Eh. This kinda breezes over what made Einstein into Einstein.
Access to education, a network of peers doing cutting edge research, and a journal of record to publish into was what separated Einstein from the assorted Very Smart Guys around the world.
Consider, as a counterpoint Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius mathematician who pioneered whole fields of number theory before his death at the age of 32. He is remembered today primarily in his correspondence with a Cambridge University professor, G. H. Hardy. and the notebooks of mathematical proofs he had assembled in his spare time.
What made Ramanujan significant was not merely his genius but his access to the academic record. In the modern era, we have dramatically expanded the reach of academic institutions. So even if you are born in a small town to totally unknown parents living provincial existences, you can access universities more easily now than before.
I might say that the real question is how all this mental horsepower is being used. The modern Einstein likely isn’t lost on a deserted road shuttling around firewood. S/he is more likely optimizing some algorithm to make the next great shitcoin or tunning the performance of the graphics rendering for the new Marvel movie.
It doesn’t breeze over anything. Lack of access to educational resources is the central theme of the comic.
I’m not sure how the other poster interpreted this comic to be anything else.
It is an expansion on a Stephen Jay Gould quote:
“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”
she has never read a textbook…and has never seen the inside of a school.”
I would go back and reread the comic. It’s pretty explicitly stated!
I also don’t see what’s wrong with intelligent people doing advanced VFX for Hollywood movies. Not everything in life needs to be purely about utility, or at least about what we consider useful as a society.
I also don’t see what’s wrong with intelligent people doing advanced VFX for Hollywood movies.
I don’t see what’s wrong with intelligent people carrying wood in the desolate landscape of a web comic.
But I think the message is that brilliant people with the opportunity to do amazing things are denied the opportunity due to poverty and subsistence living. Raising people out of poverty has a dramatic knock-on benefit for us all. It isn’t just some moralistic duty.
I get that but if we’re talking about creative/“intelligent” people, then there’s a difference between doing advanced VFX work (which is an art form at the end of the day) and manual labor to survive. Isn’t that kind of the whole point? It’s not that carrying wood is wrong, it’s obviously not. But the whole thrust of the comic is they would probably rather be doing something (and we want them to as well) else and would want access to an education because they are the next Einstein. But it’s a little harder case to make when somebody is practicing an artistic craft.
I bet the people working on effects for Black Panther - since marvel was the example - don’t regret their work and wouldn’t liken it to schlepping wood on foot all day to make ends meet while they never get to practice their craft.
I feel the same. The comic seems to imply that Einstein and everyone else are just born Einstein or not, when it actually has more to do with the environment people grow in than where they are born.
Access to education is an important issue of course, but the real problem is not that it makes existing natural born Einsteins carry firewood, but that it stops a large number of children from having a chance of becoming future Einsteins and even worse, from not having to carry firewood for the rest of their lives.
By experience in academia in a rather theoretical field, for sure you’ll struggle finding the new Einstein in academia. Most of the best people I know left at some point. System is at collapse.
In more applied field (lab-based) you still find good people, private competition is still not so better in terms of money and life balance. But for theoretical fields, it is a misery.
Most of the best people I know left at some point. System is at collapse.
In Western countries, certainly. Not a coincidence that the Koreans cloned the first sheep and the Chinese accelerated through the 7nm chip fab barrier at a speed that made Moore’s Law look like an underachievement.
In more applied field (lab-based) you still find good people, private competition is still not so better in terms of money and life balance. But for theoretical fields, it is a misery.
There’s definitely good money in engineering. Idk about private blue-sky research. I know a few guys who work at Tesla and Boston Dynamics doing the R&D work, and they have not been particularly happy.
In your point about the genius talent being wasted on dumb projects, if someone makes an amazing algorithm, people will notice no matter what it was initially used for. I agree that access to academic works is much better than it was and I think with the spread of satellite internet we’re entering a golden age of discovery
“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.” - Stephen Jay Gould
Maybe inspired by this quote?
People are getting caught up on Einstein but it’s not about that particular man. It’s about being someone that can change the world. That is exceptional. That is beyond talented.
When I was little I realized this when I was going to school. Living in a poor neighborhood I used to watch boys do insane flips and shit like it was nothing. Like Olympic level flipping.
And it occurred to me that no one but us would ever know how talented they were because nobody was checking for us.
That’s a really sobering thing to realize as a kid.
Reminds me of my brother. He could climb vines up to the tops of trees using only his hands. He could backflip twice in the air right off the ground. He’d regularly backflip out of trees and do multiple spins before landing perfectly on his feet. He was truly exceptional physically. He could run up the side of a mountain faster than most people on flat land without breaking a sweat. On top of that he was ridiculously handsome and could have been the face of whatever it was he was doing.
We lived in Appalachia. He became a coal miner.
He done that until he couldn’t stand it and now he’s a jail guard.
This is why, in my opinion, billionaires are incredibly stupid.
By hoarding wealth and forcing people to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with little-to-no time for self improvement or leisure. With few resources to devote towards education or career-building, you are strangling the pool of people who could make your life better. Who could find the cure for whatever illness finally gets you. Who could invent something you’d never have thought of that will improve your quality of life.
Before the pace of modern technology I can kind of get the impulse, but modern billionaires are operating on rules of ‘how to win’ from 100 years ago. They are – by any metric – not only socially backwards, but fundamentally stupid. They are too dumb to even get being greedy right.
… You just described a monopoly on wealth & prosperity.
Why wouldn’t a billionaire want that for themself? They invest into what they like or grows their empire or prestige whether it’s cancer drugs or dick shaped rockets.
It’s the same logic as a dictator.
Because by limiting access to those resources, they can’t be used in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Sure, you might invest in cancer research. But did you back the right horse? Soon enough? What about the person who would have engineered earlier detection if they had gone to grad school, but the resources that could have been used to provide that are tied up in your net worth?
No concentrated approach will ever have the same results as letting millions of extra people work on their millions of ideas. The chances of someone hitting on something that sticks increase dramatically with the number of people throwing shit against the wall.
Please watch the cgp grey videos on the rules for rulers or read the Dictator’s Handbook.
Sure, it’s aimed towards political leaders, but it can be mapped on many billionaires as well.
It would give you an idea about how one who is at the top would likely respond.
I’ll link it below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
They don’t care about abstract “maybe new science” when the reality is they have all the power and can do whatever the fuck they want
Not really. They’re just trying to hire private scientists to find a cure for aging and live forever so they can continue their reign.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/bryan-johnson-tech-millionaire-reverse-ageing-b1083695.html
i feel bad i misread this as “Epstein” at first and i was like… wha??