Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots
markmanson.substack.com
markmanson.substack.com
>Do you think this is really about climate change? No, these are empty human beings, desperate for their lives to mean something. And their apocalyptic climate change model has done that for them. It has nothing to do with science. They probably don’t realize that the marginal rate of energy cost is fast approaching zero. That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon. Hell, they probably aren’t even pro-nuclear.
From a BBC explainer of what these protestors want:
"Just Stop Oil (JSO) wants the UK to stop approving new fossil fuel projects, which are a major cause of climate change."
That's a narrow goal and they stopped when they thought they'd achieved it.
So their allegedly "apocalyptic" climate change model doesn't even stretch as far as stopping producing from existing oil fields, just new ones before they become sunk costs. Which makes sense because as this rant says, we have new and better tech to replace it.
They are advocating the reasonsable compromise position. This guy is the "intellectual" who isn't letting facts get in the way of his rant about smart people.
I'm guessing he's also missed the irony of citing Pol Pot killing all the educated folk as the intro to his "smart people are the problem" rant.
WHAT DOES JUST STOP OIL WANT?
We demand that the UK government commits to working with other nations to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair, and just transition.
As the "non-proliferation" treaty they link to makes clear in it's very name and in the full explanation, they want to first limit unnecessary expansion.
https://www.fossilfueltreaty.org/about#about
> Develop the plan that would allow governments to stop building out the problem by ending the expansion of coal, oil and gas production
"First" sounds like the key word in that sentence. What do they want second, third, etc?
Your link says this: "An equitable plan for the wind down of existing fossil fuel production, where nations with the capacity and historical responsibility for emissions transition fastest, providing support to others around the world."
Which sounds a lot like "stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal"
I dare to say that "intellectuals" are easy to be hated, so this post is not doing something new or groundbreaking as it believes it does. As you said, dictators are prone to kill them
THE POWER PROCESS
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.I don't believe in anti-intellectualism, but it's arguably the Elite Aspirants which are well educated, who often have the most to gain against Intellectuals.
See Stewart Rhodes, the Yale Law School Grad who started the Oath Keepers. Pol Pot himself studied at Elite schools in Cambodia, and even went on an academic trip to Paris to study radio electronics.
Meanwhile the author of the post says that "capture carbon technology is around the corner" while 99.9% of scientists say it won't work... so I let readers figure out who the clown is
This isn't strictly speaking true. While some hedge funds have the goal of beating the market, most of them have different investment philosophy. Not that long ago most of them were meant for what the name implies - hedging. The idea being that hedge funds optimized for consistency, not higher returns. Market up 20%? Your hedge fund might yield something like a 10% return. Market down 20%? Your hedge fund might be down only like 5%.
The goal of a hedge fund is definitionally to hedge some risk. If you work in say AI then they should invest very little of your funds into AI (to hedge against a blow-up in AI eliminating your income and if you invested in ai also your savings). In the current environment they’d almost certainly have below market returns. It doesn’t make the hedge fund bad; the hedge is meant to counteract losses not double down on gains.
Thats said, a lot of hedge funds now operate as pod shops and that goal is to beat the market.
I fail to see how this moves the debate in a productive direction.
For a meaningful exchange of viewpoints to take place, I find it useful to establish what facts we agree on- and disagree on, and figure out their sources, before we heat up a debate, that is simply downstream of missing or poor evidence. If two opposite parties in a debate, holding strong opinions, but both show up with strong evidence for either side, then both would ideally benefit from being exposed to the other. Closing your eyes to the other sides evidence, while denying them of yours, accomplishes neither your and their goals - if the goal is the get closer to some resemblance of truth.
That is very different from a claim that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic.
"They probably don’t realize that the marginal rate of energy cost is fast approaching zero. That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon."
Two wildly optimistic statements that can be characterized as "the model" he's criticizing in the rest of the article.
I think a bigger problem in the context of the article is that they are not intellectuals.
By adding that, he is implying "Don't need to act, keep burning fossils, tech will fix it". That is in itself asserting a simplified model assumption about a (human) world that is much more complex; something he was railing against in the previous parts of his text. Either it's a cheeky joke, he himself is an intellectual or both.
What's interesting is that the author apparently never considers the possibility that some of the people he holds up as case studies didn't actually believe their "models" were right but had other motivations for their actions.
McNamara is the perfect example of this. It's pretty well established now that he knew the US was never going to "win" in Vietnam but he kept going for other reasons, such as a deep sense of loyalty to President Johnson.
From this perspective, the numbers (picking the "right" ones and manipulating them) were used to support a narrative. They weren't evidence that McNamara actually believed his "model" was working.
Applying this to Blue Zones: intellectuals can be opportunists. They might realize the data is bad and the conclusion is not as well supported by it, but that there's a story ("model") that is appealing and can be packaged and sold.
Edit: I should also add that there's a semantic dimension to this post. Robert McNamara was not an "intellectual"; he was a technocrat. So it seems like the author is defining "intellectual" as any person who is considered "intelligent", but I guess "Intelligent People Are Fucking Idiots" wasn't as good a headline.
His article is heavy cherry picking and shows little curiosity beyond “you’re dumb I’m smart.”
> He also had a very large family despite his protests about overpopulation.
Nope, megalomaniacs are wrong prepotently loud, most of the time just because they can (a piece of paper allows them to). Which makes them all but intelligent.
The book is actually more interesting than you'd think from the title, but (IMHO) the profanity still distracts from the message, and like most self-improvement books you could probably condense the 200+ pages into 10.
Born on 3rd and thinks he hit a triple. He wrote a rant once saying that your shouldn't worry about STDs/STIs because he doesn't know anyone with one.
His own book falls apart if you think too much. He's insecure that not everyone agrees with his advice.
He never stops to think that most people can't up and quit the only job they've ever had after 6 weeks.
And if you read one, you read at least 80% of all the content of the others. Some are good and you get 20% of novelty, but that's rare
I found it a ironic to make such a confident psychological diagnosis built on zero contact with the people involved
> The more time you spend with real people out in the world, the less you will emotionally rely upon abstract intellectual models to infuse your life with a sense of connection and purpose.
> Hold all of your opinions lightly. Be proud of your ability to change your mind. Actively seek out evidence of your own ignorance and failings.
Amen, brother.
A few "razors" I use, which are probably not original to me:
(1) People are more important than ideas. Any idea that says the idea, or its vision of the future, is more important than people fails. Doesn't matter what school of thought it comes from or how good it sounds or whether it seems intellectually consistent. If the idea is not working in a way that is hurting people, toss the idea.
(2) Peoples' personal lives are absolutely on the table when evaluating their ideas. If someone's personal life is an absolute mess, or they're running a cult, or they're in one, or they treat the people around them like complete crap, it should be cause for extreme skepticism at the very least.
(3) If it's hard to understand, it might be profound... or it might be pseudo-profound bullshit that's muddying the waters to make them look deep.
If an idea is good then the idea is good regardless of the person who came up with the idea. Same principle if the idea is bad.
Or to put it another way, have you sat through a timeshare pitch to evaluate if the idea is good or bad?
Sounds like the other predictions that were wrong.
> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye
It says more about the author than anything else; that he wants it to be true.
Jerkoff sneering at intellectuals uses "marginal costs" as a metric without considering externalities that have nothing to do with economics (the softest of soft "sciences") and states that technological innovation is exponential as though that's a law of nature rather than a limited observation of a brief period in human history.
I remember the first time Daddy let me have a sip of a wine cooler too. Yawn. Hand him a moist towelette when he's done, somebody, wouldja? The grownups are working on grownup stuff.
Also that NCRI study is a joke.
Academia itself also functions as a kind of subculture, with its own customs, traditions and quirks. I'm not just thinking of the strange fraternities, processions and whatnot in old universities, but the way academic papers are worded or even titled.
Man, what a boring, downer speech. He just talked about how my generation was screwed, and we would have world wide famines at any moment now. Great topic for a bunch of kids about to head off to college and start their lives, Paul.
Ironic to be asserting.
Sounds like faith that an outdated model will trend into the future.
Started to feel a little uncomfortable given the themes and the mention of pol pot at the beginning, almost like he is calling for more genocide of intellectuals so he can keep rolling coal or something.
Stopped reading at this point. The point about not updating views as new evidence trickles in is fair - it's a problem with self-proclaimed intellectuals across the political spectrum, from the most terminally online tankie to the most vicious neoliberal who sold their mother on the free market to profit from her organs).
However, immediately going on to glaze over the fossil fuel industry's non-existent technology that's supposedly going to save us all illustrates the point of the article remarkably well. Congrats, I guess?
The people who've been doing the operations for decades are much less open to this new informstion than newly trained doctors.
They all knew the difference and the details of sievert and gray... But holy shit they were gullible idiots. They were without backbone and 0 real life experience. Most of them were the kind that got into school and they just stayed there after their PDHs.
In short it was like a group of lamb ready for the slaughter by Politicians and other industrialists.
They were all basically researchers for hire. Pay to Play. The worst of all was that they were really useful idiots and did not event realize that they are selling out.
I have so many scary stories....
Interesting that it's called silver tower in your language. What's your native language? Is the word for silver and ivory the same? Probably not, but just curious.
Ivory -> Ivoire
Silver -> argent
Often, I don't know or do the wrong translation of culture/language specific idioms.
And in between he presents his own model where we don’t need to worry about climate change
Poor Caldwell was in fact ruined by typical upscale British anti-Yankee fever, the respectable man’s anti’zionism’ but so much less libidinally rewarding than the real article. Cold War upscale Yankee snobbery often took on left wing coloration.
In physics/engineering and similar real life instantly shows how wrong you are. You can't really go far in your career believing something that is not true and tested.
In something like "relationship studies" you can live in your ivory tower for decades. Your only feedback loop is your own students and disciples who just want to live in the same ivory tower.
You can have some crazy theory like "human relationship output is dependent on socioeconomic outputs". And discuss that theory for decades, get your phd and stuff like that and your only judges are the same people in the same field.
And well, math is just applied philosophy and suddenly we're back to the ancient Greeks i guess.
Have you read the article? You have a science like "human behavior" where your experiments can't be reproduced. Simply because there will be so many variables or variation that your science is as good as a guess from somebody from the street.
Or again sciences where you just make models of some imaginary things like hidden meaning 10th century in literature. Your only test is another 10the century literature meaning searcher. You just clap each other on the shoulder and give each other phds.
Look at the EU central bank and their rising on interest rates despite rising prices not proving rising demand....but they live by their model...
You get a war as external shock that makes oil scarcer while the economy is already contracting...so they hike rates, what will not create oil but crushes demand on top of a supply collapse...
Most of the time economists are just making up excuses for why it's actually a good thing to give all the world's money to rich people who happen to employ economists, but sometimes there's a spark of truth.
Its not the ECB - many central banks are doing the same for the same reasons.
Surprisingly, this system was created by bankers and politicians, rather than economists /s
There are also many sources of 'cost of living' which are not related to money supply and therefore not directly related to monetary policy.
Central banks don’t take the cause of inflation into account when they adjust borrowing rates. This is a feature, not a bug.
What do Economists do?: Raise interest rates!
Excellent. How many barrels of oil did that create? Zero.
It takes a remarkable level of abstraction to look at a physical shortage and conclude that the real problem is that people still have too much money.
They are worst than a fraud...Economist are criminals...