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> Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. What does

• gowld 2y ago
  You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society? The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself. Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.
    • hackable_sand 2y ago
      In other words: Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.
    • dahfizz 2y ago
      How does removing gifted and talented programs support "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"? "persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
      • andrepd 2y ago
        I'm not talking about this lol, of course removing gifted programs is a stupid idea. I'm talking about your position.
  • sangnoir 2y ago
    > The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior? As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness? A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.
    • DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference. Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for that?
      • sangnoir 2y ago
        My question was specifically about the outliers: has any research been done if outlying achievements go hand in hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence, it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by extraordinary talent. Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?
        • chowchowchow 2y ago
          No, not to a person. There can be some stupendously dumb billionaires, especially since inheritance is a thing. I would however expect the average intelligence however-measured of the 100 richest "self-made" (lets just say who didn't themself inherit a generational amount of wealth) individuals in the US to be higher than a 100-person random sample of the population.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used. > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies. I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class. The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room. Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.
    • aliasxneo 2y ago
      It seems like you're choosing to selectively interpret things to fit your own argument. > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies. They did indeed kill off most of their intelligentsia in the last century. This is clearly what the OP is referencing and is a historical fact. I'm not sure why you decided to take it in a different direction.
      • cogman10 2y ago
        Because for neither China nor the USSR was that the main contributor to their national problems. Further, the education system of both are definitely implementations of "let's spend the most money on the smartest people". In a discussion about the collapse of societies, it doesn't apply. In a discussion about education reform, it does not apply. It is also not an example of the original commentors statement that conquerors have used social spending to collapse their targets. I would further point out in both the case of the USSR and China's purge of the intelligentsia; it was FAR more about consolidating power in a dictator and far less about trying to set good national policy. In Mao's case in particular, he was frankly just a bit insane.
        • 2y ago
  • r00fus 2y ago
    > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies. China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output. USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
    • teractiveodular 2y ago
      Mao's policies including the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution killed millions and set China back by decades.
      • r00fus 2y ago
        Yes, that happened. It's also undeniable that since then, they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people. I'm not sure if they get to where they are today - without going through the Maoist stage.
        • HDThoreaun 2y ago
          > they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people. Because they gave up on the command economy idea and embraced markets and education. When they persecuted the geniuses everything went to shit and when they stopped things quickly improved. Really makes you think.
  • iwontberude 2y ago
    These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
    • WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
      Completely incorrect. We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.
      • omegaworks 2y ago
        >We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry. Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model. State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price. This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
        • WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
          That is not true either. There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost. They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt. It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population. Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.
  • lykahb 2y ago
    Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests. However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'. The equality of outcome can take many forms.
  • revert_to_test 2y ago
    Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century. China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded. I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
• K0balt 2y ago
  What is good for a society and what feels just are often disparate things. But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life. What is just then? To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society? To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society? We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school. We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge. This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person. The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit. The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character. I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education. OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large. Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows. Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9. Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life. It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.
• bawolff 2y ago
  > > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. > Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer. I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.
  • rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
    Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion
• Clubber 2y ago
  >To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can. When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well. In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well. >The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    > This seems like hyperbole. It's not, there are multiple historical examples of societies, including the US, that place a low value on human life. Heck, you'll even find comments in this thread talking about how important it is to cut funding to the useless eaters... errr undeserving masses. Current US society isn't that bad, however, there is a significant population of people that see no problems with things like child labor and completely privatizing education (and everything else for that matter). > I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent. I never said the current US policies treat kids that way. I do, however, see some disturbing rhetoric throughout this thread about how we spend to much time/money/effort on individuals the commenters deem as worthless.
• AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
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