I think I view humanity fairly positively, but I admit I would gladly take the other side of that bet

A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

So like you spend a million times more than that and you still think you're not going to see some results?

> A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

I have a kid in an American university right now, and a quick search of my bank account statements confirms that there are far more expensive educations in the world.

Wow, an increasing number of US universities are going over $100k per year. That's a crazy amount. That's more than enough to hire an entire person.

Some results, sure.

But that list is extremely ambitious. Write a best seller, make a popular game, come up with a truly novel theory, consistently outtrade index funds.

That's top 0.001% human stuff, I don't think you can take just any person and get there through education alone, it takes extreme talent and dedication. There's also diminishing returns when spending on education, it doesn't just improve linearly.

The marginal return on education spending decreases fairly quickly, but obviously becomes zero at the point by which there are not enough hours in the day/year/decade to cover every single topic that humans know about - no matter the talent or resources available to the student.

except you are missing the one versus many argument here. sure we could make one human much smarter, could we make endless copies with the same intelligence? no

For $100 billion we could pay ivy-league level tuition for a million people. You don’t think investing that much in education would yield some good research or companies?

That's not what the parent comment said though

> any human for which we spend $100billion - $3 trillion...would be able to reach all of those levels

You'd get rapidly diminishing to zero returns after the cost of university a few times over. Every dollar past that would produce no performance gain beyond that.

Are you imagining artificial augmentation somehow? Purely through tutors or training programs we seem pretty limited. Otherwise billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could have far more consistently successful kids.

Don't the children of the wealthy famously have a tendency to be successful? Or have I badly misinterpreted the last several thousand years of human history.

To really drill down into that I would think you would need to figure out how many millionair children get tutored vs how many get spoiled.

Successful, sure.

Gold medal Olympic athletes who are also brain surgeons AND astronauts, no.