Peter Gleick
Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.
The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts.
The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
Aral Balkan
@petergleick A thousand times this.
Peter Bloem
This is a nonsensical way of thinking, but I couldn't help but make a rough estimate.
Assuming that, to be a recognized Mozart in the 18th century, you'd need to be male and live in Europe, that gives you a pool of about 60 million people.
Scaling that up to 8 billion, that means that if we were to keep the population constant, but promote equity and opportunity, we'd have a 133 Mozarts running around.
Pickle Rick :arakawa:
@petergleick This seems like such a venture capitalist mindset: fund a bunch of startups hoping that one is a unicorn that out-pays the losers. Yeah, it can work as a business strategy. But people like to forget: so much of the fundamental science and technology was originally developed with govt tax dollars. Most talented ppl come from good schools and free countries. People like to ignore all the infrastructure of human talent and knowledge.
Martin Owens :inkscape:
Ignoring the divisor.
This is the same nonsense that says "soon we'll have a computer so super it will be able to think like a human" without dividing by energy consumption. My 100 watt fat sponge beats the pants off of the next few centuries of computers in adjusted power.
So the real unit here is "Mr Rogers per million people" or MrRMP. How efficient are we at creating kindness this year?
Grimblob
@doctormo @beeftacos @petergleick
The important question is how can we comodify and monopolise the distribution of Mr Rogers?
I we own all the Mr Rogers per million people then our position is inherently superior both in terms of kindness and market share!
Paul Cantrell
@aubilenon @petergleick
Yes, I see that as being exactly where the Gould quote points as well
Jesse Morris
@petergleick @inthehands also I am not sold on this idea that the point of people is to have a chance at being Mozart rather than have intrinsic value of their own
Ray Jepson
@petergleick I think Bill James has already said it best.
The population of Topeka, Kansas, today is roughly the same as the population of London in the time of Shakespeare (sic). London at the time of Shakespeare had not only Shakespeare—whoever he was—but also Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and various other men of letters who are still read today. I doubt that Topeka today has quite the same collection of distinguished writers.
Why is this?
https://www.billjamesonline.com/article1400/
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
Sexy Moon
aggualaqisaaq
World population in 1756: ~650 million
World population in 1879: ~1.6 billion
World population today: ~8.016 billlion
...so obviously the problem isn't a matter of not enough people.
Actually the fact that people who are just so fucking beyond-the-pale stupid, mediocre, and unequivocally unremarkable happen to be the richest people in the world today has a lot more to do with it than birth rates... I mean Musk is proof-positive that this isn't a meritocracy.
Sexy Moon
feld
Sexy Moon
cvnt
cvnt
solient
@petergleick we have millions of not hundreds of millions of Mozarts. His talent wasn't what made him special, it was his fluke of patronage and support.
fomosapien
@petergleick This sort of mentality pushes my buttons like nothing else.
Years ago, a co-worker convinced me to attend a 1000 cups meeting, some kind of informal networking event for business butts to stink up a room together. At the meeting I attended, the presenter offered a few slides on what could be done to "attract talent" to our city; how to compete with other cities to get Ivy Leaguers and Silicon Valley emigres to choose us.
By the end of the talk I was aquiver with frustration - I'm like: "This city has one of the worst education departments in the country: there are literally thousands upon thousands of talented children who we collectively abandon every single effing year, and you're talking about how we can gentrify more neighborhoods to get more people who are already rich and successful to choose us?" Then I left.
Makes me sick.
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