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get a job at a hedge fund for a few years, and then retire and have enough $ to do math and buy a home

plenty of hedge funds would love to have a field's medalist




Yes, that's kind of the point isn't it. It's a sad reality that the world's brightest minds have to help people with capital earn more capital (or go to some big tech company design the latest dystopian surveillance algorithm or whatever), or refuse and stay destitute.


>help people with capital earn more capital

Isn't that what a job is? Unless I am missing something.


I would invite you to use your imagination about what a job might be if it weren’t to enrich others at the expense of your own potential.


Those ten years would replace the ten years early in your STEM career which comprises your most impactful work.


I agree. how much money should it be. 100k/year that should be enough for most areas or only expensive areas. but would this be for all math or physics degrees or just by IQ?


It is quite a narrow discussion, all focused around this notion of letting them live anywhere.

But to me it is simple. The genius probably doesn't want to live in London per-se. They want to mingle with other geniuses. So they want to be near the best universities so they are contunially interacting with the best when they want to. But also having private spaces to think.

Really they just need a decent serviced appartment on university grounds, or in housing nearby.

Which is something the government will probably already own or could build.


Yes, that is indeed what it is _right now_. But in Europe in the 1100s farming meant producing food for your Lord, and in Italy in the 100s meant producing food for your slavemaster. But then history happened and things evolved. In our future they will evolve still.


There is little wrong with it, but it's an uncontroversial fact that human intelligence peaks around 22 and what remains after it is a slow decline, ameliorated by amassing more crystallized knowledge.

Hardest fields require this extreme raw intelligence, thus even capable people have only their 20s to produce their most groundbreaking work.

It would be cool if human aging weren't structured like this, but if this is a problem with a solution at all, a solution still needs someone extremely talented in their 20s to work on it for a few years.

Compared to the upside, I think that providing UBI to such people should be a non-issue.


This makes the assumption that “raw intelligence” is all that’s required to push at the edge of “hardest fields”

This is simply not true. Some fields require learning 10-20 years of domain knowledge before one can push at the edge. Another factor is discipline, often the young are impatient, and lack the rigour and discipline required to execute.

I think that the large leaps made by the young are through fresh ideas made from new perspectives, their minds unburdened with legacy methods.

I’m not arguing that human intelligence peaks at young adulthood, I’m arguing that contributing to “hardest fields” is NOT simply a factor of raw intelligence like your answer assumes.


The hedge fund is what you would be doing instead of the work that would make them a field medalist.

So really they would love someone who could be a field medalist, to give that up, make them a few billion, and pay them a few million.


Assuming that the skill, creativity, & genius that this world ought to be supporting lines up at all with the same things that would make someone successful at a hedge fund seems wildly off target to me.




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