Yeah that’s true

Yeah it is insane how many of them have no higher education, or conversely simply got a PhD and have never worked in industry before

Na they’re long - they’re sitting 2 rows back /s

This is an incredibly frustrating part of my work with startups. I do economic assessments for climate tech, and if it doesn’t work on paper then you can be damn sure it won’t magically start working in the real world. There are millions of reasons a startup might fail and very few that even give a chance for success (big VC success, not just normal profitablity or survival).

In summary I agree it’s a massive lottery, but it drives me crazy how much investment goes to lottery tickets that don’t even have a legitimate chance of success.

Yeah one of the biggest learnings for me over my career is that people are hard-wired for stories. It doesn’t matter how good an engineer/scientist you are, how well explained or robust the logic/study is, etc. People only respond to how things make them feel - we are emotional beings with the ability to rationalize, not the other way around.

I mean, you COULD just have a massive membrane area. They won’t, cause that’d be crazy, but you could.

Because exactly those things you describe (as well as some other factors/events) were reckless, violent experimenting (ideological, military, technological). And now we’re finding out. Like I’m not sure if you’re aware but the world changed ridiculously fast during the 1900s and now the early 2000s compared to the rest of history.

We found out ages ago, told everyone, and no-one did anything

Yeah it is one of my biggest pet peeves when people say capitalism drives innovation. Like, it does help spread technology, and it can cause tech to be refined quickly (e.g. the smartphone), but it is absolutely not what has driven the vast majority of innovation. People just want to solve problems and fiddle with things they find interesting, not make bucketloads of money.

There are theories that hunter-gatherers worked significantly less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society