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Notes -
Robert Moses, Ronan Farrow, and the Role of the Dilettante in Society
TLDR: Dilettantes, independently wealthy men who do important work not because they need money but for personal satisfaction, are sometimes uniquely situated to achieve goals that careerists are incapable of reaching. We should be encouraging wealthy dilettantes in our society to do something cool with all that freedom they can afford, rather than trying to get them to grind away at 9-7s that anyone else with their IQ could do.
Two of the best non-fiction works I've read recently have been Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow and The Power Broker by Robert Caro. On their face, they couldn't be more different. One is a weekend beach read of an autobiographical journalism book, a Nancy Drew mystery of the intrepid reporter who tracks the lurid scandals of Hollywood despite the personal risks, a year-end bestseller. The other is a multi-volume monstrosity that goes into minute detail on the legislative process of getting parks legislation passed in the early 1900s, covering the life story of a man so ingeniously powerful that FDR at the peak of his strength couldn't dislodge him, widely considered one of the greatest non-fiction works of all time.
Yet there are a strong similarities between the two Farrow and Moses: both men came from wealthy families and attended Yale, Oxford, and had obvious nepotistic and parental support that allowed them to bounce around jobs in their 20s. Family money and connections meant that they didn't worry about supporting themselves like ordinary men, instead they caught the big fish.
Moses would try to take on a job rewriting the civil service rules for New York City, lose the ensuing political battles with Tammany Hall politicians who used the civil service jobs as patronage to maintain power, was forced to move out of state to find any job at all. Moses wouldn't find a "real" job until 1927 when he was 29 years old, he wouldn't support his own family financially until he was in his 40s, relying on support from his mother to make his (rather fancy) ends meet. Rather than major (or even take a minor) in making money, Moses focused single-mindedly on accumulating power. He took unpaid or poorly paid jobs, and attacked them with all the energy and creativity of a small-business owner or a start-up founder, worked like his life depended on it, harder than anyone. Where typical political appointees to these low paying jobs either treated them as the part-time work they were paid as, or used the powers of the position to make money selling contracts and jobs; Moses used the powers of the office purely to accumulate more power to the office. He bootstrapped the authorities into funding and bond juggernauts, dominated NYC construction, built bridges and parks, decided the course of Long Island development, all well into the 1950s. But none of that would have been possible if he had been forced to compromise his vision in the 1920s and the early 1930s so that he could feed his family.
Farrow, meanwhile, attended Yale Law and briefly practiced at a corporate firm, but found he didn't enjoy law and quit. Right there, the vast majority of law school grads cannot afford to simply decide to skip out on law, but for Farrow it was just a hobby. From there he worked in the Obama administration state department for a few years in various big-title sinecures for Yale grads with famous names, stuff like "Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Farrow left government service at the same time as Hillary Clinton, his patron, and moved right into hosting his own show on MSNBC for just one season; Farrow would say that more people would come up to him at parties after it was canceled and say they loved it than ever actually watched the show. From there Farrow would get a job producing features for Today, which would lead to him and his partner stumbling on the Weinstein story.
What's clear in the work, and from the way that Weinstein accusations would come up over and over in media, is that journalists would regularly stumble over the Weinstein story and be scared off. And boy, howdy, did they ever try to scare this ol' boy Farrow off. NBC tells him to drop the story, repeatedly, he ultimately is forced to leave his NBC job to pursue the story. No one will take his calls, none of his stories will get published in any outlet on any topic. Hillary Clinton won't talk to him and dodges their planned interview for a totally unrelated book. Israeli spies hired by Weinstein* begin tracking Farrow, trailing him, and in multiple cases posing as representatives of non-profit Feminist organizations interested in his work on Weinstein and asking to have him in to talk about what he has on Weinstein. Farrow's partner drops out early on, citing his family and his career. It is unclear at times if Farrow will be able to get any job in journalism if this doesn't play out, and it isn't clear if Farrow will be able to produce anything publishable as sources disappear or clam up under pressure from Weinstein's goons. Professional journalists dropped out under this pressure, which is the logical response to the threat of having the career by which you define yourself, by which you feed your family. Farrow don't care. For Farrow journalism is a lark, a distraction after Yale Law School, between the State Department and before the PhD from Oxford. Tell him he'll never work in Journalism again, fine, he'll move on to some other rich-kid sinecure.
And it makes me think, there's a lot of value in having men like that in the world, in our society. Men who can pursue a goal without concern for day to day things. Think of Darwin and all the gentlemen scientists of yore, the Royal Societies, men who wanted to advance knowledge with no concern for tenure or for monetizing their discoveries. Farrow and Moses needed nepotism and family support to get where they got. But they just as easily could have done nothing interesting with that family help. They could have wasted away as party boys, done nothing useful with it. They could have done something uninteresting with it, become bankers or corporate lawyers and added to their family's wealth and produced a bunch of kids who would follow them to Yale and produce more bankers and lawyers. But instead, they chose to do spectacular things. To leverage their intelligence and their freedom to do what they dreamed of, to change the world.** It's admirable, we should encourage our privileged rich kids to do more fun stuff, and less "steal a billion dollars from investors in the magic beans business" stuff.
*Hired for Weinstein by Liberal-Hero Super-Lawyer David Boies; keep this fact in mind whenever the Dershowitz-Boies saga comes up. Another Weinstein ally in going after Farrow was Matt Lauer. It's all molesters all the way down.
** Depending on your opinion of Moses, maybe not for the better. Farrow probably deserves some demerits as well for whatever the hell he was supposedly doing with youth in Afghanistan and Syria when he was with the state department, but to be honest I doubt he did much of anything while he was there.
Damn called me out. I do have spurts of intense motivation for certain things, I've just never had it last very long.
Yeah, same. Usually once the mystery is figured out and the end is in sight I lose interest in actually doing the job of finishing it and put it aside because that now feels like busywork.
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Farrow is an example of an overhyped elite protégé who way failed to live up to his promise. He wrote this books and articles that although well-researched and well-reviewed, had no impact on anything, including his articles about Trump. This is similar to all those trump bombshells and exposés by NYTs, New Yorker, etc. from 2015-2020 that were supposed to prove Trump's fraud regarding taxes, casino losses, or Russian collusion, which also went nowhere. Even the Weinstein story was broken by the NYTs, but Farrow wrote an important book and article about it. It's hard to make a difference, even if you are as smart , hard-working, and talented, and well-connected as someone like Farrow. Even the robert moses legacy is greatly inflated. He worked on some projects in the 60s and 70s, but forgotten/irreverent now too.
regarding Farrow...graduated high school at 11..wtf. Down below we were taking about SBF's IQ..that blows him out of the water.
It feels like the average IQ 130 person could master the necessary course work at age 11. This says more about their parents then anything.
Maybe, but it's also a matter of having the drive to actually do that, which is the rarer thing because it goes against basically all incentive.
I was on track to do something similar in schooling and then I sort of figured out "hang on, all this time the reward for working hard, excelling and finishing tasks early has just been more work" and that I wouldn't be, say, set free to do as I pleased, I would just be given more expectations to meet. So I thought instead I could just coast and do nothing but dick around and do what I want for a couple years until the work required actually caught up with my ability level.
And I still defend that as the obvious choice. If you want the smart kids to excel, you have to actually reward them by giving them something they actually want for doing it. If they finish your worksheet that was supposed to take 45 minutes in 15, don't just hand them another worksheet, all you're teaching them that higher ability just means you're expected to do more and they will stop trying because of it.
"To whom much is given, much will be expected" - Luke 12:47-48
"The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off." - Atlas Shrugged
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Sounds like a valuable lesson, the one incorporated in the adage "The reward for a job well-done is a harder job".
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I certainly couldn't, I just wasn't developed enough at that age. I don't think I was a uniquely late bloomer among the gifted kids either.
Graduating HS at 11 is impressive regardless of support (unless there is cheating), imo. It might also say more about how quickly someone developed than how intelligent they are..
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Maybe, but still quite impressive. Even high-IQ Asian kids plus 'tiger mom' parenting seldom gets those kind of outcomes. This is closer to Terrance Tao levels of preciousness, than just 130 IQ plus aggressive parenting.
Probably most parents sensibly recognize that this would be terrible for a child's development.
It's also nowhere close to Tao levels. Tao scored a 760 on the SAT at age 8. So figure he probably could have gotten the score of a typical high school graduate at age 6 or something.
It's possible Mr. Farrow scored almost as well, maybe at age 10. still way better than your typical 130 IQ smart kid.
If so, I agree. If.
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Have you read any of Robert Caro's work?
You need to read it to appreciate just how much the shape of New York City today owes to Robert Moses. His impact was a lot more than "some projects in the 60s and 70s."
No, but in my defense the book is 1300 pages...
And his four-volume (and not finished yet!) biography of Lyndon Johnson is even longer. But worth it.
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If you've owned a car in the metro-NYC area, hearing that list of bridges and parkways can't help but send chills down your spine. That's how you navigate anywhere between New Jersey and Connecticut, and on Long Island the things he built are the basis of Nassau and Suffolk counties. If you don't live or drive in the NYC metro, it probably all seems rather small.
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