> Or even more reductionist there are only a finite amount of talented and smart people ever in history doing truely new and interesting stuff. It’s just the nature of the game. You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent.

It’s true that we can’t turn a dial, but there must be a vast amount of human potential that goes unused every day, because people are born in impoverished countries, or suffer discrimination due to gender or race or something else, get sick with a preventable disease, or whatever other thing denies them the opportunity to make the most of themselves.

This is probably actually the norm in the world, not the exception.

So I think there’s rather a lot we could do as a species (or within individual countries) to give people opportunities and make sure potential for progress is realised

> You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent.

I'm not sure I agree there. It's notoriously hard to get/keep a research position, especially a) in academia and b) outside CS. There are a decent number of graduate student slots, some postdocs, and then you're thrown into the thunder dome.

The competition itself--and the resulting uncertainty--chases a lot of people into other careers. The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed.

It's not hard to imagine some policy tweaks that could have kept some of them in research.

>The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed.

There's research to support that actually:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/11/new-study-say...

Buried in that paper they basically show the hazard rate for exiting academics is sort of uncorrelated with metrics like citation rate etc.

Granting your premise (which I don't personally think is accurate): currently every country in the world squanders a massive amount of talent by not providing opportunity, even starting at the most basic level of universal food security and healthcare. You may not be able to infinitely turn a dial and add more talent (or productive research/innovation), but that doesn't mean our many dials are anywhere near their maximum levels either.

Another closely related possibility is that a lot of processes in science are inherently serial, i.e. they can't scale with the number of researchers, because they require slowly integrating information and making consecutive steps of progress.

Maybe after say, quantum computers are available, it takes around 25 years for a team of researchers to slowly make progress and integrate information until they find a killer application. Funding 25 teams of researchers may make them pump out papers 25x faster, but they aren't going to find the killer application in 1 year.