43 ms·

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

345 points by yurisagalov 7y ago

petra 7y ago
How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.
- Guthur 7y ago
  Because this article is nothing more than thin emotive veneer over the standard extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda.
  - tekmate 7y ago
    it's got nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with capitalism. restricting the advanced workforce and research to the thin slice of a population with the opportunity (mostly well off parents, sometimes race and sex) you lose out on a tremendous amount of human resources with the potential to create value.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    What, pray tell, is socialistic about this?
    - thrower123 7y ago
      It's not socialist, necessarily, but it's definitely blank-slatist, and the two are often stablemates.
      - akhilcacharya 7y ago
        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?
        thrower123 7y ago
        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 you try.
        akhilcacharya 7y ago
        > 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?
        thrower123 7y ago
        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.
        mav3rick 7y ago
        He clearly used a generic phrase not aimed at you. What is it with deliberately taking things personally ?
        haihaibye 7y ago
        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.
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    "extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda" A meaningless phrase that just states that "as a conservative, this makes me upset"
    - journalctl 7y ago
      The idea that the world isn’t the meritocracy one might believe it to be is very disconcerting to some people, especially the people who benefit from such privilege as wealth, or being the preferred race/sex in their particular culture. The idea that perhaps not everyone can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is foreign to people like this.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Well, if governments let corporations dominate, monopolize markets they are inevitably giving up competition and therefore innovation. Forcing talented people to work on evil things that advance company's dominant position, rather than working on innovations to have a temporary edge over competition.
- PostOnce 7y ago
  Everything is a hassle. Building permits, operating licenses, legal compliance, etc. All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful. I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc. There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially". You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit? I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    I'm a fan of the chemistry analogy here: you can catalyze (reduce barriers) and you can incentivize (increase rewards). If the incentives point the wrong way, catalyzing won't help. If the barriers are too high, incentivizing won't help. I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing incentives.
    - bumby 7y ago
      I think I agree but the question seems to be how do we lower the barriers smartly while still keeping the intent of the rules and regulations? Add to it our own bias to put more emphasis on the regulations that concretely prevent us from doing what we want now, rather than those that abstractly benefit us and its easy to point to them being the problem. It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche, something that you see as an impediment I see as a social good. Finding the right balance is tricky and unfortunately in a polarized political environment it's easy for people to fall into the far sides of the argument.
      - abakker 7y ago
        The real question is: why did we install the protections(barriers) in the first place? I assume that a major component of that was as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Self sufficiency is fine, but it is difficult to take the consequences for many things knowingly. As such, we created, one at a time, experientially driven barriers designed to protect people from new, novel issues. I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.
- aripickar 7y ago
  It depends on social pressure. For places like Silicon valley, the ultimate status symbol is being a founder, which inherently involves inventing (what a founder would call) important stuff. It's similar in Israel. Heck, there, startups are struggling to scale becuase everyone wants to be a founder.
  - petra 7y ago
    I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision". // Everyone wants to be a founder Well, you know the song "asiti": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw It's on Hebrew, but it basically talks about the Israeli tendency to always say "I did this, I did that"
    - everybodyknows 7y ago
      >I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". Not what @aripicker claimed: "... being a founder, which inherently involves inventing ..." No mention of uniqueness.
- cwingrav 7y ago
  (US centric comment) I'll add that we're making it less likely people will take risks and act on their ideas with student debt and a lack of healthcare. People can't take risks if they don't have a cushion to rely on and risk their lives (or face massive debt) if a non-trivial health concern occurs. Compounding this is a draw back of social programs to get people back on their feet if their risk turns south. I'm not advocating for paying for "slackers", but giving people a chance at least as good as what their parents had.
  - mch82 7y ago
    People are also less likely to speak up about problems at work when they must worry about losing healthcare along with a job.
- solinent 7y ago
  I think we can certainly incentivize people more, but in order to invent "important stuff" we need significant resources. If everyone was given the money to invent this important stuff, it's hard to allocate the proper resources to them, or at the very least, they will get fewer resources. Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale. Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically. We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
- paulcole 7y ago
  I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.
  - petra 7y ago
    Not necessarily important as in "single handedly curing cancer". But taking part in an important thing , even in a small role, is important. But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.
- mncharity 7y ago
  > We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen. Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Opportunity is often missed because it looks like work.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  The availability of opportunity itself has diminished. Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Often, when one of the now fewer gates to opportunity open, much less is offered inside than was historically there and the risks to benefits to open those doors is increasing across the board. I'd say it's too simplistic to imply people don't seek opportunity because it requires work, it's more to do with the fact the success rates are so low and the magnitude of work is so high now compared historically that most would rather seek other ways to add enjoyment to their lives and abandon the system. That's not sustainable for our society to continue to be successful and it has to change back to more sane thresholds. Implying people are lazy is a copout to the real problem.
  - ryanmarsh 7y ago
    Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Measured how?
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    Older opportunities only looked easy because they'd be easy for us in our more powerful position of knowledge and resources. It wasn't easy for an uneducated medieval peasant to discover the laws of electromagnetism. Even the most advantaged people didn't know what to look for. Plenty of failures happened in alchemy/witchcraft/religion/etc. that people dedicated their lives to for nothing because they didn't have our advantage of knowledge.
    - bsanr2 7y ago
      Most of the people making those discoveries were people of means, though (or at least adjacent to, but not competing with, them).
- 7y ago
eaenki 7y ago
Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Why should the federal government do this? 'The founding fathers intended the states to be social and economic experiments.' I find it frustrating that anything remotelt consistent with the scientific method is effectively shunned in economic policy and politics.
  - eaenki 7y ago
    Well the US is the major superpower in good part because of Cisco, Bell Labs, Fairchild, Intel, Apple, Lockheed, Google etc.
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      Are we speaking military expenditure, basic research, or entrepreneurialism? I'm also uncomfortable of this suggested idea about American exceptionalism. We have been bested by foreign competition despite our superior economic resources and liberty. I mean, we had to completely begin shifting gears away from public, politicized development in the launch market when our best option became hitching rides with one of our worst enemies.
      - eaenki 7y ago
        Even Lockheed (or some other aerospace company) at some point was a risky venture developing far fetched tech, doing basic research So I’d answer: all of them
marmaduke 7y ago
> list of innovations we need is long but subsequent included nothing vis-a-vis the expensive, industrial lifestyle we have these days. It is unfortunate that cultural innovation doesn't make the list, since it would go a long way toward address some pertinent problems
- everybodyknows 7y ago
  I'd go farther and suggest that culture is the central problem. Only better culture can deliver peace and a modicum of justice. In particular, a social culture in which neighbors do not seek to rob or enslave each other. Self-driving cars, or even a cure for cancer, will not advance this central goal. Better schools on the other hand, just might.
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Spot on. In this vein, I think culture can be seen as a form of 'wetware' technology. Crime, inequality and so on are technical debts of early decisions by a few, it is a sector ripe for disruption but with very strong encumbents. Unfortunately said encumbents know how important schools are in this.
boyadjian 7y ago
The talent, was originally a unity of mass and money of Antiquity, so people who have talent, means people who have money.
- tekmate 7y ago
  hard to work on your juggling if you're slaving away 20 hours a day
- inimino 7y ago
  > talent (n.) > late 13c., "inclination, disposition, will, desire," from Old French talent (12c.), from Medieval Latin talenta, plural of talentum "inclination, leaning, will, desire" (11c.), in classical Latin "balance, weight; sum of money," from Greek talanton "a balance, pair of scales," hence "weight, definite weight, anything weighed," and in later times sum of money," from PIE *tele- "to lift, support, weigh," "with derivatives referring to measured weights and thence money and payment" [Watkins]; see extol. So, no. But it's a neat folk etymology even if it isn't quite true.
  - southerndrift 7y ago
    Maybe I am missing some subtleties, but why is talent not money? >The Homeric talent "as money" was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow.[2] Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about 8.4 gm can be established for this money talent.[2] The talent of gold was known to Homer, who described how Achilles gave a half-talent of gold to Antilochus as a prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement)
    - inimino 7y ago
      It was a (rather heavy) weight, and only a unit "of money" by extension. A Homeric talent was a unit of weight, hence the half-talent "of gold" as a prize. A talent of silver would weigh the same but have less value. The Hebrew "talent" (kikar) was also a unit of weight. The later Latin talentum borrowed the existing weight measure and the Greek word τάλαντον and by the time of the parable of the talents, this word already carried the rather heavy meaning of "58.9 kg." (from your link above). So a talent in the modern metaphorical sense of "talented person" means a person carrying a heavy weight, and a heavy responsibility. If a single talent is almost 60 kg, imagine the unlucky person with five talents placed on them! Perhaps it would be better to have a genius than to be talented, though neither one makes you rich. > For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. The only thing we can say with confidence about these "goods" is that they were heavy, and not necessarily something you want... especially if they are to be repaid "with usury" at some future undisclosed time of reckoning, as in the story!
james_s_tayler 7y ago
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 just don't understand the ridiculous in-built assumption that we are somehow wronging society and the potential geniuses themselves by them not being in a time and a place that makes use of the quality of the substrate of those particular individuals. Well, sorry but nature doesn't optimize for the individual, it optimizes for the whole. You may as well get equally mad at something silly like "why doesn't everyone always roll a 6?"
- kirso 7y ago
  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.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    Yeah, I didn't miss that point. Not at all. I think you missed my point. Because you state: >Basically there are ways how to fix it My point is it's not actually broken. It's working. It's working very well. Although it doesn't tend to, opportunity _could_ arise anywhere. So, potential geniuses are peppered everywhere such that if opportunity were to arise there there are people who can take advantage of it. The assumption that it should work the other way around is ridiculous. Opportunity isn't for geniuses. Geniuses are for opportunity.
    - kirso 7y ago
      The point of the article is that majority of people are not given opportunity to become geniuses and frankly you don't even have to be one to make an impact. You don't just get born a genius its a process with lots of puzzle pieces (parents, education, environment). If your primary goal when you grow up is to not starve to death, you can hardly allocate time to study physics and make discoveries. However, tell it to the millions in Africa without food and education that the opportunity is everywhere and you will get skinned alive.
baybal2 7y ago
Invention is overvalued as well as the idea of "creativity." The biggest proof is the current China-USA standoff. USA is on the paper the biggest nation on earth by manufacturing output, but what was the last time you saw made in USA household goods in supermarket without having to specifically look for them? Why China has industrial base and USA doesn't? Wages difference? No, not by a chance. In some places in China, the cost of trained blue collar labour begins to exceed that of US. An hourly rate for an experienced pick and place machine operator in South China certainly exceeds $15 per hour, and may be closing on $20. This is what I can tell from my own experience. On an another hand, it is $16 in USA. https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries Even plain assembly line workers now get close to $15, and trained ones above that. For any manufacturing automation specialist in China, wages are better than in USA... You don't see Chinese industrialists racing to setup factories in USA. Think why now? I was telling my own story on HN few times already. I was trying to setup an electric scooter factory in Vancouver, Canada, and then in US northwest on behalf of my employer. I had to hire university grads to do plain assembly, as anybody else had hard time to just wire a battery, throttle, BMS board, and a motor. And that with colour coded wire harness with mechanical keys to prevent miswiring... We spent 6 months looking for an operator for our model of pick and place machine. In China, those are the jobs I can hire a highschooler for. America wastes its talent not any much less than, say, most countries Americans call "the third world." A very good story about that https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china-made.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  Even if wages are comparable, are other costs of employment, such as unemployment insurance, healthcare, pay roll tax comparable? And even if they are comparable now, its true that it no longer matters. The work moved to China because of low wages, and its going to stay there now because all of the labor force and supply chain infrastructure are much better developed. You are quite right those things no longer exist in the US, they have atrophied.
  - baybal2 7y ago
sdiq 7y ago
I think the better question would have been, how would Steve Jobs have ended up if he were born in Syria
- moltar 7y ago
  Not identical example. But Elon Musk was born in South Africa. Far from Syria, but still not a major world economic Center.
  - cossray 7y ago
    You may want to refreshen your knowledge regarding South Africa in its apartheid days. I would confidently posit that Elon was more privileged than your average American at that time. Of course he may want/ has created a different picture of his young days.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Certain individuals may be have been more privileged, in South Africa, during Apartheid, presuming skin colour. South Africa has not produced a thriving industrial or technological sector, though there have been individual advances in certain areas, notably medicine (heart transplants, yellow fever vaccine), and Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte, which left the country. Musk would have been 23 at the time of the election of Nelson Mandella. Musk's youth certainly was under an Apartheid regime and would reflect the benefits of being a white male under that system. He'd already left for Canada some five years earlier, which might itself speak to your parent's observations.
  - alibaba_x 7y ago
    His mother also had Canadian citizenship which allowed him to move to Canada at age 17.
- rc_mob 7y ago
  He would have stolen ideas from Syrians
bsenftner 7y ago
One place talent is not is in the screening process of VC. Attempting to raise money for a new venture is like returning to high school and being confronted by the popular kids demanding to know why you should be allowed into their club. I expected professionalism, and primarily saw immature 1%'ers so transparent in their shallowness, it turned raising funding into a surreal experience leaving bile in my throat.
threeisoneis 7y ago
Once again, an article related to utilitarian altruism that doesn't seem to draw a defensible conclusion from the arguments given. This particular type of article, and the works of the effective altruism movement more broadly, always creep up to the edge of demanding meaningful change but, in their conclusions, shrink away from it. They make the case that the world has a lot of issues, that a lot of people have bad lives and that those people should have better lives, and that "we need to do what is possible to allow everyone to live a life free of poverty, free of hunger, and free of premature death". But from there, the path they lay out, and advocate for, is one of continued oligarchy. After saying that we need to eliminate poverty, hunger, and premature death, they advocate for "[continuing] the positive developments of the last decades with more children surviving, more children growing up free of the worst poverty, and more children being better educated than ever before. If I am optimistic about the future of the world and progress against the world’s problems it is because of this." But what if you don't agree? And how could you? While some thing seem to be getting better (by some indicators only) global inequality continues to increase, and the inequality in developed economies is obscene. The climate and environment are destroyed more rapidly than ever in a continual quest for infinite growth. The solution proposed to the horrors of our present world, of improvement by creating more capitalism, is absurd. Capitalism is functioning as it must. It's not capitalism's fault as an ideology - it was designed to be this way. The world being advocated by these altruistic technocrats is no better than our own: if we lived in their utopia, we'd be at the mercy of our 'betters' who would still form a separate class above the rest of society. The suggestions for how to give back are also laughable. Donating your time or money individually while doing nothing to challenge the system won't change anything. It is through radical societal change, radical democracy, that a new and better world can be achieved. Neoliberals like this often feel the need to impress upon everyone that at least the floor is being raised - the amount of people in extreme poverty has gone down (by some metric) or the amount of people dying of disease has been reduced. But the real path to liberation isn't the gradual improvement of the bottom while the top gets fatter and richer and more powerful. The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system. What can you do, then, if you're not going to nobly work at a hedge-fund and selflessly donate some of your salary to cure malaria? Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world. If you want to end climate change, start going to the climate strikes. If you want a better life you workers at low incomes, show them solidarity when they strike. If your boss uses your open source library for an ICE contract, delete the code. When the world begins to shift, and everyone looks around and wonders why everything is so wrong, don't use data to insist that everything is good, actually. Embrace the knowledge that something is wrong! Something is wrong! And the world is fucked if it doesn't change. Don't let incrementalists like Max fool you into thinking otherwise.
vinniejames 7y ago
Opportunity is created, not found
username90 7y ago
We shouldn't worry about finding the talent who can work as researchers, first we should worry about finding the talent who can reliably work as modern farmers or in factories. That is what Africa is missing before it can take the next step towards becoming a modern society.
- reality_counts 7y ago
  All African nations have very low average IQ scores.
macawfish 7y ago
Capital is so trapped up that people don't even have the capital to take care of basic needs.
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  Seems to me capital is not just ordinary resources. More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered. Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes. When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognized. When capitalism is dominated by benevolent capitalists, basic needs are intended to be taken care of, since huge return on that type investment can be recognized.
  - pizzazzaro 7y ago
    So... How are we to ensure that we have these "benevolent Capitalists"? Seriously. Capitalism has shown twice within 100 years that it will manufacture sociopaths en masse. This is where we are now, and what made the Labor movement possible. (Join the IWW.) This is what created the Great Depression - too much concentrated Capital, too few profitable projects. This is normal to Capitalism - booms and busts that wipe out us little people, but those big players quickly find themselves with enough wealth leftover to live as Feudal Lords. From Cigarette Companies hiding that their product cases cancer to oil companies hiding that their product is actually killing the planet, even as they buy up patents for any competing technologies - the Modern Corporation has proven itself incapable of doing right by our world. Here's a fun documentary on the structure of modern Corporations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0
  - fuzzfactor 7y ago
    pizzazzaro wrote: >So... How are we to ensure that we have these "benevolent Capitalists"? Good point, that's a tough one. Sometimes there will obviously be a devastating shortage, or none available at all. Maybe the only benevolence some cultures will be able to muster is an incomplete removal of opportunity. I would estimate real benevolence should be obvious to the widest of consensus, and easily distinguishable almost universally from situations where there is some doubt. Not saying it's easy or possible to ensure anything, especially an anti-greed approach during a greed-power consolidation trend lasting longer than a lifetime.
AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
The opportunity is there. It's always there. It may not be an opportunity to immediately become the president of an international corporation, but it's an opportunity to improve your life and life of your future generations. Give your children education. Make sure they grow up in a full family. Move to a better place. All these small things add up. You won't become a millionaire this way, but your grandkids may.
known 7y ago
Very few societies promote Self-actualization in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
furthermoore24 7y ago
If you study rhetoric, this article is so full of shit :)
- mdorazio 7y ago
  If you comment like this on HN, please provide examples or you're not contributing to the conversation.
quxbar 7y ago
What's that? UBI?
vinceguidry 7y ago
I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the realm of running as fast as they can to stay in place. You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell? Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture. But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.
- jzebedee 7y ago
  Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawa...
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    Aha, thanks! I'd always sided with Kierkegaard, maybe I should give Camus his fair shake.
- manveru 7y ago
  You might enjoy http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301
NHQ 7y ago
I have tech talents that maybe a few thousand people in the world have, and research ability to move the needle (maybe even novel ideas in the field, if you ask me). I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks). I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my work. But it would be swell if it was easier to be seen, at such a high level. I would gladly teach, if offered the role. Basically, it should made way-too-easy for obviously talented, experienced, people to find some kind of work in teaching or civic developments.
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  > obviously talented The only "obvious" proof of talent that will convince anyone is having impressive accomplishments in a given field. Do you have any?
  - fuzzfactor 7y ago
    Exactly. A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not. But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x. Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way. It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself. If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand. Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not. In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost. PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it. And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.
kstenerud 7y ago
If I hadn't had to work jobs just to keep food on the table, I'd have invented the things I did A LOT earlier. I'd probably be finished rewriting the internet's protocols by now, instead of only being 30% of the way there. But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  People forget how art worked during the Renaissance - wealthy benefactors paid thr bills for the great Artists we remember. Thats not how Corporations work.
mLuby 7y ago
Immigration isn't mentioned at all; that's shocking. Assuming talent seeks opportunity to express itself, places looking for success (=talent*opportunity) should to make it easy for talent to move there. For the US, let students who earn masters/doctorates at American schools stay.
- umeshunni 7y ago
  As an immigrant in the US, I'm not surprised. The word immigration/immigrant has been subverted by the popular media in the US to refer mostly to "illegal immigrants escaping violent regimes" or some such fantasy. You'll rarely see a discussion of H1B visas or the length of the legal immigration queues discussed in the popular media. The popular media in the US also violently opposes opportunity or skills-based immigration even though that's what the majority of the world does. The liberal fantasy of immigration is a variation of the white man's burden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden) where it is the US's role to save the oppressed and the downtrodden by welcoming them to the US. Allowing immigration to be determined by talent or education is "racist".
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    As an immigrant in the US, I think your perception of the issue is driven more by your (probably pre-existing) existing attitudes on "liberals" than by the media in the US.
lopmotr 7y ago
The lack of exposure to role models for girls is a load of carefully crafted dishonesty. It gives the impression that role models are the reason for gender differences in inventing without actually saying that. Instead, it uses the same weasel word "can" as cosmetics advertising telling you that some chemical "can" reduce wrinkles. It also doesn't quantify the effect because that would probably be embarrassing. Of course role models will have some effect but it's not the only one - sexual dimorphism is there too and all the role models in the world won't change that. I wish people would stop lying to themselves and others about gender differences. Men and women are not cognitively equal on average. We have different strengths and weaknesses. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to pretend that women would be just as good as men if only society would stop misunderstanding them. It's trying to pull girls under a spell of delusion to fool them into behaving like boys, perhaps so that more of those who can do so will fulfill their potential. Why not be honest and help people understand that their own individual qualities are not the same as their group average?
jshowa3 7y ago
The worst part isn't lacking opportunity. It's knowing that you lack the ability and are forced to live your life that way without any ability to do anything about it. Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't. Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people. I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par. It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
> "The list of innovations we need is long: clean and cheap energy, better crops, interventions to help against the diseases that shorten and impair our lives. This, and much more besides, is needed to make progress against the big problems we face. But while the demand for innovation is large, its supply is limited." Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities. For example, we don't need "better crops." We need to stop wasting so much of that we do have. Less waste means less wasted resources. For example, less wasted food also means less chemicals and pesticides, which likely means less disease and medical issues. If we solved for root problem (i.e., apply The Five Whys) we'd waste less time and resources solving for symptoms. As for the supply of innovation being limit. IDK, I've heard that scarcity breeds innovation. So perhaps we are innovating, but in the wrong places, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Reducing waste can only go so far - zero waste - and worse, it has diminishing returns. Improving technology, on the other hand, has no upper bound and builds on itself to enable even more improvements. Imagine if people had just reduced food waste instead of inventing fertilizer? We probably wouldn't have western civilization.
  - chiefalchemist 7y ago
    Perhaps. But that's not the point. The waste isn't limited to food itself, but the resources to grow it, transport it, and even dispose of it. The solution of "make more" doesn't actaully address the problems
segmondy 7y ago
"Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not". I keep seeing this quote, but not attribution. Oldest I can find of it, -http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/26/144122/317/hillaryclinton/Hillary-Talent-Is-Universal-Opportunity-Is-Not- http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/26/144122/317/hillarycl...
prirun 7y ago
One problem I see in education today is that we give lots of extra resources to kids with learning problems, behavior problems, and physical handicaps, but not many resources go to gifted kids because "they'll do okay on their own". Yes, they might do "okay", but they might turn into brilliant innovators if they were given the same extra attention that the kids below the median get. This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.

345 points by yurisagalov 7y ago

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

Guthur 7y ago
Because this article is nothing more than thin emotive veneer over the standard extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda.
- tekmate 7y ago
  it's got nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with capitalism. restricting the advanced workforce and research to the thin slice of a population with the opportunity (mostly well off parents, sometimes race and sex) you lose out on a tremendous amount of human resources with the potential to create value.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  What, pray tell, is socialistic about this?
  - thrower123 7y ago
    It's not socialist, necessarily, but it's definitely blank-slatist, and the two are often stablemates.
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      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?
      - thrower123 7y ago
        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 you try.
        akhilcacharya 7y ago
        > 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?
        thrower123 7y ago
        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.
        mav3rick 7y ago
        He clearly used a generic phrase not aimed at you. What is it with deliberately taking things personally ?
      - haihaibye 7y ago
        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.
- Jonnax 7y ago
  "extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda" A meaningless phrase that just states that "as a conservative, this makes me upset"
  - journalctl 7y ago
    The idea that the world isn’t the meritocracy one might believe it to be is very disconcerting to some people, especially the people who benefit from such privilege as wealth, or being the preferred race/sex in their particular culture. The idea that perhaps not everyone can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is foreign to people like this.
zzzcpan 7y ago
Well, if governments let corporations dominate, monopolize markets they are inevitably giving up competition and therefore innovation. Forcing talented people to work on evil things that advance company's dominant position, rather than working on innovations to have a temporary edge over competition.
PostOnce 7y ago
Everything is a hassle. Building permits, operating licenses, legal compliance, etc. All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful. I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc. There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially". You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit? I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I'm a fan of the chemistry analogy here: you can catalyze (reduce barriers) and you can incentivize (increase rewards). If the incentives point the wrong way, catalyzing won't help. If the barriers are too high, incentivizing won't help. I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing incentives.
  - bumby 7y ago
    I think I agree but the question seems to be how do we lower the barriers smartly while still keeping the intent of the rules and regulations? Add to it our own bias to put more emphasis on the regulations that concretely prevent us from doing what we want now, rather than those that abstractly benefit us and its easy to point to them being the problem. It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche, something that you see as an impediment I see as a social good. Finding the right balance is tricky and unfortunately in a polarized political environment it's easy for people to fall into the far sides of the argument.
    - abakker 7y ago
      The real question is: why did we install the protections(barriers) in the first place? I assume that a major component of that was as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Self sufficiency is fine, but it is difficult to take the consequences for many things knowingly. As such, we created, one at a time, experientially driven barriers designed to protect people from new, novel issues. I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.
aripickar 7y ago
It depends on social pressure. For places like Silicon valley, the ultimate status symbol is being a founder, which inherently involves inventing (what a founder would call) important stuff. It's similar in Israel. Heck, there, startups are struggling to scale becuase everyone wants to be a founder.
- petra 7y ago
  I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision". // Everyone wants to be a founder Well, you know the song "asiti": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw It's on Hebrew, but it basically talks about the Israeli tendency to always say "I did this, I did that"
  - everybodyknows 7y ago
    >I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". Not what @aripicker claimed: "... being a founder, which inherently involves inventing ..." No mention of uniqueness.
cwingrav 7y ago
(US centric comment) I'll add that we're making it less likely people will take risks and act on their ideas with student debt and a lack of healthcare. People can't take risks if they don't have a cushion to rely on and risk their lives (or face massive debt) if a non-trivial health concern occurs. Compounding this is a draw back of social programs to get people back on their feet if their risk turns south. I'm not advocating for paying for "slackers", but giving people a chance at least as good as what their parents had.
- mch82 7y ago
  People are also less likely to speak up about problems at work when they must worry about losing healthcare along with a job.
solinent 7y ago
I think we can certainly incentivize people more, but in order to invent "important stuff" we need significant resources. If everyone was given the money to invent this important stuff, it's hard to allocate the proper resources to them, or at the very least, they will get fewer resources. Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale. Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically. We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
paulcole 7y ago
I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.
- petra 7y ago
  Not necessarily important as in "single handedly curing cancer". But taking part in an important thing , even in a small role, is important. But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.
mncharity 7y ago
> We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen. Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.

deleted 7y ago

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ryanmarsh 7y ago

Opportunity is often missed because it looks like work.

Frost1x 7y ago
The availability of opportunity itself has diminished. Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Often, when one of the now fewer gates to opportunity open, much less is offered inside than was historically there and the risks to benefits to open those doors is increasing across the board. I'd say it's too simplistic to imply people don't seek opportunity because it requires work, it's more to do with the fact the success rates are so low and the magnitude of work is so high now compared historically that most would rather seek other ways to add enjoyment to their lives and abandon the system. That's not sustainable for our society to continue to be successful and it has to change back to more sane thresholds. Implying people are lazy is a copout to the real problem.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Measured how?
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Older opportunities only looked easy because they'd be easy for us in our more powerful position of knowledge and resources. It wasn't easy for an uneducated medieval peasant to discover the laws of electromagnetism. Even the most advantaged people didn't know what to look for. Plenty of failures happened in alchemy/witchcraft/religion/etc. that people dedicated their lives to for nothing because they didn't have our advantage of knowledge.
  - bsanr2 7y ago
    Most of the people making those discoveries were people of means, though (or at least adjacent to, but not competing with, them).
7y ago

eaenki 7y ago

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y

wallace_f 7y ago
Why should the federal government do this? 'The founding fathers intended the states to be social and economic experiments.' I find it frustrating that anything remotelt consistent with the scientific method is effectively shunned in economic policy and politics.
- eaenki 7y ago
  Well the US is the major superpower in good part because of Cisco, Bell Labs, Fairchild, Intel, Apple, Lockheed, Google etc.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Are we speaking military expenditure, basic research, or entrepreneurialism? I'm also uncomfortable of this suggested idea about American exceptionalism. We have been bested by foreign competition despite our superior economic resources and liberty. I mean, we had to completely begin shifting gears away from public, politicized development in the launch market when our best option became hitching rides with one of our worst enemies.
    - eaenki 7y ago
      Even Lockheed (or some other aerospace company) at some point was a risky venture developing far fetched tech, doing basic research So I’d answer: all of them

marmaduke 7y ago

> list of innovations we need is long but subsequent included nothing vis-a-vis the expensive, industrial lifestyle we have these days. It is unfortunate that cultural innovation doesn't make the list, since it would go a long way toward address some pertinent problems

everybodyknows 7y ago
I'd go farther and suggest that culture is the central problem. Only better culture can deliver peace and a modicum of justice. In particular, a social culture in which neighbors do not seek to rob or enslave each other. Self-driving cars, or even a cure for cancer, will not advance this central goal. Better schools on the other hand, just might.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  Spot on. In this vein, I think culture can be seen as a form of 'wetware' technology. Crime, inequality and so on are technical debts of early decisions by a few, it is a sector ripe for disruption but with very strong encumbents. Unfortunately said encumbents know how important schools are in this.

boyadjian 7y ago

The talent, was originally a unity of mass and money of Antiquity, so people who have talent, means people who have money.

tekmate 7y ago
hard to work on your juggling if you're slaving away 20 hours a day
inimino 7y ago
> talent (n.) > late 13c., "inclination, disposition, will, desire," from Old French talent (12c.), from Medieval Latin talenta, plural of talentum "inclination, leaning, will, desire" (11c.), in classical Latin "balance, weight; sum of money," from Greek talanton "a balance, pair of scales," hence "weight, definite weight, anything weighed," and in later times sum of money," from PIE *tele- "to lift, support, weigh," "with derivatives referring to measured weights and thence money and payment" [Watkins]; see extol. So, no. But it's a neat folk etymology even if it isn't quite true.
- southerndrift 7y ago
  Maybe I am missing some subtleties, but why is talent not money? >The Homeric talent "as money" was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow.[2] Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about 8.4 gm can be established for this money talent.[2] The talent of gold was known to Homer, who described how Achilles gave a half-talent of gold to Antilochus as a prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement)
  - inimino 7y ago
    It was a (rather heavy) weight, and only a unit "of money" by extension. A Homeric talent was a unit of weight, hence the half-talent "of gold" as a prize. A talent of silver would weigh the same but have less value. The Hebrew "talent" (kikar) was also a unit of weight. The later Latin talentum borrowed the existing weight measure and the Greek word τάλαντον and by the time of the parable of the talents, this word already carried the rather heavy meaning of "58.9 kg." (from your link above). So a talent in the modern metaphorical sense of "talented person" means a person carrying a heavy weight, and a heavy responsibility. If a single talent is almost 60 kg, imagine the unlucky person with five talents placed on them! Perhaps it would be better to have a genius than to be talented, though neither one makes you rich. > For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. The only thing we can say with confidence about these "goods" is that they were heavy, and not necessarily something you want... especially if they are to be repaid "with usury" at some future undisclosed time of reckoning, as in the story!

james_s_tayler 7y ago

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 just don't understand the ridiculous in-built assumption that we are somehow wronging society and the potential geniuses themselves by them not being in a time and a place that makes use of the quality of the substrate of those particular individuals. Well, sorry but nature doesn't optimize for the individual, it optimizes for the whole. You may as well get equally mad at something silly like "why doesn't everyone always roll a 6?"

kirso 7y ago
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.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Yeah, I didn't miss that point. Not at all. I think you missed my point. Because you state: >Basically there are ways how to fix it My point is it's not actually broken. It's working. It's working very well. Although it doesn't tend to, opportunity _could_ arise anywhere. So, potential geniuses are peppered everywhere such that if opportunity were to arise there there are people who can take advantage of it. The assumption that it should work the other way around is ridiculous. Opportunity isn't for geniuses. Geniuses are for opportunity.
  - kirso 7y ago
    The point of the article is that majority of people are not given opportunity to become geniuses and frankly you don't even have to be one to make an impact. You don't just get born a genius its a process with lots of puzzle pieces (parents, education, environment). If your primary goal when you grow up is to not starve to death, you can hardly allocate time to study physics and make discoveries. However, tell it to the millions in Africa without food and education that the opportunity is everywhere and you will get skinned alive.

baybal2 7y ago

Invention is overvalued as well as the idea of "creativity." The biggest proof is the current China-USA standoff. USA is on the paper the biggest nation on earth by manufacturing output, but what was the last time you saw made in USA household goods in supermarket without having to specifically look for them? Why China has industrial base and USA doesn't? Wages difference? No, not by a chance. In some places in China, the cost of trained blue collar labour begins to exceed that of US. An hourly rate for an experienced pick and place machine operator in South China certainly exceeds $15 per hour, and may be closing on $20. This is what I can tell from my own experience. On an another hand, it is $16 in USA. https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries Even plain assembly line workers now get close to $15, and trained ones above that. For any manufacturing automation specialist in China, wages are better than in USA... You don't see Chinese industrialists racing to setup factories in USA. Think why now? I was telling my own story on HN few times already. I was trying to setup an electric scooter factory in Vancouver, Canada, and then in US northwest on behalf of my employer. I had to hire university grads to do plain assembly, as anybody else had hard time to just wire a battery, throttle, BMS board, and a motor. And that with colour coded wire harness with mechanical keys to prevent miswiring... We spent 6 months looking for an operator for our model of pick and place machine. In China, those are the jobs I can hire a highschooler for. America wastes its talent not any much less than, say, most countries Americans call "the third world." A very good story about that https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china-made.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...

jeremyjh 7y ago
Even if wages are comparable, are other costs of employment, such as unemployment insurance, healthcare, pay roll tax comparable? And even if they are comparable now, its true that it no longer matters. The work moved to China because of low wages, and its going to stay there now because all of the labor force and supply chain infrastructure are much better developed. You are quite right those things no longer exist in the US, they have atrophied.
- baybal2 7y ago

sdiq 7y ago

I think the better question would have been, how would Steve Jobs have ended up if he were born in Syria

moltar 7y ago
Not identical example. But Elon Musk was born in South Africa. Far from Syria, but still not a major world economic Center.
- cossray 7y ago
  You may want to refreshen your knowledge regarding South Africa in its apartheid days. I would confidently posit that Elon was more privileged than your average American at that time. Of course he may want/ has created a different picture of his young days.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Certain individuals may be have been more privileged, in South Africa, during Apartheid, presuming skin colour. South Africa has not produced a thriving industrial or technological sector, though there have been individual advances in certain areas, notably medicine (heart transplants, yellow fever vaccine), and Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte, which left the country. Musk would have been 23 at the time of the election of Nelson Mandella. Musk's youth certainly was under an Apartheid regime and would reflect the benefits of being a white male under that system. He'd already left for Canada some five years earlier, which might itself speak to your parent's observations.
- alibaba_x 7y ago
  His mother also had Canadian citizenship which allowed him to move to Canada at age 17.
rc_mob 7y ago
He would have stolen ideas from Syrians

bsenftner 7y ago

One place talent is not is in the screening process of VC. Attempting to raise money for a new venture is like returning to high school and being confronted by the popular kids demanding to know why you should be allowed into their club. I expected professionalism, and primarily saw immature 1%'ers so transparent in their shallowness, it turned raising funding into a surreal experience leaving bile in my throat.

threeisoneis 7y ago

Once again, an article related to utilitarian altruism that doesn't seem to draw a defensible conclusion from the arguments given. This particular type of article, and the works of the effective altruism movement more broadly, always creep up to the edge of demanding meaningful change but, in their conclusions, shrink away from it. They make the case that the world has a lot of issues, that a lot of people have bad lives and that those people should have better lives, and that "we need to do what is possible to allow everyone to live a life free of poverty, free of hunger, and free of premature death". But from there, the path they lay out, and advocate for, is one of continued oligarchy. After saying that we need to eliminate poverty, hunger, and premature death, they advocate for "[continuing] the positive developments of the last decades with more children surviving, more children growing up free of the worst poverty, and more children being better educated than ever before. If I am optimistic about the future of the world and progress against the world’s problems it is because of this." But what if you don't agree? And how could you? While some thing seem to be getting better (by some indicators only) global inequality continues to increase, and the inequality in developed economies is obscene. The climate and environment are destroyed more rapidly than ever in a continual quest for infinite growth. The solution proposed to the horrors of our present world, of improvement by creating more capitalism, is absurd. Capitalism is functioning as it must. It's not capitalism's fault as an ideology - it was designed to be this way. The world being advocated by these altruistic technocrats is no better than our own: if we lived in their utopia, we'd be at the mercy of our 'betters' who would still form a separate class above the rest of society. The suggestions for how to give back are also laughable. Donating your time or money individually while doing nothing to challenge the system won't change anything. It is through radical societal change, radical democracy, that a new and better world can be achieved. Neoliberals like this often feel the need to impress upon everyone that at least the floor is being raised - the amount of people in extreme poverty has gone down (by some metric) or the amount of people dying of disease has been reduced. But the real path to liberation isn't the gradual improvement of the bottom while the top gets fatter and richer and more powerful. The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system. What can you do, then, if you're not going to nobly work at a hedge-fund and selflessly donate some of your salary to cure malaria? Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world. If you want to end climate change, start going to the climate strikes. If you want a better life you workers at low incomes, show them solidarity when they strike. If your boss uses your open source library for an ICE contract, delete the code. When the world begins to shift, and everyone looks around and wonders why everything is so wrong, don't use data to insist that everything is good, actually. Embrace the knowledge that something is wrong! Something is wrong! And the world is fucked if it doesn't change. Don't let incrementalists like Max fool you into thinking otherwise.

vinniejames 7y ago

Opportunity is created, not found

username90 7y ago

We shouldn't worry about finding the talent who can work as researchers, first we should worry about finding the talent who can reliably work as modern farmers or in factories. That is what Africa is missing before it can take the next step towards becoming a modern society.

reality_counts 7y ago
All African nations have very low average IQ scores.

macawfish 7y ago

Capital is so trapped up that people don't even have the capital to take care of basic needs.

fuzzfactor 7y ago
Seems to me capital is not just ordinary resources. More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered. Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes. When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognized. When capitalism is dominated by benevolent capitalists, basic needs are intended to be taken care of, since huge return on that type investment can be recognized.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  So... How are we to ensure that we have these "benevolent Capitalists"? Seriously. Capitalism has shown twice within 100 years that it will manufacture sociopaths en masse. This is where we are now, and what made the Labor movement possible. (Join the IWW.) This is what created the Great Depression - too much concentrated Capital, too few profitable projects. This is normal to Capitalism - booms and busts that wipe out us little people, but those big players quickly find themselves with enough wealth leftover to live as Feudal Lords. From Cigarette Companies hiding that their product cases cancer to oil companies hiding that their product is actually killing the planet, even as they buy up patents for any competing technologies - the Modern Corporation has proven itself incapable of doing right by our world. Here's a fun documentary on the structure of modern Corporations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  pizzazzaro wrote: >So... How are we to ensure that we have these "benevolent Capitalists"? Good point, that's a tough one. Sometimes there will obviously be a devastating shortage, or none available at all. Maybe the only benevolence some cultures will be able to muster is an incomplete removal of opportunity. I would estimate real benevolence should be obvious to the widest of consensus, and easily distinguishable almost universally from situations where there is some doubt. Not saying it's easy or possible to ensure anything, especially an anti-greed approach during a greed-power consolidation trend lasting longer than a lifetime.

AlexTWithBeard 7y ago

The opportunity is there. It's always there. It may not be an opportunity to immediately become the president of an international corporation, but it's an opportunity to improve your life and life of your future generations. Give your children education. Make sure they grow up in a full family. Move to a better place. All these small things add up. You won't become a millionaire this way, but your grandkids may.

known 7y ago

Very few societies promote Self-actualization in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

furthermoore24 7y ago

If you study rhetoric, this article is so full of shit :)

mdorazio 7y ago
If you comment like this on HN, please provide examples or you're not contributing to the conversation.

quxbar 7y ago

What's that? UBI?

vinceguidry 7y ago

I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the realm of running as fast as they can to stay in place. You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell? Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture. But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.

jzebedee 7y ago
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawa...
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Aha, thanks! I'd always sided with Kierkegaard, maybe I should give Camus his fair shake.
manveru 7y ago
You might enjoy http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301

NHQ 7y ago

I have tech talents that maybe a few thousand people in the world have, and research ability to move the needle (maybe even novel ideas in the field, if you ask me). I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks). I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my work. But it would be swell if it was easier to be seen, at such a high level. I would gladly teach, if offered the role. Basically, it should made way-too-easy for obviously talented, experienced, people to find some kind of work in teaching or civic developments.

burntoutfire 7y ago
> obviously talented The only "obvious" proof of talent that will convince anyone is having impressive accomplishments in a given field. Do you have any?
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  Exactly. A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not. But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x. Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way. It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself. If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand. Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not. In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost. PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it. And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.

kstenerud 7y ago

If I hadn't had to work jobs just to keep food on the table, I'd have invented the things I did A LOT earlier. I'd probably be finished rewriting the internet's protocols by now, instead of only being 30% of the way there. But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.

pizzazzaro 7y ago
People forget how art worked during the Renaissance - wealthy benefactors paid thr bills for the great Artists we remember. Thats not how Corporations work.

mLuby 7y ago

Immigration isn't mentioned at all; that's shocking. Assuming talent seeks opportunity to express itself, places looking for success (=talent*opportunity) should to make it easy for talent to move there. For the US, let students who earn masters/doctorates at American schools stay.

umeshunni 7y ago
As an immigrant in the US, I'm not surprised. The word immigration/immigrant has been subverted by the popular media in the US to refer mostly to "illegal immigrants escaping violent regimes" or some such fantasy. You'll rarely see a discussion of H1B visas or the length of the legal immigration queues discussed in the popular media. The popular media in the US also violently opposes opportunity or skills-based immigration even though that's what the majority of the world does. The liberal fantasy of immigration is a variation of the white man's burden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden) where it is the US's role to save the oppressed and the downtrodden by welcoming them to the US. Allowing immigration to be determined by talent or education is "racist".
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  As an immigrant in the US, I think your perception of the issue is driven more by your (probably pre-existing) existing attitudes on "liberals" than by the media in the US.

lopmotr 7y ago

The lack of exposure to role models for girls is a load of carefully crafted dishonesty. It gives the impression that role models are the reason for gender differences in inventing without actually saying that. Instead, it uses the same weasel word "can" as cosmetics advertising telling you that some chemical "can" reduce wrinkles. It also doesn't quantify the effect because that would probably be embarrassing. Of course role models will have some effect but it's not the only one - sexual dimorphism is there too and all the role models in the world won't change that. I wish people would stop lying to themselves and others about gender differences. Men and women are not cognitively equal on average. We have different strengths and weaknesses. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to pretend that women would be just as good as men if only society would stop misunderstanding them. It's trying to pull girls under a spell of delusion to fool them into behaving like boys, perhaps so that more of those who can do so will fulfill their potential. Why not be honest and help people understand that their own individual qualities are not the same as their group average?

jshowa3 7y ago

The worst part isn't lacking opportunity. It's knowing that you lack the ability and are forced to live your life that way without any ability to do anything about it. Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't. Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people. I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par. It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

> "The list of innovations we need is long: clean and cheap energy, better crops, interventions to help against the diseases that shorten and impair our lives. This, and much more besides, is needed to make progress against the big problems we face. But while the demand for innovation is large, its supply is limited." Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities. For example, we don't need "better crops." We need to stop wasting so much of that we do have. Less waste means less wasted resources. For example, less wasted food also means less chemicals and pesticides, which likely means less disease and medical issues. If we solved for root problem (i.e., apply The Five Whys) we'd waste less time and resources solving for symptoms. As for the supply of innovation being limit. IDK, I've heard that scarcity breeds innovation. So perhaps we are innovating, but in the wrong places, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.

lopmotr 7y ago
Reducing waste can only go so far - zero waste - and worse, it has diminishing returns. Improving technology, on the other hand, has no upper bound and builds on itself to enable even more improvements. Imagine if people had just reduced food waste instead of inventing fertilizer? We probably wouldn't have western civilization.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  Perhaps. But that's not the point. The waste isn't limited to food itself, but the resources to grow it, transport it, and even dispose of it. The solution of "make more" doesn't actaully address the problems

segmondy 7y ago

"Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not". I keep seeing this quote, but not attribution. Oldest I can find of it, -http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/26/144122/317/hillaryclinton/Hillary-Talent-Is-Universal-Opportunity-Is-Not- http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/26/144122/317/hillarycl...

prirun 7y ago

One problem I see in education today is that we give lots of extra resources to kids with learning problems, behavior problems, and physical handicaps, but not many resources go to gifted kids because "they'll do okay on their own". Yes, they might do "okay", but they might turn into brilliant innovators if they were given the same extra attention that the kids below the median get. This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.