Want Your Country to Thrive? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income
bloomberg.com
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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.
With something like CBDC that would be pretty simple to solve.
> 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.
> 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.
This is my argument for it as well. There should be universal programs available to help with social mobility, help for those that want to make a change in their lives, in any direction.
There is no need to tie someone down working full time just to pay for the basics, when they could be obtaining an education.
Career changes should be easier to do as well, for example someone who would want to go from IT to Construction or another trade. It might pay well eventually, but the ramp up can take a while and there may not be another breadwinner in the house. There should be assistance for those who want to do something new and contribute to society in the way that works best for them, without burdening their family.
Brazil has a conditional cash transfer program called Bolsa Família, and this is one of the things pointed out in a couple studies - that the family used the extra cash to look for better jobs and training instead of working every day just to feed themselves.
In theory, yes. But I do not believe specialized welfare will ever go away. There are people on Social Security / Disability that absolutely require more than the most basic amount of money a typical non-handicapped citizen needs. I do not believe UBI supporters, and even society at large, would be so heartless as to tell a paraplegic to make-do because the UBI is all they are going to get. So, accommodating them would require some additional administration on top of the UBI to make sure the people with special needs get enough additional money and access to medical care. At which point we would still need to evaluate eligibility, make adjustments, and have a bureaucracy to administer it.
You can also tax things indirectly or in a more abstract way like a VAT or corporate taxes.
Voters keeping taxes too low is a problem for us too though.
Calibrating the base income is tricky.
It also scales to how much you “put in”.
Therefore wouldn’t have the same inflationary impact that a truly universal income would have.
Some things are already linked to inflation like Taxes, Social Security, etc.
Your response of inflation adjustment doesn’t address the concern of high, unchecked inflation caused by injecting more money into the economy: If everyone has more money, then prices will creep up as businesses realize they can ask for more.
My primary concern is that program like these makes everyone (especially workers) other than the very wealthiest, extremely poor.
We already see the effects of this from Trump’s Covid payments.
People thought the same thing would happen with Social Security, which is tied to inflation. It didn't happen. Though it of course generally only applies to a portion of the population, where a UBI would apply to everyone.
Let's assume your doom and gloom is true, that everyone gets a UBI that is linked to inflation and inflation goes up by 5%/yr instead of the target 2%/yr. The UBI payment will also go up 5% yr, so it can't possibly make people worse off, since the UBI payment will go up along with the inflation, just like social security. So this inflation would ruin the low-income is ridiculous on it's face. Of course it could become a death spiral, and we have ever increasing inflation, and ever increasing UBI payments. Eventually we would have to hit an equilibrium somehow.
Despite common opinion, we really know very, very little about inflation. So far we only know the broad strokes: large demand and low supply. We think high interest rates stop inflation(as it has worked historically, by supposedly drying up demand). We also think people's perception of inflation is also very important somehow. We also just sort of assume 2%/yr inflation is a great thing(a number that was mostly invented out of thin air it turns out). That's about all we really know, but there are lots and lots of possible theories out there, like the covid payments somehow caused inflation. It's possible, but the evidence is hardly rock solid. So many other things also happened that could be the cause or part of the cause as well.
So called experts will crow on and on about their knowledge of inflation and common lay-people assume they know it all as well, but honest academics will mostly shrug and say, we don't really understand it at all, because it's a weird mix of behavioural and traditional economics that is very hard to test, so all we have are some historical data points, each one different than the last enough that it's hard to say much with certainty anything about inflation.
Personally, if we stop all the other systems we have to help out the less well off, and replace it all with what is essentially an expansion of SSI, then chances are we would be better off, if only because of the savings the govt would have in not having to run and staff all of the current programs and simplifying all the rules around SSI we already have.
Of course all of this is a moot point, since there is zero chance the current political parties will ever come together thinking UBI is a good idea.
Not true. We understand the causes of inflation.
Creating models that accurately forecasts inflation is a different matter, and it’s not helped by big financial actors manipulating and hiding their actions.
The reasons Social Security doesn’t lead to rampant inflation is because Social Security is funded by the working age residents—decreasing the disposable income available to peak spenders at their peak consumption age.
And also because it’s distributed starting at an ever increasing age so it’s far from universal.
If UBI becomes necessary nationwide due to the “investment class” owning everything, that’s a sign that our system has failed completely.
Perhaps it’s inevitable.
I assume you are talking about the monetary theory of inflation, MV=PY? I've never met an economist that thinks it tells the whole story. John Cochrane(a world class economist) is in the process of writing a new book that covers inflation, and he doesn't think he has all the answers.
You and the rest of the "we" in your sentence needs to publish some academic papers informing the rest of us, as we clearly didn't get the memo.
> The reasons Social Security doesn’t lead to rampant inflation is because Social Security is funded by the working age residents
It's just a different form of a tax, perhaps it's sold to the people differently enough that they think of it the way you think of it, but it doesn't change the economics any. Taxes pay for it just like taxes would pay for a UBI.
Okay. But your position is that we know nothing about inflation. Which simply isn’t true.
Since you’re name dropping John Cochrane (I don’t subscribe to said individual, but you seem to respect them): https://www.johnhcochrane.com/research-all/fiscal-inflation from an essay: “The future is not hopeless. Inflation control simply requires our government, including the central bank, to understand classic lessons of history. Forestalling inflation is a joint task of fiscal, monetary, and micro-economic policy. Stabilizing inflation once it gets out of control is a joint task of fiscal, monetary, and micro-economic policy. Expectations are “anchored” if people believe such policy is in place, and politicians and Fed officials are ready to act if needed.”
That doesn’t read like inflation is some vast, major unknown.
What I think you’re saying is that our knowledge and models of inflation are imperfect, therefore we can’t say with certainty that UBI will cause inflation.
Which is essentially the same as “I don’t know.”
> You and the rest of the "we" in your sentence needs to publish some academic papers informing the rest of us, as we clearly didn't get the memo.
I asked a question; you provided non-answer; when you push the SS narrative I posit why SS is a poor analogy.
Trump’s covid payment is far closer to UBI.
> It's just a different form of a tax, perhaps it's sold to the people differently enough that they think of it the way you think of it, but it doesn't change the economics any. Taxes pay for it just like taxes would pay for a UBI.
I’m pointing out that SS is nothing like UBI, unless you’re saying that UBI is also meant for a subset of the population.
I’m well aware of the dent it makes in my paycheck.
What to do with the surplus population? The simplest solution is to give them money. It really doesn't matter what form it takes, so long as there's a way to get food and material needs met once robots take all the jobs.
Food we’re producing efficiently but housing & land, clothes, potable water, and infrastructure not so much.
It's not evenly distributed yet but the future is here: radio-networked pocket supercomputers; print-on-demand machines, and DNA; etc...
> housing & land, clothes, potable water, and infrastructure
Except for land itself, all of those things have become exponentially cheaper in the last few decades. That is, cheaper to make. Housing in particular is kept artificially scarce, largely due to its role as a financial instrument.
You have that backwards.
Housing is a financial instrument, because demand for housing remains high in specific areas; far in excess of supply.
Choose a less popular rust-belt city and the home cost will be one third to one quarter of the coastal cities.
Housing is also expensive because of the labor involved.
Most proposals suggest indexing UBI to inflation, but it seems like a period of severe inflation has the potential to rapidly turn into hyperinflation.
Assuming a UBI were implemented, I have a feeling keeping up with inflation would prove to be such a challenge that proposals would be made to issue people vouchers for specific goods in lieu of continually adjusting the dollar amount based on the market price of those goods. I can easily see a government choosing to nationalize some of the factories that produce essential consumer goods like toothpaste or toilet paper as a way of controlling costs. A market would still probably exist for 'premium' non-free versions of the same goods.
A voucher for basics makes sense, though that basically means a dual-currency system. We’re subsidizing agriculture so it’s really just smoke-and-mirrors.
Housing and land would still remain a problem, however.
I have no answers, but I want neither extremes of winner-takes-all capitalism; nor a pure socialist system.
That was an UBI for households with dependent children.
The argument for inflation is hard to refute given how short the program ran.
The effect was that some parents could now afford to work. Perhaps, daycare rates go up to consume that $300 but unlikely as it is already a tight margin business as are many business and services.
There is nothing in capitalism that says UBI must lead to inflation.
All economic systems are built on rationale actors.
It more like it will create artificial price ceilings.
Let's say the government gives everyone a $300 voucher for daycare.
Savvy business people are going to find a way to run a daycare for $300 per kid and collect that sweet government backed cash flow and lock their services to that amount.
The cash flow from the first $300 is guaranteed by the federal government. Anything over $300 requires a separate billing process.
At $305 that is $5 that requires an additional billing setup.
There would be a gap before the return would be worth it.
A scientific approach would be to weigh the cost between UBI and our current solutions. Unfortunately, politicians typically only favor the science that backs their ideology.
Currently there are already subsidizes in place, some people can qualify for reduced daycare rates. This is the bureaucratic way to implement such support, there is massive overhead as there are many people in the middle ensuring that all the paperwork is perfect.
What is the total cost of delivering these reduced rates vs a UBI for children?
Are we doing the more frugal approach? Almost certainly not. A swath of American's stop expecting a functioning federal government and things have stagnated since.
This is exactly what is happening in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The government employs people who have zero-accountability (often not even requiring attendance at work), so it resembles UBI much more than a bullshit job. Saudi Arabia has actually recently been transitioning to true UBI with their Citizens Account program
Citing Qatar and Saudi Arabia is not an endorsement of any kind, as both of those countries are quite extensive exploiters of what is essentially slave labour.
One political party doesn't want to give money away.
The other one will gladly pass out cash but only if the program is means-tested.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think this is a good argument against UBI when so much of our labor force is engaged in meaningless work, or what late anthropologist David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs”. [1]
I can imagine it could make some people be perceived as lazy because they now have the freedom to do anything else besides push papers 40 hours a week and that paradigm shift could induce depression because so many people lose themselves while surviving capitalism. That said, there is already a pandemic of depression (4.7% of American adults)[2] that is likely highly correlated to the mentioned phenomena. As the corpus of mental health literature increases, it becomes more and more apparent laziness and depression are not moral failings, but societal failings emerging from the Capitalist-Protestant work ethic [conjecture].
UBI won’t change human nature’s drive to improve material conditions. It will allow many people the ability to pursue meaningful enterprise and self-actualization. For those without the drive to participate in the rat race, I would congratulate their enlightenment instead of accusing them of laziness.
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.
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.
Conflating growing up poor with growing up with abuse is incorrect.
Obviously it would be a wide range of stuff to argue about but still your example sounds more to me like something we won't have that much data on, relatively speaking.
I would imagine this holds true for other definitions of genius, but I haven't seen quantitative data on it.
It's easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that a person who is dimmer than us is cognitively challenged; it's much harder to assess the smarts of someone who is smarter than us. Is he 1% smarter than me? 10% smarter? Hell, 100% smarter? All I know is that he understands stuff that I don't, and solves crosswords faster. But I don't believe that anyone is so much smarter than the average that they need to be paid 100x what I could earn.
I like this example, especially, as we're all aware, you can get better at both crosswords and IQ tests with practice.
Identify A as smarter than B
A identifies A’ A’ identifies A’’ …
There’s no need to know the quantified smartness, just the ordinal smartness.
Why not? You accept that some individuals are off the scale of various physical abilities. That try as you might, you'll never be the fastest or tallest or strongest.
What makes intelligence different? Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
If you are mediocre in obvious ways, what's left? Everyone wants to be good at something. Everyone wants to be better at something than others. But it is fairly obvious with anything with a physical component. I am a mediocre guitar player. I am not tall. I am not fast. I am not exceptionally strong. These are things that can be sussed out fairly quickly with some basic tests.
But intelligence. Well. That's not only fluid, but it's also abstract. What does it mean to have an IQ of 129 versus an IQ of 130. Especially when one could score both depending on how much sleep one has had. So you can just say IQ is bullshit. Intelligence don't real. Everyone is smart in their own way.
No. That's just simply not true. Yes, one could test differently based on conditions. However, it will fall within a range. Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range. If you score a 129, you'll be within the 125-135 group or something.
And it's just like with physical traits. Like right now, I will be much slower than normal because my quadriceps are fucking cooked. I overexerted myself and I'm sore as shit. Even though I am not normally fast, timing me now wouldn't give an accurate representation of my average speed.
And you can tell when someone has spent any time among the truly gifted. Because running into people like this is something else. They will come into a situation blind, get what you've already gotten, and then make a realization you'd never would have. They do process on a different level. And it's not about knowledge. It's not how much they know. It's about how fast they can acquire that knowledge, understand it, and then build upon it. It's how they can relate knowledge from different areas in new and novel ways. People who have spent time with the truly gifted know there's a such thing as intelligence. People who have only spent time with people who are average to above average have never actually seen intelligence at work.
No I don't!
I'm getting on, and not very fit; I can run about 30 yards, slowly, before I run out of steam. But even Olympic runners can't run 100x faster than me. I know how fast Olympic runners can run.
> Why should we believe that everyone is roughly equal in intelligence?
Why, indeed. Why do you think that I believe that?
> Which is why IQ is often expressed as a range.
I have avoided mention of IQ; I don't think it's equivalent to intelligence.
> and then make a realization you'd never would have.
Yes, of course. I've met a lot of people that are quicker on the uptake than I am. But I'm sorry; "truly gifted" suggests there's some kind of magic going on. I don't believe in magic, and I don't believe in gifts from the gods. And I don't believe that there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; my observation was simply that average people like me aren't in a position to estimate the smarts of brighter people. So there is a tendency to assume there's magic occurring; that they aren't just brighter, but there's some other ingredient.
There's no magic ingredient; we're all made roughly the same way, from the same ingredients.
There's no magic. Just like the fact Usain Bolt running the 100m dash in 9.58 seconds isn't magic. No one else has been capable of reproducing that feat. Including people who train to do exactly that.
And I don't suggest there is magic. You're forcing an argument on me that I am not making.
IQ is as good a measure of intelligence as there is. IQ is not a measure of human worth. IQ is not a measure of success. IQ is not a measure of a lot of things. IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
I am simply pointing out that intelligence is no different than any other attribute one can possess. And some people possess it at the extremes.
Sure it is. But it's not orders of magnitude.
> IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
[citation needed] That claim is both specific and vague at the same time. I'll try to work out how you did that :-)
And how do you mean "specific and vague".
IQ isn't precise because like all of our physical attributes, there's wiggle room. Like how you may think you're a certain height, but you actually fluctuate throughout the day. Same with weight. Or strength. Or speed. IQ is a rough measure. It can really only tell us what you get when you take the test. But if you take it several times, it should fall within a range.
And a good IQ test shouldn't test knowledge. It should test reasoning, spatial ability, pattern matching, etc. You know, the factors that make up our raw processing power.
Are you saying it's "specific and vague" because it's an imprecise measure of a specific ability? That wouldn't be "specific and vague" in the way you mean. You could say it's a vague claim about a specific thing, but that's not mysterious.
> Then you say that you don't believe there are people that are orders of magnitude smarter than the average. There are.
So you're stating that some people are orders of magnitude smarter than the average; but you've adduced no evidence. I don't agree; you're making the claim, so the burden is on you.
> IQ is the rough measure of the raw processing power of a human brain.
That's a very specific claim. I know what "raw processing power" means in the context of a CPU, and I know of various ways of measuring it. But a brain is not a CPU. It's not a processor; arguably what it does is not similar to information processing.
I used to think this as well, having gone to a famous university. Some people just seemed to get it much faster than others.
With some hindsight I no longer believe it. I think it was all hard work, and very much influenced by environment.
One guy I knew seemed really quite bright, always seemed to know everything. Ended up getting a PhD as well. But I realized that he basically just studied a lot. I wanted to think he was smarter than me, but I also knew inside I wasn't putting in the same amount of practice he was.
I brought the same fellow into a business to work with me, and he was ordinary. Couldn't have known that he was one of the top grads of two world famous universities, just one among a sea of reasonably competent quants. I'm fairly sure a lot of firms make this mistake as well, they think they need the people who did best at uni, but actually it has a lot to do with what you do with people, who you stick them with, what training they get, and so on.
The thing about highly productive creatives is they seem to have special motivation. They ome into some field, they see connections, they are more motivated to read more, talk to more people, study more. That seems to be the driver. I never saw anyone good that was just smart but not engaged as well.
And while that exact stretch remains unbroken, similar levels of dominance in the game are typical. Kasparov was world champion for 15 years. And in current times Magnus Carlsen has been world champion for about a decade, and #1 in the world (by a wide margin) for years beyond that.
On things we can't measure, one can observe facts like the open problem that Einstein would go on to solve (in his twenties, while working at a patent office) was being dug into by countless brilliant minds, to no avail, since Einstein was 8 years old! And his work after that point makes it clear it wasn't just a freak coincidence.
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I definitely do think there are plenty who are "that much" smarter than average, but I don't think they need to be paid to succeed. Nor do I think one having an official affirmation that he is a "genius" is conducive to clear-headedness. It naturally drives a sense of entitlement, and can be detrimental to actually putting in the work necessary to make things happen. All the potential in the world is irrelevant without a corresponding work ethic.
But how many chess grandmasters are also fabulously wealthy CEOs? They tend to stay chess-players.
I'm curious about what skill in chess consists of. It seems to correspond to general cognitive capacity; but that's certainly not all of it.
It's difficult to explain if you've never really gotten seriously into chess, but the game is, by far, one of the most satisfying and rewarding activities in existence. You can put infinite mental energy into the game and continue to get ever more out of it. It is extremely addictive, especially once one reaches a certain level in the game. If I had the choice of retiring to a life endless beaches and scantily clad ladies delivering me all the drinks and pleasures of life one could imagine, or retiring to a [safe] ghetto full of nothing but old highly skilled chess players - I would pick #2 in a heart beat.
There are plenty of chess player anecdotes along the lines of Gata Kamsky. He became frustrated with his progress in chess at some point (as one of the best in the world, but not the best in the world) and just casually decided to become a lawyer. So he did that and breezed through law school and set himself to a traditional path of money and even power. But, as is always the end of these stories, the game called him back. Today he streams himself playing chess for hours a day (on Twitch) to an audience of tens and is clearly more content and satisfied than ever.
Yeah, but a power scale implies that there are outliers at any distance from the median. That can't be true, so the model is defective.
I could try to explain what those numbers mean mathematically, but I think there's an even easier way to get the gist of it. There are hundreds of of thousands of FIDE rated players. That #1 player's rating is 2859. For him to be 50 points higher than the #2 player is insane in terms of any notion of broad-level approximate human equality, but perfectly normal in the not-even-remotely-equal reality of what we see in chess.
And this is mirrored everywhere, even in sports where the physical limitations on the body are presumably more limiting than the cognitive ones. Running is nice because it's a field where we are going to miss close to 0 outliers, and you can fairly compare generations regardless of time.
Imagine we take Usain Bolt at his peak, and have him run a 200m race against the 200th fastest human to have ever lived at his peak. People might expect this to be a pretty close race. In reality? He'd finish about 9.8 meters, more than 32 feet ahead of the other guy. It would look like 'fast' guy vs 'meh, more or less average' guy. When in reality that 'more or less average' guy is one of the fastest humans to have ever lived!
That is what I'm saying about smart people; I don't accept that there are people arbitrarily smarter than the average. My guess is that the cutoff is somewhere around double the average (modulo your method for measuring smartness).
It is a textbook power law. There are only 2 humans better than 2800, and one is pushing near 2900. Then there are only 37 humans from 2700-2799, 168 from 2600-2699 and so on with an increasingly exponential gain in brackets near the median. And each bracket tends to be exceptionally dominant of brackets just one below, let alone more.
A finite sample means any distribution will have a min and a max. If the odds of a Magnus are 1 in 10 billion, then we can expect to see one person of a roughly proportional skill every generation or two. But if the odds of the next tier of exponentially dominating outlier out are 1 in 500 billion then any given generation of humanity would be unlikely to see one, at least not until we start dramatically increasing our population sizes.
But in reality the top is not approximately equal. In chess there are hundreds of thousands of rated players. The #1 player is rated 50 points higher than the #2 player. The #1 player is rated 2859. Think about the implications of those three facts! And this is likely precisely the case with Einstein, and also the reason for his success.
Back to current times/domain I'd also argue this is why having exponentially more scientists than ever before has not really led to what somebody who assumed a normal distribution would expect to see.
You get picked for the team because you're a little bit better than number 2, you feel motivated, you get more training... down the road you are a lot better.
Sports especially is filled with these kinds of stories.
Even in the chess world, "prodigies" are a dime a dozen and Magnus was a relatively late bloomer among his peers. Magnus received his International Master title (the second highest title in chess, prior to Grandmaster) at a later age than Sergey Karjakin, a fellow prodigy, received his Grandmaster title. He also achieved victory coming from a country that had relatively little chess culture. Grandmasters coming from countries with greater chess culture would have had access to greater resources, minds, coaching, and opportunities.
But this isn't a negative, you're proposing that there's some sort of strong connection between observable potentials and eventual outcomes, am I right? So now we need the evidence.
Sports is a great place to look btw. The history of recruiting busts in the sports world simply incredible. People they guessed wrong on: Tom Brady, Ravel Morrison, Johnny Manziel, Carlos Bacca, just to give you a false positive and a false negative in two different sports.
It just seems to me that is really isn't all that obvious who might be really good, and so we should spread our bets rather than concentrate on a few promising geniuses.
> For instance Einstein...
So how does this say anything about skill? Couldn't he just be a low-probability ticket that won? There were other people looking at similar ideas at the time.
> Even in the chess world...
Thing is chess is international now, Magnus could be Norwegian but very cheaply access chess culture from other countries. Maybe in an earlier era this argument made sense. But just like in football, it's international now and people aren't surprised by regional styles.
And in any case, for people that are "off the charts" - they aren't going to have difficulty excelling in a capitalist economic system, nearly regardless of their humbleness of their beginnings. I would even be inclined to argue that acknowledging somebody as "genius" and plying them with money is more likely to lead to distorted rather than enhanced development. Just because somebody may be several sigmas from the mean cognitively, doesn't mean that they're immune to the trappings any human may succumb to: ego, vice, hedonism, entitlement, laziness, and so on.
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As for your response, I find it uncompelling. You're trying to argue that there's some childhood butterfly effect that drives outcomes, while hand-waving away major factors that would imperil development (from an environmental POV). Similarly, the 'dart-throw theory' doesn't hold as it wasn't only Einstein's initial ideas that were exceptional - but rather a persisted trend throughout his entire career.
He published more than 450 papers over his 50 year career, with countless revolutionary discoveries. For some context, that's an academic output rate of publishing 0.75 papers per month, for his entire life until his death bed. It's not like he made one great discovery and then coasted on his laurels while reminiscing about the past. His "miracle year", for instance, while working at a patent office, involved the publication of 4 distinct (and ground-breaking) papers! All without any real access to academic resources, or even peers to really bounce ideas off of.
I'd rather work with a random person who grew up on a farm or the streets than someone who had the best tutors and went to Harvard. People who have to work hard, who grow up hard, are hardened against the world. They learn to survive.
Most of our best entrepreneurs and builders grow up building and being independent. To be independent you have to learn to survive on your own, i.e. not with UBI. I'd rather have a higher level competition, not selecting based on IQ.
In way of an example, a friend of mine who worked blue collar his whole life (running large repairs & logistics operations) ended up moving up the command. Eventually, he ended up in a consulting capacity as part of an R&D team for a massive logistics company. His first day on the job he saved an average of 2 lives a year and around $5m.
He was given the job of improving a warehouse with a bunch of newly hired kids from Yale, Harvard, etc. The kids spent weeks going over all the different locations, trying to optimize layout, etc.
Eventually, my friend just talked to people on the floor. At one point, he noticed a fork lift operator who was having an issue picking up a pallet off a truck. He asked what the issue was and the fork life operator said they didn't know exactly where the height of the pallet is. The ivy league consultants started planning out using cameras to select the correct height(s), looked at the budget associated with hiring developers, tried to identify the costs to retrofit all the fork lifts, etc.
While that went on, my friend got two magnet strips, put some bright tape on the back, measured and put the magnet at the exact height the truck bed and as the pallets were a default height he knew where to put the next strip. Every new truck that came in would just move both strips based on the new truck height. He was done that afternoon and it was a $5 retrofit.
On average, 2-3 workers died a year at all their warehouses due to pallets being knocked down, losses were an estimated $5m.
The point of the story is that "genius" doesn't work better than practical problem solving. Problem solving comes from learning to survive and be independent.
Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.
Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.
> 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.
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
On the other hand, don't most IQ tests have elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms? E.g., handwriting an ungraded written portion?
It seems perfectly plausible that repeatedly taking IQ tests would likely result in a higher score due to practice and familiarity. Especially if there is a significant financial incentive involved and someone is on the border of qualifying for it.
I'm not concerned with trainability. Lots of minimum bars are trainable, like the bar exam, or the Marine Corps PFT/IST. The fact that they're trainable doesn't mean the measures are invalid w/r/t minimum competence as a lawyer, or minimum fitness as a Marine. Similarly, I don't think trainability on tests of logical reasoning, pattern recognition, reading comprehension, memory, etc. necessarily meaningfully reduces the effectiveness of the tests that measure such things. On the contrary, I think it shows that intelligence increases when exercised.
IQ is the most reproducible finding in psychology and psychometrics by far.
It is influenced by all sorts of factors, from parental income to nutrition.
My family has folks in psych, and they universally regard IQ as "pretty bad, but useful for roughly measuring one form of intelligence".
What a weird line of reasoning. So are rocket propulsion, gold, and English language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect?wprov=sfla1
you must be joking right
It's a much more complicated topic than your comment would suggest. The very definition of "intelligence" in regards to the iq test is fuzzy and ill -defined.
Not to mention that Alfie Binet (created the iq test) believed the test itself to be insufficient, and asserted that any true measure of intelligence could not be quantitative.
The references in the article might be good sources, but they too often do not actually support the article.
This type of circularity is willful submission to the algorithm. We reduce the richness of human cognition only so it can be bureaucratized (e.g. tie it to some fiscal benefit like UBI). It is not fair in any humane (as opposed to mechanical) sense.
There's good science in Psychology, even if the field as a whole is suffering the replication crisis. Some parts of cognitive psychology such as studies in reaction times, memory, and perception are very reproducible. Classic conditioning is a standard in animal training.
Psychology as a whole has a bed reputation, and it has received solid criticism. I think a lot of it has to do with a few high profile frauds, bad translational science (theory to application), perverse publication incentives in academia, and the tendency for non-scientist to use questionable findings to justify their opinions.
IQ is only propaganda for an ideology.
There's a loud chorus saying that. Mostly they're making excuses for some racial group not doing well.
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.
Well, are you still a cook now?
A program like this is focused on the disproportionate number of home runs it would produce, fully expecting some to strike out.
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.
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.
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?
I'm anti-UBI. I've been open about that for years.
I would like to bring back SROs* in walkable, mixed-used neighborhoods and improve public transit and cycling infrastructure, and make food stamps more or less a "You want them? Just ask." kind of thing. I think if we had sufficiently cheap housing where you could comfortably live without a car and you could be guaranteed to eat, that would be a better means to provide the social stability and social mobility that UBI proponents seem to be shooting for with what is, in my opinion, a thoroughly broken mental model for a long list of reasons.
There are already programs to grant "geniuses" money. I'm cool with that. Those programs generally seem to have a thorough selection process, something this article very much lacks.
If you are picking "the best of the best" from Harvard to give money to, you already know just about anyone at Harvard will do something useful with that money and not spend it on the oft joked about "hookers and cocaine" that some lottery winners more or less actually do spend their money on.
We are awash in vast societal wealth. We need to find better ways to put in a floor for "everybody" (while recognizing that no matter what you do, some people will be "problem children" and you will need to find ways to cut them out so as to try to force them to behave) while making sure we aren't destroying society in the process.
I do not believe this idea of just passing out cash for supposed "genius" based on IQ tests has any merit at all. The historical examples cited in the article as things that worked well for that place and time were not examples of passing out cash for "smarts." It was passing out cash to smart people who did things.
Yes, on the one hand, people gotta eat and yadda. On the other hand, there is the Duke Nukem Forever phenomenon where seemingly endless cash meant that they didn't ship until the company was nearly broke again.
Money can be very useful stuff. Lots of problems don't budge merely because you throw money at them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
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?
I don't actually understand what you are asking. You would need to clarify.
Ya, I am a HUGE fan of reconsidering fundamentals.
Have you ever noticed that almost no one considers the current way we do things to be immutable, as if it had been passed down from God himself? Like when people are talking about what we should do about homeless people, and how we can't house them because that would cost too much money.....like, might it be possible that there's something in between sleeping on the sidewalk and a condo? If we were to look around the world or even in our own history, might we notice that there is a broad spectrum of forms of housing? This very simple principle applies everywhere - I swear, it seems to me like I live on a planet of walking zombies with a thin layer of personality over top. If people just arrived here on Earth (but with the same computational horsepower), do you think everyone would find things as acceptable and non-batshit-insane as they do now, after slowly simmering in this insane broth for an entire lifetime?
> There are already programs to grant "geniuses" money. I'm cool with that. Those programs generally seem to have a thorough selection process, something this article very much lacks.
And what do they produce: more of the same, well within the boundaries of the Overton Window.
> We are awash in vast societal wealth. We need to find better ways to put in a floor for "everybody" (while recognizing that no matter what you do, some people will be "problem children" and you will need to find ways to cut them out so as to try to force them to behave) while making sure we aren't destroying society in the process.
You should come visit Canada - here, we "are" "better" than the Americans with their small-minded selfishness....meanwhile, our super duper "free" medical system is falling apart, people are dying in hallways waiting for treatment, tent cities are now common across the country, and so forth and so on. Simultaneously, 30% or so of the population have become (multi-)millionaires based on being in the right place at the right time: buying real estate. And the kicker: no capital gains tax for one's primary residence - that is considered craaaaaaaazy to both rich and poor, whereas having to kick 40% of your hard earned income into the kitty is "just common sense, thou shalt not question it".
> I don't actually understand what you are asking. You would need to clarify.
As far as I can tell: not only do humans have near zero self-awareness, they have an extremely strong aversion to the very notion.
I believe things are much worse than they appear on the surface - were it not for the boosts we've enjoyed from science, engineering, plentiful commodities (a state of affairs that is not guaranteed), and formerly "ok" leadership, I think we'd be much more fucked than we are....a situation that I believe we are going to see start to seriously manifest in the next few decades, if not sooner. I would not be surprised if things started unravelling even in the next few years.
Homelessness is a complex topic. It's hard to wrap one's brain around it. Trying to adequately analyze a complex topic and then effectively communicate about it with people who haven't studied it the way you have for years is actually, like, hard.
People want to think it's not. Unlike, say, Physics, they want to think something social like that is simple to understand or whatever. It's really not.
My answer to something "between the sidewalk and a condo" is updating the concept of the SRO and bringing them back. We've torn down about a million of them in the US in recent decades.
And what do they produce: more of the same, well within the boundaries of the Overton Window.
Yet another reason to not want to pay people merely to "be smart." Solid solutions typically come from the margins and from people directly impacted by the pain points enough that they have skin in the game and can't just walk away, no matter how much they might wish they could.
our super duper "free" medical system is falling apart
Health care and medical care are not the same thing. There is vast room for improvement in non-medical health care which has tremendous potential to alleviate some of the stressors on modern medical systems while improving quality of life and reducing costs.
I believe things are much worse than they appear on the surface
I'm an optimist whose father fought in the front lines of two wars -- including WW2 -- and was decorated both times. Humans have faced potentially world-ending crises before and risen to the occasion. I see no reason why it can't be done again.
I've studied what we (in the US) did for WW2 and I don't see any reason we can't do a lot of those things again. We raised Victory Gardens. We made work spaces female-friendly with on-site daycare and such. We converted all our efforts to solving the problem and it got solved and the prosperity of the 50s and 60s was rooted in what we did during the war.
We did a whole lot and I get tired of trying to repeat it. It's the kind of thing you can write entire books about and still miss stuff and a comment on a forum never does it justice and is exhausting to write.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic also used to be hard, until we started teaching people how to do it. Perhaps thinking is similar? (Sorry for the animosity, I'm angry at the system, not you.)
> People want to think it's not. Unlike, say, Physics, they want to think something social like that is simple to understand or whatever. It's really not.
I wonder if our love affair with science that works in a (relatively) simple, deterministic problem space might have stunted our ability to realize the complexity we're swimming in. I think it would be hilarious if by jumping out of the frying pan that is religion, we've ended up in the fire of another delusional ideology.
> My answer to something "between the sidewalk and a condo" is updating the concept of the SRO and bringing them back. We've torn down about a million of them in the US in recent decades.
Agree, but I think it may be useful to set aside some cycles for considering associated phenomena: why can so few people understand that cost of solutions is a super big deal? I agree that things like SROs are rarely discussed...but why is this the case? Why can smart people not realize the significance in this scenario (cost control is taken very, very seriously during implementation design elsewhere)?
Or more generically: what is it about the mind that causes it to execute computation so differently depending on the topic of discussion, and why can so few people recognize this phenomenon (why does the mind refuse to examine itself)?
> Yet another reason to not want to pay people merely to "be smart." Solid solutions typically come from the margins and from people directly impacted by the pain points enough that they have skin in the game and can't just walk away, no matter how much they might wish they could.
Yup....yet we continue to do the opposite of what is obviously smart.
> Health care and medical care are not the same thing. There is vast room for improvement in non-medical health care which has tremendous potential to alleviate some of the stressors on modern medical systems while improving quality of life and reducing costs.
Agree, but the end result remains: our super duper "free" medical system is falling apart.
> I'm an optimist whose father fought in the front lines of two wars -- including WW2 -- and was decorated both times. Humans have faced potentially world-ending crises before and risen to the occasion. I see no reason why it can't be done again.
I worry that we are (currently) not adequately the same as we used to be. It's true that the laws of physics don't stop us, but there certainly seems to be some kind of force(s) in play that render us incapable of getting out of the trap we've maneuvered ourselves into, and seem intent on staying in (shitposting on the internet about the members of your ideological outgroups may seem like doing something positive, but I suspect it is not actually).
> I've studied what we (in the US) did for WW2 and I don't see any reason we can't do a lot of those things again. We raised Victory Gardens. We made work spaces female-friendly with on-site daycare and such. We converted all our efforts to solving the problem and it got solved and the prosperity of the 50s and 60s was rooted in what we did during the war.
Simplistically:
Step 1: set a goal.
Step 2: achieve that goal.
Not working? Add Step 0: be actually serious, stop communicating in the form of truthy but not actually true statements, like we do with great success in science, engineering, etc.
> We did a whole lot and I get tired of trying to repeat it. It's the kind of thing you can write entire books about and still miss stuff and a comment on a forum never does it justice and is exhausting to write.
I wonder: are internet forums the peak of human communication? Perhaps we haven't maxed out what is possible.
I'm sort of amused and wondering if some detail failed to communicate effectively.
I've had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy as part of pursuing an unfinished Bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management with a Concentration in Housing as part of a plan to eventually get a Master's in Urban Planning. I've studied housing issues for years, both formally and informally, and I spent years homeless and I'm pretty happy with where I am on the topic and with my efforts to find a path forward.
Nonetheless, it remains challenging to try to effectively communicate with other people who don't have the background knowledge I have and be adequately succinct while effectively making a point. You need to master the lingo and figure out how to side-step language that just causes conversations to go pointlessly sideways and get nowhere and it's still actually hard work to do that.
I spend less time these days trying to talk at internet strangers on public forums (about housing issues/homelessness) and more time trying to flesh out Project: SRO. I think in the long run, that's a more effective use of my time that has some hope of accomplishing something, someday.
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.
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.
Unconditional as in mousetrap cheese it will be.
This is a great thing to make every growing children to be trained / optimized for one or some specific things only.
- Stephen Jay Gould
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.
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.
Lots of people who graduated with me followed the same path for the same reason
If one does not try something, should one expect there to be evidence of how well it works?
> People with a particular drive are the ones who find a way.
Tautological thinking can be useful, but it is a double edged sword.
> 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.
Agreed, perhaps there is a lack of instruction in how to think in an exploratory manner. Maybe we are too short term results oriented.
> Will some opportunities have been missed? Yes, but that’s life.
a) Confident delusional beliefs about free will aside, it is at least plausible that the state of affairs at any given snapshot in time is a consequence of our actions that preceded it.
b) People in relatively comfortable positions often are more comfortable with the current state of affairs than those who are not in a comfortable position.
> Nature isn’t about maximizing everything.
It also isn't (or doesn't have to be) about having no interest in optimizing the environment in a manner that benefits all people, but it seems this is the local maxima we're stuck at, for now.
The market is imperfect (as we see it's attracting outsized talent to selling crass ads) and on the other hand, central planning/state enterprises (Soviet-style) also has shortcomings which are even worse --though they do well in developing talent for where it's needed (however they are bad at figuring out 'needs') and suffers from gross mismanagement in operations.
So, given the above, it would seem there is a place for a middle-ground somewhere, I just don't see the magic in UBI necessary to achieve that.
One option is what kind of exists in certain underattracted/underserved areas where the government underwrites someone's education in return for service. So there are grants one can receive in exchange for service commitment after graduation. Obviously you can't "play around" and try to figure out if you like something and then something else... You have to know what you want.
Fundamentally, we seem to be unable to consider whether our approach is wrong, never mind where we're going to get the money.
And as for me: I do not believe this to be an accident, and I do not believe it to be only those dirty Republicans / religious people: I think western culture itself is a fucking disaster that needs to be rewritten from the ground up.
You keep using that world.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
But to make it work, it has to be Universal, i.e. everyone gets it automatically.
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.
The thing about UBI is that it takes away financial terror from everyone; whatever happens, you won't have to beg on the pavement. Socialized health assures you that you won't be forced to sell your family's home if you get ill.
It's hard to measure the value of these social goods, so they don't get measured. But they are undeniably goods.
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!
So Einstein doesn't have to waste his time pushing papers in the patent office.
Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
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.
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.
The solution is to remove restrictions like "we will only give you disability/medicare if you have less than $2000 in 'non-acceptable' assets", or "you can only get food stamps if you make less than $20k/yr" or any number of horribly terrible things we do that effectively give very poor people, in an economic sense, marginal tax rates much much greater than 100%.
Punishing people for making more money is never the solution. Honestly this is one reason why UBI is so enticing... any benefit that is abruptly taken away at any point creates these horrible incentives.
I know someone who is on social security disability. They can't even save money to buy a car without losing their benefits. For medical reasons, they are unable to work a full-time job, but they could possibly work virtually part time. But if they even apply to a job they lose their benefits. And the amount they get from social security isn't even enough to pay housing and medical expenses, nevermind food. If they didn't have external support they'd be SOL.
That is not common knowledge where I am from and would like to see what scientific studies have determined.
At least for me personally, I doubt that would be true. Having a guaranteed basic support and healthcare for me family as a safety net would allow me to take more risks such as starting a company or joining a startup.
I know I have to spread out my vacation. If I take more than a few days at a time, I get bored and start tinkering on a hobby project.
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.
- 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Someone has to do all this yucky boring work and by golly it's not going to be me! Out of sight, out of mind.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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).
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?
Create more geniuses, and more clever people in general.
By the way, do people at Google still get 1 day to work on their own projects?
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.
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...
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.
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.
I feel like this scenario was already played out by the dystopian postapocalyptic Brazilian sci-fi show 3%.
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.
Not that requiring geniuses to be career academics makes much sense, in any case.
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?
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".
"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.
So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?