{"id":21663,"date":"2016-09-17T10:37:18","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T15:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21663"},"modified":"2016-09-17T10:37:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-17T15:37:18","slug":"the-intellectual-yet-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21663","title":{"rendered":"The Intellectual Yet Idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Intellectual Yet\u00a0Idiot<\/a><\/h3>\n

W<\/span>hat 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 \u201cclerks\u201d 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\u2026 and 5) who to vote for.<\/p>\n

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the \u201cintelligenzia\u201d can\u2019t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren\u2019t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities\u200a\u2014\u200abut 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.<\/p>\n

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren\u2019t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism\u200a\u2014\u200ain 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\u200a\u2014\u200athose who want to \u201cnudge\u201d us into some behavior\u200a\u2014\u200amuch of what they call \u201crational\u201d or \u201cirrational\u201d comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we\u00a0saw in the chapter extending the minority rule<\/a>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Intellectual Yet\u00a0Idiot 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 \u201cclerks\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14270,14269,14272,14273,7248,14271],"class_list":["post-21663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-idiot","tag-intellectual","tag-intelligentzia","tag-medium","tag-nassim-taleb","tag-no-skin-in-the-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21664,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21663\/revisions\/21664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}