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Want Your Country to Thrive? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income

149 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

hooby 4y ago
Invest in education. Create more geniuses, and more clever people in general.
xqcgrek2 4y ago
https://archive.ph/69Inn https://archive.ph/69Inn
richardjam73 4y ago
What does the the word universal mean again?
- beardyw 4y ago
  Well UBI is a well established concept to create a more equal society, so let's steal the name and use it to create inequality. Brilliant!
- etiennebausson 4y ago
  That was my though as well. Without touching the inequalities / corruption aspect, it would be closer to a research grant than a Universal basic income the way it is set up. Then again, it's bloomberg.
Ekaros 4y ago
This scheme seems extremely ripe for corruption. Essentially you are promising someone millions on a few tests... So just paying 50 thousand to get your child this status would setup them for life...
- sybercecurity 4y ago
  Doesn't even need to be that explicit. It would be no surprise to find out that the those managing the program that identifies "genius" discovers that genius runs in their families (and friends' families).
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    And the graduates of the "right" genius-test-prep programs.
- zikzak 4y ago
  I'll go one step further, it's total BS. :) I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12. I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s. My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated). I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program. I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time". Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition. I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    Surely you understand that no matter what there will always be some amount of 130IQ+ people who languish their whole lives? A program like this is focused on the disproportionate number of home runs it would produce, fully expecting some to strike out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - diceduckmonk 4y ago
    > Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition. Well, are you still a cook now?
- dfxm12 4y ago
  Well, if you give everyone in your country a UBI, then all geniuses in your country will get a UBI. No (means) tests needed.
- derbOac 4y ago
  Also, keep in mind debates about embryonic selection are going on even as it is being offered as a service for a fee right now. There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
- rapind 4y ago
  Yeah it misses the whole point of “universal” programs. No gatekeepers, no forms, cheap to administer, and most importantly fair.
walkhour 4y ago
This idea is like telling the absolutist kings to try a bit of democracy for a while; it's contrary to all the social policies in the last 20 years and contrary to the central tenets of equity. It won't happen for the same reason orchestra auditions aren't blind anymore.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > contrary to the central tenets of equity. "Equity" is a concept in law: AIUI (IANAL) it mainly concerns trusts and contracts. The word is sometimes used as a synonym for "fairness", but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets. And I don't think there's anything unfair about a UBI, any more than universal healthcare, or a universal police service.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Equity > Eq"ui*ty (?), n.; pl. equities (#). [F. équité, L. aequitas, fr. aequus even, equal. See Equal.] > 1. Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality. > [....] > Syn. -- Right; justice; impartiality; rectitude; fairness; honesty; uprightness. See Justice. That's Webster's 1913, so it's not a new usage. And it's what was chosen for definition #1 (the others are, as you note, lawyer jargon).
  - hnfong 4y ago
    > but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets. FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_of_equity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_of_equity
zozbot234 4y ago
I believe the word for this is "tenure".
CrypticShift 4y ago
The problem is the current systems are getting less efficient at supporting geniuses financially : - The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines) - The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know. - The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.
- jsiva 4y ago
  Is the ChatGPT threat to knowledge workers an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one? I don't think at the current performance of ChatGPT and similar models are enough to displace genius knowledge workers. Although I could see the possibility of ChatGPT-like models allowing more work to be done by fewer knowledge workers. And in this scenario, there is no guarantee that an "unfound" genius makes it through the new system.
  - CrypticShift 4y ago
    > are enough to displace genius knowledge workers I was more referring to the genius that does routine employment work mostly to support himself (like for the cliche example: Einstein working in the patent office while preparing his theories). > an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one? This is a big question. chatGPT is pushing some buttons a lot faster than I thought. is it just a jolt? is there an AI winter on the horizon? The fact that these systems are still mostly magical black boxes does not help us predict. So, who knows?
johnkpaul 4y ago
Reminds me of the great short story Manna. It has a much more idealistic and more be the book definition of “universal”. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
lordnacho 4y ago
I'm not sure the idea of genius is one we should rely on. Why is it that we think one or two great people are responsible for all progress? I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment. With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Plus, geniuses tend to make a shitload of money already. And when they dont, there is a reason.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    Genius is also loaded. It's a fact kids in poverty have lower test grades, so the ACT of giving them UBI will in fact RAISE test scores and maybe move them up to the 'genius' level, or at least give them a better shot. It's hard to focus on schooling when you're tummy is growling, or there's a ton of stress at home, or abuse, etc.
    - wankle 4y ago
      We grew up poor in the US. We worked hard in school and had above average to excellent test scores. Being poor does not directly support bad test scores or whether society can or should bear the burden of UBI. Conflating growing up poor with growing up with abuse is incorrect.
      - akie 4y ago
        And assuming wealth and poverty do NOT correlate with test scores and professional success is equally problematic.
        torstenvl 4y ago
fendy3002 4y ago
Goodhart's Law [1] says that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". This is a great thing to make every growing children to be trained / optimized for one or some specific things only. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
thweoruio34234 4y ago
Erm. This is why you have grad-school, and then tenure-track, and then finally, tenure.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  To weed out those who can't afford all that education?
- bell-cot 4y ago
  At least in the U.S., modern academia has been slowly and quietly eliminating tenure. Not that requiring geniuses to be career academics makes much sense, in any case.
stuaxo 4y ago
Give everyone a basic income.
- xyzzy4747 4y ago
  If everyone had a basic income, nobody would need to work. Jobs would be obsolete. Just think how nice the country would be.
  - hospadar 4y ago
    I think this is a pretty big logical fallacy. There are TONS of people right now, today, who never need to work another day in their life and could live in a cozy dry home with plenty of food and decent healthcare - even in the US. Not just Jeff B & Elon, but plenty of well-off 50 year olds who _could_ retire, but would much rather keep working for a while longer so that their retirement involves trips to europe and fun boats instead of a modest home and little travel. Lots of people love their jobs, and love the things they can afford because they work harder than they strictly need to (me too! I definitely don't _need_ a nice espresso machine). Lots of start-up founders get into it because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, and the thought that they might be taking the blade from LGA and cruising around on a huge boat I'm sure doesn't hurt their desire to do the insanely hard work of starting a company. My personal hot take is that capitalism's emphasis on coercion (you only get healthcare if you work, we sometimes worry that our biggest problem is $15/hour workers slacking off) blinds us to the fact that lots of (most?) us really enjoy our work and love having something to do all day that feels useful.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Yes, because no one ever wants to make more money once they are able to afford the bare necessities of food and shelter.
    - xyzzy4747 4y ago
      My grandfather quit his job the moment he could go on welfare and live in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC. He never worked again.
TomK32 4y ago
It's not universal then.
black_13 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
golergka 4y ago
You won't actually give UBI to geniuses. You will give UBI to whomever bureaucratic machine deems as genius.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Geniuses tend to make a shitload of money already. And when they dont, there is a reason.
borbulon 4y ago
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
- mc32 4y ago
  And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory. People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way. There are smart people out there but a lot of them get into boring jobs because they are easy. They don’t particularly like difficult exploration. Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life. Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
  - borbulon 4y ago
    > And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory. There's no evidence either way. You're citing lack of evidence on something that's barely been tested, much less had enough time in the wild to have its effects studied.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    I'm no genius, but in a world where I was born in a nation with UBI (or just expected a fat inheritance) I would have taken that masters in Bioinformatics scholarship and continued my research instead of writing shit code so businesses can make money Lots of people who graduated with me followed the same path for the same reason
    - BoGoToTo 4y ago
      Yep, smartest guy I knew in my physics program dropped out of his masters when he realized he would earn more in a year at a MAGMA than he would over half a decade begging for grants.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      If given a UBI, I'd definitely be going back to university.
MisterTea 4y ago
Great. Create a class of "elite thinkers" who go on loafing about, full of them selves. Just no to this line of thinking.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > a class of "elite thinkers" who go on loafing about So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?
throwaway123q 4y ago
Or give corrupt or fraudsters asylum like Britian does. Or sell visas to rich people like Canda and Australia do.
moab 4y ago
As a little twist on the author's badly thought out proposal, what if we simply take the NSF scheme for doling out funding and make it more broadly available. Each year (or every few years) you can submit a proposal about what you plan to do if you're given a UBI, it will go through peer-review, and about 6 months later you'll get a notification if you were selected for funding or not. Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
lakomen 4y ago
It's either universal, no strings attached, unconditional or GTFO!
- Yuyudo_Comiketo 4y ago
  Unconditional free money for everyone. Nice story for 5 yo children, but not for those who have even the most basic of grasps on the history of the humankind. Unconditional as in mousetrap cheese it will be.
AnnoyedComment 4y ago
readingnews 4y ago
Great: How do you now define genius? What is the old saying? Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. I think we would have to first prove that the genius is going to provide something for us in some way, even if it is just research, it can not be frivolous research with no end in sight that does not produce. Uh-oh, how do I show that we are doing research that will eventually produce something? Einstein noted that if we knew what we were doing, we would not call it research. So many great discoveries were accidental, but then how do I prevent the scammers from gaming the system?
jscipione 4y ago
Western nations implemented UBI in 2020 and 2021 in the form of checks and loans and we are now living through the disastrous effects of UBI as the economy sputters and inflation and high prices lower our standard of living and make all of our lives worse. In short, UBI has been a complete disaster and is not a viable solution to any problem.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I didn't see any of those cheques or loans; perhaps "universal" doesn't include me.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  No, that only happened in socialist countries. Nothing like that here.
newaccount2021 4y ago
odo1242 4y ago
The entire point is it's a universal basic income. Giving geniuses money is missing the entire point.
nisegami 4y ago
This is such an absurd suggestion that I'm convinced it's intended to sour public perception of UBI.
amelius 4y ago
Also, bring these geniuses together in a space where they can experiment with expensive equipment. Call that space a "lab". And give them an office near that lab so they can work out new ideas.
resuresu 4y ago
Yes let’s subsidize those that already won the genetic lottery, sounds like a great idea. Let’s give multi-millionaire trust fund babies UBI as while we are at it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Well yes, give it to the trust fund babies, but also give it to everyone else too. That's the "universal" part of UBI. Once you take out the "universal" part it isn't UBI anymore.
myth_drannon 4y ago
It reminded me a sci-fi book by Strugatsky brothers (of Stalker/Roadside picnic fame) which is called "Monday begins of Saturday". It's a funny novel about working in what were called Research Institutes(НИИ) in USSR. So all kinds of supposedly smart people were spending their lives there in order to advance "scientific progress". I see it as basically UBI but with some strings and bureucracy attached. Depending who you ask, but it had so many problems.
- popilewiz 4y ago
effnorwood 4y ago
steele 4y ago
lol no. Give everyone UBI.
dandare 4y ago
UNIVERSAL You keep using that world. I don't think it means what you think it means.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I'm strongly in favour of a UBI. It totally makes sense, at least in wealthy Western societies; there's a whole expensive bureaucracy involved in means testing, prosecuting welfare fraud, and so on. But to make it work, it has to be Universal, i.e. everyone gets it automatically.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    I hate government welfare programs about as much as possible, but the "administrative overhead" arguments I see from UBI advocates really doesn't make much sense. The savings from eliminating most overhead in welfare programs isn't nearly as much money as most UBI advocates seem to think. Roughly 5% of the cost of the food stamp program in the US goes to administrative overhead. Social Security (which doesn't have means testing, the only requirement is age-based) spends ~0.6% on overhead. From what I can find about Medicaid, admin costs are generally around 5%. You'd only save ~$40 billion a year if you eliminated all administrative overhead for Medicaid (which is nothing to sneeze at, but it's nowhere near enough to fund a UBI).
    - swores 4y ago
      People are saying it's a benefit, nobody (maybe with the exception of an occasional misinformed internet commenter, but I don't think I've even seen that) is claiming the saving in reduced admin costs would fully fund UBI. And the fact it wouldn't fully fund it doesn't take away from the fact that saving billions and billions of wasted money wouldn't be a big side-benefit that helps reduce the cost. UBI would be funded by increased taxation on the wealthiest, but the fact that the majority of current welfare admin costs would be saved reduces the amount of tax-based funding meaning that more benefit comes out of each dollar taxed.
      - 4y ago
temptemptemp111 4y ago
motohagiography 4y ago
Want more geniuses? Challenge kids to solve real and useful problems. If we can teach kids to code, and play in Chopin competitions, we can teach them surgery, higher math, engineering, and to be research assistants. Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? The people behind this proposal can't be included, because the incentives of welfare traps and maintaining genius status to keep the payments coming is a perverse incentive. Look what publish or perish did to academia. It just created garbage factories. Also, the best way to get their ideas resented and ignored is to grant them privileges, and not necessarily because it's unjust, but because there is a basic human instinct to find irresponsibility and dependency in adults disgusting. What we absolutely do know is that if you want to destroy group, give it welfare. Just like feeding wild animals who become dependent and get wiped out by scarcity, the most universally reliable way to create a failure to thrive is to substitute taking care of themselves with adapting to dependency. The best thing about this idea is that it we know whatever the right thing is, it's going to be the opposite of this.
- htag 4y ago
  > Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? I have 100% meet very smart (genius debatable) people that have trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income, or have to over invest time in pursuits beneath them. They usually share some of these common characteristic. * Highly intrinsically motivated. External rewards like money or reputation don't factor into their decision making, or in some cases demotivate them. * Social outsider. The usually show behavior a psychologist could diagnosis as a disorder. * Self learner. They learn by reading or by doing, and very little is learned in a classroom or a group setting.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  I love the fact that people still unironically use the term "welfare trap", while we can see massive numbers of homeless and home insecure people all over America. People actually believing the bad faith constructed arguments of those with massive amounts of wealth and power actually make me believe America deserves to keep licking the boots of the 1% like dogs until we all die.
trollerator23 4y ago
Lol. And who chooses the geniuses?
liminal 4y ago
Please no more "geniuses." This cult of personality celebrity idol worship is toxic. The U in UBI stands for "universal" -- you don't need to be a genius to apply. UBI is great for enabling everyone to advance to their ultimate potential by alleviating financial constraints. (It may also lead to laziness as people no longer need to advance to survive.) Hopefully the net benefit outweighs any negative consequences.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Please no more "geniuses." This cult of personality celebrity idol worship is toxic. Agreed. Just look at Trump, his I.Q. is one of the highest and yet his presidency has been among the worst in American history.
  - buzzin__ 4y ago
    Was his IQ high because he was a stable genius, and had a good you know what?
  - pif 4y ago
    Trump is not the problem: he is a symptom. The millions of idiots that voted for him, twice, are the problem.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    If you remove everything he said and a pandemic which his opponent stopped him from instantly responding to in promoting disease. Was it so bad really? No new wars for one thing.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      > If you remove everything he said Now that's asking for a lot. But maybe you're right, it's way better to have a president who doesn't say much of anything.
    - thelock85 4y ago
      Amazing how a sitting president can have an opponent 3.75 years before the next cycle, unless you mean Pelosi and Schumer similar to how Obama had McConnell. Of course Trump had a lot of opposition within various levels of government but that’s also not a new phenomenon, just one he played up by constantly talking about it as a means to working through it. Arguably if he’d just shut up, he’d have given up his biggest political strength and more co-opted by the corporate deep state. And then there is the massive PPP wealth transfer he oversaw, both to criminals (not necessarily his fault, just his responsibility) and via the US Treasury (definitely on him). But these things are also nothing new compared to other recent POTUSes except for the most powerful playing constant victim.
dslowell 4y ago
Much more important would be giving them (and others) the opportunities to realize their own potential even if they don't go on the exact path early in life. It's not impossible, but it is extremely difficult at the age of 26 to realize that marketing isn't for you and that your true calling is astrophysics. Our society typically sorts people at a young age, and there's no easy path out once you've been sorted (again, not impossible, but very difficult). I've met a number of remarkable people who were stuck in remedial jobs, but really excelled and took off when they finally got their break. They were lucky; many aren't. I've seen people say things like "I despair at all of the Einsteins out there who are stuck plowing fields." But that sentiment is a bit of a cop out; the issue is made to be distant enough that we can relieve ourselves of a certain amount of responsibility. How about all of the Einsteins in our own society who are still stuck in the patent office?
htag 4y ago
> Children who score [IQ]145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. > They could start at, say $75,000 a year and go up by $25,000 increments every decade. The payments could expire if our geniuses decided to take paid employment but then resume if they decided to “drop out” again. 1. I don't think UBI expires, this is more like unemployment benefit which include perverse incentives against employment. 2. IQ is a controversial measurement. It's validity is questionable. It's been used or purposed to be used for truly horrible state sponsored actions in the past. I have a bias against using it for discrimination across populations, simply because of it's history and proponents over the years.
- cgb223 4y ago
  > Children who score [IQ]145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. Sounds like it would create MASSIVE incentives to cheat on the IQ test or pay off the graders to give you a good score as well It would literally set your kids up for life
  - neilv 4y ago
    Also, it doesn't have to be overt "cheating": I suspect that whatever metric(s) would be both defined and gamed by the affluent, like college admissions criteria.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    This is the only cogent criticism I can find in this thread. I'm predisposed to like the proposal, but I don't really have a good response for you. On the other hand, don't most IQ tests have elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms? E.g., handwriting an ungraded written portion?
    - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
      You insinuate you have a high IQ and that is the only cogent critisms you can find here.
      - deleted 4y ago
DoreenMichele 4y ago
UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. These people have no idea what they are talking about. IQ tests are tools. In order to properly assess very high IQ children or twice exceptional -- gifted and disabled -- children, they need to be administered by a qualified professional. Most IQ tests only go to 145. Very high IQs can only be meaningfully assessed by about age 7. If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Last I heard, we were having trouble updating our IQ tests for various reasons and, also, IQ tests are highly culturally biased. An IQ test for Americans won't effectively assess a Brit or Canadian. IQ tests are extremely controversial. The first test, created by Binet, that became the starting point of modern IQ tests was not intended to assess intelligence. It was intended to assess school readiness in children in France in an era where not all kids had birth certificates, so you couldn't use age as your metric, and rural kids tended to be less ready for public school than city kids for cultural reasons.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > These people have no idea what they are talking about. It's true, but despite that I think they are plausibly in the ballpark of a useful idea. Their particular implementation sucks, but what if an implementation included a decision making process where false/flawed "facts" were subjected to skilful review by other people. In this case, each proposition asserted by the proponent could be rejected based on valid critiques from a diverse set of reviewers (here there is non-trivial complexity, but nothing insurmountable imho), and they could rework their recommendations to eliminate those flaws and return with an improved plan that would be subjected to the same process. After several rounds, I'd think this could produce better ideas, and over time I'd think people would get much better at it cutting the time it takes for iterations. > If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Under current approaches that mostly come from academia (not exactly the most diverse set of minds), and are subject to long iteration cycles - fund 100 startups to work on the problem and we may see better results. Isn't it weird that we complain endlessly about poor results, and yet hardly anyone has strong feelings about doing things differently (if not outright scoff at the very idea)? I've read your posts for many years, please tell me that you can see this phenomenon all around us?
pessimizer 4y ago
You should do this if you want intelligence testing to revert to whiteness testing. I can't wait for my government IQ test to require knowledge of How I Met Your Mother characters. I feel like this scenario was already played out by the dystopian postapocalyptic Brazilian sci-fi show 3%.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  IQ tests are already extremely useful for upward mobility, but they haven't reverted to whiteness testing. White people, who invented most of the tests, aren't even the demographic that does the best on them.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I’d settle for universal basic healthcare at this point (US biased comment).
ransom1538 4y ago
The title is wrong, should be: "Want Your Country to Implode? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income." Welfare states destroy families and cultures.
tgv 4y ago
Can't read the article, but I highly doubt they have enough empirical backup for a plan that could influence society heavily, if any.
pelasaco 4y ago
So then the question is who defines who is genius.
transfire 4y ago
How about we just get rid to the government/insurance/lobbyist collusion.
transfire 4y ago
It’s not UBI if it’s not for everyone, Geniuses.
- SirLJ 4y ago
  LOL
theGnuMe 4y ago
This article was brought to you by Mensa.
sva_ 4y ago
Geniuses... that must be the people at the "Genius Bar"?
Mikeb85 4y ago
Forget geniuses... Figure out UBI for everyone or at least a better social net. Even non-geniuses start businesses or do interesting things when given some economic freedom. Thriving countries have strong business investment, lots of small business startups (not just tech), high labour force participation, etc... Giving only geniuses money would just turn it into a strange technocracy...
mgrthrow 4y ago
Give everyone a ubi, sorting out the geniuses will never actually identify only the geniuses. And less smart people deserve basic human dignity. Just give it to everyone. I guarantee you people will still want to work. That work might end up being more creative work and less "flipping burgers because if I don't take this job I will starve and die" work.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Well, this article is certainly an example of cognitive decline it's talking about. Why would society want to encourage geniuses to work less thanks to welfare? UBI does have several purposes worth considering: - If people are in a temporary crisis, giving them enough spending money to live in a dorm and eat rice and lentils can let them recover rather than the crisis becoming worse and more permanent due to traumatic life experiences. - Some adults are permanently incapable of fully supporting themselves through commercial employment. Could be because of physical or mental disability, or just a 50 year old coal miner too old to learn new marketable skills. So instead of having a fraction of the population be angry, miserable and fomenting trouble, we offer them an early retirement/semi-retirement. Let robots work for you, enjoy! But that's at best a necessary evil, with many side effects. For example, when these functions are taken up by voluntary institutions, aid recipients are incentivized to not bite the hand that feeds them and to support themselves or pay it forward to the largest degree possible. The last thing we want to do is to impose dependency on people who least need it and are most able to benefit the rest of us through their hard work. Get all the obstacles out of their way, let them get their foot in the door through apprenticeships if college is not a good option and let them shine!
- randcraw 4y ago
  > Why would society want to encourage geniuses to work less thanks to welfare? So Einstein doesn't have to waste his time pushing papers in the patent office.
  - SirLJ 4y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, it was his drive to get out of that office?
karaterobot 4y ago
Apart from the awkward misunderstanding of the word "universal", there are other issues with this proposal. For one, having a high IQ is neither necessary nor sufficient for making a major contribution to society. For a variety of reasons, most people with very high IQs never do anything important with it (in the sense of an invention, a company, a movement, a masterpiece, etc), and it's not because they lack a guaranteed income. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because IQ, vision, and motivation are three different qualities which are, at best, weakly correlated. If you want to make your country better, make it easier for people with good ideas to get the resources to pursue them. For starters, make it easier to get grants. There are already projects trying to do this, but having 100x the resources wouldn't hurt.
zhouyisu 4y ago
One solution could be: If you volunteered to be acknowledged as a genius, you must open your status. You wear special shakles which is salient and observable to everyone paying the resources directly or indirectly. You shouldn't be allowed to physically protect yourself to your surroundings or you lose the genius status. (or under some absolute physical restraint or suffering verifiable by everyone). Everyone could challenge you at court with sound evidences, which is judged by random sampled jury group by laws well established in future. With that I could trust to give them "life long resources" to give us "prophecy".
- zhouyisu 4y ago
  I changed my mind. Give all same kind UBI is better idea. Otherwise "shakled genius" may find a way to jailbreak and cast wisdom of revenge on everyone else.
- bena 4y ago
  What the fuck is wrong with you? "You shouldn't be allowed to physically protect yourself to your surroundings or you lose the genius status. (or under some absolute physical restraint or suffering verifiable by everyone)." We've already effectively given people life long resources for nothing more than exiting the correct vagina. And you seem to want to make it legal to effectively freely harass nerds.
toss1 4y ago
No, let's not give it to just "geniuses". Even as someone privileged enough to do very well on those tests while barely studying and picking up the knowledge through osmosis and curiosity, and who would find it a great relief to have a guaranteed stipend, I can hardly think of a worse idea. The immediate knock-on effects would make it a disaster at both a societal level and a personal level (just start with taking the existing resentments about 'elites' and turning them up to 11). What is really needed is actual Universal Basic Income, with emphasis on the "Universal" - for everyone. Eliminate bureaucracy with it's overhead and inherent prejudices. We're an advanced society, just ensure everyone has enough for basic food, housing, & health. That'll intrinsically shut down many of the worst types of exploitation, and we wont' have to worry about releasing the potential of the 143-IQ vs the 147-IQ people, or the motivated 97-IQ person.
jmpman 4y ago
I’d heard that most entrepreneurs were children of wealthy individuals who have at least $20M, and the only good reason to not have extremely high estate taxes. I’m skeptical that a UBI will have the same effect. The entrepreneurs need to have resources to start a company without risk, not just resources to survive.
GuB-42 4y ago
Is it just me or no one seems to get the point of a Universal Basic Income. Universal, everyone has it, same amount, no condition. Be a genius or an idiot, active or retired, poor or billionaire, hero or criminal, no exception, except maybe for minors. Making it universal has the added bonus of simplifying welfare programs. Subsidized housing and transport, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc... no need, it is all UBI now. No more fraud because there is no need to: you always qualify, and as a result, no need to fight it. No more rewarding optimization since there is nothing to optimize. In my view, UBI is not generous, there will be losers, and a lot of jobs related to welfare will be made pointless. It may be a problem for those who have trouble managing a budget too: what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? I think it won't work not because people will stop working, but because it is too big a change and some people will find themselves literally starving, at least during the transition. It is like many solutions to complex problems: clear, simple and wrong.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think the budget management could be solved. Just allow setting a schedule. You can be paid weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. With something like CBDC that would be pretty simple to solve.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  A lot of people to resist to the Universal part is because of some moral judgement about a person "deserving" it or not. > No more fraud Some people will find a way to take it away from someone else, or to appear to the government as multiple people. > what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? The same if you overspend your salary - you get another job. UBI does not prevent people from working or finding jobs - it just gives workers more flexibility and freedom to pursue better options. Let's say you want to move to the middle of the country. You need to consider a lot of things, including leaving your current job and how long it'd take to find a new one at the destination. With UBI the risk decreases and people will make such moves. What UBI makes it harder is underemployment and labor exploitation - people won't work in terrible jobs unless they need to and UBI removes that need.
  - 4y ago
ajl666 4y ago
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sys32768 4y ago
Giving free money to most geniuses I know would result in morbid obesity of both them and their Steam libraries. Genius doesn't produce much when motivation is lacking, and most geniuses I know just aren't very motivated. Many expend much of their energy wrestling various mental health challenges including anxiety, OCD, ADHD, sensory issues, etc, etc.
doodlebugging 4y ago
This is a really dumb idea. Perhaps the author of the article or idea would not qualify for this "universal" income. A large problem with the decline in intellectual curiosity relates to the "teach to the test" mentality adopted in so many places where students are not encouraged to think about or reason through problems, only to regurgitate blurbs and numbers. My kids went through a Montessori education from infancy until they were about 9-12 years old (can't remember). Under that philosophy, they learned whatever interested them at their own pace and they were not only allowed, but they mixed with kids older and younger so that all could play off of and learn from each other. Older kids mentored younger kids. The materials they worked with challenged them to think about the subject matter. We moved them to a private school later and they were ahead of everyone in their grade level. Both are in college with one graduating with a MS this week and continuing to a PhD next spring and the other finishing up a BS. I always felt under-utilized as a Dad resource because my kids almost never asked for help with their homework. I wanted to dig in and help them understand the materials they were covering. They didn't need my help because they had the mental tools to think through things on their own.
29athrowaway 4y ago
I disagree. We have scholarships, which force the geniuses to make use of their cognitive abilities in specific ways. UBI can be used for anything, including staying at home, accumulating wealth by investing the money without giving back anything to society, etc. Not all "intelligent" people are industrious.
throw7 4y ago
"Universal". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The OP is more of a Genius Tax Credit... where I imagine a world where congress passes it with the stipulation that it's only for those making greater than $400K income.
amelius 4y ago
Want your company to thrive? Give geniuses 100% free time to work on their own projects. By the way, do people at Google still get 1 day to work on their own projects?
randcraw 4y ago
This article does invite the question, "How best can a society maximize the potential of their untapped best and brightest?" The first step is identifying them. Obviously an IQ test is a seriously dumb threshold. Untold numbers of high IQers have done nothing with their lives despite having myriad opportunities. (AFAIK, everyone famous only for extraordinary IQ has failed to excel otherwise, like Marilyn vos Savant.) But the second criterion has to be: what is it about _some_ 'geniuses' that makes them disruptors and creators? That quality is surely more important to success than pure brainpower. Is it imagination? Is it independent thought?
drewcoo 4y ago
Elite and want to have a scapegoat? Create a new class of "elites," give them everything they need, more than most people, and put all the spotlight on them. If anything goes wrong, who's everyone gonna blame?
simne 4y ago
This is huge mistake. Really, progress driven by entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are special type of people, who constantly pursue something, which could change world. And entrepreneurs don't need ubi, they need just freedom. Because main principle of business, to broke borders, mental, or physical, or legal, and sell people something, which they cannot buy inside their borders without help from some third party.
simne 4y ago
Only thing from article, with which I agree, need good enough education for all, who want it (again, FREEDOM), but this is not the same target as ubi. Unfortunately, in real life, many schools does not give really good education, and Universities in many cases instead of education, muster in young people into their religion.
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/EYppA https://archive.ph/EYppA
notaspecialist 4y ago
This article has it backwards. > is why intellectual progress is stalling. It's stalling specifically because of the "progress" we have made over the past 100 years. Welfare didn't exist back then. Government mandated schooling either. These are the absolute reasons why we're getting dumber and dumber. You're a parrot at school, not thinking for yourself. You don't have to think or plan about food or housing, tomorrow or the next year - go and get a hand-out - free housing, free food. Look at all the geniuses and their path to success. This is what we should be emulating. Obviously not all of us are geniuses, but continuing this path will ensure that none appear. UBI is only going to make it worse. Okay, that's my 2 minutes. I'm off, back to TikTok.
timka 4y ago
Hopefully, implementing Serge Saveliev's idea of cerebral sorting would give a way to detect geniuses in an evidence-based way. Unfortunately, this is still technically impossible (MRI resolution is still too low). Another issue is that many would like their kids to become one of the geniuses, even if they're fake, as long as this gives them some advantages. Such people would reject the idea of cerebral sorting. Also, according to Saveliev, for ideological reasons neural science in the West hasn't advanced in mapping brain fields and sub-fields (postmortem slicing and photographing) as much as in USSR. That is even if one gets both Saveiliev and an hi-res MRI scanner from the future, the whole idea of sorting would be considered unacceptable for similar reasons.

149 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

hooby 4y ago

Invest in education. Create more geniuses, and more clever people in general.

xqcgrek2 4y ago

https://archive.ph/69Inn https://archive.ph/69Inn

richardjam73 4y ago

What does the the word universal mean again?

beardyw 4y ago
Well UBI is a well established concept to create a more equal society, so let's steal the name and use it to create inequality. Brilliant!
etiennebausson 4y ago
That was my though as well. Without touching the inequalities / corruption aspect, it would be closer to a research grant than a Universal basic income the way it is set up. Then again, it's bloomberg.

Ekaros 4y ago

This scheme seems extremely ripe for corruption. Essentially you are promising someone millions on a few tests... So just paying 50 thousand to get your child this status would setup them for life...

sybercecurity 4y ago
Doesn't even need to be that explicit. It would be no surprise to find out that the those managing the program that identifies "genius" discovers that genius runs in their families (and friends' families).
- bell-cot 4y ago
  And the graduates of the "right" genius-test-prep programs.
zikzak 4y ago
I'll go one step further, it's total BS. :) I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12. I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s. My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated). I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program. I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time". Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition. I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Surely you understand that no matter what there will always be some amount of 130IQ+ people who languish their whole lives? A program like this is focused on the disproportionate number of home runs it would produce, fully expecting some to strike out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  > Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition. Well, are you still a cook now?
dfxm12 4y ago
Well, if you give everyone in your country a UBI, then all geniuses in your country will get a UBI. No (means) tests needed.
derbOac 4y ago
Also, keep in mind debates about embryonic selection are going on even as it is being offered as a service for a fee right now. There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
rapind 4y ago
Yeah it misses the whole point of “universal” programs. No gatekeepers, no forms, cheap to administer, and most importantly fair.

walkhour 4y ago

This idea is like telling the absolutist kings to try a bit of democracy for a while; it's contrary to all the social policies in the last 20 years and contrary to the central tenets of equity. It won't happen for the same reason orchestra auditions aren't blind anymore.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> contrary to the central tenets of equity. "Equity" is a concept in law: AIUI (IANAL) it mainly concerns trusts and contracts. The word is sometimes used as a synonym for "fairness", but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets. And I don't think there's anything unfair about a UBI, any more than universal healthcare, or a universal police service.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Equity > Eq"ui*ty (?), n.; pl. equities (#). [F. équité, L. aequitas, fr. aequus even, equal. See Equal.] > 1. Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality. > [....] > Syn. -- Right; justice; impartiality; rectitude; fairness; honesty; uprightness. See Justice. That's Webster's 1913, so it's not a new usage. And it's what was chosen for definition #1 (the others are, as you note, lawyer jargon).
- hnfong 4y ago
  > but I don't think something as vague as "fairness" has central tenets. FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_of_equity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_of_equity

zozbot234 4y ago

I believe the word for this is "tenure".

CrypticShift 4y ago

The problem is the current systems are getting less efficient at supporting geniuses financially : - The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines) - The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know. - The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.

jsiva 4y ago
Is the ChatGPT threat to knowledge workers an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one? I don't think at the current performance of ChatGPT and similar models are enough to displace genius knowledge workers. Although I could see the possibility of ChatGPT-like models allowing more work to be done by fewer knowledge workers. And in this scenario, there is no guarantee that an "unfound" genius makes it through the new system.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  > are enough to displace genius knowledge workers I was more referring to the genius that does routine employment work mostly to support himself (like for the cliche example: Einstein working in the patent office while preparing his theories). > an actual threat (let's say in the timeframe of a decade) or only a perceived one? This is a big question. chatGPT is pushing some buttons a lot faster than I thought. is it just a jolt? is there an AI winter on the horizon? The fact that these systems are still mostly magical black boxes does not help us predict. So, who knows?

johnkpaul 4y ago

Reminds me of the great short story Manna. It has a much more idealistic and more be the book definition of “universal”. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

lordnacho 4y ago

I'm not sure the idea of genius is one we should rely on. Why is it that we think one or two great people are responsible for all progress? I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment. With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Plus, geniuses tend to make a shitload of money already. And when they dont, there is a reason.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  Genius is also loaded. It's a fact kids in poverty have lower test grades, so the ACT of giving them UBI will in fact RAISE test scores and maybe move them up to the 'genius' level, or at least give them a better shot. It's hard to focus on schooling when you're tummy is growling, or there's a ton of stress at home, or abuse, etc.
  - wankle 4y ago
    We grew up poor in the US. We worked hard in school and had above average to excellent test scores. Being poor does not directly support bad test scores or whether society can or should bear the burden of UBI. Conflating growing up poor with growing up with abuse is incorrect.
    - akie 4y ago
      And assuming wealth and poverty do NOT correlate with test scores and professional success is equally problematic.
      - torstenvl 4y ago

fendy3002 4y ago

Goodhart's Law [1] says that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". This is a great thing to make every growing children to be trained / optimized for one or some specific things only. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

thweoruio34234 4y ago

Erm. This is why you have grad-school, and then tenure-track, and then finally, tenure.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
To weed out those who can't afford all that education?
bell-cot 4y ago
At least in the U.S., modern academia has been slowly and quietly eliminating tenure. Not that requiring geniuses to be career academics makes much sense, in any case.

stuaxo 4y ago

Give everyone a basic income.

xyzzy4747 4y ago
If everyone had a basic income, nobody would need to work. Jobs would be obsolete. Just think how nice the country would be.
- hospadar 4y ago
  I think this is a pretty big logical fallacy. There are TONS of people right now, today, who never need to work another day in their life and could live in a cozy dry home with plenty of food and decent healthcare - even in the US. Not just Jeff B & Elon, but plenty of well-off 50 year olds who _could_ retire, but would much rather keep working for a while longer so that their retirement involves trips to europe and fun boats instead of a modest home and little travel. Lots of people love their jobs, and love the things they can afford because they work harder than they strictly need to (me too! I definitely don't _need_ a nice espresso machine). Lots of start-up founders get into it because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, and the thought that they might be taking the blade from LGA and cruising around on a huge boat I'm sure doesn't hurt their desire to do the insanely hard work of starting a company. My personal hot take is that capitalism's emphasis on coercion (you only get healthcare if you work, we sometimes worry that our biggest problem is $15/hour workers slacking off) blinds us to the fact that lots of (most?) us really enjoy our work and love having something to do all day that feels useful.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Yes, because no one ever wants to make more money once they are able to afford the bare necessities of food and shelter.
  - xyzzy4747 4y ago
    My grandfather quit his job the moment he could go on welfare and live in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC. He never worked again.

TomK32 4y ago

It's not universal then.

black_13 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

golergka 4y ago

You won't actually give UBI to geniuses. You will give UBI to whomever bureaucratic machine deems as genius.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Geniuses tend to make a shitload of money already. And when they dont, there is a reason.

borbulon 4y ago

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

mc32 4y ago
And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory. People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way. There are smart people out there but a lot of them get into boring jobs because they are easy. They don’t particularly like difficult exploration. Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life. Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
- borbulon 4y ago
  > And there is no evidence a basic income would have altered that trajectory. There's no evidence either way. You're citing lack of evidence on something that's barely been tested, much less had enough time in the wild to have its effects studied.
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  I'm no genius, but in a world where I was born in a nation with UBI (or just expected a fat inheritance) I would have taken that masters in Bioinformatics scholarship and continued my research instead of writing shit code so businesses can make money Lots of people who graduated with me followed the same path for the same reason
  - BoGoToTo 4y ago
    Yep, smartest guy I knew in my physics program dropped out of his masters when he realized he would earn more in a year at a MAGMA than he would over half a decade begging for grants.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    If given a UBI, I'd definitely be going back to university.

MisterTea 4y ago

Great. Create a class of "elite thinkers" who go on loafing about, full of them selves. Just no to this line of thinking.

dane-pgp 4y ago
> a class of "elite thinkers" who go on loafing about So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?

throwaway123q 4y ago

Or give corrupt or fraudsters asylum like Britian does. Or sell visas to rich people like Canda and Australia do.

moab 4y ago

As a little twist on the author's badly thought out proposal, what if we simply take the NSF scheme for doling out funding and make it more broadly available. Each year (or every few years) you can submit a proposal about what you plan to do if you're given a UBI, it will go through peer-review, and about 6 months later you'll get a notification if you were selected for funding or not. Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.

lakomen 4y ago

It's either universal, no strings attached, unconditional or GTFO!

Yuyudo_Comiketo 4y ago
Unconditional free money for everyone. Nice story for 5 yo children, but not for those who have even the most basic of grasps on the history of the humankind. Unconditional as in mousetrap cheese it will be.

AnnoyedComment 4y ago

readingnews 4y ago

Great: How do you now define genius? What is the old saying? Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. I think we would have to first prove that the genius is going to provide something for us in some way, even if it is just research, it can not be frivolous research with no end in sight that does not produce. Uh-oh, how do I show that we are doing research that will eventually produce something? Einstein noted that if we knew what we were doing, we would not call it research. So many great discoveries were accidental, but then how do I prevent the scammers from gaming the system?

jscipione 4y ago

Western nations implemented UBI in 2020 and 2021 in the form of checks and loans and we are now living through the disastrous effects of UBI as the economy sputters and inflation and high prices lower our standard of living and make all of our lives worse. In short, UBI has been a complete disaster and is not a viable solution to any problem.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
denton-scratch 4y ago
I didn't see any of those cheques or loans; perhaps "universal" doesn't include me.
Ekaros 4y ago
No, that only happened in socialist countries. Nothing like that here.

newaccount2021 4y ago

odo1242 4y ago

The entire point is it's a universal basic income. Giving geniuses money is missing the entire point.

nisegami 4y ago

This is such an absurd suggestion that I'm convinced it's intended to sour public perception of UBI.

amelius 4y ago

Also, bring these geniuses together in a space where they can experiment with expensive equipment. Call that space a "lab". And give them an office near that lab so they can work out new ideas.

resuresu 4y ago

Yes let’s subsidize those that already won the genetic lottery, sounds like a great idea. Let’s give multi-millionaire trust fund babies UBI as while we are at it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Well yes, give it to the trust fund babies, but also give it to everyone else too. That's the "universal" part of UBI. Once you take out the "universal" part it isn't UBI anymore.

myth_drannon 4y ago

It reminded me a sci-fi book by Strugatsky brothers (of Stalker/Roadside picnic fame) which is called "Monday begins of Saturday". It's a funny novel about working in what were called Research Institutes(НИИ) in USSR. So all kinds of supposedly smart people were spending their lives there in order to advance "scientific progress". I see it as basically UBI but with some strings and bureucracy attached. Depending who you ask, but it had so many problems.

popilewiz 4y ago

effnorwood 4y ago

steele 4y ago

lol no. Give everyone UBI.

dandare 4y ago

UNIVERSAL You keep using that world. I don't think it means what you think it means.

denton-scratch 4y ago
I'm strongly in favour of a UBI. It totally makes sense, at least in wealthy Western societies; there's a whole expensive bureaucracy involved in means testing, prosecuting welfare fraud, and so on. But to make it work, it has to be Universal, i.e. everyone gets it automatically.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  I hate government welfare programs about as much as possible, but the "administrative overhead" arguments I see from UBI advocates really doesn't make much sense. The savings from eliminating most overhead in welfare programs isn't nearly as much money as most UBI advocates seem to think. Roughly 5% of the cost of the food stamp program in the US goes to administrative overhead. Social Security (which doesn't have means testing, the only requirement is age-based) spends ~0.6% on overhead. From what I can find about Medicaid, admin costs are generally around 5%. You'd only save ~$40 billion a year if you eliminated all administrative overhead for Medicaid (which is nothing to sneeze at, but it's nowhere near enough to fund a UBI).
  - swores 4y ago
    People are saying it's a benefit, nobody (maybe with the exception of an occasional misinformed internet commenter, but I don't think I've even seen that) is claiming the saving in reduced admin costs would fully fund UBI. And the fact it wouldn't fully fund it doesn't take away from the fact that saving billions and billions of wasted money wouldn't be a big side-benefit that helps reduce the cost. UBI would be funded by increased taxation on the wealthiest, but the fact that the majority of current welfare admin costs would be saved reduces the amount of tax-based funding meaning that more benefit comes out of each dollar taxed.
    - 4y ago

temptemptemp111 4y ago

motohagiography 4y ago

Want more geniuses? Challenge kids to solve real and useful problems. If we can teach kids to code, and play in Chopin competitions, we can teach them surgery, higher math, engineering, and to be research assistants. Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? The people behind this proposal can't be included, because the incentives of welfare traps and maintaining genius status to keep the payments coming is a perverse incentive. Look what publish or perish did to academia. It just created garbage factories. Also, the best way to get their ideas resented and ignored is to grant them privileges, and not necessarily because it's unjust, but because there is a basic human instinct to find irresponsibility and dependency in adults disgusting. What we absolutely do know is that if you want to destroy group, give it welfare. Just like feeding wild animals who become dependent and get wiped out by scarcity, the most universally reliable way to create a failure to thrive is to substitute taking care of themselves with adapting to dependency. The best thing about this idea is that it we know whatever the right thing is, it's going to be the opposite of this.

htag 4y ago
> Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? I have 100% meet very smart (genius debatable) people that have trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income, or have to over invest time in pursuits beneath them. They usually share some of these common characteristic. * Highly intrinsically motivated. External rewards like money or reputation don't factor into their decision making, or in some cases demotivate them. * Social outsider. The usually show behavior a psychologist could diagnosis as a disorder. * Self learner. They learn by reading or by doing, and very little is learned in a classroom or a group setting.
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
I love the fact that people still unironically use the term "welfare trap", while we can see massive numbers of homeless and home insecure people all over America. People actually believing the bad faith constructed arguments of those with massive amounts of wealth and power actually make me believe America deserves to keep licking the boots of the 1% like dogs until we all die.

trollerator23 4y ago

Lol. And who chooses the geniuses?

liminal 4y ago

Please no more "geniuses." This cult of personality celebrity idol worship is toxic. The U in UBI stands for "universal" -- you don't need to be a genius to apply. UBI is great for enabling everyone to advance to their ultimate potential by alleviating financial constraints. (It may also lead to laziness as people no longer need to advance to survive.) Hopefully the net benefit outweighs any negative consequences.

zozbot234 4y ago
> Please no more "geniuses." This cult of personality celebrity idol worship is toxic. Agreed. Just look at Trump, his I.Q. is one of the highest and yet his presidency has been among the worst in American history.
- buzzin__ 4y ago
  Was his IQ high because he was a stable genius, and had a good you know what?
- pif 4y ago
  Trump is not the problem: he is a symptom. The millions of idiots that voted for him, twice, are the problem.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  If you remove everything he said and a pandemic which his opponent stopped him from instantly responding to in promoting disease. Was it so bad really? No new wars for one thing.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > If you remove everything he said Now that's asking for a lot. But maybe you're right, it's way better to have a president who doesn't say much of anything.
  - thelock85 4y ago
    Amazing how a sitting president can have an opponent 3.75 years before the next cycle, unless you mean Pelosi and Schumer similar to how Obama had McConnell. Of course Trump had a lot of opposition within various levels of government but that’s also not a new phenomenon, just one he played up by constantly talking about it as a means to working through it. Arguably if he’d just shut up, he’d have given up his biggest political strength and more co-opted by the corporate deep state. And then there is the massive PPP wealth transfer he oversaw, both to criminals (not necessarily his fault, just his responsibility) and via the US Treasury (definitely on him). But these things are also nothing new compared to other recent POTUSes except for the most powerful playing constant victim.

dslowell 4y ago

Much more important would be giving them (and others) the opportunities to realize their own potential even if they don't go on the exact path early in life. It's not impossible, but it is extremely difficult at the age of 26 to realize that marketing isn't for you and that your true calling is astrophysics. Our society typically sorts people at a young age, and there's no easy path out once you've been sorted (again, not impossible, but very difficult). I've met a number of remarkable people who were stuck in remedial jobs, but really excelled and took off when they finally got their break. They were lucky; many aren't. I've seen people say things like "I despair at all of the Einsteins out there who are stuck plowing fields." But that sentiment is a bit of a cop out; the issue is made to be distant enough that we can relieve ourselves of a certain amount of responsibility. How about all of the Einsteins in our own society who are still stuck in the patent office?

htag 4y ago

> Children who score [IQ]145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. > They could start at, say $75,000 a year and go up by $25,000 increments every decade. The payments could expire if our geniuses decided to take paid employment but then resume if they decided to “drop out” again. 1. I don't think UBI expires, this is more like unemployment benefit which include perverse incentives against employment. 2. IQ is a controversial measurement. It's validity is questionable. It's been used or purposed to be used for truly horrible state sponsored actions in the past. I have a bias against using it for discrimination across populations, simply because of it's history and proponents over the years.

cgb223 4y ago
> Children who score [IQ]145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. Sounds like it would create MASSIVE incentives to cheat on the IQ test or pay off the graders to give you a good score as well It would literally set your kids up for life
- neilv 4y ago
  Also, it doesn't have to be overt "cheating": I suspect that whatever metric(s) would be both defined and gamed by the affluent, like college admissions criteria.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  This is the only cogent criticism I can find in this thread. I'm predisposed to like the proposal, but I don't really have a good response for you. On the other hand, don't most IQ tests have elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms? E.g., handwriting an ungraded written portion?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    You insinuate you have a high IQ and that is the only cogent critisms you can find here.
    - deleted 4y ago

DoreenMichele 4y ago

UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. These people have no idea what they are talking about. IQ tests are tools. In order to properly assess very high IQ children or twice exceptional -- gifted and disabled -- children, they need to be administered by a qualified professional. Most IQ tests only go to 145. Very high IQs can only be meaningfully assessed by about age 7. If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Last I heard, we were having trouble updating our IQ tests for various reasons and, also, IQ tests are highly culturally biased. An IQ test for Americans won't effectively assess a Brit or Canadian. IQ tests are extremely controversial. The first test, created by Binet, that became the starting point of modern IQ tests was not intended to assess intelligence. It was intended to assess school readiness in children in France in an era where not all kids had birth certificates, so you couldn't use age as your metric, and rural kids tended to be less ready for public school than city kids for cultural reasons.

mistermann 4y ago
> These people have no idea what they are talking about. It's true, but despite that I think they are plausibly in the ballpark of a useful idea. Their particular implementation sucks, but what if an implementation included a decision making process where false/flawed "facts" were subjected to skilful review by other people. In this case, each proposition asserted by the proponent could be rejected based on valid critiques from a diverse set of reviewers (here there is non-trivial complexity, but nothing insurmountable imho), and they could rework their recommendations to eliminate those flaws and return with an improved plan that would be subjected to the same process. After several rounds, I'd think this could produce better ideas, and over time I'd think people would get much better at it cutting the time it takes for iterations. > If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Under current approaches that mostly come from academia (not exactly the most diverse set of minds), and are subject to long iteration cycles - fund 100 startups to work on the problem and we may see better results. Isn't it weird that we complain endlessly about poor results, and yet hardly anyone has strong feelings about doing things differently (if not outright scoff at the very idea)? I've read your posts for many years, please tell me that you can see this phenomenon all around us?

pessimizer 4y ago

You should do this if you want intelligence testing to revert to whiteness testing. I can't wait for my government IQ test to require knowledge of How I Met Your Mother characters. I feel like this scenario was already played out by the dystopian postapocalyptic Brazilian sci-fi show 3%.

torstenvl 4y ago
IQ tests are already extremely useful for upward mobility, but they haven't reverted to whiteness testing. White people, who invented most of the tests, aren't even the demographic that does the best on them.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I’d settle for universal basic healthcare at this point (US biased comment).

ransom1538 4y ago

The title is wrong, should be: "Want Your Country to Implode? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income." Welfare states destroy families and cultures.

tgv 4y ago

Can't read the article, but I highly doubt they have enough empirical backup for a plan that could influence society heavily, if any.

pelasaco 4y ago

So then the question is who defines who is genius.

transfire 4y ago

How about we just get rid to the government/insurance/lobbyist collusion.

transfire 4y ago

It’s not UBI if it’s not for everyone, Geniuses.

SirLJ 4y ago
LOL

theGnuMe 4y ago

This article was brought to you by Mensa.

sva_ 4y ago

Geniuses... that must be the people at the "Genius Bar"?

Mikeb85 4y ago

Forget geniuses... Figure out UBI for everyone or at least a better social net. Even non-geniuses start businesses or do interesting things when given some economic freedom. Thriving countries have strong business investment, lots of small business startups (not just tech), high labour force participation, etc... Giving only geniuses money would just turn it into a strange technocracy...

mgrthrow 4y ago

Give everyone a ubi, sorting out the geniuses will never actually identify only the geniuses. And less smart people deserve basic human dignity. Just give it to everyone. I guarantee you people will still want to work. That work might end up being more creative work and less "flipping burgers because if I don't take this job I will starve and die" work.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Well, this article is certainly an example of cognitive decline it's talking about. Why would society want to encourage geniuses to work less thanks to welfare? UBI does have several purposes worth considering: - If people are in a temporary crisis, giving them enough spending money to live in a dorm and eat rice and lentils can let them recover rather than the crisis becoming worse and more permanent due to traumatic life experiences. - Some adults are permanently incapable of fully supporting themselves through commercial employment. Could be because of physical or mental disability, or just a 50 year old coal miner too old to learn new marketable skills. So instead of having a fraction of the population be angry, miserable and fomenting trouble, we offer them an early retirement/semi-retirement. Let robots work for you, enjoy! But that's at best a necessary evil, with many side effects. For example, when these functions are taken up by voluntary institutions, aid recipients are incentivized to not bite the hand that feeds them and to support themselves or pay it forward to the largest degree possible. The last thing we want to do is to impose dependency on people who least need it and are most able to benefit the rest of us through their hard work. Get all the obstacles out of their way, let them get their foot in the door through apprenticeships if college is not a good option and let them shine!

randcraw 4y ago
> Why would society want to encourage geniuses to work less thanks to welfare? So Einstein doesn't have to waste his time pushing papers in the patent office.
- SirLJ 4y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, it was his drive to get out of that office?

karaterobot 4y ago

Apart from the awkward misunderstanding of the word "universal", there are other issues with this proposal. For one, having a high IQ is neither necessary nor sufficient for making a major contribution to society. For a variety of reasons, most people with very high IQs never do anything important with it (in the sense of an invention, a company, a movement, a masterpiece, etc), and it's not because they lack a guaranteed income. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because IQ, vision, and motivation are three different qualities which are, at best, weakly correlated. If you want to make your country better, make it easier for people with good ideas to get the resources to pursue them. For starters, make it easier to get grants. There are already projects trying to do this, but having 100x the resources wouldn't hurt.

zhouyisu 4y ago

One solution could be: If you volunteered to be acknowledged as a genius, you must open your status. You wear special shakles which is salient and observable to everyone paying the resources directly or indirectly. You shouldn't be allowed to physically protect yourself to your surroundings or you lose the genius status. (or under some absolute physical restraint or suffering verifiable by everyone). Everyone could challenge you at court with sound evidences, which is judged by random sampled jury group by laws well established in future. With that I could trust to give them "life long resources" to give us "prophecy".

zhouyisu 4y ago
I changed my mind. Give all same kind UBI is better idea. Otherwise "shakled genius" may find a way to jailbreak and cast wisdom of revenge on everyone else.
bena 4y ago
What the fuck is wrong with you? "You shouldn't be allowed to physically protect yourself to your surroundings or you lose the genius status. (or under some absolute physical restraint or suffering verifiable by everyone)." We've already effectively given people life long resources for nothing more than exiting the correct vagina. And you seem to want to make it legal to effectively freely harass nerds.

toss1 4y ago

No, let's not give it to just "geniuses". Even as someone privileged enough to do very well on those tests while barely studying and picking up the knowledge through osmosis and curiosity, and who would find it a great relief to have a guaranteed stipend, I can hardly think of a worse idea. The immediate knock-on effects would make it a disaster at both a societal level and a personal level (just start with taking the existing resentments about 'elites' and turning them up to 11). What is really needed is actual Universal Basic Income, with emphasis on the "Universal" - for everyone. Eliminate bureaucracy with it's overhead and inherent prejudices. We're an advanced society, just ensure everyone has enough for basic food, housing, & health. That'll intrinsically shut down many of the worst types of exploitation, and we wont' have to worry about releasing the potential of the 143-IQ vs the 147-IQ people, or the motivated 97-IQ person.

jmpman 4y ago

I’d heard that most entrepreneurs were children of wealthy individuals who have at least $20M, and the only good reason to not have extremely high estate taxes. I’m skeptical that a UBI will have the same effect. The entrepreneurs need to have resources to start a company without risk, not just resources to survive.

GuB-42 4y ago

Is it just me or no one seems to get the point of a Universal Basic Income. Universal, everyone has it, same amount, no condition. Be a genius or an idiot, active or retired, poor or billionaire, hero or criminal, no exception, except maybe for minors. Making it universal has the added bonus of simplifying welfare programs. Subsidized housing and transport, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc... no need, it is all UBI now. No more fraud because there is no need to: you always qualify, and as a result, no need to fight it. No more rewarding optimization since there is nothing to optimize. In my view, UBI is not generous, there will be losers, and a lot of jobs related to welfare will be made pointless. It may be a problem for those who have trouble managing a budget too: what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? I think it won't work not because people will stop working, but because it is too big a change and some people will find themselves literally starving, at least during the transition. It is like many solutions to complex problems: clear, simple and wrong.

Ekaros 4y ago
I think the budget management could be solved. Just allow setting a schedule. You can be paid weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. With something like CBDC that would be pretty simple to solve.
rbanffy 4y ago
A lot of people to resist to the Universal part is because of some moral judgement about a person "deserving" it or not. > No more fraud Some people will find a way to take it away from someone else, or to appear to the government as multiple people. > what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? The same if you overspend your salary - you get another job. UBI does not prevent people from working or finding jobs - it just gives workers more flexibility and freedom to pursue better options. Let's say you want to move to the middle of the country. You need to consider a lot of things, including leaving your current job and how long it'd take to find a new one at the destination. With UBI the risk decreases and people will make such moves. What UBI makes it harder is underemployment and labor exploitation - people won't work in terrible jobs unless they need to and UBI removes that need.
- 4y ago

ajl666 4y ago

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sys32768 4y ago

Giving free money to most geniuses I know would result in morbid obesity of both them and their Steam libraries. Genius doesn't produce much when motivation is lacking, and most geniuses I know just aren't very motivated. Many expend much of their energy wrestling various mental health challenges including anxiety, OCD, ADHD, sensory issues, etc, etc.

doodlebugging 4y ago

This is a really dumb idea. Perhaps the author of the article or idea would not qualify for this "universal" income. A large problem with the decline in intellectual curiosity relates to the "teach to the test" mentality adopted in so many places where students are not encouraged to think about or reason through problems, only to regurgitate blurbs and numbers. My kids went through a Montessori education from infancy until they were about 9-12 years old (can't remember). Under that philosophy, they learned whatever interested them at their own pace and they were not only allowed, but they mixed with kids older and younger so that all could play off of and learn from each other. Older kids mentored younger kids. The materials they worked with challenged them to think about the subject matter. We moved them to a private school later and they were ahead of everyone in their grade level. Both are in college with one graduating with a MS this week and continuing to a PhD next spring and the other finishing up a BS. I always felt under-utilized as a Dad resource because my kids almost never asked for help with their homework. I wanted to dig in and help them understand the materials they were covering. They didn't need my help because they had the mental tools to think through things on their own.

29athrowaway 4y ago

I disagree. We have scholarships, which force the geniuses to make use of their cognitive abilities in specific ways. UBI can be used for anything, including staying at home, accumulating wealth by investing the money without giving back anything to society, etc. Not all "intelligent" people are industrious.

throw7 4y ago

"Universal". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The OP is more of a Genius Tax Credit... where I imagine a world where congress passes it with the stipulation that it's only for those making greater than $400K income.

amelius 4y ago

Want your company to thrive? Give geniuses 100% free time to work on their own projects. By the way, do people at Google still get 1 day to work on their own projects?

randcraw 4y ago

This article does invite the question, "How best can a society maximize the potential of their untapped best and brightest?" The first step is identifying them. Obviously an IQ test is a seriously dumb threshold. Untold numbers of high IQers have done nothing with their lives despite having myriad opportunities. (AFAIK, everyone famous only for extraordinary IQ has failed to excel otherwise, like Marilyn vos Savant.) But the second criterion has to be: what is it about _some_ 'geniuses' that makes them disruptors and creators? That quality is surely more important to success than pure brainpower. Is it imagination? Is it independent thought?

drewcoo 4y ago

Elite and want to have a scapegoat? Create a new class of "elites," give them everything they need, more than most people, and put all the spotlight on them. If anything goes wrong, who's everyone gonna blame?

simne 4y ago

This is huge mistake. Really, progress driven by entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are special type of people, who constantly pursue something, which could change world. And entrepreneurs don't need ubi, they need just freedom. Because main principle of business, to broke borders, mental, or physical, or legal, and sell people something, which they cannot buy inside their borders without help from some third party.

simne 4y ago

Only thing from article, with which I agree, need good enough education for all, who want it (again, FREEDOM), but this is not the same target as ubi. Unfortunately, in real life, many schools does not give really good education, and Universities in many cases instead of education, muster in young people into their religion.

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/EYppA https://archive.ph/EYppA

notaspecialist 4y ago

This article has it backwards. > is why intellectual progress is stalling. It's stalling specifically because of the "progress" we have made over the past 100 years. Welfare didn't exist back then. Government mandated schooling either. These are the absolute reasons why we're getting dumber and dumber. You're a parrot at school, not thinking for yourself. You don't have to think or plan about food or housing, tomorrow or the next year - go and get a hand-out - free housing, free food. Look at all the geniuses and their path to success. This is what we should be emulating. Obviously not all of us are geniuses, but continuing this path will ensure that none appear. UBI is only going to make it worse. Okay, that's my 2 minutes. I'm off, back to TikTok.

timka 4y ago

Hopefully, implementing Serge Saveliev's idea of cerebral sorting would give a way to detect geniuses in an evidence-based way. Unfortunately, this is still technically impossible (MRI resolution is still too low). Another issue is that many would like their kids to become one of the geniuses, even if they're fake, as long as this gives them some advantages. Such people would reject the idea of cerebral sorting. Also, according to Saveliev, for ideological reasons neural science in the West hasn't advanced in mapping brain fields and sub-fields (postmortem slicing and photographing) as much as in USSR. That is even if one gets both Saveiliev and an hi-res MRI scanner from the future, the whole idea of sorting would be considered unacceptable for similar reasons.