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.
Engage with reality as much as possible. That means less time on this site and more time in the world. Less time watching human faces on a screen and more time seeing human faces in person.
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.
Good advice for everyone in this age of staring at screens.
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.
Agree in principle, but some people mistakenly believe that because a wealthy person did something and succeeded, regardless of the cost or externalities, it must have been a good idea.
Unfortunately it seems that many leading figures in the tech industry live by the absolute opposite of these. Just look at Elon Musk, Sam Altman, DHH... the list goes on.
Yeah, well, fuck those guys. Don’t try to emulate them. Fortunately, we have better wealthy role models like Melinda French Gates, Mackenzie Scott, and Warren Buffett to look up to.
Making an antithetical statement doesn't invalidate anything by definition. If you have a rebuttal, do as the author, and express it. State specifically what you're opposing, and give your best rebuttal. Then we can consider what set of arguments and data best predict reality.
Not all claims in the article are outrageous. As a matter of fact most are pretty solid. Which is why the bit about "just wait for tech to solve climate change" stood out for me.
"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.
I agree that bit is wildly optimistic, but its still not a claim that climate change is not real but it does not really change his main points that they are idiots.
I think a bigger problem in the context of the article is that they are not intellectuals.
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.
By adding that, he is implying "Don't need to act, keep burning fossils, tech will fix it". That is in itself asserting a simplified model assumption about a (human) world that is much more complex; something he was railing against in the previous parts of his text.
Either it's a cheeky joke, he himself is an intellectual or both.
The people in 'Just stop oil' really are fools. The movement is bankrolled by the largest Solar PV importer in the UK. Also, the UK is too far north for solar PV to be environmentally friendly as their solar albino is less than .25. So they are annoying others to force an economically and environmentally unworkable solution. Yes, that is the behavior of a fool. If you are going to put so much into an issue, you should really do your research and be sure what you are trying to do makes sense. These people do not.
This is about the 50th anti-solar panel comment I've seen from you over the last number of months. If you google "solar albino" you just get your comments on here (and the AI summary is absolutely roasting you btw), perhaps you mean something else. None of the comments of yours I've seen have ever contained a source for your claims. I'd hate to assume bad faith but it does seem ideologically motivated more than based on reality.
I see this all the time. I was trying to explain recently to someone how a person can be highly intelligent and a fool at the same time. It is as if the brain takes skills from one area to build them up in another. Many intelligent people lack social understanding, and some are extremely cut off and cruel in their view of the wider population. Some intellectuals are highly totalitarian in their thinking.
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.
That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon.
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?
Wait until you hear about the ultimate fraud...Economists.
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...
Yes, that is how it works. To make supply and demand meet, you can increase supply or decrease demand. Central banks only have one of those levers and have to use it to counteract whatever the market does to the other lever.
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.
Economics is always political, and economists advice reflects that. Other fields can be political, economics remains largely "political economy" with a pretence at neutrality.
Its not the ECB - many central banks are doing the same for the same reasons.
I was in a pretty decent econ program big public university. The program and our professors at the time had close Wall Street ties due to proximity. Despite that, no professor took themselves very seriously and many would make constant cracks about the absurdity of the field and why would anyone listen to them. It was a totally cool department of self-aware smart people.
Central bank interest rates don't exist to 'control prices' per se. The state would like to create new money supply to make the economy move faster (e.g. maintain high employment in slow business periods). This would be to the disadvantage of the banks (their loans to debtors would be devalued). Hence a compromise was created to make the money supply more elastic without risking hyperinflation - banks may create new money supply for this purpose but must pay for it at the interest rate. Inflation is key a part of the feedback loop, to limit money creation to some supposedly optimal target range.
Surprisingly, this system was created by bankers and politicians, rather than economists /s
There are also many sources of 'cost of living' which are not related to money supply and therefore not directly related to monetary policy.
Best article read this year. Give this man an Oscar for his courage. Many have tried but have been crucified, I am puzzled HN set this one in main page.
This is written by the author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", so gratuitous cursing is his schtick.
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.
I can vouch for that too. I used to work with nuclear scientists in the IAEA.
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.
Or consider the fact that over 91% of hedge fund managers can’t beat the market, despite the fact that the entire purpose of hedge funds is to explicitly create better returns than the market.
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%.
Intelligent people can be wrong. Massive revelation here.
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.
Agreed. Ehlrich as well. He was a butterfly specialist and applied population theories he used in his own research onto humans. His book was a surprise best seller and made him an intellectual celebrity. He also had a very large family despite his protests about overpopulation.
His article is heavy cherry picking and shows little curiosity beyond “you’re dumb I’m smart.”
Intelligent people can be wrong. Massive revelation here.
Nope, megalomaniacs are wrong prepotently loud, most of the time just because they can (a piece of paper allows them to). Which makes them all but intelligent.
Intellectuals in soft sciences are fucking idiots.
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.
So what do you propose? We stop any research into anything that isnt math because it fails to adhere to the methods of math? Becasue biology and medicine clearly are soft sciences, and physics and chemistry are just applied math so why bother.
And well, math is just applied philosophy and suddenly we're back to the ancient Greeks i guess.
Biology and medicine clearly are not so soft because they can be tested by scientific methods.
Have you read the article? You have a science like "human behavior" where your experiments can't be reproduced. Simply because there will be so many variables or variation that your science is as good as a guess from somebody from the street.
Or again sciences where you just make models of some imaginary things like hidden meaning 10th century in literature. Your only test is another 10the century literature meaning searcher. You just clap each other on the shoulder and give each other phds.
One of the most famous one is the doctor who proved that it's better to wash your hands before an operation, and all the other existing doctors who never did that previously shunned him, because it would prove they "did their job poorly" before
Ironically this article itself is a model of "life in 2026" based on examples cherry-picked to support the author's viewpoint. I wonder if he as open to being proved wrong about this exact thesis as he encourages his audience to be?
This article kind of lost the plot after a little bit, it started descending into its own criticisms with flippant dismissals of climate change being a real concern, dismissal of people's motivations without evidence, assurances based on vague predictions that climate engineering will suddenly become viable.
Started to feel a little uncomfortable given the themes and the mention of pol pot at the beginning, almost like he is calling for more genocide of intellectuals so he can keep rolling coal or something.
While I absolutely believe in climate change, I DO think that there are people out there talking about it as fanatically as the most MAGA Trump worshiper talks about Trump. We have to be careful to not let the most fringe element of any issue become the de facto voice of the issue because media, both social and otherwise, profits on drama.
'This one eccentric professor wrote a provocative engagement-bait ideological book on a topic outside his area of study 60 years ago. Expert opinions can therefore be safely ignored by people with common sense / exposure to reality'
The sources for the withering opening anecdote about the stupid leftist intellectual are pretty thin. Everyone involved is just guessing why this guy was killed.
It says more about the author than anything else; that he wants it to be true.
Do you think this is really about climate change? No, these are empty human beings, desperate for their lives to mean something. And their apocalyptic climate change model has done that for them. It has nothing to do with science. 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. Hell, they probably aren’t even pro-nuclear.
From a BBC explainer of what these protestors want:
"Just Stop Oil (JSO) wants the UK to stop approving new fossil fuel projects, which are a major cause of climate change."
That's a narrow goal and they stopped when they thought they'd achieved it.
So their allegedly "apocalyptic" climate change model doesn't even stretch as far as stopping producing from existing oil fields, just new ones before they become sunk costs. Which makes sense because as this rant says, we have new and better tech to replace it.
They are advocating the reasonsable compromise position. This guy is the "intellectual" who isn't letting facts get in the way of his rant about smart people.
I'm guessing he's also missed the irony of citing Pol Pot killing all the educated folk as the intro to his "smart people are the problem" rant.
The Just Stop Oil website’s FAQ suggests their goals are far more ambitious than now new projects:
WHAT DOES JUST STOP OIL WANT?
We demand that the UK government commits to working with other nations to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair, and just transition.
As the "non-proliferation" treaty they link to makes clear in it's very name and in the full explanation, they want to first limit unnecessary expansion.
Hah. Paul Ehrlich was my high school graduation speaker. Stanford's Professorville was districted to my high school, so I'm sure some parent were friends with him or something.
Man, what a boring, downer speech. He just talked about how my generation was screwed, and we would have world wide famines at any moment now. Great topic for a bunch of kids about to head off to college and start their lives, Paul.
Isn't that the "silver tower" syndrom?
Which “that”?
Ivory tower.
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.
Ivory tower?
Amen, brother.
Good advice for everyone in this age of staring at screens.
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.
Isn't your second point essentially an ad hominem?
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.
Agree in principle, but some people mistakenly believe that because a wealthy person did something and succeeded, regardless of the cost or externalities, it must have been a good idea.
Unfortunately it seems that many leading figures in the tech industry live by the absolute opposite of these. Just look at Elon Musk, Sam Altman, DHH... the list goes on.
Yeah, well, fuck those guys. Don’t try to emulate them. Fortunately, we have better wealthy role models like Melinda French Gates, Mackenzie Scott, and Warren Buffett to look up to.
Master Mazu sat on the chair. Baizhang stood up and rolled up his sitting mat. Mazu stood up and went back to his quarters.
Believable statements with an anti climate change statement squeezed in the middle :)
I found it an apt demonstration of his own thesis.
Is the author an "intellectual"?
Savour the irony.
It's more of a statement about excessive alarmism.
Making an antithetical statement doesn't invalidate anything by definition. If you have a rebuttal, do as the author, and express it. State specifically what you're opposing, and give your best rebuttal. Then we can consider what set of arguments and data best predict reality.
Why should someone put effort in rebutting his nonsense? He is the one who posits some outrageous claims without any proof.
Not all claims in the article are outrageous. As a matter of fact most are pretty solid. Which is why the bit about "just wait for tech to solve climate change" stood out for me.
He is calling Just Stop Oil idiots. He is saying its idiotic to vandalise paintings.
That is very different from a claim that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic.
What could one individual do to reduce climate change by more than their own contribution?
You're missing this part:
"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.
I agree that bit is wildly optimistic, but its still not a claim that climate change is not real but it does not really change his main points that they are idiots.
I think a bigger problem in the context of the article is that they are not intellectuals.
By adding that, he is implying "Don't need to act, keep burning fossils, tech will fix it". That is in itself asserting a simplified model assumption about a (human) world that is much more complex; something he was railing against in the previous parts of his text. Either it's a cheeky joke, he himself is an intellectual or both.
The people in 'Just stop oil' really are fools. The movement is bankrolled by the largest Solar PV importer in the UK. Also, the UK is too far north for solar PV to be environmentally friendly as their solar albino is less than .25. So they are annoying others to force an economically and environmentally unworkable solution. Yes, that is the behavior of a fool. If you are going to put so much into an issue, you should really do your research and be sure what you are trying to do makes sense. These people do not.
"Wind and solar power could significantly exceed Britain’s energy needs" - 2023
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-09-26-wind-and-solar-power-co...
This is about the 50th anti-solar panel comment I've seen from you over the last number of months. If you google "solar albino" you just get your comments on here (and the AI summary is absolutely roasting you btw), perhaps you mean something else. None of the comments of yours I've seen have ever contained a source for your claims. I'd hate to assume bad faith but it does seem ideologically motivated more than based on reality.
I see this all the time. I was trying to explain recently to someone how a person can be highly intelligent and a fool at the same time. It is as if the brain takes skills from one area to build them up in another. Many intelligent people lack social understanding, and some are extremely cut off and cruel in their view of the wider population. Some intellectuals are highly totalitarian in their thinking.
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?
"Intellectuals are idiots, listen to me instead"
I took it as ‘watch me demonstrate’.
Wait until you hear about the ultimate fraud...Economists.
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...
Yes, that is how it works. To make supply and demand meet, you can increase supply or decrease demand. Central banks only have one of those levers and have to use it to counteract whatever the market does to the other lever.
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.
Economics is always political, and economists advice reflects that. Other fields can be political, economics remains largely "political economy" with a pretence at neutrality.
Its not the ECB - many central banks are doing the same for the same reasons.
I was in a pretty decent econ program big public university. The program and our professors at the time had close Wall Street ties due to proximity. Despite that, no professor took themselves very seriously and many would make constant cracks about the absurdity of the field and why would anyone listen to them. It was a totally cool department of self-aware smart people.
Central bank interest rates don't exist to 'control prices' per se. The state would like to create new money supply to make the economy move faster (e.g. maintain high employment in slow business periods). This would be to the disadvantage of the banks (their loans to debtors would be devalued). Hence a compromise was created to make the money supply more elastic without risking hyperinflation - banks may create new money supply for this purpose but must pay for it at the interest rate. Inflation is key a part of the feedback loop, to limit money creation to some supposedly optimal target range.
Surprisingly, this system was created by bankers and politicians, rather than economists /s
There are also many sources of 'cost of living' which are not related to money supply and therefore not directly related to monetary policy.
Central banks don’t take the cause of inflation into account when they adjust borrowing rates. This is a feature, not a bug.
We should check if AI gives better predictions than economists, and if so replace them.
Best article read this year. Give this man an Oscar for his courage. Many have tried but have been crucified, I am puzzled HN set this one in main page.
Don't worry, the heresy has been flagged already.
Together with my comment at the very bottom :)) If you want to know more always look at the "bottom" of the comments.
This is written by the author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", so gratuitous cursing is his schtick.
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.
He's also a white guy from a rich family.
Born on 3rd and thinks he hit a triple. He wrote a rant once saying that your shouldn't worry about STDs/STIs because he doesn't know anyone with one.
His own book falls apart if you think too much. He's insecure that not everyone agrees with his advice.
He never stops to think that most people can't up and quit the only job they've ever had after 6 weeks.
I can vouch for that too. I used to work with nuclear scientists in the IAEA.
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.
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%.
Intelligent people can be wrong. Massive revelation here.
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.
Agreed. Ehlrich as well. He was a butterfly specialist and applied population theories he used in his own research onto humans. His book was a surprise best seller and made him an intellectual celebrity. He also had a very large family despite his protests about overpopulation.
His article is heavy cherry picking and shows little curiosity beyond “you’re dumb I’m smart.”
Wikipedia says he had one daughter and then immediately had a vasectomy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich
Nope, megalomaniacs are wrong prepotently loud, most of the time just because they can (a piece of paper allows them to). Which makes them all but intelligent.
So "intellectuals" are all megalomaniacs now?
You can find examples of deluded people everywhere. It would be more defensible to claim that some intellectuals are idiots.
Intellectuals in soft sciences are fucking idiots.
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.
So what do you propose? We stop any research into anything that isnt math because it fails to adhere to the methods of math? Becasue biology and medicine clearly are soft sciences, and physics and chemistry are just applied math so why bother.
And well, math is just applied philosophy and suddenly we're back to the ancient Greeks i guess.
Biology and medicine clearly are not so soft because they can be tested by scientific methods.
Have you read the article? You have a science like "human behavior" where your experiments can't be reproduced. Simply because there will be so many variables or variation that your science is as good as a guess from somebody from the street.
Or again sciences where you just make models of some imaginary things like hidden meaning 10th century in literature. Your only test is another 10the century literature meaning searcher. You just clap each other on the shoulder and give each other phds.
One of the most famous one is the doctor who proved that it's better to wash your hands before an operation, and all the other existing doctors who never did that previously shunned him, because it would prove they "did their job poorly" before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
This is also a current story about operations that after careful study don't actually improve patient outcomes.
The people who've been doing the operations for decades are much less open to this new informstion than newly trained doctors.
Ironically this article itself is a model of "life in 2026" based on examples cherry-picked to support the author's viewpoint. I wonder if he as open to being proved wrong about this exact thesis as he encourages his audience to be?
This article kind of lost the plot after a little bit, it started descending into its own criticisms with flippant dismissals of climate change being a real concern, dismissal of people's motivations without evidence, assurances based on vague predictions that climate engineering will suddenly become viable.
Started to feel a little uncomfortable given the themes and the mention of pol pot at the beginning, almost like he is calling for more genocide of intellectuals so he can keep rolling coal or something.
I found it a ironic to make such a confident psychological diagnosis built on zero contact with the people involved
While I absolutely believe in climate change, I DO think that there are people out there talking about it as fanatically as the most MAGA Trump worshiper talks about Trump. We have to be careful to not let the most fringe element of any issue become the de facto voice of the issue because media, both social and otherwise, profits on drama.
'This one eccentric professor wrote a provocative engagement-bait ideological book on a topic outside his area of study 60 years ago. Expert opinions can therefore be safely ignored by people with common sense / exposure to reality'
The sources for the withering opening anecdote about the stupid leftist intellectual are pretty thin. Everyone involved is just guessing why this guy was killed.
It says more about the author than anything else; that he wants it to be true.
Under a picture of "Just Stop Oil" protestors:
From a BBC explainer of what these protestors want:
"Just Stop Oil (JSO) wants the UK to stop approving new fossil fuel projects, which are a major cause of climate change."
That's a narrow goal and they stopped when they thought they'd achieved it.
So their allegedly "apocalyptic" climate change model doesn't even stretch as far as stopping producing from existing oil fields, just new ones before they become sunk costs. Which makes sense because as this rant says, we have new and better tech to replace it.
They are advocating the reasonsable compromise position. This guy is the "intellectual" who isn't letting facts get in the way of his rant about smart people.
I'm guessing he's also missed the irony of citing Pol Pot killing all the educated folk as the intro to his "smart people are the problem" rant.
The Just Stop Oil website’s FAQ suggests their goals are far more ambitious than now new projects:
WHAT DOES JUST STOP OIL WANT?
We demand that the UK government commits to working with other nations to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair, and just transition.
https://juststopoil.org/faqs-updated/
I think that's just poor wording:
As the "non-proliferation" treaty they link to makes clear in it's very name and in the full explanation, they want to first limit unnecessary expansion.
https://www.fossilfueltreaty.org/about#about
Hah. Paul Ehrlich was my high school graduation speaker. Stanford's Professorville was districted to my high school, so I'm sure some parent were friends with him or something.
Man, what a boring, downer speech. He just talked about how my generation was screwed, and we would have world wide famines at any moment now. Great topic for a bunch of kids about to head off to college and start their lives, Paul.
It’s a rare thinker who can combine a story about brutal communism and gym memberships.