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1945

The author isn't exactly a thought leader in the space, or really any space for that matter. Opinion worth nothing.

I've never met a "thought leader" whose opinion was worth anything.

"Thought leader" isn't an actual title (or at least it shouldn't be). In my mind, its simply someone who you recognize as having the expertise worth paying attention to.

It’s a title that is given to people to get them to present at junkets, a modern socially and legally acceptable way to bribe people. No one should take them seriously.

Ok, I didn't know that. I thought it was just a shorthand for people in leadership positions with lots of expertise.

I'm a "thought follower". Wherever my leaders tell me to go, I follow.

Never quite realized how much I disliked the term "Thought Leader" until I read it 5x in the comments responses of this thread.

I should have said domain expert instead. These two casually chosen words really riled them up

I just said the word "domain expert" in my head 5x, and I don't like it any better.

Both of them give off "influencer" vibes. They're meaningless without more context. We used to just call people "experts", but now that's an arbitrarily bad word.

Have bubbles ever been successfully called by thought leaders?

Yes. Say there are 10000 thought leaders with different thinkings. There's a chance that at least one is right.

Yep. Then they're the lottery winner that gets to go on TV and write a book about it as if it was expertise that led to their prediction.

If by "thought leader" you mean domain experts making criticism then yes.

For example, Nouriel Roubini calling out the risks of the 2008 Recession before it happened, Michael Pettis calling out the risks of a real estate balance sheet crisis in China before Evergrande happened, and Arvind Subramanian calling out the risks of a a shadow bank crisis in India before the ILFS collapse in 2018.

For AI/ML, I'd tend to trust Emily Bender, given her background in NLP which itself was what became LLMs originated from.

Hrm. I'd read "thought leader" to mean "hype man"; that's how the term is normally used. I certainly wouldn't read it as "domain expert"; the people generally referred to as 'thought leaders' frequently are not.

But people being just a "thought leader in the space" is exactly the reason there's a bubble.

Bubbles are a lot easier to visualise from the outside.

Is Sam Altman a thought leader?

IMO “thought leaders” only set the agenda of groupthink. So… yes?

It's just another anecdote, but the "vibes" feel like they're shifting.

The employment numbers, the inflation numbers, government austerity, the gpt-5 disappointment... the valuations are all more like meme stocks and not based on reality.

If enough articles about the crash start appearing, and enough people believe the crash is coming, the congratulations: the crash will occur.

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