• bullsworth@pawb.social
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    7 days ago

    We almost certainly have 1,000 Einsteins and 1,000 Mozarts alive today. A relevant quote from 1979:

    “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.”

    -Stephen Jay Gould

    • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      I remember a talk by a Microsoft VP who said that a very optimistic estimate would be that we were using human intelligence and creativity at maybe 5% efficiency. The actual number is likely much lower than that.

      • LuckyBoy@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        That is pseudo science and a really stupid take. Our brain is expensive as fuck since the moment of conception, born realy early and mostly under developed because of Our fucking big head. The whole evolution says that we animals use it or loose it, let that be tails, guils or brain power.

        If we didnt use the whole brain it would be cut off for efficiency.

        • Claidheamh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 days ago

          Maybe the quote wasn’t about the brain, but about human resource management, which would make more sense in the context here?

        • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          Mind the context, we are talking about how little our society is capitalizing on the abilities of people, not on some stupid “we only use 10% of our brain” take

  • LotrOrc@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Think about how many Einsteins and Mozarts all over the world who he and the other billionaires have killed through their policies and greed

  • Almacca@aussie.zone
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    7 days ago

    The only reason ghouls like Bezos want a bigger population is because they want more people to exploit, especially artists and scientists.

    • Jumi@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I’m certain if I hadn’t fought depression and sucidial thoughts for the most part of my life I’d be in a better position now.

    • Digit@lemmy.today
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      7 days ago

      Yep. So much wasted human potential.

      Fuck billionaires, and their rigged game.

  • tigermountain@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Stories like these from people like these are always delivered through the lens of what’s best for business. This is propaganda.

    • Napster153@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Also lack of genuine self-awareness on their own true intentions. To them, being greedy is so ingrained they can’t see it as a hazard to themselves until its too late.

  • Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    I’ve heard both Melon Husk and Lil’ Jeffy Kisses repeat this sentiment. Where do they even get their figure? Something like 120 billion humans have existed, ever, and there has been only one Einstein and one Mozart. 1/120B * 1T = 8.5.

    Factor in the widespread nutritional and medical resource shortages that would come along with one trillion humans, and I’m confident that number would drop to zero.

    It seems to be that we’d be better off ensuring the future of humanity and focusing on science. Surely it would be quicker to experiment with genetics to grow an Einstein than it would be to implement a trillion-human breeding lottery hoping to find one.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    7 days ago

    That unfortunate reality that their enormous wealth has been mostly down to population growth and psychopathic greed, and not because they were born with magical business brains.

  • Digit@lemmy.today
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    7 days ago

    With proper resource management (up to and beyond availing and provisioning all emancipatory technologies), such that we could build vast multi-layered forest arcologyscapes, we could increase the carrying capacity of earth, for humans, to over 300 trillion, living in vast spacious lush garden abundance. Not saying that we should. Just that we could. Such is our headroom.

    But we don’t get to have nice things, because of the likes of Bezos.

    Industrialists, monopolists, “globalists” [oh they love that one, a flowery euphemism for more like “megalomaniacs”?], who eliminate any competition, by whatever means necessary to attain and maintain an imbalance of power.

    A few years back I recall some journalists unearthing a study that showed how Wall St (and other stock exchange centers), were not only not “making” money/wealth, but extracting it from the economy, and further, for every dollar of wealth they extracted from the economy, they destroy another 7 dollars of wealth. … Takes a moment for the magnitude of that to sink in.

    So then we get these fauxlanthropists, swanning around, like Rockerfeller, giving a dime to someone on camera, in a community from whom he’d stolen millions, to whitewash their image.

    … by whatever means necessary… a lot of that’s just by the patents system and the legal system. How many patents get secreted a year? How many merely get sat on? How much lawfare’s done to scare off inventors of technologies that would out-compete and obsolete enshitified rent-extraction maximisation technologies? How much else? A spat of inventors disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances recently. How far would you go to protect a multi trillion industry? As far as to actively prevent a better world without resource wars or poverty from ever happening? How far would a psychopath who’s drawn to power go, with exacerbating tragedies of the commons for their own selfish short-sighted power-grab and resource gain? There’s nothing stopping them…

    We can all be polymaths in the making,

    not slaves in training, lapping up the platitudes that placate us, from those who enslave us.

    (PS, I’ve been boycotting Amazon since 2004, waiting for everybody else to see it. Maybe now with their participation in vast rampant destruction of rare books to feed their AI for cheap, to become the info monopoly, able to shape our agnosis, more people will see it and stop falling for it, in this small window we have, before their total information management becomes complete and we become a cosmic dystopian tragedy, with our minds entirely curated by the everpresent cold-reading psychopathic ai hypnotist, not just coercively hoodwinking us to carrying it in our pocket, but skynet, will be everywhere, especially in our mind. Except it wont be our mind any more. It will be the corporation’s. Maximum capitalisation, reducing people to the numbers. … Bezos, a trillion humans? Sure. But we are not the same.)

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    If you had 1000 kids with proper education, a good safe environment environment, who are allowed and motivated to follow their dreams, and with the economics to support all that you’ll probably could also get 1000 Mozarts.

    Also you could just name 1000 kids Amadeus, idk.

  • marighost@piefed.social
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    8 days ago

    Imagine how many more Mozarts and Einsteins we could have if we removed barriers like poverty and hunger and allowed everyone to have a fair shot at life.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Exactly this

      We have so much untapped potential in the world because of the system he is a product of. The vast majority of people have to spend most of their time and effort on general survival. There’s diminishing amounts of time and effort that average Joe can actually spend on intellectual and artistic pursuits orthogonal to their source of income. Hell, just fucking having hobbies is becoming a bit of a privileged position in 2026, which is frankly a desolate place we’ve managed to take civilisation.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      See, that’s the thing these guys don’t want to understand. There could be a thousand generational talents like that "right fucking now*, who have these enormous gifts and won’t ever be able to realize them because they gotta go to their third job so they don’t fall behind on rent AGAIN.

      Your Uber driver might be a virtuosic violin player who’s never realized it because he’s never had the opportunity to try. The cashier at Taco Bell might be an amazing painter, who can’t afford to paint because every last cent has to go to one bill or another. That kid in Ghana you’re watching on the TV charity commercial might be the next talent in rocketry or physics or poetry or any of a dozen other fields if they had a shot.

    • I know a guy who draws absolutely beautiful sketches, and having seen some of the paintings he “dabble with”, I’m positive he could make some amazing things.

      Unfortunately, all he gets to do is small sketches in his down time, because he works two jobs and has 2 kids.

      Imagine how many people have an ideas for something that would make tons of people’s lives better, but they can’t work on it because they have to go to work and all their energy is spent just trying not to become a statistic…

    • LucidNightmare@anarchist.nexus
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      8 days ago

      It’s so nice to see other people with this sentiment. Even at a young age I always thought it was a little silly for only rich people to have “the best” education when there are people out there who can’t follow their passions or dreams because of various things.

      So nice to see, thank you for pointing it out!

    • Blastboom Strice@mander.xyz
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      7 days ago

      And if we cooperated instead of antagonizing each other (which happens under this capitalist system) we could probably collectively achieve even more than 1000 “mozarts” could do

    • Janx@piefed.social
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      7 days ago

      But. Then we’d have no Elon Musks or Jeff Bezos’s or Jeffrey Epsteins… Surely you don’t want healthcare that bad, right??

    • Kanda@reddthat.com
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      7 days ago

      No no no, just make endless people living in poverty and maybe a gentleman can pick up a child prodigy here and there

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    We probably already have thousands of them out there but they never recieved the education they would have needed to unlock their potential and or are too busy surviving in abject poverty to contribute to the advancement of humanity.

    Because shitheads like him hoard all the money and do everything they can so others around them are stuck in the poverty trap so they can use them as cheap, desperate and exploitable labor.