Item — HN Reader

> In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth... Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains. And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the most efficient way of getting them.

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You're so right. I strongly dislike the argument put forward by Bezos and others (paraphrased, "imagine how many Einsteins we would have with a much larger world population"). Completely ignoring the billions of human brains that are full of scientific potential but forced to spend their efforts trying to figure out how to survive.

I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable) percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about abstract concepts all day.

Not to mention that Einstein had a fairly stable, stress-free job that paid the bills and even allowed him some extra time to moonlight his ideas with various friends from the university and work on his doctorate. These same people want to pay people as little as possible and make them work as hard as possible, cut the social safety nets, not pay for national infrastructure like healthcare, education, and transportation, and retreat to their $250 million mansions--of which Bezos himself could afford one thousand--and fuck off to space. Tell us more about all those latent Einsteins, oh exalted one!

I'm tired of this doom and gloom. Things have never been better for the average person globally. Someone in relative poverty today lives better than even the wealthiest people a few hundred years ago.

Do you have any evidence to support your view?

Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do science is greatly impacted by raising the total population and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.

To clarify, my view is that there are billions of people who never engage with the scientific establishment because they lack the means to do so. Among these are many people who might have made tremendous discoveries if they had grown up in a more privileged environment.

I might point at the fact that tenure-track professors are 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD than the general population (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6wjxc). Also, here's a good, factual article illustrating my general point: https://www.nature.com/articles/537466a

Reading between the lines, I think your view is that the valuable contributors (the extreme outliers) will find a way to contribute regardless of background. I think that's true, to some extent, but less common than we give it credit for. I also think that ignores the majority of scientists who are not outliers but make important discoveries just as a matter of course. Discoveries that may inform future breakthroughs.

Anyway, the truth is certainly somewhere in the middle. By growing the population of people who might make contributions (one way or another), we will increase the rate of contributions. I just think it's best from a moral, social, and ecological perspective to make the most of the minds we already have.

> Reading between the lines, I think your view is that the valuable contributors (the extreme outliers) will find a way to contribute regardless of background.

This is you reading in a total strawman.

There aren’t billions that would engage in science — there’s only 800 million in need of food security, total.

Of those, we’d expect only some small fraction to engage in science at all — maybe 8M, of whom a few hundred thousand will make substantial contributions and a few thousand groundbreaking work.

Of course we should help those people — but you’re off by orders of magnitude on your claims. I was objecting to your made up numbers, not whatever “between the lines” nonsense you read in to ignore that point.

And driving a total increase will require more people — because increasing the world by 2B population will drive more results than those 800M ever could. (While also being more realistic than “fix poverty everywhere”.)

It’s simple. If you don’t know when your next meal will be, you can’t spare a thought in solving cold fusion.

In order to solve problems you don’t need “more people”. You need “more people with good enough living conditions so that they can work on solving problems”. This doesn’t necessarily means increasing the total number of people. It could go down. As long as enough people went from dispossessed to good enough, that would be enough.

> You need “more people with good enough living conditions so that they can work on solving problems”.

no, this isn't true, because randomly feeding people isn't going to just magically make them able to solve problems like fusion.

What is needed is productivity increases, from perhaps existing investments or new investments, which is then used to fund research work. This funding can come privately, or via public taxation.

The popular image of an einstein like loner working in their own garage, funded by their own wealth (or some sort of social security funding), and creating world changing tech is such a mythos.

The same principle applies. It is still a prerequisite that that person needs to have the base of their piramid of needs covered in order to even think about investments or being enterprisey. Increase the quality of life of the population and you will get more of it.

China has made big progress in building mega infrastructures while at the same time aggressively pursuing population control strategies. They did so by reallocation of people from farming to factories.

It could be argued that building high speed rail isn’t same as doing science. But it does provide excellent raw material for scientific research. I won’t be surprised if we start seeing scientific breakthroughs from China in next few decades.

We have hundreds of millions of people using most of their cognitive bandwidth just to survive. Imagine what’s possible if even a fraction of those stop worrying about their survival and start pursuing their curiosity.

In my experience, science is rarely driven by outliers. Most scientists are very smart of course, but the majority of scientific progress is shaped by slow, steady incremental work that builds on top of itself, rather than brilliant idea men.

Scientists are already self-selected outliers, eg 0.46% of undergraduate degrees are awarded in physics.

So if you’re talking about a physicist, you’re talking about a tiny fraction. If you start talking about those who complete graduate studies, and the 1 in 100 of them who generates truly groundbreaking work… you’re talking about 1 in 50,000 or rarer.

https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/physics-bachelors-deg...