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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

I was about to say that. If a genuine polymath were 1 in a million we should have 7000 von Neumanns right now.

You know we might just have 7000 von Neumanns among us, but may be unable to recognize them. The vast majority of 7+ billion people on the planet are unknown to everyone some except family and a couple of friends.

The adage "Popular does not equal good" has never been more relevant.

> The adage "Popular does not equal good" has never been more relevant.

Eh, it depends. It's not true that popular ==> good, but I think there are plenty of areas where it's more true than it used to be that good ==> popular. For example, many more people now have a much better chance to get an education and demonstrate aptitude in some area. And better communication means talent is better matched to opportunity.

That's not to say we're really optimizing human potential. That doesn't even seem close to true. But I think we're doing a lot better than we were even 50 years ago.

For the past few decades, we've absorbed them into adtech.

Only in HN is the notion that the "geniuses" of this generation are working for the FAANGs, sure, some may be, but I am willing to bet 99% of them are not.

I think it might be an allusion to the Jeff Hammerbacher quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads".

Or optimizing microseconds out of high-frequency trading algorithms. Quote James Tobin (1984),

> I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges.

In my twenty five years of browsing the web I've clicked on two ads. The second one very recently. I guess it's a tough job.

How do you figure? Intelligence / multi-talented-ness, and interest in changing the world, aren't necessarily correlated. Most "geniuses" still probably just want to get reasonable wealthy and retire to pursue their hobbies. (They just have more interesting hobbies than the average person.) And, for people who weren't born to wealth, the FAANGs are a good place to get one's f-you money from, without necessarily needing to dedicate the entirety of one's motivational resources to solving work-related problems.

Because "geniuses" may well want to get reasonably wealthy and retire, but might be fundamentally unable to adapt to working for a large corporation.

I think his comment was implying that such individuals would have naturally gravitated toward the highest-paying jobs and thus adtech. The subtext being that we waste the brightest minds of our generation on trivial and useless jobs.

But we dont that is my point. HN wants to believe that. It is not true.

Or they just don't want to be Oppenheimer

Maybe they're all working in sweatshops or mining cobalt.

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