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Comment by tinfoilcondom | Hacker News Reader

Now AI can be just like Zuck and come up with 0 original ideas that have any value.

Facebook copied MySpace and bought Instagram (with FB Camera losing to them).

Their only original idea was Metaverse - an FoA (flop-on-arrival).

They even dropped the ball on AI, something they should have had a massive advantage at with their ad profiles and social media empire.

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> Their only original idea was Metaverse

surely you must be joking.

Can you name some companies whose products are built on original ideas?

To be fair, General Motors is built off of the idea of the wheel, which I believe is an original idea

By that logic, the Taggart Baking Co. should have been one of the richest companies ever, since everyone compares their product to it as the greatest thing since.

Chillicothe Baking Company.

I'm not so sure, their 'original' wheel was just a refinement to the round boulders that already existed on the planet and the mechanical advantages naturally existing in that form.

> Build one of most valuable companies in history and grow to be one of youngest billionaires

> tinfoilcondom (account created 5 min ago): dude has no talent or original ideas

I love this platform

> grow to be one of youngest billionaires

Are you equating intelligence with networth? :-)

I think it's more like this https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Face...

IQ is highly correlated with both income and wealth so it seems like a fair comment. Of course not all billionaires have a high IQ, but far more billionaires do than your average person.

survivorship bias.

there is absolutely nothing stopping a poor child in sierra leone from becoming the next einstein, outside of access to things that should be considered mandatory for human life.

Blank slate theory has been thoroughly discredited so many times I'm not sure why I'm even responding, but this is complete nonsense. If you're born with 62 IQ like the average Sierra Leone citizen, no amount of education will get you to 120. It's literally not possible.

According to research, a full education can add ~15 IQ points.

So someone from Sierra Leone who's average and receives a full education can expect to have around 77 IQ, which means severe issues with reading comprehension, math beyond simple arithmetic and following multi-step instructions.

so geographical region of birth dictates intelligence? how intriguing.

i would like to know if that child was fed well, provided with shelter and given a good education -- would it still be, in your words, "not possible" for them to break even 100IQ?

I didn't claim that, this appears to be a strawman. I specifically stated average IQ, and yes, necessarily your region of birth does inform your average IQ.

Environmental and educational impacts on IQ are very minimal. Someone with an average Sierra Leone IQ is not becoming a genius after world-class education and the best environment possible. They'll be measurably improved, but not by 50 IQ points.

your region of birth does inform your average IQ.

I doubt you can demonstrate this empirically, because there is no such thing as a regional survey of average IQ.

Not in the way you're implying. There's an IQ threshold that correlates somewhat with income, but correlated gains drop (kind of vanish) after it, and that threshold is pretty low; it might be 100.

Nothing you just said disproves anything I claimed. Billionaires tend to have significantly higher IQ than average. The same is true for high income people.

I think it is in fact not the case that high income people generally have significantly higher IQ than average. As for billionaires: when was the last billionaire IQ survey done?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Funny, neither of these decades-old papers includes citations to the billionaire IQ survey you're quoting. :)

Huh? The very first study studied billionaires. A simple Ctrl+F would've identified this.

I think you missed my point.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you have to be above average intelligence to start a business and become a billionaire from it

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