
Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing - arikr
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/lost-einsteins-innovation-inequality.html
======
afpx
I didn’t even begin to understand the patent system or even the business side
of innovation until I was in my late 30s. Yet, I have noticed that the most
financially successful innovators that I know have had many family advisors
and connections throughout their life.

But, inequality is just a small piece.

First, you need real education reform - educating kids on how the system
operates. The current education system is broken and harmful. It teaches 99%
of kids to become cogs in a system. And, after many years, they grow up to
believe that being a cog is all there is. Instead, they need to learn how the
system works and how to pull its levers and press its buttons to make it work
for them. But, who is going to fund that?

But, even that’s not enough. Smart kids also need access to capital (‘other
people’s money’ as my very rich friends call it) and connections. Having those
things makes a huge difference.

~~~
meri_dian
1\. We need "cogs" in the system. In a developed nation in the 21st century
being a "cog" is a really great existence.

2\. Profoundly gifted people generally do rise to the top as our system is
already structured, assuming they want to, given the average amount of
support.

"The System" as it stands is doing a great job of the dual goals of helping
the average live their lives to the fullest and also giving the gifted a
chance to rise above the rest.

~~~
afpx
I do agree that ‘cogs’ are necessary. However, shouldn’t the individual be
able to decide that, not the educational system? The current system doesn’t
enrich children in ways that allow kids to explore other options. Look up
successful technology company founders - you’ll see that many went to
alternative schools like Montessori. But, the vast majority of kids don’t have
access to that type of exploratory education.

I disagree about your second point based on my experiences. I grew up ‘gifted’
in a working class, rust belt city. Many of my schoolmates ended up with
decent middle class jobs. And, a surprising number even went on to get PhDs.
An even more surprising number didn’t make it to graduation.

The majority of the PhDs ended up switching fields (with tremendous debt)
after working for a few years. The few that went on to become professors,
successful researchers, and innovatvators came from rich families with well-
educated and successful parents.

My main criticism of our system is that it doesn’t veer far from basic primate
behavior. I would even bet that a general model of primate hierarchical system
would do well in predicting human success. And, that’s an absurd model,
especially today. Humans have given up or suppressed many primate behaviors in
order to live in the modern world. But, we still hold on to familial
hierarchical behavior - maybe because the dopamine rush of being at the top
just feels so damn good.

I am very curious to know your background and why you hold those opinions.

~~~
ataturk
Interesting comment. I grew up in a blue-ish collar rust-belt city, was
"gifted" (whatever that means) and ended up getting a PhD (no debts, though)
that I now arguably don't make money from. Everything you mentioned is very
common, but I'm not sure that observation points to some kind of change we can
make versus the underlying day to day realities of the US circa 2017.

My big takeaway from years inside higher education both as a student and as
staff and adjunct faculty is that the most successful people are those aligned
with wealthy, connected families and despite my aptitude, I was always on the
outside looking in. It's as though there are two colleges, two universities,
which is the same in the "real world" also--a few get brought along because
they're connected and the rest of us are encouraged to believe in the
illusion, the lie, really, that we can have true upward mobility. I have been
upwardly mobile, but only because where I came from was so low. In comparison
to the insiders I am talking about, many of whom I would characterize as
drooling idiots who would never make it on their own merits, my own arc is far
less profound.

The children of the wealthy and connected will always have the upper hand and
there's nothing you can do about it other than take big risks to start your
own business and build up wealth faster than working for someone else can
accomplish. If you succeed, you will be "new money" and remain an outsider.
You may improve the lot of your heirs, however.

The biggest slap for me in my whole life of hard work and continuous
improvement is the realization that I prospered more via marrying well than I
have in my actual career and that even my relatively modest wealth does not
compare to the most successful people because the bar has moved so incredibly
far up.

~~~
afpx
Your last paragraph is particularly funny to me because it’s exactly my
experience, too. For all my hard work and successes, my marriage had the most
impact. It opened doors to me that weren’t previously available. And, that
access was most important.

------
kiliantics
I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain
groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter
of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the
resources, and the underserved who may deserve them.

> "We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a
> football or playing a trumpet,"

We do a good job of this now, but if you look back, there was a time not long
ago when a black person playing the trumpet, no matter how well, was not seen
as valuable. It took time for jazz and other cultural things to enter the
mainstream and become valued by the group of people who are in power.

There are already plenty of "Einsteins" out there, who got access to at least
enough resources to explore their passions and express their creativity.
However, they still fail to be recognised when they are invisible to people in
positions of power, who may be too stuck inside their cultural framework to
acknowledge them.

~~~
bsder
> We do a good job of this now

Actually, we don't. The fact that the best hockey players are bunched around
certain birth months shows that we _create_ these kinds of differentials.

------
tensor
My main problem with this article and associate research is using patents as
an indicator of invention. Patents are only an indicator of money, sometimes
innovation, but certainly not invention.

For reference, innovation is taking existing ideas and implementing or
combining them well, invention is creating wholly new works.

Invention is still mostly the domain of academia. Some of the big corporations
can afford to fund research into true invention, but generally the risks don't
make good business sense because the rate of return is so low.

Innovation happens frequently in startups, but patents are still a poor
measure of it. Patents mainly measure whether someone can afford the lawyers
to write the applications. In my experience in software, the patents
themselves are only a loose approximation of any real technology. Perhaps in
mechanical sciences they are more concrete.

~~~
guelo
Patents are obviously a poor proxy, even inventions are a poor proxy for
social impact. But there's no reason to believe that the data would look
significantly different if we were able to measure it directly.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
What's interesting is that the great innovations of the early 20th century,
weren't by a diverse group of people. Eastern European Jews (of which Einstein
was a member) produced a disproportionate amount of those discoveries. This
was despite the fact that they were among the most persecuted groups in
history. Because of this, I don't think that US government policy is the major
reason for the differences in the article.

~~~
musage
Einstein was born in Southern Germany, with ancestors that had been there for
centuries. German Wikipedia describes his family as "assimilated, non-
orthodox, Jewish-German middleclass" and quotes him as being grateful to his
town of birth, Ulm, for part of his character. English WP says "The Einsteins
were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews", and he got the arguable most important
part of his education in Switzerland where he moved to early on.

He was already traveling the world and giving lectures well before the rise of
the Nazis, and he "simply" didn't return to Germany when they were in power. I
can't speak for him, but I would assume he would consider himself as having
had a good life with ample opportunities. The Nazis simply didn't even have a
chance to persecute him, if anything the FBI made a huge dossier on him for
his socialist views, though even that wasn't really persecution of the kind
you ascribe to him by mere association. He had plenty opportunities, he wasn't
born poor and certainly not Eastern European. I can't even begin to guess
where you have any of that from, but it's not from the actual life of the
actual person. And if that's the _only_ reason you think the article is
mistaken, then you don't _have_ a (valid) reason.

~~~
owlmirror
That does not mean that Jews didn't face sharp and harsh discrimination by the
very widespread and strong antisemitism at the time. Arguably they were one of
the most prosecuted people in European history. And despite all that they
still fared very well in comparison to the majority population.

Which makes the narrative that the lack of success in other groups is entirely
grounded in lack of opportunity due to discrimination, rather shaky.

~~~
musage
What about some actual data? The article does offer data, not a "narrative".

------
lordnacho
> We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a
> football or playing a trumpet

The number of kids who are trained in sports yet never reach the professional
level is absolutely enormous, and it has far-reaching consequences for them.

[https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-
bi...](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-biggest-
issue-boys-rejected-academies)

~~~
watwut
Those boys are all good, really. It is mostly that the number of top positions
is very limited, not that they would be bad at football or lazy.

------
lucozade
Good God this is infuriating. The single most anomalous figure in the whole
article and not one word about it.

Surely, the over representation of people of Asian descent in this, and
similar findings, is worthy of _some_ analysis?

I appreciate it spoils the narrative but, if people actually cared, it must
make sense to look at the systemic cases that buck the trend.

At the very least acknowledge it. Completely ignoring whole racial groups
strikes me as somewhere between blatantly rude and racist.

~~~
owlmirror
It's social science, where theories don't need to be falsifiable and data is
only used to support you ideology and adapted to fit your narrative but never
used to challenge some sacred a priori believes.

------
pipio21
Well, given that most people in the world by far live outside the U.S.A, and
that people that do not have opportunities are outside the US, in my opinion
the low hanging fruit for innovation is in Africa, South America and China,and
India not the USA.

In Africa you have kids that are not well fed and after 2 hours of
intellectual work they can't continue because of the low nutrition of food!!

In equatorial Africa I can't even think clearly myself because of the intense
heat all year long. In India and South Asia it is worse half a year because of
humidity.

I seriously believe that climate has a lot to do with intellectual output,
specially math is very sensitive to outside temperature.

China probably has the brightest near future, but for this it has to change
their culture. Innovating is breaking and changing the rules, something China
is very bad at.

------
camillomiller
I’m a bit bothered by how society == USA, and that’s it. There’s a world
outside of USA, with people inventing things and helping society. Maybe it’s
time we start thinking more globally, instead we’re just at globalized
thinking.

~~~
tudorw
I can understand that feeling, when I clicked I thought it was going to be
about somewhere else, the Sudan, or Congo maybe, those places where genius is
snuffed out hour by hour.

------
cableshaft
I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this
as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they
should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with
all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more
obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much
harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects
of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc).

Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting
sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on
"yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving
you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading
algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close
to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that).

Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm
sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe
it's balanced out by that a bit.

I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well
growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but
once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for
companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty
good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being
minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my
spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for
society.

And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and
card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly
(Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are
a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).

------
vowelless
> I encourage you to take a moment to absorb the size of these gaps. Women,
> African-Americans, Latinos, Southerners, and low- and middle-income children
> are far less likely to grow up to become patent holders and inventors.

I know the author uses patents as a proxy for innovation. But is it really a
valid proxy?

Do we want to maximize innovation or do we want to maximize patent holdings?

Why not remove patents and construct a modern understandig of "innovation".
Did Einstein even patent anything in his own name? What about his
contemporaries: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger?

~~~
musage
Einstein did patent inventions, around 50 are known. He also worked at a
patent office for 7 years. I think you still have a point, I also don't think
patents necessarily equal innovation, but Einstein simply is not the best
example for it.

------
tpfour
One tangential point is that earning a scholarship seems to _increase_ your
chances of winning another. I recently heard on the local news that X student
had earned a prestigious scholarship, and that he had previously won multiple
others. What's the use of giving away a lot of money and recognition to
someone? When is is "too much"?

Scholarship resources being limited, you should maybe get _less_ chances to
win another scholarship after winning one. Then you'd get more people with
scholarships, and maybe some of them would get the confidence boost they need
to actually perform instead of work stupid jobs.

One particular case I always thought was especially unethical is for some
people to win scholarships and then change branches entirely. I.e. to use the
scholarship for an application to med school, or law school, or whatever other
program they didn't get into.

------
thisisit
Here's the link for original research and presentation:

[http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve...](http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_slides.pdf)

[http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve...](http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf)

To use Occam's razor - this is an income inequality issue.

------
jerkstate
How does this jive with the Silicon Valley trope that ideas aren't worth very
much in and of themselves, but the people and teams who can execute on them
are?

~~~
api
That trope is sort of bullshit. Both matter.

It does apply when the idea is some kitschy social media thing but not so much
when it's a real key innovation.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The problem is we don't have much of a theory of innovation.

Google beat AltaVista etc because of execution, not because page ranking was
the most amazing invention in history.

But to get to Google you need a trail of gamechanger innovations in science,
physics, and math. All those innovations were created by individual geniuses
armed with a pen, some paper, a brain, and maybe some discussion with other
geniuses.

At that level, ideas don't need to be executed with a commercial strategy and
a website, because they're more abstract and far more powerful than a startup.
In fact they create an envelope in which new kinds of execution become
possible.

~~~
api
I'm skeptical of whether there _can_ be a theory of innovation. Innovation
means a novel movement in state space toward some new maximum in the fitness
landscape. Each movement is going to be different. Each innovation is a unique
thing.

A theory of innovation would be like a theory of adaptation. You can say vague
general things like "adaptations occur because of natural selection" but you
could never formulate a theory specifying the exact sequence of concrete
changes or events leading to an adaptation.

------
bsder
This is unsurprising. Simply look at what it takes to win the Regeneron (nee
Intel nee Westinghouse) Science Talent Search. If you don't have a lot of
adult support, you aren't getting anywhere.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Searc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Search)

------
em3rgent0rdr
Intellectual Property needs to be abolished. Google: "Against Intellectual
Monopoly"

------
djrobstep
Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. Even if we somehow solve it, it
would just be shuffling people up and down the ladder of an unfair system.

Instead, we should be dismantling the ladder. Real equality means equality of
outcomes.

Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to
_avoid_ talking about real equality and its implications.

~~~
Rainymood
>Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept.

What? So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with
parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born
poor due to mere chance?

>Real equality means equality of outcomes.

I completely disagree. Real equality does NOT mean equality of outcomes.
People have opportunities. People have choices. People make choices and these
choices have real consequences. I personally do not think it's fair to force
the same outcome on some college kid that binge drinks and smokes weed all day
versus some college kid that studies his bum off. Imagine what this does to
incentives!?

>Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to
avoid talking about real equality and its implications.

Would you elaborate on this? I'll be honest here that I'm not too well-versed
in this topic but I think it's interesting to talk about nonetheless.

Full disclosure: I'm from the Netherlands where I feel there is quite some
equal opportunity. Nearly every kid can go to a good primary school, high
school, and any university if they try hard enough. There are little financial
barriers as tuition is only 2.000/year. Contrast this to US universities if
you do not have a scholarship, etc.

However, the fact that everyone can go to the same university doesnt mean that
everyone will end up exactly at the same place. People make choices and these
choices have consequences.

~~~
minipci1321
This educational system you describe is great, no doubt, but are you sure it
offers __equal opportunity__ to every kid?

In my opinion, according to family history, background etc (roughly boiling
down to the income history in past 1-2-3 generations), kids won't be able to
extract the same possibilities from the same conditions offered to each one:
studies will be harder for some more than for others, simply because of the
background, logistics etc, which will require not only working harder from
someone who already does, but doing something they might not even know about:
aiming higher, not compromising where others would be allowed to, having more
confidence than an average kid their age, etc.

I don't really know how to solve this (I think this part incumbs to family,
but is that equal opportunity still?). The best thing about the system you
describe that they carefully detect and extract the "nuggets" we sometimes get
here. But I should thinks all educational systems nowadays do that more or
less well.

