The great debate 1/2

Intellectuals had one job: to understand shit without being insufferable hacks. They get comfortable lives, good paychecks, and prestige for it. And what do you think they did with that privilege? They fucking wasted it by pushing degeneracy into colleges, shutting down freedom of speech in public universities, and bashing the working class American who allows them the opportunity to do their cozy pet projects.

Day of the neurotoxin WHEN?

>>9772268
>>9772270
nassim nicholas taleb is an intellectual, of course...

>>9772288
I don't think Taleb has ever called himself an intellectual and tries to downplay his credentials whenever he can.

>>9772268
STEVE here with the clipart buddha avatar has something to say about the stupid heads rejecting the cool brahmin intellectuals as leaders

The moment one purports that there is only one all-encompassing group of 'intellectuals' is the moment this line of thinking falls apart.

Taleb has built a career on being a contrarian. In some cases he has every reason to be and comes up with great ideas like antifragility. This is an example of one of his less stellar ideas.

Is he, dare I say it, /ourkike/?

>>9772305
>This is an example of one of his less stellar ideas.
It really isn't. I've never seen a worse period for intellectuals than today where having stupid opinions can still merit you a cult following. Public intellectuals back in 1920 meant Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Today? Fucking Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and any other pundit for hire.

>>9772318
What's /lit/'s assessment of Elon Musk? He seems retarded when I see him speak publicly but if I'm being kind its probably in a 'tism kind of way.

>>9772318
There have always been vapid figures like them, our more interconnected media-centric world just gives them more publicity.

We are living in the age alongside the likes of Hawking and Higgs - it's important to remember that there will always be both wheat and chaff.

>>9772327
He's a blustery guy, but you can't deny his intellect. He taught himself rocket science from old Soviet space manuals when starting up SpaceX.

>>9772376
Why wouldnt he just use aerospace engineering textbooks?

>>9772427
Because anon believes in a meme spread to cultivate the cult of personality around Elon Musk. Musk is clearly intelligent for a business owner, but he's not very good at explaining ideas. While he's very science-literate compared to your average businessman due to studying physics at university, he's obviously not involved in day-to-day engineering. Sometimes, Elon Musk embarrasses himself by talking about complicated problems like the simulation theory in very superficial ways, kind of like the way George W. Bush tried to talk about reading literature over the summer about a decade ago, but we give Musk a pass and roast Bush because of differences in branding. Neither are public intellectuals.

>>9772327
He's a PR stunt. He will talk about AI, simulated universes, transhumanism, anything that is interesting from the point of view of a low-brow internet "geek".
If he is actually smart, we have never seen it directly. Of course we can infer it, he must be a fenomenal manager and organizer, but that part of his job is never shown to the public: everything that comes to us refers to either news on Tesla/SpaceX or pleb nerdy themes like the ones I've mentioned earlier.

Feel free to treat his public persona as a fraud.

>>9772310
He's a Lebanese Christian

>>9772448
I agree with this. He conflates artificial intelligence with machine learning, which is a completely different thing (current machine learning is very good at approximating functions based on input data without knowledge about the function itself, there is no reasoning, no intelligence involved).

Tesla is famous for churn with terrible working conditions: underpaid and overworked engineers leaving by the droves only to be replaced by new young naive engineers who've swallowed the hype.

>>9772300
That's part of the posturing that goes with being an intellectual though. For example, Harvard alumni won't outright say "I went to Harvard." They'll tell people, "I went to school in Boston" and only drop their credentials at the last possible moment for maximum possible impact. The modesty and lack of arrogance over attending what is widely considered the world's best university is supposed to increase your esteem for them. "Wow, this person is so smart that even the smartest school in the world doesn't impress them."

Of course it's total bullshit. Nobody who spent the time, effort and money to get credentialed by an elite school actually believes their credentials aren't as valuable as they're purported to be. If they did, they wouldn't be credentialed. And nobody who tells people "I studied at that one university in the general vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts" seriously thinks that the identity of their school is a great big secret the proles won't pick up on. It's just a higher order cultural signifier

>>9772561
>For example, Harvard alumni won't outright say "I went to Harvard."
I'm a Harvard undergraduate, and I will outright say I go Harvard if somebody asks the question. I often take the piss out of myself right afterwards if I feel like I'm dealing with an insecure faggot. Then again, I'm not paying for the education thanks to great financial aid, so maybe I don't have as much need to "milk my money's worth."

Antifragile was great
Skin in the Game so far is alright
I think minority rule is interesting
His book about information theory,
sounds nice

Our national broadcaster doesn't even invite university educated intellectuals live any more after they kept embarrassing themselves in-front of millions of viewers, they were being regularly destroyed by journalists with little to no professional education.

>mfw people repeat "What if scientists ran the country"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtQDxtQEfm4