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mcguire | 6 months ago

"They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.

"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."

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AnimalMuppet|6 months ago

If your only measure of success is money, then you are poor in a way that money can never fix.