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I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.
It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.
And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.
I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.
I think this has also enshittened movies. When I watch movies made before 20 years ago, they seem like they were made by people who had life experience outside of filmmaking and celebrity scenes. Which is maybe strange, because Hollywood has been very nepotistic since the moment it came into being. But for whatever reason, Hollywood used to pull in more talent who had experience with life outside movies. There were soldiers, blue collar people, hippies, wild politically unorthodox guys like John Milius, and all sorts of other kinds of people who got into the film industry. When I watch modern film, on the other hand, I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies and going to parties in New York and Los Angeles.
I could be biased, maybe my political opinions are filtering into my perception of movies. But this is how it feels to me.
No, because I noticed the same. The people making films today all come from the PMC for the most part and know no other lifestyle. It’s also just that in the 1950s society was much more economically integrated in the sense that the emerging PMC was very likely to grow up in neighborhoods and attend schools with the working class. Most of the generation that marched off to college after the war (or sent their kids to college) grew up working factory, sales, or skilled labor jobs or at least knew people who did. Modern elites are much less likely to have any significant contact with blue collar types, less likely to have served in the military, etc. so what they know about war, blue collar work, small towns, religion, and so on, come through narrative fiction.
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Fix what? Elites developed the policy that solved the 2008 mortgage crisis as the rest of the world struggled. The zero-interest rate policy and QE has since been copied by other central banks. It was not elites who were buying those mc mansions with 0-money down. Same for Covid vaccines.
Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society. Society is not going to solve difficult problems like space travel using only ordinary people. Difficult coordination problems require elites. Sometimes the public isn't always owed an explanation or it would be against the interests of national security, like the Manhattan Project.
Dollars to donuts Elon had a summer job shovelling shit or picking apples at some point -- Kamala seems to be kind of an early adopter on this sort of thing being Just Not Done for aspiring white-collar climbers, to the point where not only does she need to make up a story about working at McDonalds, McDonalds is the shittiest job she can even think of to lie about.
Trump probably never had to literally lay bricks or whatever, but based on how much he seems to enjoy hanging around with garbagemen and workers at his hotels, it's a good bet that he's done quite a bit of shit-shooting with the pointy end of his construction crews as well.
I’m still not convinced that she lied about working at McDonald’s. I think it more likely that she lied on her resume about not working at McDonald’s. Of course, that shows not just ignorance, but shame at being associated with the working classes.
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Which is the more central example of our Elites as a class: Musk, or the management of Boeing? Would you say that Boeing has demonstrated a solid track record of solving difficult problems?
Like everything, it's hit or miss. Elites being necessary doesn't imply all elites are good or competent.
OK, now that we know some elites are bad and incompetent, who gets to decide when the public is owed an explanation? The elites themselves? The ones you just said are "hit or miss"? The Dalai Lama? Some Guru? The Bishop of Rome? Greta Thunberg?
The decision that was reached in the enlightenment is that the public does; the actions of elites who serve the public are accountable to the public. And I'm all ears for criticisms of the enlightenment, but you're coming right up against the very reasons people even wanted democratic rule in the first place.
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How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
The silver spoon people from what I have observed are sometimes more humble or nicer than the pulled-myself-up people. People have it reversed for some reason, maybe due to pop culture. The silver spoon people know they are already at a big advantage starting out in life, so they understand that luck plays a huge role. A McDonald's stint will not change this. The pulled-myself-up people already had stints in bad jobs. It's quite common for people who start at the lower rungs and then move to the top to become detached, not those who start at the top.
I agree with the observation, but not the reason. I'd say it's more like: it's easy to be nice when life is nice and easy. That, and while the hypothetical job pays few dollars, it comes with a chance at Harvard per six months worked - an excellent hourly rate.
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A better way to fix the Ivies would be to ban legacy admissions.
But really, that would just eliminate the Ivies, as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites (and a few token minorities so the brochures don’t look too white) in the company of experts who can connect them to major industries. They’re not looking for smart people, specifically, they’re looking for high-IQ go-getters who are so type A that their type A-ness is literally more pronounced than their IQ. They’re not looking for nerds, they’re looking for chads. That’s why they cling insistently to “holistic admissions”, because it’s important to them that their admits aren’t just smart, but gifted in many other ways.
I would much rather we separate the finishing schools for elite children from our institutions of knowledge, but things are they way they are for the simple reason that knowledge isn’t power; power is knowledge. Everything is kayfabe and the humanities are word games, which is why the only fields who have major institutions that are looking for nerds lay in STEM, where “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
I've heard this phrased as something like "merit laundering". Harvard et al. reserve part of the class for their primary clientele (uber-elites) and part of the class for the actual best students (IMO medalists, etc.) to maintain their legitimacy. They grade inflate and then everyone's resume line looks roughly the same coming out.
In this context, their aversion to non-holistic admissions makes sense. The intelligent, motivated, but not particularly exceptional kid with perfect SAT/GPA and a list of strategically selected, exaggerated extracurriculars who goes to Harvard only to eventually settle down as a private practice dermatologist in the suburbs contributes minimally to their true goal.
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or even better, companies should stop requiring degrees for everything unless the job necessitates it , like being a doctor
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Wealthy parents will gladly have their kid work at McDonald’s for 6 months to go to Harvard, that wouldn’t stop anyone.
McDonald's would build a restaurant near Harvard in a wealthy area and the manager (probably an elite who would usually not actually be present at the restaurant -- some middle class schlub would be hired as assistant manager to actually run things) would in practice only require well-connected prospective Harvard student employees to show up on a single day in their 6 month shift and excuse all other absences. It would just become another node in the elite influence and favor trading network. You would need a powerful sovereign of some sort to actually impose this on the rich and well-connected.
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I don’t think the idea is to stop anyone, but rather have them do non abstract work like flipping burgers and learn the culture and average intelligence of the public and fast food coworkers rather than remain in their high IQ bubble
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