Right. That much was obvious. But what does that mean in more detail? If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
Don't we run that experiment on every moderately wealthy child on the planet? I can tell you that the hit rate there is definitely not 100%.
If you are asking about what I've seen anecdotally, which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us who is the subject matter expert between us, all those who were moderately wealthy children that I know have grown up into having success with R&D in at least some limited capacity. They haven't all dedicated their lives to R&D, but they've had no trouble being able to invent things when the situation necessitated it.
If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop. But, again, you're the expert among us here. I don't know much about it — that is why I'm asking you.
Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
Not sure why the snark is necessary. Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status. I'm not an expert, but the line for rich kids doesn't go to 100%.
> If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop.
Because not everyone is a bottomless pit of ambition. Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
> Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
I'm speaking in generalities. Research is generally a race, and the smartest and hardest working generally win the race. Even if everyone's IQ and ambition shot up, there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
After that last paragraph, it isn't clear to me that you disagree with my core premise of "not everyone should do research".