I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology.
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
You're misunderstanding what a think tank is. It's a place that gets money from places and is a parking lot for displaced political people. They aren't there to have original thoughts -- they are there to support the perspective of whomever is signing the checks. What they say isn't very important, but what they don't say is critical.
Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.
Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
I live in Washington, DC. The tiny bandwidth of acceptable opinion here would be hilarious if these people weren't running the country. When I go to parties and meet people with powerful jobs, it's appalling how poorly thought out their analyses of many situations are. Being here for the last 2 years has given me a lot of insight into how and why America is being run into the ground.
>2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
This one particularly annoys me. Anytime you hear it you can be almost certain the person saying it has no actual experience in innovation/wealth/job creation. I prefer Andy Grove's take on it:
"Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."
Great list. I've seen lots of these ideas float around certain circles.
As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections.
One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook.
Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.
"Typically, the IYI [Intellectual Yet Idiot] get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains."
The entire pursuit of "thought leadership" is a joke. If someone purposefully seeks thought leadership then they are probably incapable of truly demonstrating it. Thought leaders don't try to become thought leaders, they become so by focusing on their areas of expertise
Vi Hart, taking a break from math/music, made a great video[1] on how artists (or "thought leaders", etc) create audiences. She quotes heavily from the forward to Edmund Snow Carpenter's book "They became what they beheld", which was probably written (or at least heavily influenced) by Marshall McLuhan.
The main thesis is that old-media was about finding channels of distribution. If you didn't utilize existing media channels, nobody would see your ideas. When technology made the mechanics of publication cheap and easy, it became easy for the artist and audience to interact without the need for an imprimatur or interacting with any gatekeeper. True "thought leadership" was made a lot easier - and a lot more powerful - because original thoughts could be conveyed with new types of media to create new audiences.
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
> The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully [old media's methods], is that clear speaking is generally obsoleted thinking. Clear statement is like an art object; it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". Utilizing existing mediums is by definition following what worked successfully in the past; the "thought leaders" and avant-garde artist are seen as "leaders" because they utilize new mediums, not just new messages.
This is mistaken. For example, pg became a thought leader by attempting to become one.
You can disagree with how influential his ideas were, but it's hard to disagree with the results. If not for his essays, there's a good chance YC wouldn't exist.
You're right that the most effective thought leaders don't call themselves that, though.
An example from the article, Sheryl Sandberg, has hardly become a thought leader by trying to become one, there's nothing about the achievement that requires an intentional pursuit.
This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.
What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who enable them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.
You're mincing words - first, the author uses "the wealthy" about twice as much "billionaire". Second, billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich". "Millionaire" sounds a little too ho-hum these days, I guess.
Anyway - the problem isn't that wealthy or poor people believe the kind of garbage that comes out of TED talks, it's that they fund it! The wealthy buy the books, the wealthy go to the conferences, the wealthy give them seats on their News Media channels or feature their talks prominently on their news websites. The wealthy run the Universities that give people their doctorates that legitimize their wacky capitalistic ethos. The poor can repost a TED Talk to Facebook, and that's about as far as their power to influence goes. The truly poor do not even have the money to buy 8 plagiarized Fareed Zakaria books.
It's worth mentioning, also, how little you need to make to be "wealthy" in America. With generational wealth playing such a big factor in people's finances, merely NOT having mountains of debt or being in good health are game changers. Throw a $100k salary on top of that (that's more than 75% of people make) and you're living large enough to buy a Fareed Zakaria book every hour for the rest of your life if you so needed.
> plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.
This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
Thew criticisms leveled at the Thought Leadership industry are valid, I think. I am much more skeptical that blogs, magazines, and small publications are the solution, or even a solution to this problem.
Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.
I shudder at reading the phrase "Thought Leadership industry". It is largely manufactured, consensus-oriented opinions by people that happened to get popular for one reason or another and most likely don't really know exactly what they're talking about aside from some popular slogans, terms, or arguments already having been made. It's really quite anti-intellectual, yet at the same time ivory-tower.
"Thought Leader" and "Influencer" are terms that make me cringe. Anytime I see those labels on someones bio, resume, twitter profile, etc, I can't help but roll my eyes.
If "thought leader" is on their resume, they better have a ted talk or something under their belt. I cringe at "influencer" because it's so plainly evil, and influencing is just "marketing" of ideas.
They are terms that one can't apply to oneself. It's fine for other people to call me a thought leader, but I can't say it myself. I suspect this may also apply to "entrepreneur".
Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.
Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting?
The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.
This reminds me of a comment from the book "Postwar: a History of Europe between 1945 to 1989". Many oppressive governments that sprang up were initially supported by the learned classes. The quote is as follows:
"Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals"
I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.
Thought leadership these days is almost always about pushing a corporate agenda. It's not true thinking, it's marketing.
That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power".
It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.
Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”"
Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?
A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
I once read an article headlined something like "It's Clay Shirky's internet and we just live in it". I thought to myself, who the fuck is Clay Shirky and who decided it was his internet? Is he besties with Vint Cerf or something?
I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.
Its comical how everyone in this thread shits on thought leaders, put then praise PG in his thread on insurance. He didn't intend to become one, but thousands of people read (literally) "Thoughts on Insurance". He is by definition a thought leader. Like anything in this world, some are bad and some are good.
[+] [-] mabub24|8 years ago|reply
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.
[+] [-] pcunite|8 years ago|reply
Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
[+] [-] projectramo|8 years ago|reply
(Looking for an agent)
[+] [-] kevmo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|8 years ago|reply
This one particularly annoys me. Anytime you hear it you can be almost certain the person saying it has no actual experience in innovation/wealth/job creation. I prefer Andy Grove's take on it:
"Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grov...
[+] [-] IsaacL|8 years ago|reply
As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections.
One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook.
Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.
[+] [-] uberstuber|8 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
[+] [-] lgleason|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|8 years ago|reply
Well, now you know what a think tank is for! :)
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RUTHLESS_RUFUS|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RUTHLESS_RUFUS|8 years ago|reply
The real world has yet to offer up a counterexample to my childish whimsy.
[+] [-] sadfjhsdf66|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomc1985|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdkl95|8 years ago|reply
The main thesis is that old-media was about finding channels of distribution. If you didn't utilize existing media channels, nobody would see your ideas. When technology made the mechanics of publication cheap and easy, it became easy for the artist and audience to interact without the need for an imprimatur or interacting with any gatekeeper. True "thought leadership" was made a lot easier - and a lot more powerful - because original thoughts could be conveyed with new types of media to create new audiences.
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
> The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully [old media's methods], is that clear speaking is generally obsoleted thinking. Clear statement is like an art object; it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". Utilizing existing mediums is by definition following what worked successfully in the past; the "thought leaders" and avant-garde artist are seen as "leaders" because they utilize new mediums, not just new messages.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
You can disagree with how influential his ideas were, but it's hard to disagree with the results. If not for his essays, there's a good chance YC wouldn't exist.
You're right that the most effective thought leaders don't call themselves that, though.
[+] [-] davidw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalChris|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.dailybuddhism.com/archives/670
[+] [-] kyleschiller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natmaster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] et1337|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcelluspye|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasbroslasher|8 years ago|reply
Anyway - the problem isn't that wealthy or poor people believe the kind of garbage that comes out of TED talks, it's that they fund it! The wealthy buy the books, the wealthy go to the conferences, the wealthy give them seats on their News Media channels or feature their talks prominently on their news websites. The wealthy run the Universities that give people their doctorates that legitimize their wacky capitalistic ethos. The poor can repost a TED Talk to Facebook, and that's about as far as their power to influence goes. The truly poor do not even have the money to buy 8 plagiarized Fareed Zakaria books.
It's worth mentioning, also, how little you need to make to be "wealthy" in America. With generational wealth playing such a big factor in people's finances, merely NOT having mountains of debt or being in good health are game changers. Throw a $100k salary on top of that (that's more than 75% of people make) and you're living large enough to buy a Fareed Zakaria book every hour for the rest of your life if you so needed.
[+] [-] j2kun|8 years ago|reply
This is a good point, but I think it speaks more to the degradation of the PhD as a signal, due to universities disproportionately caring about graduation rates and pushing unqualified students through the system.
[+] [-] abakker|8 years ago|reply
Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self-sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.
[+] [-] muninn_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notadoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ygaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpclark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrggrr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] braneloop|8 years ago|reply
https://dojo.nearsoft.com/episodes/technology-tools-kevin-ke...
[+] [-] Bakary|8 years ago|reply
(on a more pedantic note, his last name is Sun: Tzu is an honorific title)
[+] [-] projectramo|8 years ago|reply
The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.
[+] [-] Top19|8 years ago|reply
"Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals"
I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.
[+] [-] cryptica|8 years ago|reply
That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power".
It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.
[+] [-] CryoLogic|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: In most cases
[+] [-] jonbarker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesash|8 years ago|reply
Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?
A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a New York Times (or New Yorker) columnist was listening.
[+] [-] randrodoFrodo|8 years ago|reply
Seems a little hand-wavey, no?
[+] [-] soared|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry
[+] [-] BrooklynRage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A
[+] [-] remotehack|8 years ago|reply