> The more time you spend with real people out in the world, the less you will emotionally rely upon abstract intellectual models to infuse your life with a sense of connection and purpose.
> Hold all of your opinions lightly. Be proud of your ability to change your mind. Actively seek out evidence of your own ignorance and failings.
Amen, brother.
A few "razors" I use, which are probably not original to me:
(1) People are more important than ideas. Any idea that says the idea, or its vision of the future, is more important than people fails. Doesn't matter what school of thought it comes from or how good it sounds or whether it seems intellectually consistent. If the idea is not working in a way that is hurting people, toss the idea.
(2) Peoples' personal lives are absolutely on the table when evaluating their ideas. If someone's personal life is an absolute mess, or they're running a cult, or they're in one, or they treat the people around them like complete crap, it should be cause for extreme skepticism at the very least.
(3) If it's hard to understand, it might be profound... or it might be pseudo-profound bullshit that's muddying the waters to make them look deep.
If an idea is good then the idea is good regardless of the person who came up with the idea. Same principle if the idea is bad.
Academia itself also functions as a kind of subculture, with its own customs, traditions and quirks. I'm not just thinking of the strange fraternities, processions and whatnot in old universities, but the way academic papers are worded or even titled.
Stopped reading at this point. The point about not updating views as new evidence trickles in is fair - it's a problem with self-proclaimed intellectuals across the political spectrum, from the most terminally online tankie to the most vicious neoliberal who sold their mother on the free market to profit from her organs).
However, immediately going on to glaze over the fossil fuel industry's non-existent technology that's supposedly going to save us all illustrates the point of the article remarkably well. Congrats, I guess?
Look at the EU central bank and their rising on interest rates despite rising prices not proving rising demand....but they live by their model...
You get a war as external shock that makes oil scarcer while the economy is already contracting...so they hike rates, what will not create oil but crushes demand on top of a supply collapse...
Most of the time economists are just making up excuses for why it's actually a good thing to give all the world's money to rich people who happen to employ economists, but sometimes there's a spark of truth.
Its not the ECB - many central banks are doing the same for the same reasons.
The book is actually more interesting than you'd think from the title, but (IMHO) the profanity still distracts from the message, and like most self-improvement books you could probably condense the 200+ pages into 10.
They all knew the difference and the details of sievert and gray... But holy shit they were gullible idiots. They were without backbone and 0 real life experience. Most of them were the kind that got into school and they just stayed there after their PDHs.
In short it was like a group of lamb ready for the slaughter by Politicians and other industrialists.
They were all basically researchers for hire. Pay to Play. The worst of all was that they were really useful idiots and did not event realize that they are selling out.
I have so many scary stories....
Sounds like the other predictions that were wrong.
> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye
This isn't strictly speaking true. While some hedge funds have the goal of beating the market, most of them have different investment philosophy. Not that long ago most of them were meant for what the name implies - hedging. The idea being that hedge funds optimized for consistency, not higher returns. Market up 20%? Your hedge fund might yield something like a 10% return. Market down 20%? Your hedge fund might be down only like 5%.
What's interesting is that the author apparently never considers the possibility that some of the people he holds up as case studies didn't actually believe their "models" were right but had other motivations for their actions.
McNamara is the perfect example of this. It's pretty well established now that he knew the US was never going to "win" in Vietnam but he kept going for other reasons, such as a deep sense of loyalty to President Johnson.
From this perspective, the numbers (picking the "right" ones and manipulating them) were used to support a narrative. They weren't evidence that McNamara actually believed his "model" was working.
Applying this to Blue Zones: intellectuals can be opportunists. They might realize the data is bad and the conclusion is not as well supported by it, but that there's a story ("model") that is appealing and can be packaged and sold.
In physics/engineering and similar real life instantly shows how wrong you are. You can't really go far in your career believing something that is not true and tested.
In something like "relationship studies" you can live in your ivory tower for decades. Your only feedback loop is your own students and disciples who just want to live in the same ivory tower.
You can have some crazy theory like "human relationship output is dependent on socioeconomic outputs". And discuss that theory for decades, get your phd and stuff like that and your only judges are the same people in the same field.
That is very different from a claim that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic.
"They probably don’t realize that the marginal rate of energy cost is fast approaching zero. That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon."
Two wildly optimistic statements that can be characterized as "the model" he's criticizing in the rest of the article.
sylware•42m ago
myst•23m ago
cinntaile•8m ago
Interesting that it's called silver tower in your language. What's your native language? Is the word for silver and ivory the same? Probably not, but just curious.
steveBK123•4m ago