The Parable of the Talents.
Scott Alexander.
slatestarcodex.com .
Jan 31, 2015.
Overweight people, depressed people, and poor people aren’t fully to blame for their situation – and neither are unintelligent people. It’s accidents of birth all the way down.
Srinivasa Ramanujan:
- Grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India.
- But a lot of poor people in the US had better conditions/opportunities
- Either, a lot of intelligence is innate
- Or, those poor people are just not trying hard enough.
- Ramanujan worked very hard at math, but it seems he couldn’t do this for anything else.
- He dropped out of school because of being made to study non-mathematical subjects.
I excelled at writing and sucked ass at Math despite working hard.
- I wasn’t going to beat myself up over Math
- But I also didn’t get to become too cocky about English
There’s always bigger fish (with one exception), e.g. random commenter -> Scott Alexander -> Scott Aaronson -> Terence Tao -> ? God -> ? Von Neumann
Someone: I feel dumb and worthless because my IQ isn’t high enough
- Don’t say, “don’t worry, you’re not worthless, I’m sure you can be a great scientist if you just try hard enough”
- We’d be implicitly throwing under the bus all of these people who are definitely not going to be great scientists no matter how hard they try.
- Instead, “f@#k tying my worth to being Von Neumann.”
Theoretically, the Law of Comparative Advantage proves everyone can contribute, albeit not in equal amounts. Who cares about real life when we have a theory?