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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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College used to be that. Then it got to be an expensive form of generational wealth transfer and class boundary policing.
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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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Replying to
Mediocrity will do as it does without help. Hoping for the exceptional is raging against the dying of the light. The former is important to come to terms with, but holding it up as an ideal is perverse.
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historically they haven't been created by exceptional people but by ordinary people under weird conditions you're begging the question of the supposed value of exceptional people and assuming ordinary people are worthless drags on the special
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Replying to and
If you take it as axiomatic that "great" people exist and that all value comes from them, you will land on exactly the sort of apparently self-evident conclusions and contempt for the ordinary you seem to
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You're reading a lot into my questioning but at least that answers some other Qs I had.. But you're mistaken, I think you're correct on the broader point but there's a fine line I'm trying to clarify for myself between recognition of the thing and creation of mythology around it.
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I'm not. I've watched the general tendency and pattern of your comments/replies over several years, as well as your own posts on FB etc. It's clear that you start from very different assumptions than I do on most of these questions.
Replying to and
I think your revealed axioms (and I'm confident I'm reading them correctly, I know you well enough) are basically wrong, but that's fine. Just futile to argue across such a big divide in axioms.
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