Conspiracy theories are another huge trap for smart people...I know a bunch of brilliant people, often highly educated, who never accomplish anything because they believe the government is watching their every move and there's about to be a complete societal breakdown as people realize how much the power elite is fucking them over.
Of course it's true. Whenever there's a power imbalance, one party is being fucked over, and whenever there's more than one person, there's a power imbalance. It's almost a tautology.
But acting like it's true gives you an excuse for not doing anything. And then instead of just having the power elite fuck you over, you're fucking yourself over too.
This is a silly attitude. Ultimately everybody is fucking everybody else over simultaneously. You fuck your boss over as your boss fucks you over. You fuck your employees over, and they fuck you over too. Occasionally you'll get fucked over by someone you can't fuck over, like the phone company, but the chances are that they're being fucked over by somebody who's being fucked over by somebody you're fucking over, so it all evens out in the end.
> This is a silly attitude. Ultimately everybody is fucking everybody else over simultaneously. You fuck your boss over as your boss fucks you over. You fuck your employees over, and they fuck you over too. Occasionally you'll get fucked over by someone you can't fuck over, like the phone company, but the chances are that they're being fucked over by somebody who's being fucked over by somebody you're fucking over, so it all evens out in the end.
You wouldn't be working in the porn industry, perchance?
I don't agree that whenever there is a power imbalance, one side will get "fucked over". Indeed, the whole idea of having a market is that people are mostly equal in terms of power (read Hobbes' Leviathan). It's only when power imbalances are so gross that they're obvious that one side is guaranteed to get "fucked over".
agree that pawer balance != somebody get fucked over
for instance America is a benign hegemony. Though they still fuck over people at times, they did it much less than, say, UK, or Rome, etc.
but a counter-point
- having a market means people with more money fuck over people with no money.
Are you saying that Steve Jobs is fucking me over somehow? By contrast to him, I basically have no money. If so, what exactly is he doing to me? I thought he was helping me a lot.
He does seem to base his thesis exclusively on conspiracies of cause (intentional, active plots) and leaves out the subtler but more broadly effective conspiracies of effect (think of the combination of bad education, bad social programming and predatory practices that create and perpetuate the poor as a social class).
The definition of a 'conspiracy' requires conspirators. There has to be a group of people doing something secret or it doesn't count.
I do agree with you that 'conspiracies of effect' exist, and in fact I think they are more common than conspiracies designed by people. A good example is lies told to children; that can't work unless the vast majority of adults won't spoil it by telling the truth to kids they meet. However, there is no secret leadership organizing the thing; there are no people behind a curtain; there is no smoke-filled room; it's just a nasty tradition with no secret group of conspirators causing it.
In many cases people who are participating in one of the conspiracies of effect are aware that what they are doing isn't necessarily kosher, but will have some justification that makes it OK for them to do it.
(eg. a mortgage broker might think "I pushed my lower-income clients into balloon mortgages because it helped them get lower monthly payments. Plus I really needed these Ferragamo's")
In other words given the human mind's capacity for self-delusion, it's not impossible for people to participate in these anarchic leaderless conspiracies without being consciously aware of it.
Unraveling that conundrum might actually get us close to a description of social behaviour that could be considered science.;
I think by "critical thinking" he means the ability to criticize, or point out flaws in someone's work/theory. And I took a good number of classes in the humanities where this is basically what we were expected to do: "Critically analyze Spinoza's theory of X" usually meant "Discuss what you think is stupid about Spinoza's theory of X." You could do otherwise, but you weren't expected to. Apparently coming up with your own theory, and "critically analyzing" THAT, is something special reserved for a senior thesis. But while all science majors did research projects or programming projects, only the really motivated humanities students did a thesis. Many spent four years just smugly putting down the half-formed ideas of long-dead scholars, and probably poorly.
"The professions" is a meaningless distinction these days. Investment bankers call themselves "young professionals", even though banking is NOT a profession in the historical sense.
Life in most corporations, professional or otherwise, seems to be pretty soul-sucking. Orwell described the "beetle-like" type of person, in 1984, who would, with "swift scuttling movements", tend to "flourish best under the dominion of the Party". Indeed such a type of person is most likely to succeed in large private-sector hierarchies, and the corporate grind involves submitting one's future to the whims of beetle-like masters.
Smart people generally get very educated, and higher education (in the US at least) teaches only critical thinking...They leave school thinking that the way to be useful and show your smarts is to point out why things won’t work, rather than using some of those smart to find a way forward.
Grad school in engineering, computer science, (and I assume in math and science too) usually requires that you make something, so I don't think there is a sole emphasis on critical thinking. From the point of view of "making something users want", perhaps the missing part is reliable judgment of whether people want it, rather than depending on citation counts.
What makes these "traps" so bad? I think smart people getting into medicine is a good thing. I think academics make valuable contributions to the world. I think that one of the two US presidential candidates is materially better than the other, and the world will be much better if he is elected.
Seriously, is the only worthwhile thing for an intelligent person to start a company that somehow involves blogging, RSS, and AJAX?
Hmmm nothing wrong with smart people getting into medicine. I would not have it any other way.
The point is one should not get into the "Professions" because they think they have the smarts to do it but for something more, something like "satisfying the soul" or for pure joy...
Ironic how the criticize "critical thinking" (at least, what they think it means -- they abuse the term) for not providing solutions, only problems. Yet at the same time, they don't suggest any solutions to these traps, they only list them.
thank you. this is an awesome post, and makes me recall how many times i've fallen into these traps. I've always wanted to be in politics and finance, and thought that's the best way to maximize my potential. Then i find out politics/finance is more about rent-seeking than doing good. I spent most of my college life just to figure it out. And then I find the start up life, which is really the thing - I got out of the traps. =)
I'd argue that these "traps" stem primarily from risk aversion. While it's best for society that talented people gravitate toward high-risk, high-reward pursuits, the talented individual is still often attracted to a more conservative strategy, having something to lose. Most people are terrified of straying from a well-laid-out career path.
