The Intellectual Yet Idiot (The king(s) has no clothes)

He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine…” – Johnathan Edwards

How do these know-it-alls get into office in the first place? How do people who seriously (and probably honestly) think they have the capacity to run your life – despite the fact that they appear unable to run their own lives – get to become president, senator, congressperson?

Much of it is that a certain part of the population is simply prone to bullshit. This large part of the population wants someone to tell them what to do and how to live because they know that they would be rudderless without such direction. They want a king. They want to be ruled. They want these things even though the kings and the rulers are no less flawed than they are. However, the rulers act like they know what they are doing and that is good enough for many people who want someone, anyone, to tell them what to do.

(From Medium.com)

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons…

…The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

Click here for the article.

Never trust anyone who thinks they know better than you how you should run your life. The Intellectual Yet Idiot crowd counts on your faith.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/