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It's true in a way but just pushes things back a level of causality: if we train more people as aerospace engineers, then we will have fewer trained people in o
by ElevenLathe 4y ago
It's true in a way but just pushes things back a level of causality: if we train more people as aerospace engineers, then we will have fewer trained people in other specialties. We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change. The best answer of course is "do both" and make sure more of our young people are happy, enthusiastic, and able to access necessary training and education.
There are also skills that overlap: every welder that SpaceX or Lockheed employs is one less welder able to help install a water treatment plant somewhere. Here again, the solution is to train more welders.
- ch4s3 4y ago> if we train People choose those paths on their own, not because some human industrial policy plucked them out of middle school and put them on that path.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoNonetheless, if they choose to be an aerospace engineer, they've chosen not to be, for example, a surgeon, or whatever else.
- ch4s3 4y agoYes, that is how choice and specialization work, we don't live in a feudal or autocratic system where heredity or fiat determine your life path.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoI didn't say any of that?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change And currently most of them go into trading, which is a zero-sum game, or into building another social network that causes depression. Look at top-ten list of high paying jobs, and ask youself how much crucial work for society they do
- lambdadmitry 4y agoTrading is not exactly zero sum. Trading is price discovery + arbitrage, both of which are useful even if imperfect.
- XorNot 4y agoYou don't have a finite supply of people. Because people get to choose what they do. Even the dictatorships can't order people to become a good X if they don't have the interest. It's the height of entitlement to think you're able to demand more of some profession come into existence. The worst regimes on earth can't manage it. The most you get to do is incentivize and make available the training and access and process to maybe get more of that. That's it.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoWe absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scientists and engineers, and nobody was coerced into anything. We trained enough engineers in that short time to staff a literal moonshot program plus every half-baked weapons system idea that crossed a desk anywhere in the Pentagon plus tons of other more speculative stuff like packet switching networks (aka ethernet, the internet, etc.). It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.