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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

What's far better are things like the GI Bill, which turned WWII soldiers who (based on their high-school performance) would have been laborers into NASA engineers [1].

And it's still doing that. My anecdote: a relative who did poorly in primary school, but in the last 5 years has gone from enlisted service people to college educated engineer on the GI Bill.

Genius grants are great (the MacArthur Fellowship funded the deciphering of the Maya Writing system [2]), but should be handled by private philanthropy, which has plenty of money these days to support the 140 IQ+ talent.

1. https://www.legion.org/magazine/242265/gi-bill-outer-space

2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/about.html

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I can't speak highly enough of the GI Bill providing this little bit of extra resource to those motivated enough to use it. Like the gentleman in the article you linked, I was applying for electrician jobs as my enlistment neared an end. The fact that the Post 9/11 GI Bill covered tuition plus enough allowance that my wife and I could pay rent means I'm now enjoying a career in engineering and passing that love of learning on to my children. Truly a Godsend in my opinion.

Do the people on the receiving end of America's military factor into these effusions?

Yes. My education benefits all of humanity.

That must be fantastic news to the millions dead and tens of millions displaced by our fun ventures in the Middle East, the democracies destroyed in South America, and the countless millions suffering from proxy wars fueled with US arms.

Yes, the entire Western world—and Europe especially—benefits greatly from the largess afforded to them by the Pax Americana.

Citation needed. The US invading countries like Iraq is similar to Russia invading Ukraine in net results for Europe - influx of refugees, higher oil/gas and thus everything prices.

The entire European welfare state is dependent on the fact that they don't pay to maintain trade routes internationally—the US does that for them. The huge influx of refugees came a decade after Afghanistan and Iraq, due to US, Russian, Turkish (AND EUROPEAN) meddling in MENA.

Not much. Perhaps more than your worst imagination might conjure but not much better than that.

The US military budget is a back door for all sorts of social programs with really twisted incentives (twist may vary by program, GI Bill being among the most harmless). Because the social programs are buried in a military budget, the extent to which those programs are inclusive of those on the receiving end depends largely on the size of the receiving end (e.g. was military action taken?) and the extent to which the people on the receiving end deserve any consideration at all (e.g. language around accommodating victims of war will likely be more effective than no language around accommodating customers of weapons conducting their own wars).

By and large, neither extreme is especially beneficial to those on the receiving end of being outside our borders, unless we have a fairly lax immigration posture… which, is a laughable concept at this point. And the concept of burying social programs in a military budget laughs right along with that.

I think it’s deserving of the term ironic to point out that other historical examples of programs which work this way are largely prefixed “Soviet”, or at least were aligned that way.

You probably know that what the US fought for in WWII was very different for what they fought for in Iraq.

Defeating the Nazis was just and invading Iraq was unjust, but we should not differentiate how we treat those whom we sent to do the fighting, as long has they have served honorably.

This seems less like a relevant conversation topic and more like flamebait to get people riled up about geopolitical events of years past.

> Truly a Godsend in my opinion.

Perhaps you are using "Godsend" rhetorically, but it was hotly debated and even opposed by members of Congress who felt that the class of people who physically fought the war had no place in institutions of higher education [1].

Some members of congress opposed it on the grounds that it could in theory help African Americans:

"On March 24, the Senate passed the G.I. Bill unanimously, but the House continued to debate the unemployment and education provisions for another two months. Rankin, chair of the House veterans committee, had evolved into one of its sharpest critics. An unrepentant segregationist, he worried that African-American veterans would use the benefits to avoid work and live off the government. Rankin also didn’t see the need to give African Americans the same benefits as whites." [2]

In the end, ways were found to exclude African Americans from the benefit even after the bill passed [3]. The generational knock-on effects of that are well documented.

But the tremendous value added to the economy because of government support (however unequal) of regular "non-genius" people is pretty well demonstrated by the successes of the GI Bill.

1. https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/celebrate/gi-bill.pdf

2. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-t...

3. https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-ben...

I feel like this comment and a lot of other comments deal with a repulsion to this not being a very egalitarian idea, to the point of maybe missing the forest for the trees. The GI bill is awesome and lead/leads to upward mobility that can benefit all. It’s an egalitarian program available to everyone. That’s fantastic and a good thing that we have done.

Other programs like universal income could also be egalitarian and lift all boats, and might be fantastic or a horror show, depending on your stance on motivation and it’s relation to money.

A universal income for geniuses would not be egalitarian but could provide outsized benefits for its cost to society. If the government (us, collectively) own the results and IP, it might pay for itself / run a profit. If it expanded human knowledge faster than without it, it could provide a sort of compounding effect to how fast our societies advance.

I don’t know that these things would happen but they could, which seems worth exploring rather than discarding immediately due to historically-rooted moral systems.

> It’s an egalitarian program available to everyone

Is it available to everyone if it needs the beneficiary to have enlisted in the US armed forces? It excludes those that won't be accepted (based on physical attributes) and those that wouldn't want to spend a few years oversees killing people.

The GI Bill had problems with racism [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...

Facts hurt huh

You've just pointing out that 1940s America suffered from very notable racism. It's not a very surprising statement, nor was it unique to the GI bill.

Racial bias being intentional or not, the ideas of the GI bill seem like they would have worked even if they weren't targeting certain classes of people, making the idea of the bill good. That's the interesting conversation.

No, I'm pointing out that when we collectively try to help just one class of people it turns into a predictable shitshow. It's not unique to the GI bill but it is absolutely a valid criticism.

Absolutely. African Americans were excluded from its benefits by a viciously racist society. We should rectify that today.

But it doesn't detract at all from the fact that investment in regular "non-genius" people (whether via the GI Bill or otherwise) had a fundamentally positive impact on the society.

140+ IQs are way more common than grants. The odds among geniuses of being accepted are low.

that's the problem. high IQs are not that rare.

Also, we're talking enough money to live comfortably off of

There’s about 330,000 people in the US with an IQ above 145.

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