The contributors to this piece are almost entirely (tech) entrepreneurs and content writers and editors at tech companies. Most of these people aren't known bes

The contributors to this piece are almost entirely (tech) entrepreneurs and content writers and editors at tech companies. Most of these people aren't known best for spending years of their lives understanding, say, combinatorial optimization, or the phylogeny of anoplogaster brachycera, or covert prestige in Kanjobalan–Chujean language speaking communities. Which isn't to say that there aren' experts of this nature among them, nor that people should be best known for this sort of niche and academic work if they've since gone on to do other things. But it makes me highly suspicious, to be frank. For instance, the first "expert" isn't even an expert -- he's an amateur data scientist who happened to build an accurate model of COVID-19. Did we all simply forget how both amateur and professional data scientists publishing bullshit COVID-19 models last year stoked the flames of misinformation for the sake of a cool portfolio project? I'm down to shit on academia. Who knows how much knowledge production have been squandered by its administrative excesses, gatekeeping and abuse? And I love that the internet has leveled the playing field in a lot of ways. But at the same time I have little faith that the private sector and tech in particular will be the great equalizers, and I'm surprised that anyone does given how much knowledge production is squandered by their gatekeeping and walled gardens. And guess what else? At the end of the day, there are lots of hard problems that can't be solved with Google, grit, and a little python -- you actually need to sit down, do the reading, do the work, listen to people who've been doing it longer than you, and do that for years.