The Intellectual yet Idiot

The evidence given for our intellectuals being clueless is the low replicability of psychology and pharmaceutical studies, and no thought is given to the fact that maybe, this stuff is hard, and maybe it's exponentially hard to keep up the exponential progress we've seen.

Maybe people are trying hard to work on hard things to help others, and they get righteous articles deriding them as elitist hacks for their troubles.

If you look at the old ARPA days, we threw money at smart guys, and if you were a smart guy, you could do smart things, like pure research. Today, not so much.

If you are a smart guy today, you either go to the west coast to algorithmically advertise things, or you go to the east coast to algorithmically drain granny's pension, or you go into academia and spend most of your time writing low-value papers to climb the ladder and chump-change grants to keep your students busy.

Sometimes, this gives otherwise decent people moral fatigue to the point where they sell out and do industry-sponsored work that, OF COURSE, couldn't possibly be biased or misleading or toxic to society because THEY'RE PROFESSIONALS.

Then there's the fact that people invest so much time and money in getting a higher education that once they hit the real world, they pretty much have to play ball with all of the awful things people want because, hey, those student loans aren't going to pay themselves, and you don't have another 5-6 years to study something else.