This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.
I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.
It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
This general idea that a previous generation was better because they lead a less pampered life goes back to some of the earliest writing. Yet here we are.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
I mean, sure. But at the same time they were constrained by the tools of their time, had no internet for instant information access and spread, and scientific collaboration has never been at a higher level than it is now. There's no reason to believe that people who grow up with instant lookup and massive computational power will somehow be less capable than people whose only tools were pen and pencil. What is possible now couldn't even be dreamed of back then.
> they're working on getting you to click on an ad
They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.
No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.
They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.
They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.
They're working on fusion.
And so on and so forth.
Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
At this point, it's not even about "money" in the traditional sense (wealth, prestige, etc.); rather, it's about stability, the alleged "American dream". I live in Chicago, so I'll consider the local national laboratory, Argonne. They pay their software engineers $101,888 per year, according to Glassdoor ($71,640 after state and federal tax). Using the 28% rule most lenders use nowadays, with today's rates, that's a maximum mortgage payment of $1,671 at 7%. However, the median house price in DuPage County is $335,000 [1], and a 30-year mortgage (with 10% down) has a monthly payment of just over $2,000. No dice - even for a highly skilled professional living in one of the most affordable parts of the country. Keep in mind that you still need to pay 2.3% per annum property tax, besides owning a car and saving for retirement. It's just not nearly as feasible a path towards financial stability as taking a $"TECH" job with west coast pay.
Yeah, I think we have a lot of sleeper geniuses out there
I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler
I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
He's actually the complete opposite based on reports of what it is like to work with him at SpaceX and Tesla in recent years. Employees describe having to avoid him so he doesn't meddle in the projects and screw them up.
Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.
Sorry, but I think it's you who are out of touch here.
Requiring 15-20 years of experience?
Just... no.
Software engineers are so well paid that many of them retire from the job market permanently after 15-20 years. You might as well ask people to be 65 years old until they can occupy the position.
20 years is 25% of a lifespan, and 33% of an adult lifespan.
Why isn't 10 years good enough? Unless it's an executive position for people who are at the end of their careers. You can become a Brigadier General in 20 years in the military, which would be broadly equivalent to a SVP.
Yeah this is a weird mentality that I encounter pretty often.
It is completely juxtaposed with the reality of most senior managers, who are identified by companies in their early 20s. Companies tend to promote high velocity career climbers and want to promote them young in order to get plenty of years of service from them.
> Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything
If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.
> With straight keys, side-swipers, and, to an extent, bugs, each and every telegrapher has their own unique style or rhythm pattern when transmitting a message. An operator's style is known as their "fist".
> Since every fist is unique, other telegraphers can usually identify the individual telegrapher transmitting a particular message. This had a huge significance during the first and second World Wars, since the on-board telegrapher's "fist" could be used to track individual ships and submarines, and for traffic analysis.
Hey's saying if you are using a straight key instead of an iambic keyer (different morse sending tech) then you can recognize the operator from their patterns (the first)
With the news stories about overseas Chinese police stations, I wonder why they didn't go after him directly in Italy. Maybe they lacked his home address. But that could be obtained by a cyber infiltration of the Italian government or through old school espionage.
> Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter
I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.
I wish society in general worked like this: less formality, more informality, more relationships.....
.... I could move to a small town. I've always lived in a large metropolis and, to be frank, I'm tired of it. I can't move to Monaco, or make the global population decrease by 90%, but I could move to a smaller community in my state. I think this is what I need to start building more relationships with other people.
Have to actually experienced this? What you want is for people to be familiar and nice, what you actually get is the banker telling everybody your account balance, the whole town talking about that time you showed up to church hungover, and the viciousness of national politics (or mean high school girls) applied to every aspect of your life.
Don’t wish for universal non anonymity unless you really know what it’s like, especially if you’re not willing to join the local moral majority.
Indeed. A small town is nice and welcoming if you are sufficiently like them, and agree with all the stuff your neighbors are on about.
If you deviate from that in some small way, it gets a lot harder. That includes being from the wrong class, or religion, or ethnicity or political leaning.
>If you deviate from that in some small way, it gets a lot harder. That includes being from the wrong class, or religion, or ethnicity or political leaning.
Or just being suspected of being something you're not. Some people in Salem in the 1600s learned the hard way what happens when these wonderful small town people aren't so nice...
I could also say that big cities are (outside of certain expensive neighborhoods and business districts) burnt out hell-holes full of organized crime, refuse, homelessness, pollution, traffic, soulless concrete buildings, and people who don't give a damn about you.
Even though there's truth in all of that (cities are plagued by these problems) it's an overly pessimistic take and is not equally applicable in all cases.
It's attractive and in many ways better, but never forget: the dark side is insularity and 'no outsiders.' When you don't have the relationships or are actively excluded by virtue of being from a lower social class...modernism ain't so bad.
It's all fun & games until you piss off the gatekeeper and now you're forbidden from traveling or pursuing gainful employment. Double-plus bad if they obtain extradition powers and can effectively confine you to poverty status.
When you move to said small town and discover that being part of the in group depends on not straying from norms, going to the same church as everyone else, etc. you start to second guess it.
I don't mind having to conform to some norms. I would even go so far as to argue that close-knit communities are impossible to maintain over long time horizons without these gatekeeping attitudes and insider values that outsiders must conform to.
Sure, but some things are harder to get used to than others. People opening conversations by complaining about environmental protections is getting old.
Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.
