Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:

1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.

2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.

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f1shy a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.

About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.

	▲	coffeemug a day ago \| parent [-]
		Right-- talent isn't that useful in a vacuum. You need economic and legal infrastructure that talented people can plug into to be productive. That infrastructure (a) takes a very long time to build and (b) depends on cultural norms that take a long time to evolve and don't find fertile ground everywhere.

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SilentM68 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.

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chrneu a day ago | parent [-]

>What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations

Literally every country does this. It's just perspective whether an individual thinks it's okay or not.

If you're on the side doing the indoctrination, you probably agree with it, or are indoctrinated yourself. We all are to some degree.

	▲	SilentM68 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That is true. But I refer to those parents that sent their children to other countries because they knew the state or gov would not have allowed them to prevent the indoctrination of their children. But yes, we all are to some degree, unfortunately.

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keybored a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.

The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.