4 ms·

Smart people aren't a resource that can be reallocated promptly like workers in an RTS. The type of person who works at a FAANG or an investment firm isn't goi

by Bakary 4y ago

Smart people aren't a resource that can be reallocated promptly like workers in an RTS. The type of person who works at a FAANG or an investment firm isn't going to suddenly seek a career that requires more work for less money if data harvesting type jobs stop existing. They'll pivot to the next plausibly profitable gig. For structural reasons, careers that attract those types necessarily have to be in sectors of the economy are flush with cash. Governmental investment is not sufficient to create massive salaries if there isn't raw money-making capacity there to begin with. Of course, medical research has its winners but it's not nearly in the same league of certainty of opportunity than tech or finance. There should still be investment to make these jobs attractive anyway, but you are not going to have the massive shift in our common fortunes you are envisioning here. It's a bit similar to those arguments implying that without religion we'd have teleportation by now or something along those lines. It completely ignores the structural nature of the problem and how the identified 'negative' sector actually works in tandem with the rest of the society in question. It's a flawed view of how incentives really work.

jimnotgym 4y ago
> Smart people aren't a resource that can be reallocated promptly like workers in an RTS. The workers didn't get to those roles promptly either. They saw an opportunity and took degree programs that would get them there. > The type of person who works at a FAANG or an investment firm... This is a generalisation that perhaps doesn't hold true for everyone. But what if adtech was banned and the Faang job didn't exist? > Governmental investment is not sufficient to create massive salaries a) change it then. b) I am sure there are plenty of very smart hn types who would have chosen academia without a faang salary, if they felt a research rules was a feasible way to make a decent living. There is middle ground here.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Here's a possible way to reframe the problem. There is a range of smart persons with different personality types, and there is a range of careers for them to pick from. To grossly simplify, let's say you have the following factors that define a career and a person's interests: Money (M) Social impact (S) Intrinsic Motivation (I) and Difficulty (D). These factors are defined in relative terms based on the opportunity cost for the smart person. Ideally, we want to maximize the number of such persons working in high S careers. The rest is just incidental from a societal perspective. Our problem is that high S careers also tend to be lower in M and higher in D, because they involve painstaking long-term research where profit occurs much later. On the other hand, they also tend to be higher in I but it's not guaranteed. Let's assume that everyone wants low D, since it will logically be the case for high M and for high S and high I the D will not be seen as D in a sense. If we start from the basis that we should increase governmental investment in the sciences anyway, we don't have to worry about people who seek high S and/or high I. Either we'll be able to meet their correspondingly low-to-medium M requirement or they will naturally seek out the 'right' career without any input. We can forget about high I low S because we can't really offer them something that will motivate a career change towards the topics we want. The problem with the middle ground is that in a sophisticated capitalistic economy, the opportunity cost for M can rise to incredible heights. The alternatives open to a smart person in our world are enormously high-M, and the definition of a decent living has to take this into account. For the government to convert a medium or high M, low S, low I person into a high S high D career, you'd better add enormous amounts of M over the long period of time needed for research, which is not something that the public sector can justify even if they do technically have the resources for it somewhere. The I can help balance this but working in low-S sectors can also have plenty of competing I on its own, and I is not guaranteed in the high-S world to begin with. We can start thinking about hypothetical ad-less FAANG-less financebro-less worlds to try to get rid of that M opportunity cost, but it is a fairly contrived exercise and doesn't guarantee that other very high M careers might not pop up in their absence.

by Bakary 4y ago

jimnotgym 4y ago

> Smart people aren't a resource that can be reallocated promptly like workers in an RTS. The workers didn't get to those roles promptly either. They saw an opportunity and took degree programs that would get them there. > The type of person who works at a FAANG or an investment firm... This is a generalisation that perhaps doesn't hold true for everyone. But what if adtech was banned and the Faang job didn't exist? > Governmental investment is not sufficient to create massive salaries a) change it then. b) I am sure there are plenty of very smart hn types who would have chosen academia without a faang salary, if they felt a research rules was a feasible way to make a decent living. There is middle ground here.

Bakary 4y ago
Here's a possible way to reframe the problem. There is a range of smart persons with different personality types, and there is a range of careers for them to pick from. To grossly simplify, let's say you have the following factors that define a career and a person's interests: Money (M) Social impact (S) Intrinsic Motivation (I) and Difficulty (D). These factors are defined in relative terms based on the opportunity cost for the smart person. Ideally, we want to maximize the number of such persons working in high S careers. The rest is just incidental from a societal perspective. Our problem is that high S careers also tend to be lower in M and higher in D, because they involve painstaking long-term research where profit occurs much later. On the other hand, they also tend to be higher in I but it's not guaranteed. Let's assume that everyone wants low D, since it will logically be the case for high M and for high S and high I the D will not be seen as D in a sense. If we start from the basis that we should increase governmental investment in the sciences anyway, we don't have to worry about people who seek high S and/or high I. Either we'll be able to meet their correspondingly low-to-medium M requirement or they will naturally seek out the 'right' career without any input. We can forget about high I low S because we can't really offer them something that will motivate a career change towards the topics we want. The problem with the middle ground is that in a sophisticated capitalistic economy, the opportunity cost for M can rise to incredible heights. The alternatives open to a smart person in our world are enormously high-M, and the definition of a decent living has to take this into account. For the government to convert a medium or high M, low S, low I person into a high S high D career, you'd better add enormous amounts of M over the long period of time needed for research, which is not something that the public sector can justify even if they do technically have the resources for it somewhere. The I can help balance this but working in low-S sectors can also have plenty of competing I on its own, and I is not guaranteed in the high-S world to begin with. We can start thinking about hypothetical ad-less FAANG-less financebro-less worlds to try to get rid of that M opportunity cost, but it is a fairly contrived exercise and doesn't guarantee that other very high M careers might not pop up in their absence.