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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 assu

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.

the_sleaze_ 7mo ago
> 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.
- roncesvalles 7mo ago
  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.
  - crhulls 7mo ago
    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.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
jjulius 7mo ago
>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.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  Agreed it is not new. But it is taken to a new level.
- keiferski 7mo ago
  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.
- spacechild1 7mo ago
  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.
  - skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
    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.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
volkk 7mo ago
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.
- jmcqk6 7mo ago
  Am I understanding you correctly that you believe that all of academia has aligned behind "one true way?"
  - volkk 7mo ago
    nope, you're definitely not understanding me correctly.
- keiferski 7mo ago
  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.
  - scandox 7mo ago
    > when analyzed by actual philosophers. Kind of proving his point a little
    - keiferski 7mo ago
      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.
simianwords 7mo ago
[flagged]
- heresie-dabord 7mo ago
  > The idea that rich people have something to say What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity. But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because they are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived.
  - simianwords 7mo ago
    > What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity. The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.
    - heresie-dabord 7mo ago
      > The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.
      - simianwords 7mo ago
        The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.
        rhines 7mo ago
        Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.
insane_dreamer 7mo ago
It's also become a huge business, with endless "business thought leader" books and podcasts that have very little substance.
pibaker 7mo ago
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.

the_sleaze_ 7mo ago

> 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.

roncesvalles 7mo ago
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.
- crhulls 7mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]

jjulius 7mo ago

>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.

jacquesm 7mo ago
Agreed it is not new. But it is taken to a new level.
keiferski 7mo ago
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.
spacechild1 7mo ago
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.
- skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
  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.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

volkk 7mo ago

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.

jmcqk6 7mo ago
Am I understanding you correctly that you believe that all of academia has aligned behind "one true way?"
- volkk 7mo ago
  nope, you're definitely not understanding me correctly.
keiferski 7mo ago
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.
- scandox 7mo ago
  > when analyzed by actual philosophers. Kind of proving his point a little
  - keiferski 7mo ago
    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.

simianwords 7mo ago

[flagged]

heresie-dabord 7mo ago
> The idea that rich people have something to say What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity. But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because they are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  > What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity. The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.
  - heresie-dabord 7mo ago
    > The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.
    - simianwords 7mo ago
      The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.
      - rhines 7mo ago
        Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.

insane_dreamer 7mo ago

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

pibaker 7mo ago

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.