> Reading between the lines, I think your view is that the valuable contributors (the extreme outliers) will find a way to contribute regardless of background.

> Reading between the lines, I think your view is that the valuable contributors (the extreme outliers) will find a way to contribute regardless of background. This is you reading in a total strawman. There aren’t billions that would engage in science — there’s only 800 million in need of food security, total. Of those, we’d expect only some small fraction to engage in science at all — maybe 8M, of whom a few hundred thousand will make substantial contributions and a few thousand groundbreaking work. Of course we should help those people — but you’re off by orders of magnitude on your claims. I was objecting to your made up numbers, not whatever “between the lines” nonsense you read in to ignore that point. And driving a total increase will require more people — because increasing the world by 2B population will drive more results than those 800M ever could. (While also being more realistic than “fix poverty everywhere”.)