18 thoughts on “Tech Leaders”

1. As Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

2. Also, Jordan Peterson has stated that there is no correlation between IQ and wisdom.

3. How could such smart people be so stupid?

   Must be a rhetorical question — unless you’ve never read an account of a Mensa meeting. Such monumental stupidity, of which only genius is capable.

   (Full disclosure: I paid seven years worth of Mensa dues.)

   1. I’ve been to Mensa meetings, and commented on them. But I don’t want to look that up right now.

4. Humility always gets the last word… it’s coming.

5. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.

   I wonder what the rationalization would be, if they did have more such exposure? Let us keep in mind the author has already glossed over Zuckerberg’s psychology studies.

   I think the primary reason that these executives have been so out of touch is not because of their training, but the mediocrity of the supposed problem. There isn’t much there to be concerned about.

   It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.

   […]

   We are now beginning to see the consequences of the dominance of this half-educated elite. As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it, “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”

   1. It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.

      This is BS. Facebook ran studies on this and without a doubt Google did the same thing. They just though Democrats were the only humans capable of understanding how to analyze data or communicate.

      The technocrats want to run society. They want to control information and perceptions. They know they know better than everyone else.

      Its not that the technocrats didn’t have a well rounded education, its that they reject the ideals of America and the precursors they were founded on.

      1. What did you expect? Propaganda was developed as an art in the corporate marketing sector. There will always be some who will want to persuade others to do their bidding, regardless if it’s in their best interest or not.

   2. The problem is that today’s “Liberal Ats” majors aren’t any more familiar with de Toqueville, Mill, Plato and Aristotle than are the tech elites about which the complaint is made. The Humanities have long since been purged of anything smacking of Dead White European Maleness.

      1. That’s very true across much of modern academia.

6. They are “shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in here.”

   What I mean by this Casablanca quote is that like Inspector Renault, they are not stupid, rather, they have been corrupted by all of the money coming in.

   1. Indeed
      When they started Google their moto was “do no evil”.

      1. Seems to me they have trouble recognizing evil.

7. A credential is not an education.

8. I’ve heard the term “severely educated” to describe such people.

9. About 100 years ago, Will Rogers noted that “everyone is ignorant, only in different subjects.” That statement is just as true today as it was then.

10. “They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.”
    Yeah, but a big problem is that these disciplines are now utterly dominated by extreme leftists and practicers of identity politics, who wish to erase all previous such understanding in favor of their own, “post-modern”, narrative.

11. They might be more likely to listen to philosophers if it weren’t for the Trolley Problem. After hearing a philosopher explain why the Trolley Problem means we should sometimes sacrifice people, they may decide to ignore philosophers and design better brakes.

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