The Age of the Clever Fool | Hacker News Reader

The Age of the Clever Fool

ft.com

36 pointsgumby35 comments

This is a rather scattershot article. The author doesn’t spend any time actually fleshing out an argument, just moves from one observation to the next.

I agree. The entire article can be summarised as

"There are lots of rich, powerful idiots. Orwell's works still have appeal."

I also take issue with the statement that 1984 was not "prophetic". That's an unimaginative misreading of the book, or even the whole genre. Dystopian novels are rarely intended as an accurate prediction.

I wouldn't consider it prophetic, although it was a reasonable prediction of what could occur after a global war is fought where the main actors are totalitarian regimes and imperialists. It could have been applied within the context of WWII or the Cold War.

Back in 1949 when the book was published, it wasn't a far-fetched notion to assume that the world would essentially be divided between conflicting forces by the 1980s. However, in reality, the last African country under colonial rule gained its independence by 1980, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

So, looking back, it wasn't prophetic but still stands as a hell of a cautionary tale. There is always the looming danger of going back to this clusterfudge of a state of affairs again (c.f. Fourth Political Theory or Duginism and how readily the so-called "Atlantist" opponents in the far-right embraced this terrible ideology).

What the author of this article seems to miss - and I'm not sure how - is that the whole purpose of this genre of fiction - speculative alternative future - is to prevent the future in the novel, not to be able to look back 70+ years after the novel is published and say, "Called it."

It wasn't prophetic, in that a lot of the book was already (at the time Orwell was writing it) a reality in Soviet Union .

Also, I think to people outside the UK, it may be less obvious that this is a style of writing that happens constantly here:

A wealthy, probably privately educated journalist, lecturing the reader on how having formal education (that they possess) is unnecessary or bad. Or is being dispensed to the 'wrong' people. And instead, that there is some other invisible indicator that makes people worthy of being listened to - implied in this article to be 'judgement' but the actual idea being peddled (here and in every article of this type) is social class.

This is not wholly a UK phenomenon. People describing themselves as populists in the US media tend to come from a handful of schools, all quite distinguished.

It’s more than just populism though - our political and media classes are deeply intermeshed and overlapping. The previous prime minister was a newspaper columnist and returned to being one. His sister is also a journalist in a prominent paper. A previous chancellor was a newspaper editor.

There is a very big class/power thing in journalism in the UK, so when an article like this turns up gesturing at Orwell (educated at Eton) with a vaguely anti-intellectual slant, I don’t think it means what it appears to at face-value

I had never given a moment's thought about Orwell's education, or lack thereof, which is probably the case for most people. I'm unconvinced this is a significant reason for Orwell's enduring popularity. It seems to me that people who do actually look at/care about what education some author like Orwell had says more about those people than Orwell.

I recently purchased this complete collection of Orwell's essays, columns, and reviews, highly recommended:

https://godine.com/book/collected-essays-journalism-and-lett...

Also, the FT's website is great. Plain and readable Georgia for body text, and their cookies page offers a simple and clear design for allowing or blocking advertising cookies. What a surprise to see a page where there's no confusion about whether the toggle button is on or off.

https://www.ft.com/preferences/manage-cookies

One thing that surprised me was using the browser's Back button after choosing a cookie setting. I've been so trained that this is not how the web works anymore that it was the last thing I expected.

had a similar thought the other day, but I couldn't put it into words.

It crossed my mind that the word "idiot" in Ancient Greek meant to describe someone who was not involved in public affairs in a derogatory way. It must have evolved into the current meaning not by sheer coincidence: well, idiots, as in its current sense, used not to take part in public affairs.

My hunch is that, after WWI, not having a strong opinion when it came to politics was too much a giveaway of someone being poor or uneducated — traits usually associated with the stereotypical 20th-century idiot, especially in prosperous societies. Then, people simply started to fake it.

A blind spot of this coping mechanism that has been carried on to this day is that, although there is no reason to assume that true idiots have no access to education and capital in the current days, people still assume that this is the case.

So, politicians and the elites cannot be considered dumb anymore; they must have ulterior motives. If their intelligence is ever called into question, it is always in the dubious sense that Umberto Eco warned us about in his essay "Ur-Fascism."

It only scratches the surface of my thoughts, but, well, I think I understand what the author means.

The author seems like what Taleb calls an Intellectual Yet Idiot, who is more or less making a similar accusation in the opposite direction- they seem to think people that are “educated” should be above taking risks, trying new activities, and exploring new ideas less they be ridiculed by… the author.

Don’t standards of journalism require the author to at least try the 4am ice bath so they can explain from a position of expertise how it is stupid?

This is an opinion piece, not much different from the strip section with regards to journalism standards. And I mean that as a good thing.

https://archive.li/7EQth

I can’t get past their captcha and I’m seeing the text

    What can I do to prevent this in the future?
    If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

Is this just me? Is this a weird ad or do I have malware on my network?

I've noticed that other-than-chrome browsers get much more captchas nowadays. All of them saying "unrecognized network activity" of course, assuming you're the bot (only bots do not have spy cookies). It seems that if you do not play nice with people that want to spy on you, you will be punished by captchas

recently I tried to google using safari (because my work-laptop's chrome was malfunctioning) and got into 3 captchas that time...

I've found these archive links have basically stopped working for me on all desktop browsers recently. The link opens fine on my mobile but not desktop chrome or FF.

As you can see from my comments; https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=archo

I have no problem accessing archive.is , I never see a CAPTCHA, why you ask? - I use a DNS other than Cloudflare.

I use 8.8.8.8 via StarLink with Firefox on Linux and I can never open an archive.* link, they're all issues with no_cypher_overlap or Error 1001.

  2023:'public-dns'

Seems multiple users have problems using desktop FF on Linux, but I can't confirm that. I use uBlock Origin (advanced mode), privacy badger (which might be redundant to some extent, but eh...), decentraleyes.

It works with these, but also if I turn these off, open the site with a clean FF profile, or if I install an unconfigured uBlock Origin (which maybe is more easily detected).

Cloudflare DNS?

Try Google or Quad9 DNS - archive.XXX and Cloudflare DNS don't play well together.

I doubt it's malware, but a few scans from a single user mode boot disk while the actual OS is offline maybe isn't a bad idea.

But it could also just be that the CAPTCHA is hard because the site cranked it up for non-US users, if you're not in the US like I am. There are many EU and Asian countries where I flat out cannot access perfectly benign websites (e.g., Home Depot†) if I'm shown on an IP from these countries.

So scan, but I doubt it will find anything.

† true, when I was in Georgia (the country) during the time that Home Depot had the huge skeleton yard decoration, I couldn't even access the Home Depot website to look as Home Depot was blocking it. The page would resolve and load, but Home Depot served up a 403 for every page. Using VPN with the US or western/northern EU countries worked, but eastern EU countries also got 403.

I get an SSL no cypher overlap error in Firefox.

There was always something iffy with that site, but I guess it's completely failed now. (Why do people use archive.li?)

Why Orwell Matters

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Orwell_Matters

>Tech bros, woke theorists, psychobabblers — George Orwell endures because his plainness is relief from them all

Google, Microsoft and arguably Apple. It took us nearly 10 years, and a huge rise of interest rate to have souls brave enough to point out the obvious.

Full of fun quotes:

> Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the singles charts in the UK with a piece of considerate advice about male orgasm postponement

> Tech bros — and no few sisters — are susceptible to libertarianism, quack lifestyle regimens of the 4am ice-bath type and, if not the Russian view of the Ukraine war, then a spurious even-handedness

> When the cultural left makes contact with that less credentialed but longer-in-the-tooth movement called the electorate, see how it struggles

Janan Ganesh has long been -one of- no, my favorite journalists. However, covering US politics isn't his strong suit.

he's one of the first i turn to when i have a physical copy of the FT (every weekend)

Indeed it is the age of the clever fool. The I’m doing Not A despite A being long established because $wallOfText. Maybe the wall of text does flesh out a solid argument. But also maybe it falls short of some basic and larger principles.

Really reminds me of attending a philosophy course at an engineering college. It’s ok to ask why study that particular course at the beginning of it and maybe retouch on the point to reinforce learning and the main thesis throughout the course-very briefly. But it’s reductive to the point of destructive if someone or something must always be on defense from existential questioning.

Yes, that’s the problem: being too clever by half is possibly making or reflective of a wider existential problem (or problems).

Further, the internet for the first time is truly global. And forcing all of humanity to reckon with all of the rest of humanity at once. There could only be wide disagreement and animosity at first. I’m hoping in later discourse for some ability to live and let live - maybe even simple, willful ignorance. The sort of ignorance of not living in glass houses. We all know we don’t need everyone walking around fully naked so we introduce some ignorance through fashionable clothes.

> But it’s reductive to the point of destructive if someone or something must always be on defense from existential questioning.

> Yes, that’s the problem: being too clever by half is possibly making or reflective of a wider existential problem (or problems).

I propose a hidden advantage Rationalists, science folks, and "critical thinkers" in general have over philosophy folks is that the above line can be magically drawn wherever the artist pleases, with a justification much more pleasing to the crowd.

Science on the other hand can investigate things to their ultimate complexity with little complaint, and be cheered if not worshipped for it.

This is a long-winded way of saying that people have unprecedented access to information yet lack the ability to adequately filter or contextualize it, leading to foolishness.

The author wrote a book about compassionate conservatism which often focuses on the necessity of religious order to solve social ills.

An attempt to sound secular, yet guided by faith. A pretentious right-wing clever fool.

To borrow from Orwell; Forced worship is Freedom. Appeals to hallucinated authority are immutable truth.

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