I didn’t mention it in the comment, but having a larger pool of researchers is not only useful for doing “ordinary” work in parallel—it also increases the rate at which your research community discovers and accumulates outlier-level, irreplaceable genius figures of the Euler/Gauss kind.
If there are some such figures already in the community, great, but there are presumably others yet to be discovered. That their impact is currently potential, not actual, does not make its sacrifice any less damaging.
Yep. (And I’m happy this overall discussion is happening, partly because, assuming rarity narratives are part of what leads to all this destructive psychic stuff as you described, then if a research community wants to work with people about whom rarity narratives would actually be somewhat *true*, the research community has as an important subgoal to figure out how to have true rarity narratives in a non-harmful way.)
I didn’t mention it in the comment, but having a larger pool of researchers is not only useful for doing “ordinary” work in parallel—it also increases the rate at which your research community discovers and accumulates outlier-level, irreplaceable genius figures of the Euler/Gauss kind.
If there are some such figures already in the community, great, but there are presumably others yet to be discovered. That their impact is currently potential, not actual, does not make its sacrifice any less damaging.
Yep. (And I’m happy this overall discussion is happening, partly because, assuming rarity narratives are part of what leads to all this destructive psychic stuff as you described, then if a research community wants to work with people about whom rarity narratives would actually be somewhat *true*, the research community has as an important subgoal to figure out how to have true rarity narratives in a non-harmful way.)