Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

motohagiography

Want more geniuses? Challenge kids to solve real and useful problems. If we can teach kids to code, and play in Chopin competitions, we can teach them surgery, higher math, engineering, and to be research assistants.

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.

> Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income?

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.

I love the fact that people still unironically use the term "welfare trap", while we can see massive numbers of homeless and home insecure people all over America. People actually believing the bad faith constructed arguments of those with massive amounts of wealth and power actually make me believe America deserves to keep licking the boots of the 1% like dogs until we all die.

Welfare traps are most definitely a thing, but removing welfare is not the solution.

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.

Yep. This is one of the big reasons in favor it UBI. It flattens the curve so people can try to get back on their feet without severe consequences of they fail.

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.

See how long UBI lasts when someone uses it to support unpopular activities. Public arts funding was a great example, where the results can be best described as democratic. Even though I like some ideas around UBI, if it is conditional or otherwise not absolutely guaranteed, it's just dominion.

Same thing can be said of welfare in general. There are way too many people who would rather let everyone die than give "the wrong people" help.

Do you have any citations to back up your claim that "What we absolutely do know is that if you want to destroy group, give it welfare"?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com