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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism. The need for intellectuals doesn't really go away, but rather we start assuming that "good at making money" = "has ideas worth listening to, on any topic." Not really surprising that many of these people are also frequent critics of academia and professors.

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> as ideas worth listening to, on any topic.

Shoe Button Complex as coined by Buffet and Munger. I see this all the time from even mildly successful people. Suddenly the Early Bitcoin Adopter is now a Macro Economist and a Relationship Guru.

Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years.

But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which many of these people naturally did. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.

I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.

Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.

The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.

My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.

>This whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism.

Fawning over wealthy people has been happening for far, far longer than America has been around. This problem is by no means new at all.

I'm not talking about fawning, I'm talking about taking the "intellectual" thoughts of rich people as seriously as academics/intellectuals. The notion of taking John Rockefeller's ideas on metaphysics seriously would have been seen as strange by his contemporaries.

What's kind of unique about the US is the way poor or middle-class people idolize the rich. As the saying goes, everyone feels like a temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

My parents told me story about their trip to the US. They went on a boat tour in Miami and when the boat passed the homes of some rich people, the tour guide proudly announced the price of each building. The US tourists on the bus applauded! My parents were shocked.

It's not everyone who is like that here--just certain classes. (For certain definitions of "class.") I laugh in derision at such people and stay as far away from them as possible. The rich people I respect are owners of respectable businesses that they built themselves or competently manage, who live in modest homes out in the boondocks--not the idle rich and bankster puppets with their big prominent homes that they want people to see and admire.

Likewise, the masses of desperately poor people trying to pretend that they are rich are just as despicable. Picture a Cadillac Escalade parked in front of a dilapidated old trailer, or a giant oversized home in an exclusive neighborhood with a garage full of high end cars and other toys, all "paid for" with $1M in debt, $100k on credit cards, and little to no actual equity or net worth. These types are everywhere nowadays, sadly. The coming market crash will wipe many of them out, however. We're in the beginning of that now.

Agreed it is not new. But it is taken to a new level.

It's also become a huge business, with endless "business thought leader" books and podcasts that have very little substance.

You don't even have to be a billionaire to make people believe whatever thing you say. In the 10s you can just say the most amateurish take on a subject imaginable and get a highly educated audience to nod along if you tell them you make $200,000 a year optimizing ad delivery for google.

goes both ways. elitism exists on both ends of the spectrum. the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count. true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth. neither of these extremes have this quality.

> the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count

Personally, every time I approach an unfamiliar domain I’m shocked by its depth and sophistication, seemingly only made possible by hundreds of thousands of hours given by passionate and intelligent people. Where there are parallels of concepts between domains, there’s often also highly specialized language formed around the exceptions that separate the two (e.g. applications of signal processing in different domains).

> true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth

True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce. For every Ramanujan, there are millions of Terrence Howards.

> True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce

there's a lot of asterisks I left out of my initial comment. I think there's a lot to elaborate on. but the shortest version I can state is -- STEM fields suffer from it a lot less where there is a lot of measurable "truth." I think people are jumping on these comments protecting academia (which is fine) but the large point is that academia also suffers from the same effects of which those they look down on

No, I don't think it's the same thing at all. For many intellectual fields, I'd say having an academic degree (or a degree's equivalent of knowledge) in the subject is more-or-less required to have an intelligent, novel opinion on the subject.

It depends on the field, but just to use one that I'm familiar with, philosophy: everyone seems to think they have novel insights on philosophical issues, but unfortunately these opinions tend to be really, obviously wrong and half-baked when analyzed by actual philosophers.

> It depends on the field, but just to use one that I'm familiar with, philosophy: everyone seems to think they have novel insights on philosophical issues, but unfortunately these opinions tend to be really, obviously wrong and half-baked when analyzed by actual philosophers.

I think there's a lot of irony and my point being further proven within this sentence

I already replied to another comment that claimed the same thing.

> when analyzed by actual philosophers.

Kind of proving his point a little

I don’t think competence implies elitism. On many topics, everyone’s opinion isn’t equal. I wouldn’t trust a random person’s opinion on civil engineering; philosophy in the sense of the specific field of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics, etc.) is no different. The effects are just more abstract.

Even then I’m not really claiming that academic philosophers are always right and amateur ones always wrong. Rather that amateur philosophers tend to make glaring mistakes that those educated in academic philosophy can easily see.

there's a fine line between competence and elitism. competence usually has direct measurable impact with ego. elitism is 0 impact, and all ego.

I don’t really know what this is supposed to mean, but it’s pretty vague and content free.

He's saying that you academics create a self-reinforcing belief system in which certain opinions are labelled acceptable or unacceptable largely or solely based on credentialism and their adherence to the preconceptions espoused within your bubble. A giant cult, essentially, that filters out ideas or ways of thinking that do not meet with its approval.

Take for example the derisive opinion of certain snooty academics about the work of Graham Hancock, or those millions of people who do not agree with the "global warming" narrative.

You will learn that academics do not have a monopoly on intelligent thought. There are many brilliant people in the world who largely reject that entire system as being obviously broken and corrupt.

I've had experience in a couple academic insitutions and among hundreds of faculty I've met, only three were real elitist assholes. Known among the departments as such too. But hey, they bring in the grant money, so people let them continue to run toxic labs. At least their sub pis are usually decent people.

I've heard of stories of posters at conferences getting tossed out because a single "important" person on the conference committee had a problem with the author's advisor.

All that being said I don't think the rate of assholism is any different from the rate among the general population. Quite the opposite. Most of us look at those Nature moonshot labs in our depts as something of a cult lacking any semblance of work-life balance. We find most of our most compelling papers and examples of great science are not in CNS publications, but in journals niche to our field with single digit impact factors. A big part of that is reviewers for niche journals are able to actually understand the work and give a better review.

Am I understanding you correctly that you believe that all of academia has aligned behind "one true way?"

nope, you're definitely not understanding me correctly.

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