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NihilCredo comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
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There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don't seem to get tired of it.
Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.
A somewhat related, impactful graph.
Of course, human effort and interest is far from perfectly fungible. But your broader point retains a lot of validity.
Yes, but what would it matter if 200 billion hours was spent refining wikipedia? There is only so much knowledge you can pump into it. I don't think that's a fair comparison.
So what else could we also accomplish? I didn't read it as 'wikipedia could be 2,000 times better', but 'we could have 2,000 wikipedia-grade resources'. (Which is probably also not true - we'd run out of low-hanging fruit. Still.)