodigies" are a dime a dozen and Magnus was a relatively late bloomer among his peers. Magnus received his International Master title (the second highest title in chess, prior to Grandmaster) at a later age than Sergey Karjakin, a fellow prodigy, received his Grandmaster title. He also achieved victory coming from a country that had relatively little chess culture. Grandmasters coming from countries with greater chess culture would have had access to greater resources, minds, coaching, and opportunities.
> In general it's pretty difficult to prove a negative.
But this isn't a negative, you're proposing that there's some sort of strong connection between observable potentials and eventual outcomes, am I right? So now we need the evidence.
Sports is a great place to look btw. The history of recruiting busts in the sports world simply incredible. People they guessed wrong on: Tom Brady, Ravel Morrison, Johnny Manziel, Carlos Bacca, just to give you a false positive and a false negative in two different sports.
It just seems to me that is really isn't all that obvious who might be really good, and so we should spread our bets rather than concentrate on a few promising geniuses.
> For instance Einstein...
So how does this say anything about skill? Couldn't he just be a low-probability ticket that won? There were other people looking at similar ideas at the time.
> Even in the chess world...
Thing is chess is international now, Magnus could be Norwegian but very cheaply access chess culture from other countries. Maybe in an earlier era this argument made sense. But just like in football, it's international now and people aren't surprised by regional styles.
No, that is not what I am arguing. I am arguing that people's skill distributions follow a power law, with outliers at nearly any level. To quote the earliest post in this chain, that indeed some people are "off the charts." And this inherent difference in these individuals plays a large role in their ultimate outcomes. And no, I don't think we should "bet" on anybody, whether focused or scattered. The point of Magnus, Einstein, and many others is that the fact that they ultimately were these "off the charts" individuals was in no way whatsoever clear.
And in any case, for people that are "off the charts" - they aren't going to have difficulty excelling in a capitalist economic system, nearly regardless of their humbleness of their beginnings. I would even be inclined to argue that acknowledging somebody as "genius" and plying them with money is more likely to lead to distorted rather than enhanced development. Just because somebody may be several sigmas from the mean cognitively, doesn't mean that they're immune to the trappings any human may succumb to: ego, vice, hedonism, entitlement, laziness, and so on.
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As for your response, I find it uncompelling. You're trying to argue that there's some childhood butterfly effect that drives outcomes, while hand-waving away major factors that would imperil development (from an environmental POV). Similarly, the 'dart-throw theory' doesn't hold as it wasn't only Einstein's initial ideas that were exceptional - but rather a persisted trend throughout his entire career.
He published more than 450 papers over his 50 year career, with countless revolutionary discoveries. For some context, that's an academic output rate of publishing 0.75 papers per month, for his entire life until his death bed. It's not like he made one great discovery and then coasted on his laurels while reminiscing about the past. His "miracle year", for instance, while working at a patent office, involved the publication of 4 distinct (and ground-breaking) papers! All without any real access to academic resources, or even peers to really bounce ideas off of.
IQ / "intelligence" is such a BS metric to go by. It's effectively the test makers deciding who would get a free ride through life. Which, incidentally would probably make those "geniuses" less intelligent overall.
I'd rather work with a random person who grew up on a farm or the streets than someone who had the best tutors and went to Harvard. People who have to work hard, who grow up hard, are hardened against the world. They learn to survive.
Most of our best entrepreneurs and builders grow up building and being independent. To be independent you have to learn to survive on your own, i.e. not with UBI. I'd rather have a higher level competition, not selecting based on IQ.
In way of an example, a friend of mine who worked blue collar his whole life (running large repairs & logistics operations) ended up moving up the command. Eventually, he ended up in a consulting capacity as part of an R&D team for a massive logistics company. His first day on the job he saved an average of 2 lives a year and around $5m.
He was given the job of improving a warehouse with a bunch of newly hired kids from Yale, Harvard, etc. The kids spent weeks going over all the different locations, trying to optimize layout, etc.
Eventually, my friend just talked to people on the floor. At one point, he noticed a fork lift operator who was having an issue picking up a pallet off a truck. He asked what the issue was and the fork life operator said they didn't know exactly where the height of the pallet is. The ivy league consultants started planning out using cameras to select the correct height(s), looked at the budget associated with hiring developers, tried to identify the costs to retrofit all the fork lifts, etc.
While that went on, my friend got two magnet strips, put some bright tape on the back, measured and put the magnet at the exact height the truck bed and as the pallets were a default height he knew where to put the next strip. Every new truck that came in would just move both strips based on the new truck height. He was done that afternoon and it was a $5 retrofit.
On average, 2-3 workers died a year at all their warehouses due to pallets being knocked down, losses were an estimated $5m.
The point of the story is that "genius" doesn't work better than practical problem solving. Problem solving comes from learning to survive and be independent.
I love the story of Faraday and Maxwell precisely for this reason. Maxwell was a bonafide genius, but Faraday was just really good at note-taking and doing experiments. Because of those talents, Faraday was able to document a lifetime of experiments with electricity. Maxwell read the entire record of those experiments and was able to derive the mathematical model of what was happening. It seems that it takes more than just "genius" for progress to occur: creativity, hard work, diligence, and passion are also required, as well as a society that supports the people engaging in such endeavors.
You're right, the 'regular' people form the base of a society. But purely biologically they aren't capable of implementing a system for governing the society. This is b/c a hard working brain consumes up to 25% of total energy which is very expensive. Therefore we tend to find shortcuts that allow us to avoid that much of brain activity. And as brain wants to be 'happy' (chemically) which biologically means good food, reproduction and dominance.
Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.
Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.
I think this is a pretty big logical fallacy. There are TONS of people right now, today, who never need to work another day in their life and could live in a cozy dry home with plenty of food and decent healthcare - even in the US. Not just Jeff B & Elon, but plenty of well-off 50 year olds who _could_ retire, but would much rather keep working for a while longer so that their retirement involves trips to europe and fun boats instead of a modest home and little travel.
Lots of people love their jobs, and love the things they can afford because they work harder than they strictly need to (me too! I definitely don't _need_ a nice espresso machine). Lots of start-up founders get into it because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, and the thought that they might be taking the blade from LGA and cruising around on a huge boat I'm sure doesn't hurt their desire to do the insanely hard work of starting a company.
My personal hot take is that capitalism's emphasis on coercion (you only get healthcare if you work, we sometimes worry that our biggest problem is $15/hour workers slacking off) blinds us to the fact that lots of (most?) us really enjoy our work and love having something to do all day that feels useful.
You seem to be conveniently forgetting the fact that first world lifestyles are only possible due to entire countries worth of third world slave labor.
Someone has to do all this yucky boring work and by golly it's not going to be me! Out of sight, out of mind.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
> And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory.
There's no evidence either way. You're citing lack of evidence on something that's barely been tested, much less had enough time in the wild to have its effects studied.
I'm no genius, but in a world where I was born in a nation with UBI (or just expected a fat inheritance) I would have taken that masters in Bioinformatics scholarship and continued my research instead of writing shit code so businesses can make money
Lots of people who graduated with me followed the same path for the same reason
Yep, smartest guy I knew in my physics program dropped out of his masters when he realized he would earn more in a year at a MAGMA than he would over half a decade begging for grants.
> And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory.
If one does not try something, should one expect there to be evidence of how well it works?
> People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way.
Tautological thinking can be useful, but it is a double edged sword.
> There are smart people out there but a lot of them get into boring jobs because they are easy. They don’t particularly like difficult exploration.
Agreed, perhaps there is a lack of instruction in how to think in an exploratory manner. Maybe we are too short term results oriented.
> Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life.
a) Confident delusional beliefs about free will aside, it is at least plausible that the state of affairs at any given snapshot in time is a consequence of our actions that preceded it.
b) People in relatively comfortable positions often are more comfortable with the current state of affairs than those who are not in a comfortable position.
> Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
It also isn't (or doesn't have to be) about having no interest in optimizing the environment in a manner that benefits all people, but it seems this is the local maxima we're stuck at, for now.
I don't disagree with much of anything you're saying. At the same time, I don't see UBI as a decent cure.
The market is imperfect (as we see it's attracting outsized talent to selling crass ads) and on the other hand, central planning/state enterprises (Soviet-style) also has shortcomings which are even worse --though they do well in developing talent for where it's needed (however they are bad at figuring out 'needs') and suffers from gross mismanagement in operations.
So, given the above, it would seem there is a place for a middle-ground somewhere, I just don't see the magic in UBI necessary to achieve that.
One option is what kind of exists in certain underattracted/underserved areas where the government underwrites someone's education in return for service. So there are grants one can receive in exchange for service commitment after graduation. Obviously you can't "play around" and try to figure out if you like something and then something else... You have to know what you want.
Fundamentally, we seem to be unable to consider whether our approach is wrong, never mind where we're going to get the money.
And as for me: I do not believe this to be an accident, and I do not believe it to be only those dirty Republicans / religious people: I think western culture itself is a fucking disaster that needs to be rewritten from the ground up.
This tugs at the heartstrings but it is more sentimental than substantial. Why not consider the number of people with potential and talent that would never discover it because they didn't need to work or apply themselves thanks to a UBI?
As a little twist on the author's badly thought out proposal, what if we simply take the NSF scheme for doling out funding and make it more broadly available. Each year (or every few years) you can submit a proposal about what you plan to do if you're given a UBI, it will go through peer-review, and about 6 months later you'll get a notification if you were selected for funding or not.
Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
Unconditional free money for everyone. Nice story for 5 yo children, but not for those who have even the most basic of grasps on the history of the humankind.
What is the old saying? Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
I think we would have to first prove that the genius is going to provide something for us in some way, even if it is just research, it can not be frivolous research with no end in sight that does not produce.
Uh-oh, how do I show that we are doing research that will eventually produce something? Einstein noted that if we knew what we were doing, we would not call it research. So many great discoveries were accidental, but then how do I prevent the scammers from gaming the system?
Western nations implemented UBI in 2020 and 2021 in the form of checks and loans and we are now living through the disastrous effects of UBI as the economy sputters and inflation and high prices lower our standard of living and make all of our lives worse. In short, UBI has been a complete disaster and is not a viable solution to any problem.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadWithout touching the inequalities / corruption aspect, it would be closer to a research grant than a Universal basic income the way it is set up.
Then again, it's bloomberg.
I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12.
I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s.
My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated).
I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program.
I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time".
Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition.
I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
Well, are you still a cook now?
A program like this is focused on the disproportionate number of home runs it would produce, fully expecting some to strike out.
There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
"Equity" is a concept in law: AIUI (IANAL) it mainly concerns trusts and contracts. The word is sometimes used as a synonym for "fairness", but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets.
And I don't think there's anything unfair about a UBI, any more than universal healthcare, or a universal police service.
> Eq"ui*ty (?), n.; pl. equities (#). [F. équité, L. aequitas, fr. aequus even, equal. See Equal.]
> 1. Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality.
> [....]
> Syn. -- Right; justice; impartiality; rectitude; fairness; honesty; uprightness. See Justice.
That's Webster's 1913, so it's not a new usage. And it's what was chosen for definition #1 (the others are, as you note, lawyer jargon).
FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_of_equity
- The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines)
- The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know.
- The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.
I was more referring to the genius that does routine employment work mostly to support himself (like for the cliche example: Einstein working in the patent office while preparing his theories).
> an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one?
This is a big question. chatGPT is pushing some buttons a lot faster than I thought. is it just a jolt? is there an AI winter on the horizon? The fact that these systems are still mostly magical black boxes does not help us predict. So, who knows?
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment.
With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.
It's hard to focus on schooling when you're tummy is growling, or there's a ton of stress at home, or abuse, etc.
Conflating growing up poor with growing up with abuse is incorrect.
Obviously it would be a wide range of stuff to argue about but still your example sounds more to me like something we won't have that much data on, relatively speaking.
I would imagine this holds true for other definitions of genius, but I haven't seen quantitative data on it.
It's easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that a person who is dimmer than us is cognitively challenged; it's much harder to assess the smarts of someone who is smarter than us. Is he 1% smarter than me? 10% smarter? Hell, 100% smarter? All I know is that he understands stuff that I don't, and solves crosswords faster. But I don't believe that anyone is so much smarter than the average that they need to be paid 100x what I could earn.
I like this example, especially, as we're all aware, you can get better at both crosswords and IQ tests with practice.
Identify A as smarter than B
A identifies A’ A’ identifies A’’ …
There’s no need to know the quantified smartness, just the ordinal smartness.
Why not? You accept that some individuals are off the scale of various physical abilities. That try as you might, you'll never be the fastest or tallest or strongest.
What makes intelligence different? Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
If you are mediocre in obvious ways, what's left? Everyone wants to be good at something. Everyone wants to be better at something than others. But it is fairly obvious with anything with a physical component. I am a mediocre guitar player. I am not tall. I am not fast. I am not exceptionally strong. These are things that can be sussed out fairly quickly with some basic tests.
But intelligence. Well. That's not only fluid, but it's also abstract. What does it mean to have an IQ of 129 versus an IQ of 130. Especially when one could score both depending on how much sleep one has had. So you can just say IQ is bullshit. Intelligence don't real. Everyone is smart in their own way.
No. That's just simply not true. Yes, one could test differently based on conditions. However, it will fall within a range. Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range. If you score a 129, you'll be within the 125-135 group or something.
And it's just like with physical traits. Like right now, I will be much slower than normal because my quadriceps are fucking cooked. I overexerted myself and I'm sore as shit. Even though I am not normally fast, timing me now wouldn't give an accurate representation of my average speed.
And you can tell when someone has spent any time among the truly gifted. Because running into people like this is something else. They will come into a situation blind, get what you've already gotten, and then make a realization you'd never would have. They do process on a different level. And it's not about knowledge. It's not how much they know. It's about how fast they can acquire that knowledge, understand it, and then build upon it. It's how they can relate knowledge from different areas in new and novel ways. People who have spent time with the truly gifted know there's a such thing as intelligence. People who have only spent time with people who are average to above average have never actually seen intelligence at work.
No I don't!
I'm getting on, and not very fit; I can run about 30 yards, slowly, before I run out of steam. But even Olympic runners can't run 100x faster than me. I know how fast Olympic runners can run.
> Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
Why, indeed. Why do you think that I believe that?
> Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range.
I have avoided mention of IQ; I don't think it's equivalent to intelligence.
> and then make a realization you'd never would have.
Yes, of course. I've met a lot of people that are quicker on the uptake than I am. But I'm sorry; "truly gifted" suggests there's some kind of magic going on. I don't believe in magic, and I don't believe in gifts from the gods. And I don't believe that there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; my observation was simply that average people like me aren't in a position to estimate the smarts of brighter people. So there is a tendency to assume there's magic occurring; that they aren't just brighter, but there's some other ingredient.
There's no magic ingredient; we're all made roughly the same way, from the same ingredients.
There's no magic. Just like the fact Usain Bolt running the 100m dash in 9.58 seconds isn't magic. No one else has been capable of reproducing that feat. Including people who train to do exactly that.
And I don't suggest there is magic. You're forcing an argument on me that I am not making.
IQ is as good a measure of intelligence as there is. IQ is not a measure of human worth. IQ is not a measure of success. IQ is not a measure of a lot of things. IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
I am simply pointing out that intelligence is no different than any other attribute one can possess. And some people possess it at the extremes.
Sure it is. But it's not orders of magnitude.
> IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
[citation needed] That claim is both specific and vague at the same time. I'll try to work out how you did that :-)
And how do you mean "specific and vague".
IQ isn't precise because like all of our physical attributes, there's wiggle room. Like how you may think you're a certain height, but you actually fluctuate throughout the day. Same with weight. Or strength. Or speed. IQ is a rough measure. It can really only tell us what you get when you take the test. But if you take it several times, it should fall within a range.
And a good IQ test shouldn't test knowledge. It should test reasoning, spatial ability, pattern matching, etc. You know, the factors that make up our raw processing power.
Are you saying it's "specific and vague" because it's an imprecise measure of a specific ability? That wouldn't be "specific and vague" in the way you mean. You could say it's a vague claim about a specific thing, but that's not mysterious.
> Then you say that you don't believe there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average. There are.
So you're stating that some people are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; but you've adduced no evidence. I don't agree; you're making the claim, so the burden is on you.
> IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
That's a very specific claim. I know what "raw processing power" means in the context of a CPU, and I know of various ways of measuring it. But a brain is not a CPU. It's not a processor; arguably what it does is not similar to information processing.
I used to think this as well, having gone to a famous university. Some people just seemed to get it much faster than others.
With some hindsight I no longer believe it. I think it was all hard work, and very much influenced by environment.
One guy I knew seemed really quite bright, always seemed to know everything. Ended up getting a PhD as well. But I realized that he basically just studied a lot. I wanted to think he was smarter than me, but I also knew inside I wasn't putting in the same amount of practice he was.
I brought the same fellow into a business to work with me, and he was ordinary. Couldn't have known that he was one of the top grads of two world famous universities, just one among a sea of reasonably competent quants. I'm fairly sure a lot of firms make this mistake as well, they think they need the people who did best at uni, but actually it has a lot to do with what you do with people, who you stick them with, what training they get, and so on.
The thing about highly productive creatives is they seem to have special motivation. They ome into some field, they see connections, they are more motivated to read more, talk to more people, study more. That seems to be the driver. I never saw anyone good that was just smart but not engaged as well.
And while that exact stretch remains unbroken, similar levels of dominance in the game are typical. Kasparov was world champion for 15 years. And in current times Magnus Carlsen has been world champion for about a decade, and #1 in the world (by a wide margin) for years beyond that.
On things we can't measure, one can observe facts like the open problem that Einstein would go on to solve (in his twenties, while working at a patent office) was being dug into by countless brilliant minds, to no avail, since Einstein was 8 years old! And his work after that point makes it clear it wasn't just a freak coincidence.
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I definitely do think there are plenty who are "that much" smarter than average, but I don't think they need to be paid to succeed. Nor do I think one having an official affirmation that he is a "genius" is conducive to clear-headedness. It naturally drives a sense of entitlement, and can be detrimental to actually putting in the work necessary to make things happen. All the potential in the world is irrelevant without a corresponding work ethic.
But how many chess grandmasters are also fabulously wealthy CEOs? They tend to stay chess-players.
I'm curious about what skill in chess consists of. It seems to correspond to general cognitive capacity; but that's certainly not all of it.
It's difficult to explain if you've never really gotten seriously into chess, but the game is, by far, one of the most satisfying and rewarding activities in existence. You can put infinite mental energy into the game and continue to get ever more out of it. It is extremely addictive, especially once one reaches a certain level in the game. If I had the choice of retiring to a life endless beaches and scantily clad ladies delivering me all the drinks and pleasures of life one could imagine, or retiring to a [safe] ghetto full of nothing but old highly skilled chess players - I would pick #2 in a heart beat.
There are plenty of chess player anecdotes along the lines of Gata Kamsky. He became frustrated with his progress in chess at some point (as one of the best in the world, but not the best in the world) and just casually decided to become a lawyer. So he did that and breezed through law school and set himself to a traditional path of money and even power. But, as is always the end of these stories, the game called him back. Today he streams himself playing chess for hours a day (on Twitch) to an audience of tens and is clearly more content and satisfied than ever.
Yeah, but a power scale implies that there are outliers at any distance from the median. That can't be true, so the model is defective.
I could try to explain what those numbers mean mathematically, but I think there's an even easier way to get the gist of it. There are hundreds of of thousands of FIDE rated players. That #1 player's rating is 2859. For him to be 50 points higher than the #2 player is insane in terms of any notion of broad-level approximate human equality, but perfectly normal in the not-even-remotely-equal reality of what we see in chess.
And this is mirrored everywhere, even in sports where the physical limitations on the body are presumably more limiting than the cognitive ones. Running is nice because it's a field where we are going to miss close to 0 outliers, and you can fairly compare generations regardless of time.
Imagine we take Usain Bolt at his peak, and have him run a 200m race against the 200th fastest human to have ever lived at his peak. People might expect this to be a pretty close race. In reality? He'd finish about 9.8 meters, more than 32 feet ahead of the other guy. It would look like 'fast' guy vs 'meh, more or less average' guy. When in reality that 'more or less average' guy is one of the fastest humans to have ever lived!
That is what I'm saying about smart people; I don't accept that there are people arbitrarily smarter than the average. My guess is that the cutoff is somewhere around double the average (modulo your method for measuring smartness).
It is a textbook power law. There are only 2 humans better than 2800, and one is pushing near 2900. Then there are only 37 humans from 2700-2799, 168 from 2600-2699 and so on with an increasingly exponential gain in brackets near the median. And each bracket tends to be exceptionally dominant of brackets just one below, let alone more.
A finite sample means any distribution will have a min and a max. If the odds of a Magnus are 1 in 10 billion, then we can expect to see one person of a roughly proportional skill every generation or two. But if the odds of the next tier of exponentially dominating outlier out are 1 in 500 billion then any given generation of humanity would be unlikely to see one, at least not until we start dramatically increasing our population sizes.
But in reality the top is not approximately equal. In chess there are hundreds of thousands of rated players. The #1 player is rated 50 points higher than the #2 player. The #1 player is rated 2859. Think about the implications of those three facts! And this is likely precisely the case with Einstein, and also the reason for his success.
Back to current times/domain I'd also argue this is why having exponentially more scientists than ever before has not really led to what somebody who assumed a normal distribution would expect to see.
You get picked for the team because you're a little bit better than number 2, you feel motivated, you get more training... down the road you are a lot better.
Sports especially is filled with these kinds of stories.
Even in the chess world, "prodigies" are a dime a dozen and Magnus was a relatively late bloomer among his peers. Magnus received his International Master title (the second highest title in chess, prior to Grandmaster) at a later age than Sergey Karjakin, a fellow prodigy, received his Grandmaster title. He also achieved victory coming from a country that had relatively little chess culture. Grandmasters coming from countries with greater chess culture would have had access to greater resources, minds, coaching, and opportunities.
But this isn't a negative, you're proposing that there's some sort of strong connection between observable potentials and eventual outcomes, am I right? So now we need the evidence.
Sports is a great place to look btw. The history of recruiting busts in the sports world simply incredible. People they guessed wrong on: Tom Brady, Ravel Morrison, Johnny Manziel, Carlos Bacca, just to give you a false positive and a false negative in two different sports.
It just seems to me that is really isn't all that obvious who might be really good, and so we should spread our bets rather than concentrate on a few promising geniuses.
> For instance Einstein...
So how does this say anything about skill? Couldn't he just be a low-probability ticket that won? There were other people looking at similar ideas at the time.
> Even in the chess world...
Thing is chess is international now, Magnus could be Norwegian but very cheaply access chess culture from other countries. Maybe in an earlier era this argument made sense. But just like in football, it's international now and people aren't surprised by regional styles.
And in any case, for people that are "off the charts" - they aren't going to have difficulty excelling in a capitalist economic system, nearly regardless of their humbleness of their beginnings. I would even be inclined to argue that acknowledging somebody as "genius" and plying them with money is more likely to lead to distorted rather than enhanced development. Just because somebody may be several sigmas from the mean cognitively, doesn't mean that they're immune to the trappings any human may succumb to: ego, vice, hedonism, entitlement, laziness, and so on.
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As for your response, I find it uncompelling. You're trying to argue that there's some childhood butterfly effect that drives outcomes, while hand-waving away major factors that would imperil development (from an environmental POV). Similarly, the 'dart-throw theory' doesn't hold as it wasn't only Einstein's initial ideas that were exceptional - but rather a persisted trend throughout his entire career.
He published more than 450 papers over his 50 year career, with countless revolutionary discoveries. For some context, that's an academic output rate of publishing 0.75 papers per month, for his entire life until his death bed. It's not like he made one great discovery and then coasted on his laurels while reminiscing about the past. His "miracle year", for instance, while working at a patent office, involved the publication of 4 distinct (and ground-breaking) papers! All without any real access to academic resources, or even peers to really bounce ideas off of.
I'd rather work with a random person who grew up on a farm or the streets than someone who had the best tutors and went to Harvard. People who have to work hard, who grow up hard, are hardened against the world. They learn to survive.
Most of our best entrepreneurs and builders grow up building and being independent. To be independent you have to learn to survive on your own, i.e. not with UBI. I'd rather have a higher level competition, not selecting based on IQ.
In way of an example, a friend of mine who worked blue collar his whole life (running large repairs & logistics operations) ended up moving up the command. Eventually, he ended up in a consulting capacity as part of an R&D team for a massive logistics company. His first day on the job he saved an average of 2 lives a year and around $5m.
He was given the job of improving a warehouse with a bunch of newly hired kids from Yale, Harvard, etc. The kids spent weeks going over all the different locations, trying to optimize layout, etc.
Eventually, my friend just talked to people on the floor. At one point, he noticed a fork lift operator who was having an issue picking up a pallet off a truck. He asked what the issue was and the fork life operator said they didn't know exactly where the height of the pallet is. The ivy league consultants started planning out using cameras to select the correct height(s), looked at the budget associated with hiring developers, tried to identify the costs to retrofit all the fork lifts, etc.
While that went on, my friend got two magnet strips, put some bright tape on the back, measured and put the magnet at the exact height the truck bed and as the pallets were a default height he knew where to put the next strip. Every new truck that came in would just move both strips based on the new truck height. He was done that afternoon and it was a $5 retrofit.
On average, 2-3 workers died a year at all their warehouses due to pallets being knocked down, losses were an estimated $5m.
The point of the story is that "genius" doesn't work better than practical problem solving. Problem solving comes from learning to survive and be independent.
Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.
Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.
This is a great thing to make every growing children to be trained / optimized for one or some specific things only.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Not that requiring geniuses to be career academics makes much sense, in any case.
Lots of people love their jobs, and love the things they can afford because they work harder than they strictly need to (me too! I definitely don't _need_ a nice espresso machine). Lots of start-up founders get into it because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, and the thought that they might be taking the blade from LGA and cruising around on a huge boat I'm sure doesn't hurt their desire to do the insanely hard work of starting a company.
My personal hot take is that capitalism's emphasis on coercion (you only get healthcare if you work, we sometimes worry that our biggest problem is $15/hour workers slacking off) blinds us to the fact that lots of (most?) us really enjoy our work and love having something to do all day that feels useful.
Someone has to do all this yucky boring work and by golly it's not going to be me! Out of sight, out of mind.
- Stephen Jay Gould
People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way.
There are smart people out there but a lot of them get into boring jobs because they are easy. They don’t particularly like difficult exploration.
Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life. Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
There's no evidence either way. You're citing lack of evidence on something that's barely been tested, much less had enough time in the wild to have its effects studied.
Lots of people who graduated with me followed the same path for the same reason
If one does not try something, should one expect there to be evidence of how well it works?
> People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way.
Tautological thinking can be useful, but it is a double edged sword.
> There are smart people out there but a lot of them get into boring jobs because they are easy. They don’t particularly like difficult exploration.
Agreed, perhaps there is a lack of instruction in how to think in an exploratory manner. Maybe we are too short term results oriented.
> Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life.
a) Confident delusional beliefs about free will aside, it is at least plausible that the state of affairs at any given snapshot in time is a consequence of our actions that preceded it.
b) People in relatively comfortable positions often are more comfortable with the current state of affairs than those who are not in a comfortable position.
> Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
It also isn't (or doesn't have to be) about having no interest in optimizing the environment in a manner that benefits all people, but it seems this is the local maxima we're stuck at, for now.
The market is imperfect (as we see it's attracting outsized talent to selling crass ads) and on the other hand, central planning/state enterprises (Soviet-style) also has shortcomings which are even worse --though they do well in developing talent for where it's needed (however they are bad at figuring out 'needs') and suffers from gross mismanagement in operations.
So, given the above, it would seem there is a place for a middle-ground somewhere, I just don't see the magic in UBI necessary to achieve that.
One option is what kind of exists in certain underattracted/underserved areas where the government underwrites someone's education in return for service. So there are grants one can receive in exchange for service commitment after graduation. Obviously you can't "play around" and try to figure out if you like something and then something else... You have to know what you want.
Fundamentally, we seem to be unable to consider whether our approach is wrong, never mind where we're going to get the money.
And as for me: I do not believe this to be an accident, and I do not believe it to be only those dirty Republicans / religious people: I think western culture itself is a fucking disaster that needs to be rewritten from the ground up.
So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?
Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
Unconditional as in mousetrap cheese it will be.
How do you now define genius?
What is the old saying? Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
I think we would have to first prove that the genius is going to provide something for us in some way, even if it is just research, it can not be frivolous research with no end in sight that does not produce.
Uh-oh, how do I show that we are doing research that will eventually produce something? Einstein noted that if we knew what we were doing, we would not call it research. So many great discoveries were accidental, but then how do I prevent the scammers from gaming the system?