(2021-11-05) Troynikov Elite Underproduction

Anton Troynikov: Elite Underproduction. Elite Overproduction is a meme started by Peter Turchin. It's also essentially unworkable on its own as an explanatory social theory, which Turchin himself goes on to clarify; [Turchin] says “stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state” are two other critical factors.

Turchin has cause and effect the wrong way around, Elite Overproduction is a consequence of a closed frontier.

Elite Overproduction is a result of Malthusian Ideology; a set of beliefs that at root reflect the idea that all frontiers are closed, and all that is left is to decide who is to own what, and who is to rule. (zero-sum game)

our institutions evolve mainly to facilitate this competition rather than performing their ostensible material functions. In turn this causes resentment to grow among those who never had access to those institutions in the first place.

This situation is a consequence of Elite Underproduction. Our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers. That makes malthusian competition inveitable.

In my line of work I meet plenty of lapsed physicists. These are people with physics degrees, even physics Ph.D's, who don't do physics. Instead they're usually some sort of programmer, or occasionally some version of a quant. Many of them work with machine learning. What they're not doing is advancing the human understanding of the physical world.

Young people going into physics are fundamentally ideologically driven. So why do they lapse?

failure modes in our systems of scientific production.

Our apparatus of scientific education, especially mathematics education, is deeply flawed. It takes too long to bring young people to the research front, and it produces a false view of what doing science is really like. It's rational that many people decide early on that it's not for them, even though our system of scientific education in no way resembles the actual practice of scientific research.

The centralizing forces of the academy as it exists today constrain productive niches

It's rational to do something else when you see no possibility to do meaningful work.

Exiting the academic meat-grinder is rational

Obviously, some people do make it through

Physics continues advancing, however slowly, in however tiny a number of correlated directions. But the opportunity cost is gargantuan. (metascience

One thousand, perhaps ten thousand times as many people could be making meaningful contributions to our understanding of the physical universe.

Similar processes and factors exist among all the natural sciences, in mathematics, as well as engineering and other adjacent fields

If we are to pursue the infinite frontier, this must change.