“Balaji is a friend of mine and is neither a dumbshit nor a clown,” tweeted economics blogger Noah Smith last June, defending Balaji from critics.
We're discussing this article, after all, right? We know who Balaji is. While look at how many very rational "Show HN" posts here fail to get traction or reach the front page.
Oftentimes, there's a kernel of a true idea behind the hype, but it's been taken to the most extreme form possible simply because the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral.
Thus social media drives society insane.
This video will make you angry is correct yet again.
We spend our lives specializing into ever smaller subdomains of already small domains. A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.
It's important to maintain a deep humbleness and acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge. Don't disregard experts in other fields because they are saying things that conflict with your biases. Learn to identify your biases and think about how they may limit you from gaining understanding. It's much more fun to go through life with the attitude of not knowing everything and listening to people who know what they know.
Often the best work is done when combining the knowledge of people from different fields. Humility is important but more collaboration is needed, not less.
I do think that past successful collaboration can lead to a bias though. As a programmer I've solved problems for a variety of disparate industries and fields. I know just enough to know I'm vastly ignorant of those fields save for a little part that I helped solve problems for. But I've seen colleagues go the opposite route.
Lately I've been watching videos tangential to conspiracies. Too many choose defensiveness when the truth is easier and more interesting.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MhkTo9Rk6_4 https://youtu.be/RJTbcfHY3AU
This is wealth brain.
> A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.
That's not explained by simple engineer brain, plenty of us engineers are not in this position. But those who are wildly, exceptionally successful under capitalism, get their ideas (good and bad) reinforced more and more. They look at their success - money, power, fame, influence, and believe it is due to the correctness of their ideas, not due to the exact stupidity of humans they look down upon.
I have just observed that the threshold is low enough that many middle-class engineers achieve it (I've always lived in low cost of living areas where engineers get to live pretty comfortable lives relative to their surroundings. But that's just my one data point). Their folly tends to be more banal, like ordering Ivermectin from Mexican pharmacies or endlessly talking about nuclear power in a near utopian fashion. Admittedly, pretty harmless stuff compared to the article.
What you are missing is that extreme wealth insulates them from any significant personal consequences of their logical imaginativeness, so such feedback never gets incorporated into their logic.
If the rest of us espoused fascism and then lost our jobs and standing in our communities, we would be in real trouble.
For the tech uber-wealthy (pun intended), money is community. Your community (peers or acolytes) will keep boosting you as long as you have it, because it completes the circular logic that explains your success.
Think of it this way, the yes man will enable the leader to drive the fully loaded truck at 100MPH even when the brakes are bad. The yes man also won't tell the leader they are rapidly approaching a cliff either.
I only see evidence of wealth. Not talent, skill or ability.
What mechanisms can fix this?
From the wikipeida: Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times[21] and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 201
And to be completely clear, noeliberalism and leftism are NOT one and the same. Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism. "Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism". Calling Noah (Or Biden, Or most mainstream democrat politicians) leftist is totally incorrect and one of my pet peeves that online commenters tend to do.
I'm sure there's better definitions too, but neoliberals are not a leftist in any of them.
You ever stop and think that the authoritarians may have been lying to you?
Outside of communist thought (wherein socialism is a stage on the route to communism—and the only concrete stage to which there is a roadmap in most communist thought, though different schools of communism have different maps), socialism is a thing sought in its own right by socialists who are not communists.
Obviously, its unsurprising that a Soviet high school would only teach the dogma of the particular brand of communism then currently held to be orthodox in the USSR, but that's a rather limited view.
Not necessarily true, see: anarchism. There are certainly anarcho-communists, but not every anarchist is a communist.