
The Intellectual yet Idiot - simonsarris
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.oppjrpu7a
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mattnewton
If there was a good point to this poorly worded rant I couldn't stick around
long enough to find it.

The evidence given for our intellectuals being clueless is the low
replicability of psychology and pharmaceutical studies, and no thought is
given to the fact that maybe, this stuff is hard, and maybe it's exponentially
hard to keep up the exponential progress we've seen.

Maybe people are trying hard to work on hard things to help others, and they
get righteous articles deriding them as elitist hacks for their troubles.

~~~
tlb
Fair enough. But to a non-intellectual, it must seem crazy that the supposed
intellectuals can't tell him whether a drug works or not, or whether eating
fat or sugar makes you fat.

Part of being non-intellectual is believing that there are simple answers to
simple questions.

------
jstewartmobile
Complexity aside, this is more of an indictment of the perverse systems that
have emerged in our time.

If you look at the old ARPA days, we threw money at smart guys, and if you
were a smart guy, you could do smart things, like pure research. Today, not so
much.

If you are a smart guy today, you either go to the west coast to
algorithmically advertise things, or you go to the east coast to
algorithmically drain granny's pension, or you go into academia and spend most
of your time writing low-value papers to climb the ladder and chump-change
grants to keep your students busy.

Sometimes, this gives otherwise decent people moral fatigue to the point where
they sell out and do industry-sponsored work that, OF COURSE, couldn't
possibly be biased or misleading or toxic to society because THEY'RE
PROFESSIONALS.

Then there's the fact that people invest so much time and money in getting a
higher education that once they hit the real world, they pretty much have to
play ball with all of the awful things people want because, hey, those student
loans aren't going to pay themselves, and you don't have another 5-6 years to
study something else.

