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He's saying it's an intrinsic quality. The implication being that we spend too many resources educating people.

• majormajor 5y ago
  He doesn't appear to be saying that. He's talking in those paragraphs about systems, and arguing that by building systems that scale, we're creating bureaucracy that de-motivates the most elite people even though it was originally intended to allow the excellent performers to rise. But he doesn't present much evidence for this beyond a speculative "If someone’s truly a member of the elite, are able to generate elite-level results, if you wanted to demotivate them and draw them out of the field, what would you do? You would surround them with mediocrity and drown them in bullshit" that's extrapolated from what the founders he's talking to are telling him. One potential blind spot seems to be "maybe weeding through tedium is a good quality in many researchers, since much of research is more tedious than founding a startup." After all, he's basing this on talking to people who left the system, not talking to today's top researchers. I think a bigger one is that he says even in his system, most (50%+) of the companies he funds fail to do anything interesting. So this is still, from the same sort of standard of efficiency applied to researchers here, woefully wasteful. I'm also not really clear on how he thinks it should be changed.