> All these people who are so great aren't really that much greater than the average schmuck on the subway. There really isn't that much range in the smartness or fitness of human beings.
Whelp, you've lost me. The difference in productivity and smartness---as measured by the consistent ability to impact the world---of people is enormous (the additional importance of luck notwithstanding). I'm not sure why you thought you were going to make progress on these deep philosophical issues with a 400 word blog post, but you're even more sunk if you throw in empirical claims that contradict both intuition and the data.
I've taught programming to kids from very poor classes of society who grokked it and excelled at it. But, guess what– a lot of them will be stuck working at McDonald's because they can't go to college, or because even if they could go to public universities their family didn't understand why they should spend 4+ years not bringing in any money when they could work at McDonald's right away.
I've also taught/privately tutored CS students from some of the US's best universities. The range in intellectual capacity between the two groups is shockingly consistent. I've had students who attended Stanford who would have been put to shame by some of my "first of the family to finish high school but can't go to college" students.
If Bill Gates hadn't been born to lawyers and bankers, data says he would likely be part of the "average schmucks on the subway".
Successful people consistently underestimate how lucky they are.
> Successful people consistently underestimate how lucky they are.
Meanwhile mediocre people consistently attribute other people's success to luck. As luck would have it, they are both right and wrong. I am a high school dropout who never went to college, yet I sold 2 companies in the last 2 years. Is my success just a matter of luck, or am I that much better than the average population. Maybe the answer is that neither are that important. What I can say for sure that I work harder than the average population, much, much harder. And that's my general problem with those who champion socialism, they never seem to want to work as hard as I do. Among ditch diggers, there are always a few men leaning on their hoe handles.
Well the solution seems to be pretty simple then- if everyone worked as hard as you did, we wouldn't have to worry about poverty, unemployment, and so on! :)
I have another real life anecdote of my own. My younger brother and I grew up more or less under the same conditions barring our individual personalities. Yet he is way smarter than me, he is about to finish college in two years, while I just got into college this season. I don't even know how well I will do, I might fail this semester who knows. We have already had two very different life trajectories and they might diverge further, even though we are brothers.
Some decades ago the per capita income of South Korea was on par with some of the poorest nations in the world. Today South Korea is a rich nation. Japan was devastated after the WWII, but it experienced an economic miracle afterwards. China was an under achiever in the last century, but in the next decades it will become a superpower. We can talk all day about how equal we are, but not everyone thrives equally, even under the best of conditions.
I can not but held the believe that among individuals, families, nations and ethnic groups, there are innate differences. Differences that are deeply rooted within our genes, we're all thinking beings but not everyone can be Newton, I sure can't. Of course you may beg to differ with me, after all individuals tend to distort the reality to their views. I might have a distorted view of reality, though I doubt it.
I think the author is saying that there isn't much difference on a relative scale. For example, humans typically weigh between 100 and 300 lbs and have a certain range of strength (say, deadlifting between 50 and 1000 lbs). Compare that to an elephant or a mouse and you can see that humans represent a very small range of weight and strength, even if it seems like lifting more than 1000 lbs is impossible in the same way lifting 10 lbs would seem impossible to a mouse. Similarly, we see intelligence on a subjective scale where the smartest humans seem brilliant. But we have nothing to compare them to. If another species (or artificial intelligence or alien) that was vastly more intelligent than us came along and compared human-level intelligence to its own then even geniuses would seem simple and stupid. There would be effectively no difference between the smartest humans and dumbest humans.
If you had a group of near-equivalent individuals, but you still had to elect a leader, the leader would end up being de facto more productive if only by his position.
There are also extremely productive people and very unproductive people, but I think it's safe to say that a very large percentage of the population falls in a specific productivity window. And the very skilled can "take one for the team" on the issues described here.
I'd like to ask whether it's "take one for the team", or "take everything of everyone's shoulders till I perish" because I've been in groups with the latter dynamic.
Productivity and smartness are measured by the consistent ability to impact the world? And there is data linking "productivity", "smartness", and "consistent impact on the world"? Does Will Hunting abandoning math to go see about a girl make him an idiot?
Whelp, you've lost me. The difference in productivity and smartness---as measured by the consistent ability to impact the world---of people is enormous (the additional importance of luck notwithstanding). I'm not sure why you thought you were going to make progress on these deep philosophical issues with a 400 word blog post, but you're even more sunk if you throw in empirical claims that contradict both intuition and the data.