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sark comments on Q&A with Harpending and Cochran - Less Wrong
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Comments (103)
Perhaps genius requires extraordinary effort, which is only worthwhile if you already have nothing to lose. So maybe the hardships and obstacles that previous highly intelligent people faced actually contributed to their eventual success.
There are still plenty of poor people, so lack of hardship doesn't seem to be the problem.
IIRC, there's a theory that you get more genius when political entities are small and competing-- hence the Renaissance. However, that's generalizing from one example-- any clues plus or minus for the theory?
There are always people with nothing to lose-- it may be less common to have elites with something to win.