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Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas?
theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."
Where does writing inane, self-centric books fit in Nnaemeka's weltanschlung?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
In the USA, it is all about credit (the ability to go into debt for the purpose of buying things) and what you have bought. When we see each other, we assess largely on what they are wearing, driving or have in their possession. Additionally, every time we hear about rich people in trouble or otherwise doing something stupid, we instictively react with "I thought they were [better than us]!!" It's not the presumption that they are just like anyone else and often times dumber, it's the opposite because we pedestrians have been taught to succeed we must be smart or skilled and to work hard. Interestingly, those are the characteristics which keep those "valuable human capital assets" in the trenches where they belong.
All the money circulates around consumerism. That is where the money is. That is what people study to join in to get a share of.
Yes, this is NOT a sustainable model. This is why we are in trouble now.
The author seems quite intent on blaming individuals for what is a structural malaise.
There's money in the kinds of fields the author talks about, and it seems a bit harsh to criticize people for trying to make a living. Agreed, Angry Birds isn't pushing the boundaries of human evolution towards a fairer, more peaceful world, but this isn't the 50's - the teet of government research is drying up through constant cuts and marginalisation. Academia and the public sector doesn't seem to have the clout it used to, and as a result long term humanitarian projects are dying off. The death of the public sector is the real reason we've never gone back to the moon. That's neoliberalism for you.
As for the "underclass" (a word I despise), I've been wondering recently whether we're witnessing the technological trend futurists warned us about; persistently lowering labour requirements. Figures certainly seem to point that way.
Outside of tech and Wall Street, making a living is quickly becoming harder and harder. There simply isn't the amount of work there was forty years ago. We're looking at genuine human tragedy if the situation is not resolved.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
I realize this is a troll, but there is some truth to this... SOME.
Smart people do not have children they can't raise in a good healthy environment and can't properly give them all the things they need as they grow and graduate into adulthood.
Unfortunately, we have far too many non-smart people. Both rich and poor, they have children they can't or won't care for. Both end up spoiled and neglected and this has been going on for 2-3 generations now. Under these conditions, the results are more than predictable. And the poor become a drain on society.
Now if this notion were followed through and actually happened? Well, that'd be another problem entirely. We need a middle class and we don't have one. The rich send our jobs everywhere else but here and they are slowly running out of people they can sell their crap to. Do you know how poor people are getting their cell phones now? Government subsidized service. Seriously. Welfare mobile phones. And of course they are on welfare everything else as well.
Most of us here on slashdot don't really know what it's like to be poor and on welfare. I've had unfortunate times, though, and I know it all too well. To me it was a nightmare, but most of them were extremely comfortable in their misery. Extremely comfortable.
Shit lost a healthy balance long ago. There is no limit on greed and no limit on laziness. Why there is a dwindling middle-class is partly because they have lowered the measure of what middle-class is and largely because of wealth distribution problems. Like global warming, I think we've gone too far already.
"we live in interesting times."
Lawyerly politicians whining about need for more STEM is exactly what both Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, and Niven, in The Mote In God's Eye were sarcastically describing.
In Starship Troopers (the book anyway), the bugs were non-sentient. But every time a colony was distressed, the workers bred this "brain bug", and then the problem would magically go away. Then the brain bug became irrelevant to it again.
In The Mote In God's Eye, the Moties are led by a political caste, with other castes obeying them, as they went about their political machinacions and wars. The Engineer caste was ungodly brilliant, but otherwise completely mute, and specifically he juxtaposed it against the yabbering schemes of the political class.
I hope some of you wake up to the memes of both parties guiding and directing you. You are disposable.
My point: This guy's bleat is a whine from the political class to come save them from their own idiocies, then shut the hell up once they take credit for breeding brain bugs to solve problems. Do it, but leave them in control.
Vernor Vinge gets even more sarcastic in A Deepness In The Sky, the sequel to the phenomenal A Fire Upon The Deep, wherein the bad guys use a drug that makes you find whatever it is impossibly seductive and pleasurable. If you do art, you will focus on it and produce world-class works. If science or engineering, phenomenal feats. And so on.
But you won't dream of resisting their control because you get to do what you want...that it's to your overlord's benefit doesn't enter into it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are an awful lot of people who are homeless because the bank took their houses away, not because they're junkies or winos who live in the street. The annual Seattle census of homeless people for the last several years has found that the number of people living in their cars in the suburbs, away from the stereotypical urban shelter residents, has been rising dramatically.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin