First, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea of “be a nerd even if it doesn’t pay off in your lifetime because it will make society better”. That said, I think it’s all the more reason to be skeptical about the argument here.
Just to zoom in on one thing, I doubt the story you tell about the discovery of astronomy. As you say, it’s illustrative and not historical, but there is some historical and anthropological evidence about this, and I’m not sure your story is very believable against that evidence. Skimming the book at that link and knowing as a general prior that humans tend to overfit data (i.e. find patterns in everything), it would be surprising to me if it took some special person with special skills to produce the sort of basic astronomy you’re suggesting. If anything, I’d expect humans to rapidly reinvent astronomy based on noticing patterns in the stars and seeing them as representative of animals, plants, etc. if you wiped the memories of every human living today and asked them to start over from scratch.
You then go on to say some things about bravery and working on neglected topics that might turn out to be hits, but this seems to have nothing to do with neurodivergence other than a kind of backwards causation where neurodivergent folks are more likely to work on neglected things, but not because they are neglected but because the space of things one might care about is wide and someone who isn’t interested in popular things will most likely not accidentally land on caring about a thing that is incidentally popular.
So overall I’m not convinced that your arguments hold up for saying anything more than that there is value in being brave and working on neglected things if you have good reason to think they are important or because you are pursuing a high-variance strategy; the rest is just incidental.
First, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea of “be a nerd even if it doesn’t pay off in your lifetime because it will make society better”. That said, I think it’s all the more reason to be skeptical about the argument here.
Just to zoom in on one thing, I doubt the story you tell about the discovery of astronomy. As you say, it’s illustrative and not historical, but there is some historical and anthropological evidence about this, and I’m not sure your story is very believable against that evidence. Skimming the book at that link and knowing as a general prior that humans tend to overfit data (i.e. find patterns in everything), it would be surprising to me if it took some special person with special skills to produce the sort of basic astronomy you’re suggesting. If anything, I’d expect humans to rapidly reinvent astronomy based on noticing patterns in the stars and seeing them as representative of animals, plants, etc. if you wiped the memories of every human living today and asked them to start over from scratch.
You then go on to say some things about bravery and working on neglected topics that might turn out to be hits, but this seems to have nothing to do with neurodivergence other than a kind of backwards causation where neurodivergent folks are more likely to work on neglected things, but not because they are neglected but because the space of things one might care about is wide and someone who isn’t interested in popular things will most likely not accidentally land on caring about a thing that is incidentally popular.
So overall I’m not convinced that your arguments hold up for saying anything more than that there is value in being brave and working on neglected things if you have good reason to think they are important or because you are pursuing a high-variance strategy; the rest is just incidental.