The Rise of the Thought Leader
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
(Looking for an agent)
One caveat, though: these people were all CEOs or senior consultants or occupying high level cabinet positions in federal and provincial governments (some were actually premiers). These people, if not "thought leaders" are certainly modelling themselves in that image and, perhaps worse, unlike "thought leaders" they are the people at the steering wheel of many important things -- they are leaders. One would hope they would be less suceptible to fads, but alas.
That's because these "elite" circles favor political skills, extroverted people with low conviction.
Peter Thiel points out that most original thinkers are introverted with high conviction, like Mark or Larry. That seems to be the formula for success in technology.
This is more or less validated by the OCEAN/5 factor model -- low agreeableness and low extroversion might be proxy for not being influenced by the convention.
Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.
I don't think we've really tried hard enough.
The "missing" info is where the conflict lay!
The author of the position piece made a number of very reasonable criticisms. He said that, for instance, while the treaty text bans "explosive" tests, and this is understood in some quarters to mean zero yield, it doesn't say that explicitly. He made two other sensible points that were at about the same order of magnitude maybe one more and one or two very hawkish points.
While I am not a diplomat or other professional in the field, I thought, hey some of these make a lot of sense, maybe they should workshop the treaty and fix these few points. I'm sure most countries would go along with a few amendments even if they've already signed it if they can get the US to say yes.
Instead he wholesale rejected the treaty and recommended that we signal total withdrawal and declare that we will no longer voluntarily comply with its terms. So essentially, he took a few reasonable points and then used them to support an extreme position.
I laughed and said aloud, "That's the Heritage Foundation that I know!"
http://www.heritage.org/arms-control/report/us-should-reject...
A couple years ago I was considering a move to Santa Monica and while my obvious employment would have been some form of software development further from the beach, I thought it might be cool to find my way into RAND in some capacity.
Do they have part-time researchers there, or maybe researchers-in-residence for sabbatical-length periods?
Ps. I had an office overlooking the Santa Monica mountains and got to spend time deeply immersing into interesting problems. Now at current tech co I'm packed into an open office plan elbows to elbows and don't immerse much past any problem that can't be solved in a week or too. I sometimes hear Gob saying in my head, "I've made a huge mistake..."
That said, there certainly are such places. I believe a large number of people at the Center for American Progress had very different career plans for 2017 than what has actually played out for them.
There is a very wide variety to think tanks. Some do a lot of serious work. Some are zombies that do nothing but cash donor checks and write letters to the editor. I'm grateful to be at one of the better ones.
Well, now you know what a think tank is for! :)
Especially in the current climate. Donald has really rattled their worldviews by seizing control of the throne.
I'm a bit skeptical that you're so much smarter and more insightful than all of these successful people you're meeting at parties in DC.
Now consider that a doctor thinks the same about medical dramas, cops and lawyers think that way about crime shows, even pastry chefs probably think that about pastry chefs on TV.
Yet the people who star in and who produce these shows are wildly successful and rich. Politics is the same.
- Incentives in government (and most of the professionals here work for the government in some way, shape, or form) are extraordinarily misaligned. Public servant pay is often crap, so people are easy to buy with stuff like expensive dinners. Public servants thus get obsessed with amassing more power - self-promotion becomes the driving force behind their decisions with little regard as to how their power actually plays out.
- Relatedly, public servants become slaves to the existing power structures, both in practice and in their thoughts. It is very, very difficult for them to think outside of the box... even when they have leadership positions that you would typically look to for this.
- Everyone here majored in political science or economics in college.
- Everyone here worships the New York Times and Washington Post.
It's like being surrounded by zombies sometimes.
Professionally, you can be a big value-add by being willing to be the person who shakes people up with new ideas and having the drive to sustain it.
As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections.
One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook.
Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.
The people who run a business, or are building something or are otherwise working, will say that. People who say they're in 'business' or are an 'entrepreneur' are the ones who haven't figured out exactly what they're up to.
This one particularly annoys me. Anytime you hear it you can be almost certain the person saying it has no actual experience in innovation/wealth/job creation. I prefer Andy Grove's take on it:
"Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grov...
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
The real world has yet to offer up a counterexample to my childish whimsy.
also, he makes more money than me.
Either this is a meme I'm not familiar with or we're being trolled. Perhaps both.
Source: I'm Australian.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-pre...
Shingy's Book of Nonsense Prophecies
Shingy Just Spent 20 Minutes Yelling Insane Gibberish on a Stage
SXSW In One Photo: Shingy on a Wrecking Ball
However, I am unsure whether she fits into the narrative of this piece, as her thought leadership would just be a side effect and result of her business career in a male-dominated industry.
You can disagree with how influential his ideas were, but it's hard to disagree with the results. If not for his essays, there's a good chance YC wouldn't exist.
You're right that the most effective thought leaders don't call themselves that, though.
PG's writing got the influence it has mainly because of his startup's success, and later YC's.
There are thousands of nerds with blogs musing about LISP and why nerds are the smartest kids in high school even though everyone thinks they're so lame; there's only one nerd that has such a blog along with a multi-million dollar startup buyout and multi-billion dollar startup accelerator.
If PG had never sold viaweb or started YC, no one would care about his blog.
You're right that money was a necessary ingredient, but it wasn't sufficient.
I didn't really care who he was or what his past achievements are, so at least in my case that proposition is false. I just liked his writing. It's probably impossible to know whether the audience resembled myself or your archetype, but it seems unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the Viaweb acquisition or about some rich Harvard graduate.
While the signals we look at to determine authority are varied and different for each person, style-of-writing is generally included in that list. Why would so much advice on etiquette and morality suggest ensuring one's written communications are of high quality?
I'll admit I didn't really read the links you posted but in looking over the first few paragraphs on http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html he is clearing signaling his authority in how he name-drops MIT and talks about his MIT educator friend. (And I don't mean to imply there is anything wrong with that; writers are often advised to establish their qualifications early) I imagine the 18-year-old me would have felt confident about his essay simply from this reference.
Finally, the wannabe theory of thought leadership isn't a hard-and-fast rule. There are exceptions...
It has been quite the ride to see this random dude whose work I started reading become a global juggernaut.
He came to give a talk at my university when YC was just getting started, and while I was a junior there, about how we could start a startup, rather than going to big companies and working for others. This was very eye opening and exciting, and it was completely independent of his previous achievements - I had never heard of him before that talk, and I had never heard of his startup.
There's no contest that his blog was an instrument in his popularity; I am questioning that it was the main one.
That's one of the distinguishing elements of humans: we learn, and retain, knowledge, and transmit it beyond the individual.
We have an entire class of indivduals whose sole productive contribution is dedicated to the task of training and instructing others. No other species has anything remotely that.
Biology is an information transfer system: molecules, DNA, learned behaviour, taught behaviour. Humans came up with writing, teaching, and now electronic information, genetic engineering, and perhaps AI, as extensions of that.
Each allows for the acquisition, storage, transmission, and application of knowledge in new ways.
(I'm not saying "without limit" or "forever accelerating". But I am noting that we've far exceeded any other life forms of which we're aware in this degree.)
The main thesis is that old-media was about finding channels of distribution. If you didn't utilize existing media channels, nobody would see your ideas. When technology made the mechanics of publication cheap and easy, it became easy for the artist and audience to interact without the need for an imprimatur or interacting with any gatekeeper. True "thought leadership" was made a lot easier - and a lot more powerful - because original thoughts could be conveyed with new types of media to create new audiences.
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
> The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully [old media's methods], is that clear speaking is generally obsoleted thinking. Clear statement is like an art object; it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". Utilizing existing mediums is by definition following what worked successfully in the past; the "thought leaders" and avant-garde artist are seen as "leaders" because they utilize new mediums, not just new messages.
This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
Good term. "The Rise of the Eloquent Bullshitters" would have been a nicer headline.
Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory.
Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.
My dad was lamenting the inability of young people to think critically. Maybe he's just a grumpy old man, but he seems to remember being trained in classical thought and critical thinking while in middle school, and notes the lack of such training even at the university level today. I think he's got a fair point.
Anyway - the problem isn't that wealthy or poor people believe the kind of garbage that comes out of TED talks, it's that they fund it! The wealthy buy the books, the wealthy go to the conferences, the wealthy give them seats on their News Media channels or feature their talks prominently on their news websites. The wealthy run the Universities that give people their doctorates that legitimize their wacky capitalistic ethos. The poor can repost a TED Talk to Facebook, and that's about as far as their power to influence goes. The truly poor do not even have the money to buy 8 plagiarized Fareed Zakaria books.
It's worth mentioning, also, how little you need to make to be "wealthy" in America. With generational wealth playing such a big factor in people's finances, merely NOT having mountains of debt or being in good health are game changers. Throw a $100k salary on top of that (that's more than 75% of people make) and you're living large enough to buy a Fareed Zakaria book every hour for the rest of your life if you so needed.
wait. doesn't that basically work? if you're a billionaire, you are super rich. if you're super rich and you're not a billionaire, are you really super rich?
i don't quite get your point there.
Debating definitions is bad, can we not?
TL;DR figurative language sometimes doesn't follow definitions exactly
Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.
I agree on the other two. It's like giving yourself a nickname.
https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-ke...
(on a more pedantic note, his last name is Sun: Tzu is an honorific title)
An obvious thing today but not sixty years ago.
The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.
Global steel production is dependent on coal. 70% of the steel produced today uses coal. Metallurgical coal – or coking coal – is a vital ingredient in the steel making process. World crude steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes in 2013.
I think the author did have a good distinction as well. A "public intellectual" questions and interrogates, while a "thought leader" seems to inordinately promote and prophesize. (I'm thinking of someone like Ray Kurzweil as a "thought leader" here) That's not perfect, but it seems to serve pretty well.
"Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals"
I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.
That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power".
It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.
EDIT: In most cases
Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?
A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.
Seems a little hand-wavey, no?
People the author likes, like Noam Chomsky, aren't considered "thought leaders" who "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot” in an attempt to “change the world.” Even though Chomsky would definitely like to change the world, and is quite prolific.
Some of the criticism leveled at some of the people is valid but doesn't support his argument. Like when he mentions Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism, as far as I know it was limited in scope and not common throughout his writing. I'm ambivalent about Zakaria, but I'd rather talk about actual ideas than focus on that episode.
He constructs this "thought leader" strawman to attack, when he would better just directly addressing some of the core ideas presented by the thought leaders he doesn't like.
Maybe the article pulled it together by the end, but I couldn't keep reading when it was this sloppily presented. It's compelling, and there are even parts that appeal to my own biases, but it's too ambitious and falls apart.
By Aaron Harris
I heard someone the other day talking about a "great article they read from Medium." I asked "who wrote it?" They didn't know. Medium is a magazine that doesn't pay it's writers. Genius.
It was on the YCombinator blog - which I don't think PG has ever written on. He writes his essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
Does it though? You're criticizing people praising PG but using an article not written by him as the example. If you have another example that's written by PG and relevant to your point then please edit your comment to use that.
A unionized elite dominates the economy. This bloc constitutes millions of unionized public sector workers who are in the top 10% of income earners, and the writers of major establishment media organisations like the New York Times and the New Republic.
I just googled David Sessions and NewsGuild, and it turns out he is/was a high-ranking member:
http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved
Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills.
This elite views the principle of a free market economy as the greatest threat to its privileges, and so it creates a conspiracy theory where any intellectual that promotes this principle is working for the interests of billionaires who are really calling the shots.
This elite is afraid of the freedom the internet provides. It is already looking to shut down free market interaction in digital media, by promoting digital media unionization:
https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-uni...
Suppose that you're right. Then why are these things more true of the relatively weak union movement in the US, and less true of the ones that governed the UK and Australia for half of the 20th Century?
Do you have actual numbers to demonstrate this large group of people are heavily in the top 10% of income earners? Journalism isn't that lucrative. Public school teaching isn't that lucrative. Unions overall have shrunk and continue to do so.
It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers, yet this is a group that you claim is in the top 10% and is therefore thriving even though they exist in a capitalist system. That's confused (unless you think we're knee-deep in socialism).
I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.
To throw you a bone, I'm not a fan of all the power public sector unions wield, and there could be some reforms, but this isn't the way to persuade people.
I haven't compiled comprehensive statistics on public servants as a whole, but in all of the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, a large percentage are in the top 10%.
For instance, across Canadian provinces, annual compensation for a teacher with 10 years experience is well over the $80,000 mark, which is approximately the threshold for being in the top 10 percent in Canada. [2] And these are very secure jobs with very low possibility of ever being fired. That has value that is not captured in compensation statistics.
The teachers in BC are so entitled now that they openly tell students they don't like a particular candidate, and every student I've talked to hates that candidate and their party. Yes I don't have statistics for this particular claim - it's just anecdotes, but for me personally, it's clear as rain that unionisation reduces accountability and creates an elitist mindset among the privileged few who work in the public sector.
There's evidence that unionisation has been very harmful to the education system [3].
Being a unionized journalist for a big media company comes with a lot of perks and job security. That is a material benefit owing from the accepted political ideology, that claims unionisation serves the public interest.
>It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers
I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy, and I am conjecturing that this leads to bias by unionized journalists against free market ideology. I think it's a fair comment to make.
>I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.
Please note the journalist in question is alleging a vast billionaire conspiracy, with nothing but anecdotes as evidence, and impugning upon the character of any 'thought leader' supporting market-based economic principles, with nothing but conjecture to support his outlandish accusations. If that's allowed here, then certainly my comment should be as well.
His position is not an evidence-based one, at all.
It's also note worthy that you're bristling at the possibility that I'm accusing journalists of being socialists/communists while you yourself don't hesitate to throw terms like "Ayn Randian inspired ideology" to denigrate me. Can I say pro-union position is "Lenin inspired ideology", or would you call for my comment to be expunged from here if I did?
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/federal-government-pay-exceeds-mos...
[2] http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-014-x/99-01...
[3] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
> I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy
While this may certainly be true for federal workers, I'm not at all convinced that this is the case for union workers. But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations and special interests who have don't just have "bias", but explicit stated goals to change the status quo in their favor.
Unions only have power because the law forces employers to negotiate exclusively with them once a bargaining unit votes to unionize. Without this type of legislation, which thoroughly violates property rights, employers would boot all unions, including the NewsGuild, to the curb.
>But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations
Are you sure that's true? Have you added up all of the compensation of unionized workers to see what it adds up to? And what about numbers? Money is very important, but having numbers helps too.
http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-we...
How is this not merely a personal attack?
One can be a welfare recipient and be of excellent character and the article doesn't question her character. The article also doesn't say that Rand's being on welfare was any sort of motive for any sort of act.
No one is questioning her right to receive welfare having paid into the system.
The criticism the article brings is her evident hypocrisy for taking welfare after criticizing it for others. That she clearly didn't need it, that she and her followers kept this a secret only adds to that hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has bearing on her thought leadership. Yeah, it really does.