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?

Why "but"? You are agreeing with the previous comment, right?

That's why I said it should inspire skepticism. I take it as a cue to take a closer look.

Broadly true but in a marketplace overrun with all sorts of ideas filtering out people who engage in acts or behavior you find abhorrent can be a useful filter for ideas to consider.

Or to put it another way, have you sat through a timeshare pitch to evaluate if the idea is good or bad?

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.

Is the author an "intellectual"?

Savour the irony.

It's more of a statement about excessive alarmism.

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.

What could one individual do to reduce climate change by more than their own contribution?

I agree that bit is wildly optimistic, but its still not a claim that climate change is not real and 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.

"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...

Probably meant albedo

The deindustrialization and degrowth policies put forth by climate activists will kill more people and cause more suffering than climate change.

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?

I took it as ‘watch me demonstrate’.

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.

despite rising prices not proving rising demand

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.

Together with my comment at the very bottom :)) If you want to know more always look at the "bottom" of the comments.

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.

and like most self-improvement books you could probably condense the 200+ pages into 10.

And if you read one, you read at least 80% of all the content of the others. Some are good and you get 20% of novelty, but that's rare

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....

That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon.

Sounds like the other predictions that were wrong.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye

The hedging in hedge funds comes not because they are intended to hedge risks you have from elsewhere, it is because they (traditionally) hedge against market risk, to seek absolute returns rather than measuring against the market.

Deleted. Thanks for the citation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"First" sounds like the key word in that sentence. What do they want second, third, etc?

Your link says this: "An equitable plan for the wind down of existing fossil fuel production, where nations with the capacity and historical responsibility for emissions transition fastest, providing support to others around the world."

Which sounds a lot like "stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal"

The article is full of irony. In the end, he talks about "social media intellectuals" trying to capture people's attention instead of being correct, while doing the same in this post.

I dare to say that "intellectuals" are easy to be hated, so this post is not doing something new or groundbreaking as it believes it does. As you said, dictators are prone to kill them

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.

technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon.

Sounds like faith that an outdated model will trend into the future.

">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."

Jerkoff sneering at intellectuals uses "marginal costs" as a metric without considering externalities that have nothing to do with economics (the softest of soft "sciences") and states that technological innovation is exponential as though that's a law of nature rather than a limited observation of a brief period in human history.

I remember the first time Daddy let me have a sip of a wine cooler too. Yawn. Hand him a moist towelette when he's done, somebody, wouldja? The grownups are working on grownup stuff.

Look at these fucking idiots. (…) They’re probably just really angry at mom and dad and don’t have the emotional skills to resolve their attachment issues or childhood baggage.

And in between he presents his own model where we don’t need to worry about climate change

Their tone reads more like a cultist knee-jerk reaction, I mean who else talks like that.