Who defines that the "important problems" are? And what about the people who, even with all the commitment in the world, can't make it to a level where they can contribute to the solution of these "important problems"?
A person on benefits could try out different things until they found something that works for them. This would allow them to explore a set of disciplines and problems far larger than what people are able to explore today. If they embrace failure and move on to something that fascinates them next, I think they'd be very likely to eventually succeed. Bottom line is that even if not everyone does, we'll all be a lot better off.
There's no one who can't contribute to important problems. You assume that they are all related to intelligence but you are wrong. Wal-Mart Greeters and nursery caregivers and hospital candystripers are all solving important, impossible to automate problems in our society. All they need is the ability to care about other people and perform fairly simple tasks and provide a warm, human presence when that is called for.
That's true. However most people are just completely beside the point, because they are not capable of making real changes happen, and don't really care. Don't put in the effort. For 99% of San Franciscans, climate change activism's purpose is meeting a boy/girlfriend and/or getting votes, not actually doing anything about the climate. So we should really, really, really make sure people get force-fed some basic economics, and stop all this obnoxious efforts that cannot succeed. Right now pretty much all efforts to "fight climate change" are not Nash equilibria. As such, they can only fail (except, of course, when it comes to delivering boy/girlfriends/votes).
It is blatantly obvious what we need. We need an economically sound reason to fight climate change (e.g. "solar is cheaper", but can only work if next point is addressed), and we need improved energy storage facilities, at the very least matching oil. There are so many things that could work it's hard to choose where to focus, but looking at actual efforts in these spaces, the effort spent there is dismal. E.g. improve the fisher-tropsch process to produce oil from sunlight + water + co2. Build denser batteries. Improve supercapacitors. Build a viable flywheel battery.
But the 999th convention in some clubhouse preaching to the choir about "the need for urgent action", and laws that just make everyone's situation worse while encouraging outsourcing ... that we do not need.
Also, given that they do cost resources and cause problems, it would be better not to have anything done at all, when it comes to laws and treaties and preaching. Most of these efforts run afoul of the broken window fallacy : as long as you can't deal with the problem as a whole in a way that doesn't depend on government intervention, or only depends on world-wide inescapable government intervention, anything you do damages some subset of society in some way. So it is NOT a positive.
As long as some people don't care about climate, or some governments (ie. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, ...) resist, any effort to fight climate change through treaties and laws is useless and counter-productive.
The problem, of course, is that all the real problems are hard. Finding a Nash-equilibrium given all the parameters is not something anybody has been able to do so far (though, if not for the energy storage problem, solar could be a very good answer). So here's what people should do : they should, first, learn economics, physics, chemistry, ..., second, find a way to make this happen.
I'm very hopeful for massive solar installations, but that is pretty much the only effort I see to have any hope of success at this point. Contribute to that. Buy some solar city stock, at the very fucking least.
