Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award.

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.

> These people have no idea what they are talking about.

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?

It's true, but despite that I think they are plausibly in the ballpark of a useful idea.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

(Sorry for the animosity, I'm angry at the system, not you.)

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.

Well I wish you luck, it is a good cause.

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