The Time of Universal Deceit

Good story about your wife, the RN. In the software business, they call it "eating your dog food". Let me excerpt some choice words from Vox Populi, an essay by H. L. Mencken that presages Trump (and Taleb) and that I condensed into a vanity on FR last year.

The Progress of Enlightenment Doesn't Reach the Great Masses of People

Enlightenment is a matter which concerns exclusively a small minority of men. The size of that minority is always grossly overestimated.
Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent — that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.
I do not here argue, of course, that the intelligence of a man is to be determined by subjected him to an examination like that recently proposed by Thomas A. Edison. Edison himself, indeed, though he could pass his own examination, must be thick-witted at bottom, for when he goes on a holiday he chooses such men as Harding and Henry Ford as his companions.
But what I do argue is that no man can be said to share fully in the progress of human knowledge who is ignorant of any of its basic facts — for example, the facts that ghosts do not actually haunt graveyards, that printing money cannot make a nation rich, and that men cannot be made virtuous by law.

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Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent — that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.

Our Governments, Universities/Colleges and many businesses/corporations are controlled and operated by the Intellectual Yet Idiots, who have been controlling our lives for decades. These Intellectual Yet Idiots control our media and most of DC and many states down to the county/city level.

Nassim Taleb Exposes The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class!

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 and fall into circularities?—?, but their main skills is ability 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 1/3th 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.

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 and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills 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 1/3th 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.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.)

This is an excerpt. To read or copy the full article go to the link below:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-16/nassim-taleb-exposes-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class

HEY! You oughta ping the actual author!

The little guy would be proud of you!

Dave,

Thanks for this.

When you have some time on your hands, check out this YouTube:

Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Laurete -- the good kind -- who gets in a very intereting conversation here with Taleb.

When you get two brilliant minds together talk, interesting stuff is learned. I'm gonna have to listen to this again myself.

Cheers...