> this responsibility is fulfilled only by sacrifice and discomfort.
The highly educated do not owe society anything. No one should have a right to my intelligence. If I want to contribute, I can and will, and if I'm smart enough and execute well enough, I will be rewarded, both monetarily and through watching my creation create real value.
This does not mean that sacrifice and discomfort are the only ways to create value. Wile start ups are roller coasters of emotion, I can bet you that Jobs, Gates, Page et al. Have gleaned much more pleasure from their creations then sacrifice, discomfort and pain.
And the only person who can make them do anything is themselves. Larry and Sergey did not bear a responsibility from society to create Google. They did by their own choice.
Sacrifice and discomfort is not a MEANS to anything, it does however imply delayed gratification that is mostly unpleasant and sends many fleeing to the nearest consulting firm. This would make sense if you actually read the article, which describes many disillusioned ivy's unwilling to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle for what could otherwise be more personally enriching and meaningful work.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to argue here—nobody wants the rights to your intelligence. But if you take a step back, you can see that every one of us has benefitted greatly from others' intelligent contributions to humanity and we can choose to either keep that wheel spinning or put ourselves at the mercy of others' history-making. If you want to use your tech idols as a yardstick for morality and virtue, you ought to look a little closer.
"I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.”
-STEVE JOBS
Some of my favorite quotes, however, are from the mouth of Napoleon:
"All my life I have sacrificed everything—comfort, self-interest, happiness—to my destiny."
"Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest."
The highly educated do not owe society anything. No one should have a right to my intelligence. If I want to contribute, I can and will, and if I'm smart enough and execute well enough, I will be rewarded, both monetarily and through watching my creation create real value.
This does not mean that sacrifice and discomfort are the only ways to create value. Wile start ups are roller coasters of emotion, I can bet you that Jobs, Gates, Page et al. Have gleaned much more pleasure from their creations then sacrifice, discomfort and pain.
And the only person who can make them do anything is themselves. Larry and Sergey did not bear a responsibility from society to create Google. They did by their own choice.