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Comment by up2isomorphism | Hacker News Reader

Maybe too much money is exactly the problem? I rarely see people tackling hard problem for money, because it is not an efficient way of making money.

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While you could convince me that too much money would attract the wrong type of people, you would be hard pressed to find more competent people by offering less money. (I'm not dismissing that there are other motivations involved, just the ability to grow a talent pool by offering less.)

Once you have a "good life" you start looking for other things than money. I know a few people who have quit a good job they didn't like for one that paid a little less but they liked more. Though there is a limit to how far someone can go down in pay before they don't like the new job because of pay.

Too much money in what context? It can be an extremely effective motivator for solving a business problem - hire smart people to work on it, they'll happily go work for double their pay.

A baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates.

Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.

There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.

In this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.

Chip fabs is just one of ‘many processes’ which was what I was replying to. It’s practically irrelevant if even 99% of all processes have this characteristic. There’s way more than enough remaining to occupy all available people who could actually speed up large complex projects by 10x.

Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.

That's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses

If there was an ‘abundant supply’ most of them wouldn’t be considered such any longer, just regular geniuses, because the population average would have been raised up.

Couldn't you keep hiring surrogates until you get a premature birth?

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