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Comment by visakanv | Hacker News Reader

Somebody on Quora once wrote beautifully about how it's impossible for the rich to ever understand what it's like to be truly, horribly poor- because there is no escape. There is no safety. The writer described how, even when he was in dire straits, at the back of his mind he knew that he could count on maybe extended family or something or someone to pull him out of trouble. The poor have no such privilege. True despair means being truly, completely cut off.

So there's really very little a rich person can do to walk in the shoes of a poor person- because even if say, Bill Gates gave away ALL his fortune and got himself into crippling debt or something- at least some people will recognize that he's Bill Gates, and treat him differently for it.

No simple solutions to offer here, just saying dis shit is complex.

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> Somebody on Quora once wrote beautifully about how it's impossible for the rich to ever understand what it's like to be truly, horribly poor- because there is no escape. There is no safety.

Jarvis Cocker wrote quite a good song in that vein:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pulp/commonpeople.html

Incidentally, I really like William Shatner's cover. It brings out the contempt in the lyrics. And it rocks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainyK6fXku0

In agreement with "dis shit is complex", I think the statement that rich people can never understand is too narrow to be true, because it ignores the rich people who came up from humble beginnings and moved up a class or two. There are a lot of those people in the programming profession -- perhaps it's because 'at the back of their mind, they can count on their intellect getting them through it all eventually'. If one accepts that there's a correlation between intelligence and income, then many poor people probably don't even have the hope that they can learn how to do a professional trade and get out of their situation that way. I'd rather see more money pumped into brain enhancement than to pay bureaucrats to come up with 'new' ways to fix the problem that eventually just boil down to giving the poor more money.

The one thing that I never get in posts kinda like yours (and yours), is how it seems when you're talking about jobs, you directly equate "intelligence" with being able to get a job or make an income. I don't believe this is true, and many people who have less "intelligence" can still find jobs. Granted, they might not be the most "cushy" of jobs, but they will still pay and are likely relatively satisfying. I would recommend watching the show "Dirty Jobs" (if you haven't already) to see many, many of the kinds of jobs where you don't need to be a college graduate with good scores to be able to get them. Heck, you can even get a job somewhere where most people would consider you having to be intelligent to get into, without actually being good at that job. (see thedailywtf for examples of "programmers" who have jobs, and just make life miserable for everyone else) So many of the jobs that I've seen in Dirty Jobs, I cannot do. (at least right now, I guess I could learn, but it would be hard) They require a completely different degree of intelligence/intuition that I've never developed. Most would consider me "intelligent" as a programmer, but I just see it as having a certain skill set, out of many, many skill sets that exist. I doubt I'm any more intelligent than a good construction worker.

I'd rather see more people learn to do trades, than become "smarter" and likely have even less of a chance of getting a job. We have more than enough "smart" people already.

On your latter point, my father does contract construction and has 40 years experience now.

He can expect $25 an hour. He is competing with $10 immigrant labor, not because they have an equatable skill set (he has a covered cab full of his own tools and is an ultimate DIY) but because the people hiring don't want to pay for quality. Note that the climate of construction radically varies based on locale, but in central PA it is always stuck at the bottom.

And he is capable of electrical, plumbing, roofing, framing, cabinetry, etc. All those professions are stuck at rock bottom because their target demographics are all getting consistently poorer. As the middle class dissolves, consumer grade high skilled trade labor dies. You can't all be building some rich guys back yard amusement park, and most busnesses contract with a trade firm for their construction rather than freelancers. My father has gotten a few industrial gigs, which were always consistent pay sources but also only paid barely minimum wage and usually hired immigrant or just-graduate workers who mess everything up and do shoddy jobs.

So it isn't that simple. If all the poor people got educated in a trade, they would still have no one with money to pay them, unless they got into one of the 3 or so degreed professions that are actually seeing hires (all stem, plus law, and maybe business administration from an Ivy League). And if they were to self teach through online tutorials or other library resources, nobody would look at them for a lack of credentials even if they site their own personal projects ,because they are not "professional" jobs.

So unless you mass migrate these poor people to where money is (and for lack of anything else there is plenty of money even if it is locked up in economic loops outside the ones those in poverty occupy) they could have all the skills in but you would have to effectively hit the reset button on their economic engine when none of them could buy or rent land anywhere to farm or mine.

Depressing an yet true; I have seen this myself with friends

I think very few people equate intelligence with getting any job or making any money at all. Can you point me to someone who has? (Okay, I guess a more general form of 'intelligence' suggests it would be impossible for a slug to apply for and get any job on the market.) Similarly I don't think people equate intelligence with getting a good, high-paying job, but there is a good correlation showing more intelligence matches with higher income, and if you use that correlation in your predictions they will be more accurate.

I watched "Dirty Jobs", great show. I agree a lot of jobs don't require much in terms of IQ, creativity, or rationality, but as you move up the scale of which jobs pay the most, you'll find they do start to require such things that commonly go into 'intelligence' definitions. You'll find counter-examples (like programmers that shouldn't be let anywhere near a computer, or CEOs who don't know a thing about their own business), but fewer and fewer. Bringing this comment back momentarily to the predictive power of intelligence, I would bet that a high IQ compilers programmer can learn to competently do any construction work job (many of such jobs use tools and methods that required high IQ people to come up with...) while a mid or low IQ construction worker couldn't learn to competently do compilers programming. In other words, having higher intelligence makes it a lot easier to change job fields, not just find and work at any job at all. (If you can find me someone with an IQ less than 110 who can understand this and create their own reference implementation without referencing the existing one http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/labor-of-division-episo... I'd be interested in meeting them! It's possible they could change my view on a lot of things.)

I'd rather less people learn to do trades, because trades are the target of two big factors for job displacement: the first is from humans who will do the same work (maybe less quality, maybe not) for less (immigrants, foreigners, starving students, people who just got fired and were living check-to-check so will do anything...), the second is from automation when even the cheap workers are too expensive. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... is a nice comment on the question of whether and how much automation is hurting the jobs market. I would like more companies to get back into the role of educating their workforce and being more willing to accept people with little or no real experience, but I can only see them doing that if either they can get guarantees of working there for X years with the option to fire them at any time, or if the universities are producing so few people capable of working that the companies are forced to educate or otherwise not have anyone to do the (presently expensive to automate) work.

I also don't think we have nearly enough "smart" people already. There are other benefits besides wealth that a more rather than less intelligent average populace receives. So it's worthwhile on those grounds as well to improve a nation's average IQ. Other forms of intelligence enhancement include wiring up computers with internet directly to the brain to allow for even easier access and processing of human knowledge. I'm currently reading What the Dormouse Said, one of the first interesting bits of info was how Doug Engelbart was motivated to augment human intelligence with technology while John McCarthy wanted to retire human intelligence with better AI. I like both approaches but ultimately I'm in the McCarthy camp, though I think a stepping stone may involve R&D of intelligence enhancement through DNA changes. Humans are roughly 4% different genetically from chimps, is there some sort of super-human that could be made that's some small % different to humans yet confers the same breadth of intelligence capabilities over humans that humans have over chimps?

Edit: One other thing I kind of wanted to bring up, is that I do see a lack of empathy among better-off folks for the lesser-off folks. I don't feel much empathy for a lot of lesser-off folks myself, especially ones that consistently make poor decisions in addition to being poor. (There is a question of how much is really "their fault" if you suppose that making good decisions is impossible without a certain level of intelligence...) But I think a lot of it is simply "no one likes a whiner" and a perception that it's the poor people whining when the well-off social justice warriors complain 'on behalf' of the poor. "Dirty Jobs" is a good show if only just to see how those people are just like other people, just like yourself perhaps in some ways, and in fact aren't whining all day about "I have to clean this and I'm being paid this little? How will I feed my family? Gosh life is so hard and privileged people suck."

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