The ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong, so if we rewarded them unconditionally for having original ideas, we’d end up incentivizing the production of wrong ideas. It may actually be a good thing that “having original ideas” is a specialization of labor largely restricted to the intellectual upper class.
I accept the premise that “the ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong,” but I would add two caveats. First, “within the domains in which those more intelligent people have relevant knowledge and draw on that knowledge,” and second, “Even then, for any difficult problem the majority of original ideas will be wrong even from more intelligent people.”
I would propose that the intelligent people might be more useful in sorting right ideas from wrong ones, than in trying to generate all the ideas themselves.
Right—comparative advantage and all that. The problem then though, is that we end up with a large population of the mentally obese, growing increasingly distrustful of the intellectual elite who are supposed to do the thinking for them, because they represent a different youth tribe. We probably want to be encouraging intellectual effort for it’s own sake in the way we try to encourage sports—even if you’re not an athlete, you should take pride in running every day before work or whatever.
The ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong, so if we rewarded them unconditionally for having original ideas, we’d end up incentivizing the production of wrong ideas. It may actually be a good thing that “having original ideas” is a specialization of labor largely restricted to the intellectual upper class.
I accept the premise that “the ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong,” but I would add two caveats. First, “within the domains in which those more intelligent people have relevant knowledge and draw on that knowledge,” and second, “Even then, for any difficult problem the majority of original ideas will be wrong even from more intelligent people.”
I would propose that the intelligent people might be more useful in sorting right ideas from wrong ones, than in trying to generate all the ideas themselves.
Right—comparative advantage and all that. The problem then though, is that we end up with a large population of the mentally obese, growing increasingly distrustful of the intellectual elite who are supposed to do the thinking for them, because they represent a different youth tribe. We probably want to be encouraging intellectual effort for it’s own sake in the way we try to encourage sports—even if you’re not an athlete, you should take pride in running every day before work or whatever.