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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

There's a long tradition of important advances in knowledge being made by people with an undemanding job [1] [2]. The 19th century university became a hotbed of research because the teaching workload was relatively light and they didn't require that you also did research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_a...

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Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many proto-scientists were people with either an established income or independent wealth, who had the freedom to pursue whatever interested them.

We ought to be finding ways to broaden the number of people who can pursue their interests, while not forfeiting security, dignity, and social respect. This is one of the arguments for universal basic income, that it could decouple (some) people's desire to pursue knowledge from the need to earn a living, and maybe even especially from the need to produce regular, measurable results. Right not we're channeling most of our people who are interested in and capable of developing new knowledge into jobs which demand "results" more than they demand that truth be followed wherever it leads, and however long it takes. This will lead to a great deal of dubious Normal Science [0], and very little revolutionary thought [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / scientists who were rentiers). If leisure was the only variable, we'd expect people with guaranteed incomes (annuities, for example, have been sold since the Middle Ages) to have been the most prolific thinkers of history.

i think you have to go back to the 18th century for that. i'm thinking britain where science was something acceptable that gentlemen could do in their spare time (with smart+poor doing a lot of heavy lifting) and in particular Antoine Lavoisier in France who literally bought the rights to be a tax farmer so he could do his research. he lost his head in the revolution so there's that. YMMV.

Well, Lavoisier's tax farming was not passive income: "Lavoisier's researches on combustion were carried out in the midst of a very busy schedule of public and private duties, especially in connection with the Ferme Générale." [1] The gentleman scientists were also usually involved in some sort of business, even if it was just administering their estates. The people who truly had a passive income - relying on annuities or government bonds, mostly inherited - are hard to spot in the history of science. They were a pretty numerous class though [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier#Gunpowder_Co...

[2] https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/piketty-and-the...

Kelvin, De Broglie, and Brahe come to mind as well.

Kelvin taught at Glasgow, Brahe was a cathedral canon, and De Broglie did his best work for his PhD thesis.

> Note that having a job seems necessary though.

I'm not sure that's true. It would be interesting to see some numbers. My naive impression is that there are at least two things needed to make intellectual history: genius, and opportunity to practice your genius. Both are rare, and given that there are far, far more people who need to earn a living than people who don't, I would expect the absolute numbers of (Genius)(NeedsAJobHasAMenialJob) to be greater than (Genius)*(Doesn'tNeedAJob).

My impression is that gentlemen of leisure have, especially in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, been a very disproportionate percentage of intellectual history, and that even the nominal jobs in that group (parson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge) were wholly orthogonal to whether they produced.

What do you think having an unrelated, undemanding job would contribute to intellectual work?

I don't have a good theory - it's just based on reading biographies. Almost no famous thinkers lived on passive income (although, as I've said, annuities and bonds have been widely available for over 500 years). And probably not any kind of job will do. The most plausible explanation I've read belongs to Richard Feynman:

> I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological. When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge

http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html

The sentiment in general is reasonable to me: that humans are generally more effective and more productive when they have something to do and work on, even when they're not getting anywhere with their main project(s).

It's not at all clear to me that a menial job is a strong solution to that problem. I would expect that in, say, a world with UBI, that also recognized this problem, people would find better ways to keep themselves feeling like they are at least doing something and making some contribution, than working on things they don't care about or believe in. There are plenty of meaningful volunteer opportunities in the world that would be much more effective "make you feel useful" solutions than filing papers in a bureaucratic office.

The Parson-naturalist list you link to lacks one very prominent scientist-cleric- Gregor Mendel (though I believe this to be deliberate, as he performed research for economic reasons rather than spiritual reasons iirc). The earliest research on genetics took years to complete and was done as a side-project in addition to other monastic duties.

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