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Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.

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What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who enable them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.

"eloquent bullshitters"

Good term. "The Rise of the Eloquent Bullshitters" would have been a nicer headline.

If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need budgets (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians.

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.

I'm not going to name names, but right now I know of a individual who has no programming or teaching experience that is doing the rounds, keynoting and speaking at tech conferences on mentoring junior developers. Many of these conferences leave the qualified technical people to pay for their own costs, they get no stipend but a free ticket. Money does enable this when you have unqualified people being given free travel, stipends etc. to speak at conferences while the qualified ones are left to fend for their own expenses when they speak. Most of these conferences derive a large percentage of their revenue from sponsorship sooooooo....

I think this sums it up well. Most people have a difficult time distinguishing between well-reasoned, philosophically-sound thought and eloquent rhetoric. The former is hard to do and hard to find. The latter is available in spades.

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.

You're mincing words - first, the author uses "the wealthy" about twice as much "billionaire". Second, billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich". "Millionaire" sounds a little too ho-hum these days, I guess.

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.

> billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich"

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.

For instance, you could own or have inherited (or even work for) a business that generates you $1 million in income every year - this puts you in the 99% income percentile. You certainly don't have a massive fortune saved up, just a modest $300 million. By all means you are "super rich" compared to the average human but you're not a billionaire.

Debating definitions is bad, can we not?

TL;DR figurative language sometimes doesn't follow definitions exactly

> plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.

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.

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