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The Rise of the Thought Leader

248 points by imartin2k 9y ago

pcunite 9y ago
TLDR; Corporations are funding university research in a way to get a return on their investment which leads to remaking society according to their own, unrepresentative political beliefs. After all, corporations are headed by billionaires who are making the world a better place, or are they? The one percent have disrupted the media and universities by creating their own brands, products, authors and bloggers around themselves. New energy to address unionization (create or destroy - not sure) within the established media and academic circles (our flag bearers of trust and intellectualism) can create strong political networks to protect us all from this type of future.
abakker 9y ago
Thew criticisms leveled at the Thought Leadership industry are valid, I think. I am much more skeptical that blogs, magazines, and small publications are the solution, or even a solution to this problem. Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  I shudder at reading the phrase "Thought Leadership industry". It is largely manufactured, consensus-oriented opinions by people that happened to get popular for one reason or another and most likely don't really know exactly what they're talking about aside from some popular slogans, terms, or arguments already having been made. It's really quite anti-intellectual, yet at the same time ivory-tower.
  - abakker 9y ago
    Infographics, Advertorials, and TEDx talks, brought to you by Thought Leadership of America Foundation for Progress, the Center for Media Excellence and the nam-shub of Enki. /s
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Dan Drezner also spoke on his book at the lawfare podcast, I found it quite a good listen: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry
mabub24 9y ago
I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology. They basically all repeated a number of the same points. 1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation. 2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea. 3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies. 4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers. 5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values. There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
- pcunite 9y ago
  Its part of the game: Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
- projectramo 9y ago
  Why can't you just enjoy the disruptive potential of complex algo-intelligence deployed for the incremental betterment of a functioning economy? (Looking for an agent)
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Can I preorder your book?
    - projectramo 9y ago
      I'll give you a discount if you can nominate me for TED.
projectramo 9y ago
Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting? The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Drezner's proposal is that "thought leaders" are narrow but deep, usually evangelizing one big idea as the solution to our problems and that public intellectuals are broad and that their role is in pulling apart and critiquing the big ideas of thought leaders. As I understand it he believes that big money is putting their thumb on the scale so that we've lost our balance between the two. Lots of bad big ideas floating around with not enough discourse about why they are bad.
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    There's good and bad to most ideas that apply sometimes and not in others. "The exception that proves the rule" I didn't know there were other reasons to mine coal than just energy. Should we not mine coal for those purposes? Solar panels aren't disposed of properly usually. Should we not use those? The discussion is Coal bad. Solar good. Not well we need some coal for steel production. Global steel production is dependent on coal. 70% of the steel produced today uses coal. Metallurgical coal – or coking coal – is a vital ingredient in the steel making process. World crude steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes in 2013.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jamesash 9y ago
      Metallurgical coal - mostly found in Appalachia - is <10% of the 800 million tons of coal mined annually in the USA, and commands higher premiums: about $161/ton versus $53/ton for "thermal" coal. Not trying to correct anything you said, just trying to add to the discussion by providing additional facts.
tomc1985 9y ago
The entire pursuit of "thought leadership" is a joke. If someone purposefully seeks thought leadership then they are probably incapable of truly demonstrating it. Thought leaders don't try to become thought leaders, they become so by focusing on their areas of expertise
- davidw 9y ago
  My favorite 'thought leader': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    It seems that his only credentials are his hair.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    i'm sold solely because he calls himself a 'digital prophet.' also, he makes more money than me.
  - uiri 9y ago
    The article says that he was born in 1970 but has nothing on his career before 1999. Maybe an Australian can chime in on the quality of the Billy Blue College of Design, but stints at unknown "digital media" companies and then at AOL (long after the dot-com boom) doing marketing doesn't seem like a particularly successful career. I'm kind of surprised that he meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
  - FuckOffNeemo 9y ago
    I've never heard of him. Or Billy Blue design. Or anything to do with him and I'd expect I'd recognise his hair. Either this is a meme I'm not familiar with or we're being trolled. Perhaps both. Source: I'm Australian.
    - semperdark 9y ago
      It's essentially a meme now. Either he conned AOL into giving him a sort of chief innovator job, or AOL was in on trying to market him as their very own Steve Jobs. He got onto a bunch of news programs a few years ago where they fawned about how much of an honor it was to have him on. http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-predicts-our-future-141561923586 http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-pre...
et1337 9y ago
This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.
- j2kun 9y ago
  > plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this. This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
- marcelluspye 9y ago
  What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who enable them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.
  - imartin2k 9y ago
    "eloquent bullshitters" Good term. "The Rise of the Eloquent Bullshitters" would have been a nicer headline.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need budgets (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians. Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory. Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.
notadoc 9y ago
"Thought Leader" and "Influencer" are terms that make me cringe. Anytime I see those labels on someones bio, resume, twitter profile, etc, I can't help but roll my eyes.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  In my experience, Influencers at least have some kind of mass social media following they can use for marketing, Thought Leaders tend to lack even that.
- ygaf 9y ago
  If "thought leader" is on their resume, they better have a ted talk or something under their belt. I cringe at "influencer" because it's so plainly evil, and influencing is just "marketing" of ideas.
- mpclark 9y ago
  They are terms that one can't apply to oneself. It's fine for other people to call me a thought leader, but I can't say it myself. I suspect this may also apply to "entrepreneur".
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    I can't believe people downvoted you for talking about yourself in a manner that could be considered arrogant except they didn't realize you were actually just being hypothetical.
    - Bakary 9y ago
      My understanding is that the standard usage is to employ the second person singular instead of the first when expressing this.
      - Hydraulix989 9y ago
        And then it's mistaken instead to be a direct insult because the same people who don't have a firm enough grasp on the English language to correctly comprehend hypothetical speech in the first-person case are also not going to understand the hypothetical second-person case either; instead, these people will also misconstrue that the speaker is directly referring to themselves.
CryoLogic 9y ago
Thought Leader is just another way of saying "Some guy who wants to sell you something" EDIT: In most cases
- radicalbyte 9y ago
  The official term is "bovine scatologist".
tmaly 9y ago
While some may shun Ayn Rand for her raw view of capitalism, if you read Atlas Shrugged, she does do a good job of calling out this "arcane unintelligibility"
- sharemywin 9y ago
  title says it all: http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-welfare-queen/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-we...
  - infoworm 9y ago
    You mean she used a system she had paid into? How is this not merely a personal attack?
    - CalChris 9y ago
      A personal attack, or ad hominem, attacks the character, motive, or other attribute of the person. One can be a welfare recipient and be of excellent character and the article doesn't question her character. The article also doesn't say that Rand's being on welfare was any sort of motive for any sort of act. No one is questioning her right to receive welfare having paid into the system. The criticism the article brings is her evident hypocrisy for taking welfare after criticizing it for others. That she clearly didn't need it, that she and her followers kept this a secret only adds to that hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has bearing on her thought leadership. Yeah, it really does.
soared 9y ago
Its comical how everyone in this thread shits on thought leaders, put then praise PG in his thread on insurance. He didn't intend to become one, but thousands of people read (literally) "Thoughts on Insurance". He is by definition a thought leader. Like anything in this world, some are bad and some are good.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  Thoughts on Insurance By Aaron Harris
  - api 9y ago
    That's a fantastic example of something that's very wrong with the Internet socially. I heard someone the other day talking about a "great article they read from Medium." I asked "who wrote it?" They didn't know. Medium is a magazine that doesn't pay it's writers. Genius.
    - nl 9y ago
      It's not an example of that at all though! It was on the YCombinator blog - which I don't think PG has ever written on. He writes his essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
      - api 9y ago
        I think I did a poor job explaining that. I was referring to the original commenter's mis-attribution of the article and how it demonstrates a branding effect.
  - soared 9y ago
bitwize 9y ago
I once read an article headlined something like "It's Clay Shirky's internet and we just live in it". I thought to myself, who the fuck is Clay Shirky and who decided it was his internet? Is he besties with Vint Cerf or something? I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.
BrooklynRage 9y ago
@ProfJeffJarviss on twitter is a great parody of the thought leaders. Would recommend following (https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss)
- Bakary 9y ago
  You know it's a great parody when some light scrolling across the page is enough to induce slight nausea.
megamindbrian 9y ago
thinkfluencing.
- tpeo 9y ago
  Terrible. I love it!
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  thinkfluenza
remotehack 9y ago
It sounds like someone is trying to sell something.
sunbuntu 9y ago
Personally, I love how there is a direct correlation between "Thought Leaders" and spectacular corporate failures. At this moment the CEO of the Australian CPAs has just been fired after losing millions of dollars. He spent many millions of the member's money hosting a TV show and raising his personal profile to become a "Thought Leader" Instead of him being paid millions in a golden parachute if there was any justice he would go to jail.
rrggrr 9y ago
Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.
- braneloop 9y ago
  A colleague and I just interviewed Kelly on his latest book "The Inevitable Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future": https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-kelly/ https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-ke...
- Bakary 9y ago
  What aspects of Asimov do you think are the most prescient? (on a more pedantic note, his last name is Sun: Tzu is an honorific title)
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    My guess would be AI/automation. An obvious thing today but not sixty years ago.
jonbarker 9y ago
There exists a need for a niche un-Ted, one without music and tidy closing remarks.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
I stopped reading after "... organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas ..." because I believe that an extremely convincing case for the superiority of GMO intellectuals has already been made many times.
- wgjordan 9y ago
  The term 'organic intellectuals' (Antonio Gramsci, ~1926-37) actually predates 'organic farming' (Walter James Northbourne, 1940).
jamesash 9y ago
Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”" Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches? A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
Jabanga 9y ago
I'd like to offer an alternate theory: A unionized elite dominates the economy. This bloc constitutes millions of unionized public sector workers who are in the top 10% of income earners, and the writers of major establishment media organisations like the New York Times and the New Republic. I just googled David Sessions and NewsGuild, and it turns out he is/was a high-ranking member: http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills. This elite views the principle of a free market economy as the greatest threat to its privileges, and so it creates a conspiracy theory where any intellectual that promotes this principle is working for the interests of billionaires who are really calling the shots. This elite is afraid of the freedom the internet provides. It is already looking to shut down free market interaction in digital media, by promoting digital media unionization: https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-unionization-can-and-cant-strengthen-labor https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-uni...
- thisrod 9y ago
  > Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills. Suppose that you're right. Then why are these things more true of the relatively weak union movement in the US, and less true of the ones that governed the UK and Australia for half of the 20th Century?
- TheCowboy 9y ago
  This sounds more like you have a chip on your shoulder for the people you defined as elites than a legitimate argument. It sounds like you're doing what you accuse them of: creating a set of myths to justify this imagined scapegoat; creating a conspiracy theory to attempt to neutralize a perceived threat by the defined group. Do you have actual numbers to demonstrate this large group of people are heavily in the top 10% of income earners? Journalism isn't that lucrative. Public school teaching isn't that lucrative. Unions overall have shrunk and continue to do so. It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers, yet this is a group that you claim is in the top 10% and is therefore thriving even though they exist in a capitalist system. That's confused (unless you think we're knee-deep in socialism). I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology. To throw you a bone, I'm not a fan of all the power public sector unions wield, and there could be some reforms, but this isn't the way to persuade people.
randrodoFrodo 9y ago
No one to name. No examples to present. Just an agenda to suppose. Seems a little hand-wavey, no?
- TheCowboy 9y ago
  More than a few names are mentioned, such as Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg, but it also seems a disingenuous at times. His theory looks more coherent than it actually is once you begin to break it down. People can be too quick to believe in vague ideas about "the elites" who are against us. People the author likes, like Noam Chomsky, aren't considered "thought leaders" who "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot” in an attempt to “change the world.” Even though Chomsky would definitely like to change the world, and is quite prolific. Some of the criticism leveled at some of the people is valid but doesn't support his argument. Like when he mentions Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism, as far as I know it was limited in scope and not common throughout his writing. I'm ambivalent about Zakaria, but I'd rather talk about actual ideas than focus on that episode. He constructs this "thought leader" strawman to attack, when he would better just directly addressing some of the core ideas presented by the thought leaders he doesn't like. Maybe the article pulled it together by the end, but I couldn't keep reading when it was this sloppily presented. It's compelling, and there are even parts that appeal to my own biases, but it's too ambitious and falls apart.
Top19 9y ago
This reminds me of a comment from the book "Postwar: a History of Europe between 1945 to 1989". Many oppressive governments that sprang up were initially supported by the learned classes. The quote is as follows: "Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals" I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Does North Korea have intellectuals or is it not truly succeeding?
cryptica 9y ago
Thought leadership these days is almost always about pushing a corporate agenda. It's not true thinking, it's marketing. That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power". It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
  I would go so far as to say that "thought leadership" is an oxymoron. It makes as much sense as "sex leadership" to me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
LinuxBender 9y ago
I do not see any references to Thought Leader[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A

248 points by imartin2k 9y ago

TLDR; Corporations are funding university research in a way to get a return on their investment which leads to remaking society according to their own, unrepresentative political beliefs. After all, corporations are headed by billionaires who are making the world a better place, or are they? The one percent have disrupted the media and universities by creating their own brands, products, authors and bloggers around themselves. New energy to address unionization (create or destroy - not sure) within the established media and academic circles (our flag bearers of trust and intellectualism) can create strong political networks to protect us all from this type of future.

abakker 9y ago

Thew criticisms leveled at the Thought Leadership industry are valid, I think. I am much more skeptical that blogs, magazines, and small publications are the solution, or even a solution to this problem. Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.

muninn_ 9y ago
I shudder at reading the phrase "Thought Leadership industry". It is largely manufactured, consensus-oriented opinions by people that happened to get popular for one reason or another and most likely don't really know exactly what they're talking about aside from some popular slogans, terms, or arguments already having been made. It's really quite anti-intellectual, yet at the same time ivory-tower.
- abakker 9y ago
  Infographics, Advertorials, and TEDx talks, brought to you by Thought Leadership of America Foundation for Progress, the Center for Media Excellence and the nam-shub of Enki. /s

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Dan Drezner also spoke on his book at the lawfare podcast, I found it quite a good listen: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry

mabub24 9y ago

I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology. They basically all repeated a number of the same points. 1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation. 2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea. 3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies. 4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers. 5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values. There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.

pcunite 9y ago
Its part of the game: Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
projectramo 9y ago
Why can't you just enjoy the disruptive potential of complex algo-intelligence deployed for the incremental betterment of a functioning economy? (Looking for an agent)
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Can I preorder your book?
  - projectramo 9y ago
    I'll give you a discount if you can nominate me for TED.

projectramo 9y ago

Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting? The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Drezner's proposal is that "thought leaders" are narrow but deep, usually evangelizing one big idea as the solution to our problems and that public intellectuals are broad and that their role is in pulling apart and critiquing the big ideas of thought leaders. As I understand it he believes that big money is putting their thumb on the scale so that we've lost our balance between the two. Lots of bad big ideas floating around with not enough discourse about why they are bad.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  There's good and bad to most ideas that apply sometimes and not in others. "The exception that proves the rule" I didn't know there were other reasons to mine coal than just energy. Should we not mine coal for those purposes? Solar panels aren't disposed of properly usually. Should we not use those? The discussion is Coal bad. Solar good. Not well we need some coal for steel production. Global steel production is dependent on coal. 70% of the steel produced today uses coal. Metallurgical coal – or coking coal – is a vital ingredient in the steel making process. World crude steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes in 2013.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamesash 9y ago
    Metallurgical coal - mostly found in Appalachia - is <10% of the 800 million tons of coal mined annually in the USA, and commands higher premiums: about $161/ton versus $53/ton for "thermal" coal. Not trying to correct anything you said, just trying to add to the discussion by providing additional facts.

tomc1985 9y ago

The entire pursuit of "thought leadership" is a joke. If someone purposefully seeks thought leadership then they are probably incapable of truly demonstrating it. Thought leaders don't try to become thought leaders, they become so by focusing on their areas of expertise

davidw 9y ago
My favorite 'thought leader': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  It seems that his only credentials are his hair.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  i'm sold solely because he calls himself a 'digital prophet.' also, he makes more money than me.
- uiri 9y ago
  The article says that he was born in 1970 but has nothing on his career before 1999. Maybe an Australian can chime in on the quality of the Billy Blue College of Design, but stints at unknown "digital media" companies and then at AOL (long after the dot-com boom) doing marketing doesn't seem like a particularly successful career. I'm kind of surprised that he meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
- FuckOffNeemo 9y ago
  I've never heard of him. Or Billy Blue design. Or anything to do with him and I'd expect I'd recognise his hair. Either this is a meme I'm not familiar with or we're being trolled. Perhaps both. Source: I'm Australian.
  - semperdark 9y ago
    It's essentially a meme now. Either he conned AOL into giving him a sort of chief innovator job, or AOL was in on trying to market him as their very own Steve Jobs. He got onto a bunch of news programs a few years ago where they fawned about how much of an honor it was to have him on. http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-predicts-our-future-141561923586 http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-pre...

et1337 9y ago

This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.

j2kun 9y ago
> plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this. This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
marcelluspye 9y ago
What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who enable them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.
- imartin2k 9y ago
  "eloquent bullshitters" Good term. "The Rise of the Eloquent Bullshitters" would have been a nicer headline.
- tpeo 9y ago
  If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need budgets (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians. Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory. Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.

notadoc 9y ago

"Thought Leader" and "Influencer" are terms that make me cringe. Anytime I see those labels on someones bio, resume, twitter profile, etc, I can't help but roll my eyes.

kyleschiller 9y ago
In my experience, Influencers at least have some kind of mass social media following they can use for marketing, Thought Leaders tend to lack even that.
ygaf 9y ago
If "thought leader" is on their resume, they better have a ted talk or something under their belt. I cringe at "influencer" because it's so plainly evil, and influencing is just "marketing" of ideas.
mpclark 9y ago
They are terms that one can't apply to oneself. It's fine for other people to call me a thought leader, but I can't say it myself. I suspect this may also apply to "entrepreneur".
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  I can't believe people downvoted you for talking about yourself in a manner that could be considered arrogant except they didn't realize you were actually just being hypothetical.
  - Bakary 9y ago
    My understanding is that the standard usage is to employ the second person singular instead of the first when expressing this.
    - Hydraulix989 9y ago
      And then it's mistaken instead to be a direct insult because the same people who don't have a firm enough grasp on the English language to correctly comprehend hypothetical speech in the first-person case are also not going to understand the hypothetical second-person case either; instead, these people will also misconstrue that the speaker is directly referring to themselves.

CryoLogic 9y ago

Thought Leader is just another way of saying "Some guy who wants to sell you something" EDIT: In most cases

radicalbyte 9y ago
The official term is "bovine scatologist".

tmaly 9y ago

While some may shun Ayn Rand for her raw view of capitalism, if you read Atlas Shrugged, she does do a good job of calling out this "arcane unintelligibility"

sharemywin 9y ago
title says it all: http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-welfare-queen/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-we...
- infoworm 9y ago
  You mean she used a system she had paid into? How is this not merely a personal attack?
  - CalChris 9y ago
    A personal attack, or ad hominem, attacks the character, motive, or other attribute of the person. One can be a welfare recipient and be of excellent character and the article doesn't question her character. The article also doesn't say that Rand's being on welfare was any sort of motive for any sort of act. No one is questioning her right to receive welfare having paid into the system. The criticism the article brings is her evident hypocrisy for taking welfare after criticizing it for others. That she clearly didn't need it, that she and her followers kept this a secret only adds to that hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has bearing on her thought leadership. Yeah, it really does.

soared 9y ago

Its comical how everyone in this thread shits on thought leaders, put then praise PG in his thread on insurance. He didn't intend to become one, but thousands of people read (literally) "Thoughts on Insurance". He is by definition a thought leader. Like anything in this world, some are bad and some are good.

deleted 9y ago
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robotresearcher 9y ago
Thoughts on Insurance By Aaron Harris
- api 9y ago
  That's a fantastic example of something that's very wrong with the Internet socially. I heard someone the other day talking about a "great article they read from Medium." I asked "who wrote it?" They didn't know. Medium is a magazine that doesn't pay it's writers. Genius.
  - nl 9y ago
    It's not an example of that at all though! It was on the YCombinator blog - which I don't think PG has ever written on. He writes his essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
    - api 9y ago
      I think I did a poor job explaining that. I was referring to the original commenter's mis-attribution of the article and how it demonstrates a branding effect.
- soared 9y ago

bitwize 9y ago

I once read an article headlined something like "It's Clay Shirky's internet and we just live in it". I thought to myself, who the fuck is Clay Shirky and who decided it was his internet? Is he besties with Vint Cerf or something? I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.

BrooklynRage 9y ago

@ProfJeffJarviss on twitter is a great parody of the thought leaders. Would recommend following (https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss)

Bakary 9y ago
You know it's a great parody when some light scrolling across the page is enough to induce slight nausea.

megamindbrian 9y ago

thinkfluencing.

tpeo 9y ago
Terrible. I love it!
HillaryBriss 9y ago
thinkfluenza

remotehack 9y ago

It sounds like someone is trying to sell something.

sunbuntu 9y ago

Personally, I love how there is a direct correlation between "Thought Leaders" and spectacular corporate failures. At this moment the CEO of the Australian CPAs has just been fired after losing millions of dollars. He spent many millions of the member's money hosting a TV show and raising his personal profile to become a "Thought Leader" Instead of him being paid millions in a golden parachute if there was any justice he would go to jail.

rrggrr 9y ago

Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.

braneloop 9y ago
A colleague and I just interviewed Kelly on his latest book "The Inevitable Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future": https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-kelly/ https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-ke...
Bakary 9y ago
What aspects of Asimov do you think are the most prescient? (on a more pedantic note, his last name is Sun: Tzu is an honorific title)
- paulddraper 9y ago
  My guess would be AI/automation. An obvious thing today but not sixty years ago.

jonbarker 9y ago

There exists a need for a niche un-Ted, one without music and tidy closing remarks.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

I stopped reading after "... organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas ..." because I believe that an extremely convincing case for the superiority of GMO intellectuals has already been made many times.

wgjordan 9y ago
The term 'organic intellectuals' (Antonio Gramsci, ~1926-37) actually predates 'organic farming' (Walter James Northbourne, 1940).

jamesash 9y ago

Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”" Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches? A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....

Jabanga 9y ago

I'd like to offer an alternate theory: A unionized elite dominates the economy. This bloc constitutes millions of unionized public sector workers who are in the top 10% of income earners, and the writers of major establishment media organisations like the New York Times and the New Republic. I just googled David Sessions and NewsGuild, and it turns out he is/was a high-ranking member: http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills. This elite views the principle of a free market economy as the greatest threat to its privileges, and so it creates a conspiracy theory where any intellectual that promotes this principle is working for the interests of billionaires who are really calling the shots. This elite is afraid of the freedom the internet provides. It is already looking to shut down free market interaction in digital media, by promoting digital media unionization: https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-unionization-can-and-cant-strengthen-labor https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-uni...

thisrod 9y ago
> Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills. Suppose that you're right. Then why are these things more true of the relatively weak union movement in the US, and less true of the ones that governed the UK and Australia for half of the 20th Century?
TheCowboy 9y ago
This sounds more like you have a chip on your shoulder for the people you defined as elites than a legitimate argument. It sounds like you're doing what you accuse them of: creating a set of myths to justify this imagined scapegoat; creating a conspiracy theory to attempt to neutralize a perceived threat by the defined group. Do you have actual numbers to demonstrate this large group of people are heavily in the top 10% of income earners? Journalism isn't that lucrative. Public school teaching isn't that lucrative. Unions overall have shrunk and continue to do so. It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers, yet this is a group that you claim is in the top 10% and is therefore thriving even though they exist in a capitalist system. That's confused (unless you think we're knee-deep in socialism). I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology. To throw you a bone, I'm not a fan of all the power public sector unions wield, and there could be some reforms, but this isn't the way to persuade people.

randrodoFrodo 9y ago

No one to name. No examples to present. Just an agenda to suppose. Seems a little hand-wavey, no?

TheCowboy 9y ago
More than a few names are mentioned, such as Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg, but it also seems a disingenuous at times. His theory looks more coherent than it actually is once you begin to break it down. People can be too quick to believe in vague ideas about "the elites" who are against us. People the author likes, like Noam Chomsky, aren't considered "thought leaders" who "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot” in an attempt to “change the world.” Even though Chomsky would definitely like to change the world, and is quite prolific. Some of the criticism leveled at some of the people is valid but doesn't support his argument. Like when he mentions Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism, as far as I know it was limited in scope and not common throughout his writing. I'm ambivalent about Zakaria, but I'd rather talk about actual ideas than focus on that episode. He constructs this "thought leader" strawman to attack, when he would better just directly addressing some of the core ideas presented by the thought leaders he doesn't like. Maybe the article pulled it together by the end, but I couldn't keep reading when it was this sloppily presented. It's compelling, and there are even parts that appeal to my own biases, but it's too ambitious and falls apart.

Top19 9y ago

This reminds me of a comment from the book "Postwar: a History of Europe between 1945 to 1989". Many oppressive governments that sprang up were initially supported by the learned classes. The quote is as follows: "Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals" I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.

humanrebar 9y ago
Does North Korea have intellectuals or is it not truly succeeding?

cryptica 9y ago

Thought leadership these days is almost always about pushing a corporate agenda. It's not true thinking, it's marketing. That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power". It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.

thinkfurther 9y ago
I would go so far as to say that "thought leadership" is an oxymoron. It makes as much sense as "sex leadership" to me.

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LinuxBender 9y ago

I do not see any references to Thought Leader[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A