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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

banning Harvard from enrolling international students is a pretty clear signal to elite intellectual capital that the US is no longer the obvious place to study. Trump 2.0 is fascinating social experiment - can reducing aggregate brainpower lead to better outcomes for the country? Not a rhetorical question, being smart is not the only way to win

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I'm genuinely curious: how do you think reducing aggregate brainpower could lead to better outcomes?

If you primarily reduce the brainpower of scammers, like Vivek Ramaswamy, I think that would help, even if it reduces overall brainpower.

being smarter doesn't always lead to better decision making - many people overly intellectualise a problem and fail to move to action. Trump is definitely action oriented, a lot of it really dumb, but it does alter the external conditions which may produce better outcomes.

True. Because clearly the problem for China the last few decades has been a failure to move to action.

The Chinese need to start installing a whole dumber bunch of people to lead their country so their leaders are more action oriented.

China doesn't have a leadership problem atm, though certainly has had its fair share of anti-intellectual leaders. Trump's actions are very familiar to Chinese people, especially ones who have been educated on the excesses of Maoism.

That said, point of post is - will Trump anti-intellectualism 'work', where work = benefiting America. Ostensibly, the answer looks like 'of course not' but in my view, it is too early to say

Sigh

Brainpower is not a commodity and this discussion is absurd

That's obvious: the brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the body, so shutting down the brain leads to significant energy savings. The energy saved this way can then be spent on drilling for more oil, and the oil can be burned to power AI datacenters where the real thinking is done.

It's not the only way in an "Attention Economy" cause you don't need to be Einstein to collect the most likes and followers in the land.

Where the Attention Economy takes the real US Economy we shall see soon as AI explodes Supply of content with Demand hardly growing.

smart or educated?

Arguably, smart people seek better education, such that making American universities less competitive will lead to smart people going elsewhere.

fair observation

Studying at Harvard isn’t about the books or the lectures. It’s about rubbing elbows with future CEOs at late-night pizza runs.

Putting aside the negatives, I see zero upsides of reducing brain power. The people being more equal perhaps? Maybe the path to the fabled middle class is to bring down the upper class.

I see zero upsides of reducing brain power

You have fewer annoying people pointing out logical problems with your policies.

These days, a lot of brainpower is spent on scamming people (case in point: Vivek Ramaswamy). One can really make quite a good living off of scamming people these days. If you could reduce the brainpower of that demographic, I think this would be good for everyone else.

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