I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology.
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
You're misunderstanding what a think tank is. It's a place that gets money from places and is a parking lot for displaced political people. They aren't there to have original thoughts -- they are there to support the perspective of whomever is signing the checks. What they say isn't very important, but what they don't say is critical.
Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.
The RAND Corporation is a "think tank" but it's definitely not what you describe. They are quite valued for their objective and bi-partisan analysis domestically and even internationally. They actually shut down one of their international offices because the government in power basically asked them to spread propaganda on their behalf. RAND puts out great reports on all sorts of topics around policy and decision making. Education, marijuana reform, cybercrime, you name it. I bother saying this because I used to work there and think folks really misunderstand that there are some think tanks doing very valuable work. I'm a little salty even because when I moved to my current job at well known tech company, once there, I found my past experience gets massively discounted, even controlling for the differences between R&D/think tank vs tech company. It's annoying and it mostly seems to stem from ignorance and stereotypes based on a few of the bad apples that call themselves think tank but are actually partisan propaganda mills.
RAND is a pretty interesting place -- and as far as I know totally not connected to a certain author popular among libertarians. Research ANd Development, right?
A couple years ago I was considering a move to Santa Monica and while my obvious employment would have been some form of software development further from the beach, I thought it might be cool to find my way into RAND in some capacity.
Do they have part-time researchers there, or maybe researchers-in-residence for sabbatical-length periods?
They have part-timers who were once full timers but typically you can't start off part time. Closest thing is the summer associates program for visiting PhD students.
Ps. I had an office overlooking the Santa Monica mountains and got to spend time deeply immersing into interesting problems. Now at current tech co I'm packed into an open office plan elbows to elbows and don't immerse much past any problem that can't be solved in a week or too. I sometimes hear Gob saying in my head, "I've made a huge mistake..."
I think places like RAND are exceptions that prove the rule, and there are others -- the political mills put up the trappings of intellectualism to pretend to look like a place like RAND!
Well that's the article's point, a think tank serves one of the factions of the plutocracy and on the global and national stage public intellectuals have also been replaced by puppets of the plutocracy. They all serve money and people who hold it, just different factions. While at the same time the intellectuals in universities have become more and more divorced from reality, embracing ideologies that are excessively liberal and left leaning rather than centrist.
I work for a public policy think tank, and this absolutely DOES NOT describe us. No one here is just parking themselves while waiting for a gig with one administration or another.
That said, there certainly are such places. I believe a large number of people at the Center for American Progress had very different career plans for 2017 than what has actually played out for them.
There is a very wide variety to think tanks. Some do a lot of serious work. Some are zombies that do nothing but cash donor checks and write letters to the editor. I'm grateful to be at one of the better ones.
For some of them, what they say can be important (though this doesn't invalidate the rest of what you're saying). The Heritage Foundation is basically writing our executive policy in the US these days, for instance.
I was doing some research into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (would ban underground nuclear tests, US has been voluntarily complying since the 90s but Republican Senators have refused to ratify) the other day. As I was researching, I stumbled upon an old Heritage Foundation position on the treaty. I knew of their reputation so I began reading with skepticism.
The author of the position piece made a number of very reasonable criticisms. He said that, for instance, while the treaty text bans "explosive" tests, and this is understood in some quarters to mean zero yield, it doesn't say that explicitly. He made two other sensible points that were at about the same order of magnitude maybe one more and one or two very hawkish points.
While I am not a diplomat or other professional in the field, I thought, hey some of these make a lot of sense, maybe they should workshop the treaty and fix these few points. I'm sure most countries would go along with a few amendments even if they've already signed it if they can get the US to say yes.
Instead he wholesale rejected the treaty and recommended that we signal total withdrawal and declare that we will no longer voluntarily comply with its terms. So essentially, he took a few reasonable points and then used them to support an extreme position.
I laughed and said aloud, "That's the Heritage Foundation that I know!"
Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
Why are you looking for a person when the future is intelligent agents acting as agents using a deep learning AI approach to disrupt the cosy middle-man economy to enhance our societal well-being on a functional level? Maybe you don't really believe?
I live in Washington, DC. The tiny bandwidth of acceptable opinion here would be hilarious if these people weren't running the country. When I go to parties and meet people with powerful jobs, it's appalling how poorly thought out their analyses of many situations are. Being here for the last 2 years has given me a lot of insight into how and why America is being run into the ground.
Well you know about computers presumably if you're here, so think about how computers, hacking, mainframes etc are portrayed on TV and in movies. Ludicrous, right?
Now consider that a doctor thinks the same about medical dramas, cops and lawyers think that way about crime shows, even pastry chefs probably think that about pastry chefs on TV.
Yet the people who star in and who produce these shows are wildly successful and rich. Politics is the same.
I'll just rattle off some sweeping observations that I think have to do with the narrow set of viewpoints and shallow analysis that often results:
- Incentives in government (and most of the professionals here work for the government in some way, shape, or form) are extraordinarily misaligned. Public servant pay is often crap, so people are easy to buy with stuff like expensive dinners. Public servants thus get obsessed with amassing more power - self-promotion becomes the driving force behind their decisions with little regard as to how their power actually plays out.
- Relatedly, public servants become slaves to the existing power structures, both in practice and in their thoughts. It is very, very difficult for them to think outside of the box... even when they have leadership positions that you would typically look to for this.
- Everyone here majored in political science or economics in college.
- Everyone here worships the New York Times and Washington Post.
It's like being surrounded by zombies sometimes.
Professionally, you can be a big value-add by being willing to be the person who shakes people up with new ideas and having the drive to sustain it.
Politicians need to be excellent at getting elected. That requires skills in persuasion, manipulation, forming alliances etc, but not neccssarily deep thought. Being a politician is at its core a sales job, and how much insight do you typically expect from salesmen?
Initially. They tend to get pretty flustered if you simultaneously remain calm and knowledgeably begin discussing how you disagree with a premise (when people get heated, they're much easier to dismiss).
Especially in the current climate. Donald has really rattled their worldviews by seizing control of the throne.
One caveat, though: these people were all CEOs or senior consultants or occupying high level cabinet positions in federal and provincial governments (some were actually premiers). These people, if not "thought leaders" are certainly modelling themselves in that image and, perhaps worse, unlike "thought leaders" they are the people at the steering wheel of many important things -- they are leaders. One would hope they would be less suceptible to fads, but alas.
Think how difficult it would be for a young Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page to advance within that group of people. It would be impossible.
That's because these "elite" circles favor political skills, extroverted people with low conviction.
Peter Thiel points out that most original thinkers are introverted with high conviction, like Mark or Larry. That seems to be the formula for success in technology.
Yes, that is interesting thought; in fact, he even goes further and consider Aspergers as an advantage in this context.
This is more or less validated by the OCEAN/5 factor model -- low agreeableness and low extroversion might be proxy for not being influenced by the convention.
Social intelligence seems to be what's typically need to rise to the top of the management or political hierarchy, unlike intelligence as it would be defined here.I can't think of too many politicians I consider even remotely smart these days.
>2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
This one particularly annoys me. Anytime you hear it you can be almost certain the person saying it has no actual experience in innovation/wealth/job creation. I prefer Andy Grove's take on it:
"Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."
Great list. I've seen lots of these ideas float around certain circles.
As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections.
One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook.
Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.
This sounds exactly like every person I've ever met who is in to "business". They don't specialize in any particular industry, and aren't actually doing business related things, but participate in some farcical, nebulous buzzword-centric concept of it. I would liken it to business-theater. There's a reason people like this stay in academia.
To be fair, that's my impression of a number of people who introduce themselves as 'entrepreneurs'.
The people who run a business, or are building something or are otherwise working, will say that. People who say they're in 'business' or are an 'entrepreneur' are the ones who haven't figured out exactly what they're up to.
"Typically, the IYI [Intellectual Yet Idiot] get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains."
The entire pursuit of "thought leadership" is a joke. If someone purposefully seeks thought leadership then they are probably incapable of truly demonstrating it. Thought leaders don't try to become thought leaders, they become so by focusing on their areas of expertise
Vi Hart, taking a break from math/music, made a great video[1] on how artists (or "thought leaders", etc) create audiences. She quotes heavily from the forward to Edmund Snow Carpenter's book "They became what they beheld", which was probably written (or at least heavily influenced) by Marshall McLuhan.
The main thesis is that old-media was about finding channels of distribution. If you didn't utilize existing media channels, nobody would see your ideas. When technology made the mechanics of publication cheap and easy, it became easy for the artist and audience to interact without the need for an imprimatur or interacting with any gatekeeper. True "thought leadership" was made a lot easier - and a lot more powerful - because original thoughts could be conveyed with new types of media to create new audiences.
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
> The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully [old media's methods], is that clear speaking is generally obsoleted thinking. Clear statement is like an art object; it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". Utilizing existing mediums is by definition following what worked successfully in the past; the "thought leaders" and avant-garde artist are seen as "leaders" because they utilize new mediums, not just new messages.
'The artist talks to himself out loud.' is a beautifully succinct way to phrase the creative process of the authentic artist, at least as I understand it. Thanks for that.
This is mistaken. For example, pg became a thought leader by attempting to become one.
You can disagree with how influential his ideas were, but it's hard to disagree with the results. If not for his essays, there's a good chance YC wouldn't exist.
You're right that the most effective thought leaders don't call themselves that, though.
PG's writing got the influence it has mainly because of his startup's success, and later YC's.
There are thousands of nerds with blogs musing about LISP and why nerds are the smartest kids in high school even though everyone thinks they're so lame; there's only one nerd that has such a blog along with a multi-million dollar startup buyout and multi-billion dollar startup accelerator.
If PG had never sold viaweb or started YC, no one would care about his blog.
HN's original users came directly from pg's site, and HN is largely responsible for YC's meteoric success. His audience was in the hundreds of thousands, so without an audience none of that would have happened. And the audience came for his ideas.
You're right that money was a necessary ingredient, but it wasn't sufficient.
I didn't really care who he was or what his past achievements are, so at least in my case that proposition is false. I just liked his writing. It's probably impossible to know whether the audience resembled myself or your archetype, but it seems unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the Viaweb acquisition or about some rich Harvard graduate.
This is much closer to the way I remember it. I discovered the essays before YC existed, and he became one of my favorite writers. I barely knew anything about his online store thingy that he flipped during dotcom mania, and I didn't care about lisp. I definitely thought of him as a thinker that I resonated with.
Perhaps not those events specifically, but even the qualities you mention are byproducts of success. A how-to book on the same subjects, written by different authors of equivalent writing ability, where one is a successful practitioner and the other a fraud, will net you two different books.
While the signals we look at to determine authority are varied and different for each person, style-of-writing is generally included in that list. Why would so much advice on etiquette and morality suggest ensuring one's written communications are of high quality?
I'll admit I didn't really read the links you posted but in looking over the first few paragraphs on http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html he is clearing signaling his authority in how he name-drops MIT and talks about his MIT educator friend. (And I don't mean to imply there is anything wrong with that; writers are often advised to establish their qualifications early) I imagine the 18-year-old me would have felt confident about his essay simply from this reference.
Finally, the wannabe theory of thought leadership isn't a hard-and-fast rule. There are exceptions...
I started reading PG's writings in 2001 on the advice of my computer science teacher in high school. That was pre-ycombinator. I read his stuff because it was really interesting and spoke to me (while it doesn't have the same valence it once did for me, at the time I really loved his article on nerds).
It has been quite the ride to see this random dude whose work I started reading become a global juggernaut.
I think you have it backwards. PG's writing was popular before YC was popular, and it certainly wasn't popular because of Viaweb. It was popular because he's a very good writer, expressing interesting ideas with an uncommon clarity and concision.
He came to give a talk at my university when YC was just getting started, and while I was a junior there, about how we could start a startup, rather than going to big companies and working for others. This was very eye opening and exciting, and it was completely independent of his previous achievements - I had never heard of him before that talk, and I had never heard of his startup.
Well, they were located in the area (Boston), and one of his cofounders (RTM) teaches at my school, so it probably wasn't that hard to organize a little talk.
It's essentially a meme now. Either he conned AOL into giving him a sort of chief innovator job, or AOL was in on trying to market him as their very own Steve Jobs. He got onto a bunch of news programs a few years ago where they fawned about how much of an honor it was to have him on.
The article says that he was born in 1970 but has nothing on his career before 1999. Maybe an Australian can chime in on the quality of the Billy Blue College of Design, but stints at unknown "digital media" companies and then at AOL (long after the dot-com boom) doing marketing doesn't seem like a particularly successful career. I'm kind of surprised that he meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
An example from the article, Sheryl Sandberg, has hardly become a thought leader by trying to become one, there's nothing about the achievement that requires an intentional pursuit.
I first wanted to agree with you, but then I thought: If a business executive writes a book which is built around some kind of encouraging mantra, then isn't this an explicit (or at least implicit) choice to become a thought leader?
However, I am unsure whether she fits into the narrative of this piece, as her thought leadership would just be a side effect and result of her business career in a male-dominated industry.
Why must they be communicated? Surely it is the rest of civilization that decides which ideas it is ready for, and which it isn't. Go ahead and write a song like "Imagine", or give a speech like "I Have a Dream", and you'll see how well the rest of civilization responds. Civilization isn't pretty; communicating ideas the people aren't ready for gets you killed.
Knowledge that's not propogated and retained isn't cultural knowledge, it's personal knowlege. It dies with the individual.
That's one of the distinguishing elements of humans: we learn, and retain, knowledge, and transmit it beyond the individual.
We have an entire class of indivduals whose sole productive contribution is dedicated to the task of training and instructing others. No other species has anything remotely that.
Biology is an information transfer system: molecules, DNA, learned behaviour, taught behaviour. Humans came up with writing, teaching, and now electronic information, genetic engineering, and perhaps AI, as extensions of that.
Each allows for the acquisition, storage, transmission, and application of knowledge in new ways.
(I'm not saying "without limit" or "forever accelerating". But I am noting that we've far exceeded any other life forms of which we're aware in this degree.)
This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.
What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who enable them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.
If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need budgets (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians.
Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory.
Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.
I'm not going to name names, but right now I know of a individual who has no programming or teaching experience that is doing the rounds, keynoting and speaking at tech conferences on mentoring junior developers. Many of these conferences leave the qualified technical people to pay for their own costs, they get no stipend but a free ticket. Money does enable this when you have unqualified people being given free travel, stipends etc. to speak at conferences while the qualified ones are left to fend for their own expenses when they speak. Most of these conferences derive a large percentage of their revenue from sponsorship sooooooo....
I think this sums it up well. Most people have a difficult time distinguishing between well-reasoned, philosophically-sound thought and eloquent rhetoric. The former is hard to do and hard to find. The latter is available in spades.
My dad was lamenting the inability of young people to think critically. Maybe he's just a grumpy old man, but he seems to remember being trained in classical thought and critical thinking while in middle school, and notes the lack of such training even at the university level today. I think he's got a fair point.
You're mincing words - first, the author uses "the wealthy" about twice as much "billionaire". Second, billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich". "Millionaire" sounds a little too ho-hum these days, I guess.
Anyway - the problem isn't that wealthy or poor people believe the kind of garbage that comes out of TED talks, it's that they fund it! The wealthy buy the books, the wealthy go to the conferences, the wealthy give them seats on their News Media channels or feature their talks prominently on their news websites. The wealthy run the Universities that give people their doctorates that legitimize their wacky capitalistic ethos. The poor can repost a TED Talk to Facebook, and that's about as far as their power to influence goes. The truly poor do not even have the money to buy 8 plagiarized Fareed Zakaria books.
It's worth mentioning, also, how little you need to make to be "wealthy" in America. With generational wealth playing such a big factor in people's finances, merely NOT having mountains of debt or being in good health are game changers. Throw a $100k salary on top of that (that's more than 75% of people make) and you're living large enough to buy a Fareed Zakaria book every hour for the rest of your life if you so needed.
> billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich"
wait. doesn't that basically work? if you're a billionaire, you are super rich. if you're super rich and you're not a billionaire, are you really super rich?
For instance, you could own or have inherited (or even work for) a business that generates you $1 million in income every year - this puts you in the 99% income percentile. You certainly don't have a massive fortune saved up, just a modest $300 million. By all means you are "super rich" compared to the average human but you're not a billionaire.
Debating definitions is bad, can we not?
TL;DR figurative language sometimes doesn't follow definitions exactly
> plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.
This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
Thew criticisms leveled at the Thought Leadership industry are valid, I think. I am much more skeptical that blogs, magazines, and small publications are the solution, or even a solution to this problem.
Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.
I shudder at reading the phrase "Thought Leadership industry". It is largely manufactured, consensus-oriented opinions by people that happened to get popular for one reason or another and most likely don't really know exactly what they're talking about aside from some popular slogans, terms, or arguments already having been made. It's really quite anti-intellectual, yet at the same time ivory-tower.
Infographics, Advertorials, and TEDx talks, brought to you by Thought Leadership of America Foundation for Progress, the Center for Media Excellence and the nam-shub of Enki. /s
"Thought Leader" and "Influencer" are terms that make me cringe. Anytime I see those labels on someones bio, resume, twitter profile, etc, I can't help but roll my eyes.
If "thought leader" is on their resume, they better have a ted talk or something under their belt. I cringe at "influencer" because it's so plainly evil, and influencing is just "marketing" of ideas.
They are terms that one can't apply to oneself. It's fine for other people to call me a thought leader, but I can't say it myself. I suspect this may also apply to "entrepreneur".
I think you can call yourself an entrepreneur if you start a business and nobody will think twice. The definition Google gives is, "a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so," which is rather clear.
I agree on the other two. It's like giving yourself a nickname.
I can't believe people downvoted you for talking about yourself in a manner that could be considered arrogant except they didn't realize you were actually just being hypothetical.
And then it's mistaken instead to be a direct insult because the same people who don't have a firm enough grasp on the English language to correctly comprehend hypothetical speech in the first-person case are also not going to understand the hypothetical second-person case either; instead, these people will also misconstrue that the speaker is directly referring to themselves.
In my experience, Influencers at least have some kind of mass social media following they can use for marketing, Thought Leaders tend to lack even that.
Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.
Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting?
The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.
I think one distinction we should try to make is that a "public intellectual" is someone who actively seeks to relate academic/scholarly research and methods to the public in accessible, but not simplified, terms and is open to serious debate. A "thought leader" tends to be associated with little scholarly rigour, a tendency to skirt debate, and over-simplification of complex ideas.
I think the author did have a good distinction as well. A "public intellectual" questions and interrogates, while a "thought leader" seems to inordinately promote and prophesize. (I'm thinking of someone like Ray Kurzweil as a "thought leader" here) That's not perfect, but it seems to serve pretty well.
How are they getting paid a shit professors paycheck or a big fat sponsor check? That's how I would distinguish. Maybe not always right but pretty darn close.
Drezner's proposal is that "thought leaders" are narrow but deep, usually evangelizing one big idea as the solution to our problems and that public intellectuals are broad and that their role is in pulling apart and critiquing the big ideas of thought leaders. As I understand it he believes that big money is putting their thumb on the scale so that we've lost our balance between the two. Lots of bad big ideas floating around with not enough discourse about why they are bad.
There's good and bad to most ideas that apply sometimes and not in others. "The exception that proves the rule" I didn't know there were other reasons to mine coal than just energy. Should we not mine coal for those purposes? Solar panels aren't disposed of properly usually. Should we not use those? The discussion is Coal bad. Solar good. Not well we need some coal for steel production.
Global steel production is dependent on coal. 70% of the steel produced today uses coal. Metallurgical coal – or coking coal – is a vital ingredient in the steel making process. World crude steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes in 2013.
Metallurgical coal - mostly found in Appalachia - is <10% of the 800 million tons of coal mined annually in the USA, and commands higher premiums: about $161/ton versus $53/ton for "thermal" coal.
Not trying to correct anything you said, just trying to add to the discussion by providing additional facts.
Subjectivity exists, but surely you aren't going to claim we can't make any distinction whatever that most reasonable people would accept between superficial and deep consideration of something.
This reminds me of a comment from the book "Postwar: a History of Europe between 1945 to 1989". Many oppressive governments that sprang up were initially supported by the learned classes. The quote is as follows:
"Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals"
I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.
Thought leadership these days is almost always about pushing a corporate agenda. It's not true thinking, it's marketing.
That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power".
It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.
Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”"
Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?
A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
I once read an article headlined something like "It's Clay Shirky's internet and we just live in it". I thought to myself, who the fuck is Clay Shirky and who decided it was his internet? Is he besties with Vint Cerf or something?
I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.
More than a few names are mentioned, such as Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg, but it also seems a disingenuous at times. His theory looks more coherent than it actually is once you begin to break it down. People can be too quick to believe in vague ideas about "the elites" who are against us.
People the author likes, like Noam Chomsky, aren't considered "thought leaders" who "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot” in an attempt to “change the world.” Even though Chomsky would definitely like to change the world, and is quite prolific.
Some of the criticism leveled at some of the people is valid but doesn't support his argument. Like when he mentions Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism, as far as I know it was limited in scope and not common throughout his writing. I'm ambivalent about Zakaria, but I'd rather talk about actual ideas than focus on that episode.
He constructs this "thought leader" strawman to attack, when he would better just directly addressing some of the core ideas presented by the thought leaders he doesn't like.
Maybe the article pulled it together by the end, but I couldn't keep reading when it was this sloppily presented. It's compelling, and there are even parts that appeal to my own biases, but it's too ambitious and falls apart.
Its comical how everyone in this thread shits on thought leaders, put then praise PG in his thread on insurance. He didn't intend to become one, but thousands of people read (literally) "Thoughts on Insurance". He is by definition a thought leader. Like anything in this world, some are bad and some are good.
Does it though? You're criticizing people praising PG but using an article not written by him as the example. If you have another example that's written by PG and relevant to your point then please edit your comment to use that.
That's a fantastic example of something that's very wrong with the Internet socially.
I heard someone the other day talking about a "great article they read from Medium." I asked "who wrote it?" They didn't know. Medium is a magazine that doesn't pay it's writers. Genius.
I think I did a poor job explaining that. I was referring to the original commenter's mis-attribution of the article and how it demonstrates a branding effect.
A unionized elite dominates the economy. This bloc constitutes millions of unionized public sector workers who are in the top 10% of income earners, and the writers of major establishment media organisations like the New York Times and the New Republic.
I just googled David Sessions and NewsGuild, and it turns out he is/was a high-ranking member:
Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills.
This elite views the principle of a free market economy as the greatest threat to its privileges, and so it creates a conspiracy theory where any intellectual that promotes this principle is working for the interests of billionaires who are really calling the shots.
This elite is afraid of the freedom the internet provides. It is already looking to shut down free market interaction in digital media, by promoting digital media unionization:
This sounds more like you have a chip on your shoulder for the people you defined as elites than a legitimate argument. It sounds like you're doing what you accuse them of: creating a set of myths to justify this imagined scapegoat; creating a conspiracy theory to attempt to neutralize a perceived threat by the defined group.
Do you have actual numbers to demonstrate this large group of people are heavily in the top 10% of income earners? Journalism isn't that lucrative. Public school teaching isn't that lucrative. Unions overall have shrunk and continue to do so.
It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers, yet this is a group that you claim is in the top 10% and is therefore thriving even though they exist in a capitalist system. That's confused (unless you think we're knee-deep in socialism).
I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.
To throw you a bone, I'm not a fan of all the power public sector unions wield, and there could be some reforms, but this isn't the way to persuade people.
Evidence that most federal employees are in the top 10% of income earners [1].
I haven't compiled comprehensive statistics on public servants as a whole, but in all of the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, a large percentage are in the top 10%.
For instance, across Canadian provinces, annual compensation for a teacher with 10 years experience is well over the $80,000 mark, which is approximately the threshold for being in the top 10 percent in Canada. [2] And these are very secure jobs with very low possibility of ever being fired. That has value that is not captured in compensation statistics.
The teachers in BC are so entitled now that they openly tell students they don't like a particular candidate, and every student I've talked to hates that candidate and their party. Yes I don't have statistics for this particular claim - it's just anecdotes, but for me personally, it's clear as rain that unionisation reduces accountability and creates an elitist mindset among the privileged few who work in the public sector.
There's evidence that unionisation has been very harmful to the education system [3].
Being a unionized journalist for a big media company comes with a lot of perks and job security. That is a material benefit owing from the accepted political ideology, that claims unionisation serves the public interest.
>It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers
I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy, and I am conjecturing that this leads to bias by unionized journalists against free market ideology. I think it's a fair comment to make.
>I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence-based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.
Please note the journalist in question is alleging a vast billionaire conspiracy, with nothing but anecdotes as evidence, and impugning upon the character of any 'thought leader' supporting market-based economic principles, with nothing but conjecture to support his outlandish accusations. If that's allowed here, then certainly my comment should be as well.
His position is not an evidence-based one, at all.
It's also note worthy that you're bristling at the possibility that I'm accusing journalists of being socialists/communists while you yourself don't hesitate to throw terms like "Ayn Randian inspired ideology" to denigrate me. Can I say pro-union position is "Lenin inspired ideology", or would you call for my comment to be expunged from here if I did?
> I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy
While this may certainly be true for federal workers, I'm not at all convinced that this is the case for union workers. But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations and special interests who have don't just have "bias", but explicit stated goals to change the status quo in their favor.
Even if someone doesn't work in the public sector, they depend on the widespread acceptance of major tenets of 'big government' ideology for their union perks.
Unions only have power because the law forces employers to negotiate exclusively with them once a bargaining unit votes to unionize. Without this type of legislation, which thoroughly violates property rights, employers would boot all unions, including the NewsGuild, to the curb.
>But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations
Are you sure that's true? Have you added up all of the compensation of unionized workers to see what it adds up to? And what about numbers? Money is very important, but having numbers helps too.
> Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills.
Suppose that you're right. Then why are these things more true of the relatively weak union movement in the US, and less true of the ones that governed the UK and Australia for half of the 20th Century?
I stopped reading after "... organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas ..." because I believe that an extremely convincing case for the superiority of GMO intellectuals has already been made many times.
While some may shun Ayn Rand for her raw view of capitalism, if you read Atlas Shrugged, she does do a good job of calling out this "arcane unintelligibility"
A personal attack, or ad hominem, attacks the character, motive, or other attribute of the person.
One can be a welfare recipient and be of excellent character and the article doesn't question her character. The article also doesn't say that Rand's being on welfare was any sort of motive for any sort of act.
No one is questioning her right to receive welfare having paid into the system.
The criticism the article brings is her evident hypocrisy for taking welfare after criticizing it for others. That she clearly didn't need it, that she and her followers kept this a secret only adds to that hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has bearing on her thought leadership. Yeah, it really does.
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.