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Utopia Talk / Politics / IQs say something
jergul
large member
Tue Nov 06 12:20:43
Sammy: "Proper humans do not define themselves by how well they do on trivial tasks."

You are merely saying that you find value in the self-esteem boost you think your IQ gives you when it is high-lighted in whatever minute single digit percentage of your time you spend doing things requiring an IQ outside the 80-90 range.

Fair enough, but that self-esteem boost would still have a pretty marginal utility value overall.

People feel good about themselves for many reasons.
jergul
large member
Tue Nov 06 12:23:39
Actually, not quite correct as you were linking a small fraction of your time to your identity (your sense of self). The logic is still valid.
Sam Adams
Member
Tue Nov 06 13:02:47
What i do in a day ten thousand sebs would struggle to do in a year, and no number of jerguls could ever do.

When it comes to complex tasks the value of intelligence is very exponential.
jergul
large member
Tue Nov 06 14:17:37
Sammy
Graveyards are full of people who thought they were irreplacable. But I get what you are saying. You have niche expertise that is uncommon in the marketplace and desirable (or required by regulation as more often the case) in the job you do.

Niche technical experts are by no means an uncommon phenomena. I am acquainted with quite a number of them. So is Seb for that matter.

Now lets take away the procedural (tasks that could be done by anyone with the proper job description in hand and training). This should leave you with a few decision points a day where intelligence above 80-90 might be useful.

Though ultimately, I think it a job that would be done better by algorithms (as you have discounted imagination and intuition as important earlier).

But I digress. You have 10hrs a week where the utility of an IQ above 80-90 is quite valuable. In that ballpark (we would need a detailed time analysis to know exactly).

Or simply demonstrating the marginal utility of an IQ above 80-90 overall.

Its still important to be smert. Because it buys you time before age or illness related cognitive decline makes most things you do impossible. We might be speaking of 5-10 years extra of decent cognitive functionality (depending on the specifics of circumstance.

Which is nothing to sneeze at.
Seb
Member
Tue Nov 06 16:02:39
Sam:

I very much doubt what you do couldn't be done by ten thousand technically competent people with above average iq organised in the right way in a year.

cf. for example the nth country study, where two grad students were able to replicate designs for a nuclear weapon in under a year given access to open reference material.

Unless every day your work involves instigating some dramatic paradigm shift, I rather think it would be pretty easy for a moderately intelligent technically qualified people to pick up.

Walking talking exemplar of Dunning Kruger!


Seb
Member
Tue Nov 06 16:04:15
I'm pretty sure you couldn't do my job, not because your lack intelligence, but because you don't look like you have the necessary competence and behaviours.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 10:35:27
Given your mediocre reasoning ability and slow understanding of atmospheric physics(have you figured out that temperature equals thickness yet?), and perhaps worse, your love of incompetent bureaucracy and buzzwords, i stand by 10,000 sebs taking a year to get results as accurate as what i will do this afternoon.

Dont forget to organize your daily standup!!
Seb
Member
Wed Nov 07 10:56:17
If a stand-up needs organising, something's gone very wrong.

This is the point, you are not a team player. This is why you will be kept in your box and wheeled out only when needed for answering relatively well defined questions that fit within your known areas of competence.

jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:03:28
I rather think it would take me 3 minutes to get within 80% of your accuracy once I had played around with the software you use for a while.

I doubt I would be inclined to spend much more than 3 minutes on that task.

For someone with 80-90 IQ following rigid procedures would probably match that 80%.

Properly designed computer algorithms would outscore you in a fraction of the time.

But your job is probably safe for the time being.

Organizational inertia being what it is.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 11:03:56
"you are not a team player."

Perhaps not with an incompetent clown.

But the bulk of my actual coworkers are fucking elite. Its great. We do amazing things, and we do them fast and safely in environments where mistakes are punished with rapid death. When you hire the best, you dont need your hand holding whiny bullshit.
jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:06:00
Last was @sammy.
jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:06:30
You drive nascars for a living sammy?
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 11:07:45
"Properly designed computer algorithms"

Who do you think writes those?

Ya, thats me as well. Work sam is a combination of conscious sam and all the computer tools sam created to sometimes do his work for him. Thats how one sam is so awesome at what he does.

Pwnt.
jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:08:08
Your elite co-workers are the clowns we see on tv chasing hurricanes?
jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:09:44
Sammy
Lulz, I have seen the programming questions you ask here. No, they would not qualify as properly designed algorythms.

The term you are looking for is "spreadsheet".
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 11:14:26
Im sure i did ask newb questions... 10 years ago.

Fortunately my high iq causes fast and accurate learning.
jergul
large member
Wed Nov 07 11:21:06
I am pretty sure a high IQ is not required to learn how to spreadsheet stuff over the course of a decade.

You know what they say about monkeys, typewriters and the complete works of William Shakespeare (always a bit reduntantly - a single monkey on an infinite timeline would be enough to retype them).
Seb
Member
Wed Nov 07 15:53:45
Sam:

Pretty sure I was answering your newbie questions a decade ago while I was writing software to solve novel classes of problems
Been there, done that, literally wrote a book on it.

Maths and coding isn't hard, just involves a bit of effort.

The interesting stuff isn't doing that. It's defining the questions that the c-suite sense but can't articulate, answering them, setting the strategy and then building the organisational capability to deliver to it.

The cool thing about your workplace as you describe it isn't being you. It's being the guy that recruits, retains and ensures you and your immediate colleagues function.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 23:08:04
If you could do science and math well, you would still be doing it. Management is an intellectual step backwards and you know it.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Nov 07 23:10:33
Now dont get me wrong there are a few good managers, and many acceptable ones. But as a whole they talk more and understand less.
jergul
large member
Thu Nov 08 04:46:15
lol Sammy. Management and policy is extremely complicated. Confirmed perhaps by your opinion of most managers.

I strongly dislike the random human element involved in all management and policy issues. Humans suck and really defy all attempts to spreadsheet their behavior.

The bias you are indicating is that all things you are bad at are by definition an "intellectual step backwards".
jergul
large member
Thu Nov 08 04:46:42
behavior at an individual level*
Sam Adams
Member
Thu Nov 08 10:20:20
"Management and policy is extremely complicated"

Lol. To a fisherman that thinks 90 iq is enough, it might be.
jergul
large member
Thu Nov 08 10:37:20
Sammy
Wow. Managing social interactions is the main reason humanity has developed the IQs it has in the first place.

I think the bias I mentioned is confirmed.
Seb
Member
Thu Nov 08 12:47:24
Sam:

You have far more immediate impact doing what I do than as a research scientist, and far better pay. Why on earth wouldn't i leave?

Pretty much the moment I realised I wanted to set large scale strategy was when I realised not only was nuclear fusion unlikely to be delivered in my lifetime, but that it was actually addressing the wrong problem. Strategically, fusion is a dead end.

Also I get paid far more than what researchers get paid unless they - like you - sell out to provide a very niche class of repeated problem solving. Which isn't really science - just quantitative analysis. I suspect what you do is very little different from being a quant in a hedge fund and I can think of nothing so boring. I looked at that when a head hunter approached me on LinkedIn back when I decided I wanted to get into policy and strategy. While the pay would have been larger than what I got as a civil servant, there is literally no amount of money you could offer me to do that job - it's far too limiting.

I get to figure out how to solve complex unspecified multidimensional problems, and then make them happen.

That still involves quantitative analysis to. But I've always liked the figuring out rather than being attached to exercising specific narrow skills and methods.
It's not like I have a deep yearning void because I no longer need to use numerical methods to solve MHD equations.
Sam Adams
Member
Thu Nov 08 12:58:43
"Strategically, fusion is a dead end. "

Fusion is actually the great hope for humanity. But i suspect you failed out of science, going unhired by the labs working on it. So in self defense, your mind has developed "fusion cant work" as a useful delusion.
Sam Adams
Member
Thu Nov 08 13:04:19
Sad really. Seb had great hope but couldnt hack it, and was relagated to low level management in some public policy thinktank, to live out his days in ignominy and buzzwords.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Nov 09 00:47:15
Please don’t tell me this is where this ends? I just popped a new bag of popcorns :(
jergul
large member
Fri Nov 09 01:20:52
Humanist and climate defender Sam: "Fusion is actually the great hope for humanity"

Rofl.

And no. Unless you mean great hope in the same way we can hope the Gods intervene.
Seb
Member
Fri Nov 09 02:26:05
Sam:

That's often what people who know little about fusion and nothing about economics and commercial matters think.

Let's say we figure out the first wall challenge (a material that can yeah 100 displacements per atom) and instabilities.

It's not actually clean - the first wall and other in vessel components end up being highly activated. No long lived waste, but plenty of short lived waste.

So you need all the hot cells, remote handling and cooling ponds.

Now long lived waste storage and disposal isn't factored into conventional fissions economics.

The key issue with fission economically is they are hugely capital intensive which means they need massive upfront investment with the investor taking the risk that the plant can keep enough uptime and life to make that back, and the price of electricity remains high enough.

And fission comes in large chunks between 250MW to 1000MW.

Nuclear fusion is currently coming in more expensive than fission in forecast models. But it's even more capital intensive compared to fission, with the same operating challenges, much less certainty on technical performance, and projected min capacity of around 1500-2000MW.

And because it's capital intensive, it has to run for about 20 -30 years to make profit.

That's a terrible feature for a novel power source as that period is the typical timescale for operator learning curves that give you improved efficiency with each generation.

Meanwhile solar continues to reduce in cost, energy storage at scale continues to mature, and there are better forms of fission available.

We won't need fusion for centuries.

Trying to build fusion reactors now is a good science project, but it's like trying to build an integrated circuit with metal rather than semiconductors.






Seb
Member
Fri Nov 09 02:31:17
Think tank? Bzzz wrong.
jergul
large member
Fri Nov 09 03:17:14
"energy storage at scale continues to mature"

That too is a highly optimistic view. But is actually the core problem. Storage. Not production (production has essentially been solved).
Seb
Member
Fri Nov 09 06:29:32
For comparison to fusion you are looking at at least 30 years to a viable powerplant putting energy to grid.

What's the maturity curve on storage look like over that time frame?

Most European countries plan to phase out ICE by then, so lots of mobile energy storage devices.

There isn't a commercial niche here that fusion fits.

It would require an act of huge state intervention (but why fusion over new concept fission) or alternatively a dramatic cost reduction in forecast energy cost (10x) plus an unrealistic certainty on whole life cost for the plant.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Hence, I looked elsewhere.

Sam Adams
Member
Fri Nov 09 11:33:19

"What's the maturity curve on storage look like over that time frame? "

Probably worse than fusion. Jergul is correct... storage economics really suck. That tech is no where near mature.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Nov 09 14:06:39
The only real way to solve this issue is to burn everything down and rebuild entire cities and national infrastructure with the lessons we have learned, but can't get past because of the horribly inefficient legacy shit everywhere and lack of a complete systems approach. Civilian infrastructure has thousands of years of tradition and novelty built into it's thinking and the product. Refitting is done very slowly as acceptance of new technology is conservative for monetary and functional (materials, design etc) reasons. If you would build a city today, you wouldn't build it like Stockholm or London, or even where London or Stockholm are on the map. You would have district heating/cooling, you wouldn't put radiators near the fucking walls, you would have heated floors, have better insulation. The entire city from the ground up.

Evacuate everyone, burn it down and do this whole civilization thing differently.
Seb
Member
Fri Nov 09 15:15:35
Sam:

"That tech is no where near mature"

Hence "continues to mature".

Probably worse than fusion seems unlikely given we are talking about a thirty year period before fusion can be said to have even launched
jergul
large member
Fri Nov 09 15:33:23
You are talking about fire bombing Dresden when at worst we would need the equivalent of a rationing scheme like say Chicago had during world war 2.


Seb
I dunno. The mainstay of storage remains in the form of potential energy behind hydro-electric dams. Like back in the 19th century. Maturing at geological speeds in other words.

Sam Adams
Member
Fri Nov 09 15:53:39
When can you get me a battery for 15 euro(this years value) per kwh?
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