Now imagine that large numbers of people got together and coordinated their time, energy, and money to solve big problems. There are a handful of super rich successful people and an innumerable number of problems.
What I really want to read in the press is how "100,000 hackers from the online site called [insert Hacker News/reddit, etc] worked cohesively for X years and were instrumental in solving problem Y."
Certainly there must be some problems where a large number of people can solve them together.
I think that would be workable, and people would commit to solving those problems, if they knew that for the next X years their basic needs would be taken care of.
This kind of thing has happened before (ref: Manhattan Project) But I think it requires some great underlying shared purpose/motivation for thousands of brilliant minds to come together and accomplish something.
What I really want to read in the press is how "100,000 hackers from the online site called [insert Hacker News/reddit, etc] worked cohesively for X years and were instrumental in solving problem Y."
Certainly there must be some problems where a large number of people can solve them together.