But that's exactly because they're being stupid. Only basic science or medicine has any chance of making any significant impact on their lives. And most of the potential basic science impact will do so via medicine. Being a billionaire won't protect you from cancer and multi resistant bacteria.
They are missing an opportunity to increase their life span and life quality and do the same for their children. Only very few billionaires understand this, Bill Gates being maybe the most obvious example.
I'm sure you're completely unaware of the fact that your world view comes from protestant religion, which equates richness with god's favour, thus ending up considering poor people as worse sinners who don't deserve a better life due to their moral failings.
People of other religions and cultures don't necessarily share your same faith (I realise you think you're being completely rational, but to an external observer you are not).
I'm an atheist, but this is what I learned in school (by Protestant Christian Socialist teachers):
Matthew 19:23-26 American Standard Version (ASV)
And Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It is hard
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say
unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones. As in, in catholic ones rich people aren't seen as model of virtue and everybody knows that "hard work" won't get you there.
> In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones.
I think you're misunderstanding the "hard work" part. Unlike (perhaps) in the US, the work ethic part of northern/Germanic countries is not about working super hard to get rich, but rather to do the job with the integrity and effort that is reasonable, given your health and abilities.
The typical reward is not to get super rich quickly. But if you uphold the ideal, you deserve respect, even if you're cleaning staff or the janitor.
Similarly, NOT living up to the ethical standards will be damning regardless of social status. Cheating and corruption comes with harsh social punishment, especially for those near the top.
Remember that we're talking about the part of the world that pratically invented both Social Democracy and the Nordic Model.
Now, I also have family and contacts in various places in Southern Europe and South East Asia, some of which as very wealthy. What these ALL have in common is that various types of corruption and plutocracy are just facts of life that are taken for granted, and nobody cares.
Now my own hypothesis is that religion plays only a small role in this difference, and that this is mostly a consequence of the difficulty of surviving as a farmer in Northern Europe during the medieaval era, and especially in Scandinavia.
People used to live on isolated farms or in small villages, where the farms would barely produce enough food to sustain the family of the farmer. Those who did not work at least moderately hard usually would not survive, and there was little left over to give to either the poor or the nobility.
This led to an egalitarian outlook, where people who wanted to live off the produce of others were not tolerated easily, regardless of whether they were beggars, thieves or barons. And since production was low, there was little to tax or steal, anyway.
In warmer climates, farm yields were much greater, which caused success to be much more about social relationships than hard work at the farm.
You mean the search engine that NEVER EVER gives me the documentation I'm locking for, but always goes for a vaguely related blog with hundreds of ads?
A good canteen can combine more ingredients in a more sophisticated way than I have time for at home. I'm not making Beef Bourguignon at home, but it's easy for them to make up a big batch. Economies of scale!
But that also exists in the AI world. It’s called „fine tuning“: a LLM trained on a big general dataset can learn special knowledge with little effort.
I’d guess it’s exactly the same with humans: a human that received good general education can quickly learn specific things like C.
Humans have experienced an amount of data that absolutely dwarfs the amount of data even the largest of LLMs have seen. And they've got billions of years of evolution to build on to boot
The process of evolution "from scratch", i.e. from single-celled organisms took billions of years.
This is all relevant because humans aren't born as random chemical soup. We come with pre-trained weights from billions of years of evolution, and fine-tune that with enormous amounts of sensory data for years. Only after that incredibly complex and time-consuming process does a person have the ability to learn from a few examples.
An LLM can generalize from a few examples on a new language that you invent yourself and isn't in the training set. Go ahead and try it.
Ah yeah I had a boss that wanted me to open tickets, estimate them, plan them, do them, to fix 1 line issues that I would randomly find working on other tasks.
Normally I just fix them within a separate commit.
