Is it just me or no one seems to get the point of a Universal Basic Income.
Universal, everyone has it, same amount, no condition. Be a genius or an idiot, active or retired, poor or billionaire, hero or criminal, no exception, except maybe for minors.
Making it universal has the added bonus of simplifying welfare programs. Subsidized housing and transport, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc... no need, it is all UBI now. No more fraud because there is no need to: you always qualify, and as a result, no need to fight it. No more rewarding optimization since there is nothing to optimize.
In my view, UBI is not generous, there will be losers, and a lot of jobs related to welfare will be made pointless. It may be a problem for those who have trouble managing a budget too: what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? I think it won't work not because people will stop working, but because it is too big a change and some people will find themselves literally starving, at least during the transition. It is like many solutions to complex problems: clear, simple and wrong.
A lot of people to resist to the Universal part is because of some moral judgement about a person "deserving" it or not.
> No more fraud
Some people will find a way to take it away from someone else, or to appear to the government as multiple people.
> what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat?
The same if you overspend your salary - you get another job. UBI does not prevent people from working or finding jobs - it just gives workers more flexibility and freedom to pursue better options. Let's say you want to move to the middle of the country. You need to consider a lot of things, including leaving your current job and how long it'd take to find a new one at the destination.
With UBI the risk decreases and people will make such moves.
What UBI makes it harder is underemployment and labor exploitation - people won't work in terrible jobs unless they need to and UBI removes that need.
>"Making it universal has the added bonus of simplifying welfare programs. Subsidized housing and transport, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc... no need, it is all UBI now. No more fraud because there is no need to: you always qualify, and as a result, no need to fight it. No more rewarding optimization since there is nothing to optimize."
In theory, yes. But I do not believe specialized welfare will ever go away. There are people on Social Security / Disability that absolutely require more than the most basic amount of money a typical non-handicapped citizen needs. I do not believe UBI supporters, and even society at large, would be so heartless as to tell a paraplegic to make-do because the UBI is all they are going to get. So, accommodating them would require some additional administration on top of the UBI to make sure the people with special needs get enough additional money and access to medical care. At which point we would still need to evaluate eligibility, make adjustments, and have a bureaucracy to administer it.
As someone on the right spectrum of fiscal policies, I wholly support UBI for the potential to reduce spending overall. No more fat cats in the government, you don't need managers upon managers to decide who gets what. On average, the US federal government spends at least 1 trillion on welfare each year, and state and local another 1.4 Trillions in hundreds (maybe thousands) of programs. 2.4 trillions each year means 7500 per person. Double up that number (it will be a wash for richer people) and you're mostly done. All the state needs to do is take care of special disabilities, which require significantly more money. But most everyone else can make due with 15k a year.
The biggest flaw is that every election would have at least one party, if not both, pushing for increasing the base income regardless of whether or not it makes sense.
Universal Basic Income would only work if it were truly universal, as in everyone in the world would get $2/day rather than Americans getting $40/day. The alternative is that a small in-group outsource all their real work to an out-group that doesn't receive UBI, so they are incentivized to stagnate and keep working conditions low for this out-group to make the most out of their UBI.
This is exactly what is happening in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The government employs people who have zero-accountability (often not even requiring attendance at work), so it resembles UBI much more than a bullshit job. Saudi Arabia has actually recently been transitioning to true UBI with their Citizens Account program
While I like the idea of universal income, something I don’t quite understand: How would it prevent inflation such that the bar for survival isn’t just adjusted to be higher?
In the absence of price controls UBI will be quickly absorbed by resetting the prices of food, housing, etc. The inflation kicks in and negates most of the UBI benefits. Income (basic or otherwise) is the reflection of person's productivity. UBI breaks relationship between productivity and income.
Please no more "geniuses." This cult of personality celebrity idol worship is toxic. The U in UBI stands for "universal" -- you don't need to be a genius to apply. UBI is great for enabling everyone to advance to their ultimate potential by alleviating financial constraints. (It may also lead to laziness as people no longer need to advance to survive.) Hopefully the net benefit outweighs any negative consequences.
>It may also lead to laziness as people no longer need to advance to survive
I don’t think this is a good argument against UBI when so much of our labor force is engaged in meaningless work, or what late anthropologist David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs”. [1]
I can imagine it could make some people be perceived as lazy because they now have the freedom to do anything else besides push papers 40 hours a week and that paradigm shift could induce depression because so many people lose themselves while surviving capitalism. That said, there is already a pandemic of depression (4.7% of American adults)[2] that is likely highly correlated to the mentioned phenomena. As the corpus of mental health literature increases, it becomes more and more apparent laziness and depression are not moral failings, but societal failings emerging from the Capitalist-Protestant work ethic [conjecture].
UBI won’t change human nature’s drive to improve material conditions. It will allow many people the ability to pursue meaningful enterprise and self-actualization. For those without the drive to participate in the rat race, I would congratulate their enlightenment instead of accusing them of laziness.
The geniuses bombed the entire planet for generations with their COVID response ideas. I shudder when I hear them talk about "dimming the sun" next. Could use a little less "genius" for awhile.
I'm not sure the idea of genius is one we should rely on. Why is it that we think one or two great people are responsible for all progress?
I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment.
With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.
I love the story of Faraday and Maxwell precisely for this reason. Maxwell was a bonafide genius, but Faraday was just really good at note-taking and doing experiments. Because of those talents, Faraday was able to document a lifetime of experiments with electricity. Maxwell read the entire record of those experiments and was able to derive the mathematical model of what was happening. It seems that it takes more than just "genius" for progress to occur: creativity, hard work, diligence, and passion are also required, as well as a society that supports the people engaging in such endeavors.
I dislike the notion that some individuals are off the scale on cleverness.
It's easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that a person who is dimmer than us is cognitively challenged; it's much harder to assess the smarts of someone who is smarter than us. Is he 1% smarter than me? 10% smarter? Hell, 100% smarter? All I know is that he understands stuff that I don't, and solves crosswords faster. But I don't believe that anyone is so much smarter than the average that they need to be paid 100x what I could earn.
You're right, the 'regular' people form the base of a society. But purely biologically they aren't capable of implementing a system for governing the society. This is b/c a hard working brain consumes up to 25% of total energy which is very expensive. Therefore we tend to find shortcuts that allow us to avoid that much of brain activity. And as brain wants to be 'happy' (chemically) which biologically means good food, reproduction and dominance.
Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.
Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.
IQ / "intelligence" is such a BS metric to go by. It's effectively the test makers deciding who would get a free ride through life. Which, incidentally would probably make those "geniuses" less intelligent overall.
I'd rather work with a random person who grew up on a farm or the streets than someone who had the best tutors and went to Harvard. People who have to work hard, who grow up hard, are hardened against the world. They learn to survive.
Most of our best entrepreneurs and builders grow up building and being independent. To be independent you have to learn to survive on your own, i.e. not with UBI. I'd rather have a higher level competition, not selecting based on IQ.
In way of an example, a friend of mine who worked blue collar his whole life (running large repairs & logistics operations) ended up moving up the command. Eventually, he ended up in a consulting capacity as part of an R&D team for a massive logistics company. His first day on the job he saved an average of 2 lives a year and around $5m.
He was given the job of improving a warehouse with a bunch of newly hired kids from Yale, Harvard, etc. The kids spent weeks going over all the different locations, trying to optimize layout, etc.
Eventually, my friend just talked to people on the floor. At one point, he noticed a fork lift operator who was having an issue picking up a pallet off a truck. He asked what the issue was and the fork life operator said they didn't know exactly where the height of the pallet is. The ivy league consultants started planning out using cameras to select the correct height(s), looked at the budget associated with hiring developers, tried to identify the costs to retrofit all the fork lifts, etc.
While that went on, my friend got two magnet strips, put some bright tape on the back, measured and put the magnet at the exact height the truck bed and as the pallets were a default height he knew where to put the next strip. Every new truck that came in would just move both strips based on the new truck height. He was done that afternoon and it was a $5 retrofit.
On average, 2-3 workers died a year at all their warehouses due to pallets being knocked down, losses were an estimated $5m.
The point of the story is that "genius" doesn't work better than practical problem solving. Problem solving comes from learning to survive and be independent.
> Children who score [IQ]145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award.
> They could start at, say $75,000 a year and go up by $25,000 increments every decade. The payments could expire if our geniuses decided to take paid employment but then resume if they decided to “drop out” again.
1. I don't think UBI expires, this is more like unemployment benefit which include perverse incentives against employment.
2. IQ is a controversial measurement. It's validity is questionable. It's been used or purposed to be used for truly horrible state sponsored actions in the past. I have a bias against using it for discrimination across populations, simply because of it's history and proponents over the years.
Even as a High IQ person, if someone gave me this kind of money as a teenager, I would have spent half on liquor and wild women and the other half, I would have wasted…
This scheme seems extremely ripe for corruption. Essentially you are promising someone millions on a few tests... So just paying 50 thousand to get your child this status would setup them for life...
I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12.
I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s.
My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated).
I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program.
I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time".
Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition.
I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
Doesn't even need to be that explicit. It would be no surprise to find out that the those managing the program that identifies "genius" discovers that genius runs in their families (and friends' families).
Also, keep in mind debates about embryonic selection are going on even as it is being offered as a service for a fee right now.
There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award.
These people have no idea what they are talking about.
IQ tests are tools. In order to properly assess very high IQ children or twice exceptional -- gifted and disabled -- children, they need to be administered by a qualified professional. Most IQ tests only go to 145. Very high IQs can only be meaningfully assessed by about age 7.
If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Last I heard, we were having trouble updating our IQ tests for various reasons and, also, IQ tests are highly culturally biased. An IQ test for Americans won't effectively assess a Brit or Canadian.
IQ tests are extremely controversial. The first test, created by Binet, that became the starting point of modern IQ tests was not intended to assess intelligence. It was intended to assess school readiness in children in France in an era where not all kids had birth certificates, so you couldn't use age as your metric, and rural kids tended to be less ready for public school than city kids for cultural reasons.
> These people have no idea what they are talking about.
It's true, but despite that I think they are plausibly in the ballpark of a useful idea. Their particular implementation sucks, but what if an implementation included a decision making process where false/flawed "facts" were subjected to skilful review by other people.
In this case, each proposition asserted by the proponent could be rejected based on valid critiques from a diverse set of reviewers (here there is non-trivial complexity, but nothing insurmountable imho), and they could rework their recommendations to eliminate those flaws and return with an improved plan that would be subjected to the same process. After several rounds, I'd think this could produce better ideas, and over time I'd think people would get much better at it cutting the time it takes for iterations.
> If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially.
Under current approaches that mostly come from academia (not exactly the most diverse set of minds), and are subject to long iteration cycles - fund 100 startups to work on the problem and we may see better results.
Isn't it weird that we complain endlessly about poor results, and yet hardly anyone has strong feelings about doing things differently (if not outright scoff at the very idea)? I've read your posts for many years, please tell me that you can see this phenomenon all around us?
This is a really dumb idea. Perhaps the author of the article or idea would not qualify for this "universal" income.
A large problem with the decline in intellectual curiosity relates to the "teach to the test" mentality adopted in so many places where students are not encouraged to think about or reason through problems, only to regurgitate blurbs and numbers.
My kids went through a Montessori education from infancy until they were about 9-12 years old (can't remember). Under that philosophy, they learned whatever interested them at their own pace and they were not only allowed, but they mixed with kids older and younger so that all could play off of and learn from each other. Older kids mentored younger kids. The materials they worked with challenged them to think about the subject matter.
We moved them to a private school later and they were ahead of everyone in their grade level. Both are in college with one graduating with a MS this week and continuing to a PhD next spring and the other finishing up a BS.
I always felt under-utilized as a Dad resource because my kids almost never asked for help with their homework. I wanted to dig in and help them understand the materials they were covering. They didn't need my help because they had the mental tools to think through things on their own.
Unconditional free money for everyone. Nice story for 5 yo children, but not for those who have even the most basic of grasps on the history of the humankind.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Well, this article is certainly an example of cognitive decline it's talking about. Why would society want to encourage geniuses to work less thanks to welfare?
UBI does have several purposes worth considering:
- If people are in a temporary crisis, giving them enough spending money to live in a dorm and eat rice and lentils can let them recover rather than the crisis becoming worse and more permanent due to traumatic life experiences.
- Some adults are permanently incapable of fully supporting themselves through commercial employment. Could be because of physical or mental disability, or just a 50 year old coal miner too old to learn new marketable skills. So instead of having a fraction of the population be angry, miserable and fomenting trouble, we offer them an early retirement/semi-retirement. Let robots work for you, enjoy!
But that's at best a necessary evil, with many side effects. For example, when these functions are taken up by voluntary institutions, aid recipients are incentivized to not bite the hand that feeds them and to support themselves or pay it forward to the largest degree possible. The last thing we want to do is to impose dependency on people who least need it and are most able to benefit the rest of us through their hard work. Get all the obstacles out of their way, let them get their foot in the door through apprenticeships if college is not a good option and let them shine!
As a little twist on the author's badly thought out proposal, what if we simply take the NSF scheme for doling out funding and make it more broadly available. Each year (or every few years) you can submit a proposal about what you plan to do if you're given a UBI, it will go through peer-review, and about 6 months later you'll get a notification if you were selected for funding or not.
Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
Want more geniuses? Challenge kids to solve real and useful problems. If we can teach kids to code, and play in Chopin competitions, we can teach them surgery, higher math, engineering, and to be research assistants.
Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? The people behind this proposal can't be included, because the incentives of welfare traps and maintaining genius status to keep the payments coming is a perverse incentive. Look what publish or perish did to academia. It just created garbage factories. Also, the best way to get their ideas resented and ignored is to grant them privileges, and not necessarily because it's unjust, but because there is a basic human instinct to find irresponsibility and dependency in adults disgusting.
What we absolutely do know is that if you want to destroy group, give it welfare. Just like feeding wild animals who become dependent and get wiped out by scarcity, the most universally reliable way to create a failure to thrive is to substitute taking care of themselves with adapting to dependency. The best thing about this idea is that it we know whatever the right thing is, it's going to be the opposite of this.
It reminded me a sci-fi book by Strugatsky brothers (of Stalker/Roadside picnic fame) which is called "Monday begins of Saturday".
It's a funny novel about working in what were called Research Institutes(НИИ) in USSR. So all kinds of supposedly smart people were spending their lives there in order to advance "scientific progress". I see it as basically UBI but with some strings and bureucracy attached.
Depending who you ask, but it had so many problems.
Apart from the awkward misunderstanding of the word "universal", there are other issues with this proposal. For one, having a high IQ is neither necessary nor sufficient for making a major contribution to society. For a variety of reasons, most people with very high IQs never do anything important with it (in the sense of an invention, a company, a movement, a masterpiece, etc), and it's not because they lack a guaranteed income. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because IQ, vision, and motivation are three different qualities which are, at best, weakly correlated.
If you want to make your country better, make it easier for people with good ideas to get the resources to pursue them. For starters, make it easier to get grants. There are already projects trying to do this, but having 100x the resources wouldn't hurt.
The problem is the current systems are getting less efficient at supporting geniuses financially :
- The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines)
- The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know.
- The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.
Much more important would be giving them (and others) the opportunities to realize their own potential even if they don't go on the exact path early in life. It's not impossible, but it is extremely difficult at the age of 26 to realize that marketing isn't for you and that your true calling is astrophysics. Our society typically sorts people at a young age, and there's no easy path out once you've been sorted (again, not impossible, but very difficult). I've met a number of remarkable people who were stuck in remedial jobs, but really excelled and took off when they finally got their break. They were lucky; many aren't.
I've seen people say things like "I despair at all of the Einsteins out there who are stuck plowing fields." But that sentiment is a bit of a cop out; the issue is made to be distant enough that we can relieve ourselves of a certain amount of responsibility. How about all of the Einsteins in our own society who are still stuck in the patent office?
[+] [-] GuB-42|3 years ago|reply
Universal, everyone has it, same amount, no condition. Be a genius or an idiot, active or retired, poor or billionaire, hero or criminal, no exception, except maybe for minors.
Making it universal has the added bonus of simplifying welfare programs. Subsidized housing and transport, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc... no need, it is all UBI now. No more fraud because there is no need to: you always qualify, and as a result, no need to fight it. No more rewarding optimization since there is nothing to optimize.
In my view, UBI is not generous, there will be losers, and a lot of jobs related to welfare will be made pointless. It may be a problem for those who have trouble managing a budget too: what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat? I think it won't work not because people will stop working, but because it is too big a change and some people will find themselves literally starving, at least during the transition. It is like many solutions to complex problems: clear, simple and wrong.
[+] [-] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
> No more fraud
Some people will find a way to take it away from someone else, or to appear to the government as multiple people.
> what if you overspend you UBI and have nothing left to eat?
The same if you overspend your salary - you get another job. UBI does not prevent people from working or finding jobs - it just gives workers more flexibility and freedom to pursue better options. Let's say you want to move to the middle of the country. You need to consider a lot of things, including leaving your current job and how long it'd take to find a new one at the destination.
With UBI the risk decreases and people will make such moves.
What UBI makes it harder is underemployment and labor exploitation - people won't work in terrible jobs unless they need to and UBI removes that need.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|3 years ago|reply
In theory, yes. But I do not believe specialized welfare will ever go away. There are people on Social Security / Disability that absolutely require more than the most basic amount of money a typical non-handicapped citizen needs. I do not believe UBI supporters, and even society at large, would be so heartless as to tell a paraplegic to make-do because the UBI is all they are going to get. So, accommodating them would require some additional administration on top of the UBI to make sure the people with special needs get enough additional money and access to medical care. At which point we would still need to evaluate eligibility, make adjustments, and have a bureaucracy to administer it.
[+] [-] flavius29663|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhino369|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|3 years ago|reply
This is exactly what is happening in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The government employs people who have zero-accountability (often not even requiring attendance at work), so it resembles UBI much more than a bullshit job. Saudi Arabia has actually recently been transitioning to true UBI with their Citizens Account program
[+] [-] nobodyandproud|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
With something like CBDC that would be pretty simple to solve.
[+] [-] drewcoo|3 years ago|reply
One political party doesn't want to give money away.
The other one will gladly pass out cash but only if the program is means-tested.
[+] [-] lr1970|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liminal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanw444|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyre|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think this is a good argument against UBI when so much of our labor force is engaged in meaningless work, or what late anthropologist David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs”. [1]
I can imagine it could make some people be perceived as lazy because they now have the freedom to do anything else besides push papers 40 hours a week and that paradigm shift could induce depression because so many people lose themselves while surviving capitalism. That said, there is already a pandemic of depression (4.7% of American adults)[2] that is likely highly correlated to the mentioned phenomena. As the corpus of mental health literature increases, it becomes more and more apparent laziness and depression are not moral failings, but societal failings emerging from the Capitalist-Protestant work ethic [conjecture].
UBI won’t change human nature’s drive to improve material conditions. It will allow many people the ability to pursue meaningful enterprise and self-actualization. For those without the drive to participate in the rat race, I would congratulate their enlightenment instead of accusing them of laziness.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
[2]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/depression.htm
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
Agreed. Just look at Trump, his I.Q. is one of the highest and yet his presidency has been among the worst in American history.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|3 years ago|reply
I'd rather think that it's about creating an environment where someone will solve our problems, and that we merely need to nurture the environment.
With pre-identified geniuses, we end up with an entitled class populated by people who had hired tutors, and a bunch of people who think they'll never amount to anything because they didn't pass the test.
[+] [-] jhedwards|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
It's easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that a person who is dimmer than us is cognitively challenged; it's much harder to assess the smarts of someone who is smarter than us. Is he 1% smarter than me? 10% smarter? Hell, 100% smarter? All I know is that he understands stuff that I don't, and solves crosswords faster. But I don't believe that anyone is so much smarter than the average that they need to be paid 100x what I could earn.
[+] [-] nonethewiser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timka|3 years ago|reply
Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.
Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
I'd rather work with a random person who grew up on a farm or the streets than someone who had the best tutors and went to Harvard. People who have to work hard, who grow up hard, are hardened against the world. They learn to survive.
Most of our best entrepreneurs and builders grow up building and being independent. To be independent you have to learn to survive on your own, i.e. not with UBI. I'd rather have a higher level competition, not selecting based on IQ.
In way of an example, a friend of mine who worked blue collar his whole life (running large repairs & logistics operations) ended up moving up the command. Eventually, he ended up in a consulting capacity as part of an R&D team for a massive logistics company. His first day on the job he saved an average of 2 lives a year and around $5m.
He was given the job of improving a warehouse with a bunch of newly hired kids from Yale, Harvard, etc. The kids spent weeks going over all the different locations, trying to optimize layout, etc.
Eventually, my friend just talked to people on the floor. At one point, he noticed a fork lift operator who was having an issue picking up a pallet off a truck. He asked what the issue was and the fork life operator said they didn't know exactly where the height of the pallet is. The ivy league consultants started planning out using cameras to select the correct height(s), looked at the budget associated with hiring developers, tried to identify the costs to retrofit all the fork lifts, etc.
While that went on, my friend got two magnet strips, put some bright tape on the back, measured and put the magnet at the exact height the truck bed and as the pallets were a default height he knew where to put the next strip. Every new truck that came in would just move both strips based on the new truck height. He was done that afternoon and it was a $5 retrofit.
On average, 2-3 workers died a year at all their warehouses due to pallets being knocked down, losses were an estimated $5m.
The point of the story is that "genius" doesn't work better than practical problem solving. Problem solving comes from learning to survive and be independent.
[+] [-] htag|3 years ago|reply
> They could start at, say $75,000 a year and go up by $25,000 increments every decade. The payments could expire if our geniuses decided to take paid employment but then resume if they decided to “drop out” again.
1. I don't think UBI expires, this is more like unemployment benefit which include perverse incentives against employment.
2. IQ is a controversial measurement. It's validity is questionable. It's been used or purposed to be used for truly horrible state sponsored actions in the past. I have a bias against using it for discrimination across populations, simply because of it's history and proponents over the years.
[+] [-] cgb223|3 years ago|reply
Sounds like it would create MASSIVE incentives to cheat on the IQ test or pay off the graders to give you a good score as well
It would literally set your kids up for life
[+] [-] rendall|3 years ago|reply
IQ is the most reproducible finding in psychology and psychometrics by far.
[+] [-] SirLJ|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwatt|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hppbxV9C63g
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
There's a loud chorus saying that. Mostly they're making excuses for some racial group not doing well.
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zikzak|3 years ago|reply
I tested as a genius level IQ in elementary school. I went to special educational programs in grade 4-5, then a school with a stream just for "enrichment learning" (bused in with other kids) from grade 6-12.
I tried pot for the first time at 12, was a typical stoner at 15, and went into the intellectual pursuit of "working in a kitchen" until my mid-20s.
My family was financially and socially stable enough that I could move back home with my parents at get a degree in Computer Science when various medical conditions prevented me from working as a cook any longer. I would have had a minor in "Math" had my university handed those out (they started a year after I graduated).
I in no way excelled. I had a decent GPA but it was hard work and my mature student status that got me through that first year back and kept me in it to get a degree. I couldn't handle being in university any longer so I dropped out of the Masters program.
I have I had gone to university right out of High School I probably would have failed and gone on the same path. My genius IQ did not set me up for curing cancer. It set me up for "I don't have to study to do well in school" and let me figure out "I can stage in different kitchens to travel around and see the world while also in a job that doesn't care if I am high all the time".
Giving me a guaranteed income would have probably stifled even that little bit of ambition.
I do think there's room for giving kids who didn't have the millions of squandered advantages I had some financial help but it should not be based on IQ.
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sybercecurity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapind|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
There's all sorts of things ethically questionable about this proposal. Even if the model of progress it's based on was correct, and even if there wasn't any fraud, there would be plenty of other problems with it.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|3 years ago|reply
These people have no idea what they are talking about.
IQ tests are tools. In order to properly assess very high IQ children or twice exceptional -- gifted and disabled -- children, they need to be administered by a qualified professional. Most IQ tests only go to 145. Very high IQs can only be meaningfully assessed by about age 7.
If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Last I heard, we were having trouble updating our IQ tests for various reasons and, also, IQ tests are highly culturally biased. An IQ test for Americans won't effectively assess a Brit or Canadian.
IQ tests are extremely controversial. The first test, created by Binet, that became the starting point of modern IQ tests was not intended to assess intelligence. It was intended to assess school readiness in children in France in an era where not all kids had birth certificates, so you couldn't use age as your metric, and rural kids tended to be less ready for public school than city kids for cultural reasons.
[+] [-] mistermann|3 years ago|reply
It's true, but despite that I think they are plausibly in the ballpark of a useful idea. Their particular implementation sucks, but what if an implementation included a decision making process where false/flawed "facts" were subjected to skilful review by other people.
In this case, each proposition asserted by the proponent could be rejected based on valid critiques from a diverse set of reviewers (here there is non-trivial complexity, but nothing insurmountable imho), and they could rework their recommendations to eliminate those flaws and return with an improved plan that would be subjected to the same process. After several rounds, I'd think this could produce better ideas, and over time I'd think people would get much better at it cutting the time it takes for iterations.
> If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially.
Under current approaches that mostly come from academia (not exactly the most diverse set of minds), and are subject to long iteration cycles - fund 100 startups to work on the problem and we may see better results.
Isn't it weird that we complain endlessly about poor results, and yet hardly anyone has strong feelings about doing things differently (if not outright scoff at the very idea)? I've read your posts for many years, please tell me that you can see this phenomenon all around us?
[+] [-] doodlebugging|3 years ago|reply
A large problem with the decline in intellectual curiosity relates to the "teach to the test" mentality adopted in so many places where students are not encouraged to think about or reason through problems, only to regurgitate blurbs and numbers.
My kids went through a Montessori education from infancy until they were about 9-12 years old (can't remember). Under that philosophy, they learned whatever interested them at their own pace and they were not only allowed, but they mixed with kids older and younger so that all could play off of and learn from each other. Older kids mentored younger kids. The materials they worked with challenged them to think about the subject matter.
We moved them to a private school later and they were ahead of everyone in their grade level. Both are in college with one graduating with a MS this week and continuing to a PhD next spring and the other finishing up a BS.
I always felt under-utilized as a Dad resource because my kids almost never asked for help with their homework. I wanted to dig in and help them understand the materials they were covering. They didn't need my help because they had the mental tools to think through things on their own.
[+] [-] richardjam73|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakomen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yuyudo_Comiketo|3 years ago|reply
Unconditional as in mousetrap cheese it will be.
[+] [-] fendy3002|3 years ago|reply
This is a great thing to make every growing children to be trained / optimized for one or some specific things only.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
[+] [-] borbulon|3 years ago|reply
- Stephen Jay Gould
[+] [-] dandare|3 years ago|reply
You keep using that world.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
UBI does have several purposes worth considering:
- If people are in a temporary crisis, giving them enough spending money to live in a dorm and eat rice and lentils can let them recover rather than the crisis becoming worse and more permanent due to traumatic life experiences.
- Some adults are permanently incapable of fully supporting themselves through commercial employment. Could be because of physical or mental disability, or just a 50 year old coal miner too old to learn new marketable skills. So instead of having a fraction of the population be angry, miserable and fomenting trouble, we offer them an early retirement/semi-retirement. Let robots work for you, enjoy!
But that's at best a necessary evil, with many side effects. For example, when these functions are taken up by voluntary institutions, aid recipients are incentivized to not bite the hand that feeds them and to support themselves or pay it forward to the largest degree possible. The last thing we want to do is to impose dependency on people who least need it and are most able to benefit the rest of us through their hard work. Get all the obstacles out of their way, let them get their foot in the door through apprenticeships if college is not a good option and let them shine!
[+] [-] moab|3 years ago|reply
Hell, as a PI currently writing a bunch of NSF proposals this doesn't sound half bad to me.
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
Are geniuses having trouble solving the problem of acquiring a basic income? The people behind this proposal can't be included, because the incentives of welfare traps and maintaining genius status to keep the payments coming is a perverse incentive. Look what publish or perish did to academia. It just created garbage factories. Also, the best way to get their ideas resented and ignored is to grant them privileges, and not necessarily because it's unjust, but because there is a basic human instinct to find irresponsibility and dependency in adults disgusting.
What we absolutely do know is that if you want to destroy group, give it welfare. Just like feeding wild animals who become dependent and get wiped out by scarcity, the most universally reliable way to create a failure to thrive is to substitute taking care of themselves with adapting to dependency. The best thing about this idea is that it we know whatever the right thing is, it's going to be the opposite of this.
[+] [-] myth_drannon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
If you want to make your country better, make it easier for people with good ideas to get the resources to pursue them. For starters, make it easier to get grants. There are already projects trying to do this, but having 100x the resources wouldn't hurt.
[+] [-] CrypticShift|3 years ago|reply
- The Academic Genius (Scholarship -> Tenure) : Supposedly, you have minimal work schedule (the article is pointing to some worsening fault lines)
- The Entrepreneur Genius (VC funds -> Equity) : You supposedly work on what you "love". It its true that you have to be a somewhat business-genius too to navigate the system, but this did work for a lot of people in the last decades. Where are we heading? I don’t know.
- The employee Genius (Salary -> Social security): Well, ChatGPT is again stirring that panic : a lot of knowledge workers jobs may not be immune to automation (soonish). And Social security is not in a good shape.
[+] [-] nisegami|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dslowell|3 years ago|reply
I've seen people say things like "I despair at all of the Einsteins out there who are stuck plowing fields." But that sentiment is a bit of a cop out; the issue is made to be distant enough that we can relieve ourselves of a certain amount of responsibility. How about all of the Einsteins in our own society who are still stuck in the patent office?