Conversation

Everyone wants to discover and invest in the "smartest" and "most driven" people 👀 I instinctively want to avoid anyone who makes it through such a filter
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I've occasionally faked my way into rigged lists of "smartest" under test conditions, and occasionally managed to fake "driven" for several weeks in a row, but if anyone seriously tried to bet on me using such tests in hopes of returns, damn... I'd be a total shitcoin. No moon.
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If I had money to throw at such ideas, I'd probably go for random distribution. At most some testing of basic mental competence to handle money, and not being a known serial killer or something. And no return in an income share sense, just gently encourage a pay-it-forward norm
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Anyone who wants to create artificial selection pressures regimes to reproduce their notions of optimal human beings is typically trying to clone a self-congratulatory idea of themselves at scale
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It's not that it can't work in an investment sense. You'll almost certainly get a certain "yield" of stars, a bunch of mediocrities, and some dogs you quietly ignore. It's just a shitty way to think about human development in general.
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The kind of idea I really like is for systems that can take average mediocrities as input and produce interesting results and evolutions.
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Replying to
My objection btw isn't about false positive or false negative errors, it's about the very idea of exceptionally privileging exceptionality at the expense of the ability of the ordinary to pursue completely ordinary lives
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for some reason people want to either drag everyone down to the same level (as in SF school district) OR ritually sacrifice the ordinary entirely, as in "shut down ordinary schools/colleges and only back the presciently picked winners"
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Replying to
given the level of higher education among young people, college is clearly a vehicle for normal people to expand their horizons the problem is that elites only think about elite schools which have always been exclusionary and boundary policing