My experience is that there are people who like to create and people who like to conform. The conformists have a very difficult time with the people who create. The creators experiment and question. The conformists see this as troublemaking. The conformists do what’s been done before without question, and they defer to the judgment, expectations, and preferences of their perceived betters, who they hope to emulate and replace. I don’t think IQ per se has a lot to do with it: frequently the conformists did quite well in school, and the creatives did well in spite of school.
If conformists did quite well in school, and the creatives did well in spite of it, what do you call those the can't work with schools at all (either only able to function outside of it, or generally mal-productive)?
The IQ range of 85 to 115 may be in the middle distribution but this is not the kind of people actually described in the hypothesis. To become a mid-level bureaucrat or a run-of-the-mill academic you need to be 115 and up.
The conflict posited in the hypothesis (with which I partially agree BTW) is mostly between the 115- 130 crowd and the 145+ crowd, with the 131 - 145s sometimes aspiring to the higher level and sometimes conforming down.
This said, I think that although the conflict stratified by IQ level exists, the reason for institutional decay has more to do with infiltration by high-functioning status-maximizing psychopaths. Psychopaths are attracted to power like flies to shit which is why every movement, club, religion, company, or party that achieves some success tends to accumulate them in proportion to the amount of power that is available. Looking from the outside you may think that power corrupts but the real mechanism is that the corrupt are attracted to power, and they corrupt everything they touch.
And better still, is the niche idea that "power does not corrupt, responsibility does" draws the distinction between midwits/idealists/gentry vs topwits/opportunists/elite, however it only stems from an exclusively Machiavellian bent, and not a moral one. https://archive.fo/C6t8V
Well, I agree strongly with the first half of your comment, but not so much with the second.
By which I mean I have no doubt whatsoever that there are indeed some psychopaths within the midwits who do disproportionate damage, but the ordinary midwits exactly as AK describes do plenty of damage themselves. If we weren’t sure of this before, it can be clearly seen among the institutional woke DEI crowd, and its most pernicious effects seen amongst college students who have drunk the woke kool aid and oppressor- oppressed theory so deeply that they actually chose “Back Hamas” in the wake of that group’s murder, rape, baby decapitation and hostage-taking rampage. And do so thinking themselves virtuous.
If it were only 3-5% of such people, we could reasonably label them all psychopaths, I suppose. But when it’s about 50% of 18-24 year olds (and thus clearly a much higher percentage still of college-“educated” 18-24 year olds, it’s clearly not just a function of psychopaths. (Admittedly, while that group is headlined by midwits, there are clearly plenty of less than midwits in the ranks, too to have such appallingly high numbers. But dollars to doughnuts the radicals leading the effort are almost all midwits. How many of *then* are psychopaths, I couldn’t begin to guess).
Back then [i.e. in 1956 - C.], Whyte was extremely pessimistic. He saw signs that in the struggle for dominance between the Sociopaths (whom he admired as the ones actually making the organization effective despite itself) and the middle-management Organization Man, the latter was winning. He was wrong, but not in the way you’d think. The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.
---
One problem with this solution is that non-commercial organizations are not subject to this cycle, at least not in recent times, for various reasons. For instance, in olden times, states that grew too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality were routinely cannibalized by their neighbors, but more recently this approach has been strongly discouraged.
"One problem with this solution is that non-commercial organizations are not subject to this cycle, at least not in recent times, for various reasons."
USG has other specials problems too. Many non-profits can at least change their total compensation packages with great flexibility in order to adjust to market conditions and recruit and retain people with the necessary amount of experience and talent. CEOs of technically 'non-profit' Hospitals and Credit Unions can earn eight figures. Even public universities often have a number of people paid high 6 or even 7-figure salaries (and this is even ignoring the athletics coaches pay thing, which is at a whole other level).
But, with a few very special exceptions, the vast majority of USG top managers, senior executives, nearly all of Congress, and top Generals and Admirals can't get more than $200K, with even District Court Judges and Cabinet Secretaries making about $225K. At the top, many jobs are really kind of terrible in ways the public doesn't appreciate because they think the jobs are so 'powerful' and 'high ranking'.
The confirmation process is totally awful and the level of disclosure for uncertain prospects is more than most people would bear. Literally no sane person talented enough to have other options or perhaps not completely fanatical about 'the cause' they think they are helping would agree to accept such a position until they really believed that it was just an investment for the real payoff later.
In practice this means that the peculiarly legal manner of first world corruption in the form of post-government employment - so long as you do the winking just right, which your lawyer will teach you how to do - is not just an occasional thing, but in fact and by necessity almost universal. As I understand it, these considerations are of high importance in the recruitment of individuals to do these jobs and at the forefront of negotiations (or indirectly provided assurances by the 'real sponsors').
A lot of big companies and universities are pretty open about being willing to (wink wink, you'll be taken care of) compensate some of their top people for doing a revolving-door stint in government during which they are paid a small fraction of their normal salary, precisely for the influence they think those individuals will exert in favor of the preferences and interests of the institution.
One advantage of this scheme, er, I mean, common pattern of arrangements, er, I mean, random collection of mere anecdotes, is that it *does* allow you to get some top notch folks in that you couldn't otherwise get if the official government salary you were paying them was actually the expected present value of their pecuniary gain. On the other hand, what are those top-notch people really doing with their top-notch talents when officially working for one master - the public interest - but really working at least in part for another - whoever will be taking care of them afterwards.
Their elitism is based on the fact that they were considered "smart" in school, and probably graduated from college (though probably not with physics degree).
They are the kind of people who will pedantically correct someone else's spelling and think they won the argument.
However, they typically don't realize on their own that being merely above average does not make them noteworthy or unique. When confronted with this reality, they invest in status markers of being "smart" to reassure themselves.
The weird idea is that there are at least three different class of Midwits: spergs/labor, cynics/gentry and manipulators/upper.
The "spergs" (est. 110-115 IQ or trade/community college) of the laborite are more likely to talk in terms of trivia, and evoke a sense of success and merit. They are more likely to have dead-pan cookie-cutter humor that are more-or-less "punching up". They think of rules as what is written on paper, and that it is sacred.
The "cynics" (est. 115-125 IQ AKA "island 120" or mass university core) of the educated professional class are more likely to talk about abstractions, and are serious about work and perceived impact/status. Their humor is juvenile, and are the most likely to involve one-upmanship and self-deprecation as false humility. They think of rules are "living" and are subjected to change, but are unable to change it.
The "manipulators" (est. 125-135 IQ or top alumnis) of the sub-elite class are more likely to gossip, and wanted to hint as a sense of integration and superiority. Their frat boy humor is often an impotent version of the one person "sociopathic" humor (see The Gervais Principle by V. Rao) They understand that there is a distinction between ceremonial rules and effective social conventions, but has difficulty conversing with power.
Intriguing subject. And a cause for introspection. I’m a Midwit, having been exposed to bonifide elites in the corporate world. My strengths are: work ethic, personality, willingness to get out of my comfort zone (but not to the extent of an entrepreneur), and here’s the big one… recognizing and working around my weaknesses. And I am incredibly disgusted by those Midwits posing as Elites, and especially Elites pretending to know more than they actually do.
And for some reason, this type of phrasing is what made the middle or lower rungs of midwits looks foolish, the "self-improvement" industry is specifically made for these people to feel good about themselves. (Rao is very antagonistic on this point in "Curse of Development") Also, elites often have connotations of "sociopaths" or "opportunists" and thus their nastiness is likely part of a big picture (or just profit). Do midwits realize they engage in tit-for-tat social games rather than added-value coalitional games? See also: the Midwit Matrix
Midwit probably has some correlation with IQ, but it's much more a kind of mindset. There are obviously lots of people with 130 IQs that are thoroughly Midwit as discussed here. If anything, such people are more dangerous than actual Midwits (they are more capable advocates for the Midwit way).
Hypothesis: the hierarchy is defined by extraversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability. But there is a gap between midwits/idealists/gentry (Agreeableness, Light Triad, Authoritarianism) vs topwits/opportunists/elite (Openness, Dark Triad, Social Dominance).
Secondary guess: Midwits have really strong verbal tilt (wordcel lol), and therefore are less analytical and more semantic. They are also more creative, but at the same time more likely to have mental issues.
I think this is very important. Sunstein and Holmes are both probably high IQ, yet their constant "Regular people are too stupid to make their own decisions, and so we smart people must give them proper guidance for them to conform to," is probably more responsible for the rise of midwittery than anything else they do.
When someone like Andreessen makes such generalizations about the academy as a whole, they just look foolish. Physics departments aren't swimming in mediocrity. Math departments aren't swimming in mediocrity.
Does anyone seriously think Einstein would've been a venture capitalist in today's world? Or von Neumann? Of course not. Same goes for Nima Arkani-Hamed, Terry Tao, and all of the people making difficult advances in science today who are frankly doing things that no one in VC would be able to achieve if they tried for a thousand years.
These fields are just the clearest examples; this blanket anti-academic rhetoric is laughable.
To be fair, though, the vast majority of academics are not mathematicians or physicists. All the hard sciences together are likely a small minority, I would guess under 25%. I am almost certain it is not over 50% in the US.
But are more than 25% of venture capitalists as able as these scientists? I don't think so; it's just that the contributions of the small handful of folks in VC who are good at what they do get magnified by the economy. This is a good thing, but it can lead folks to exaggerate the actual skill level of the total VC talent pool.
And like I said, I was just talking about the clearest examples that everyone should agree on. There are many life sciences fields, and several social science and humanities fields, that are far from being dens of mediocrity.
It probably depends a bit by what one means as "able". I don't have a strong sense that VCs are not made up of many conformist midwits myself, but it does seem to be a realm that demands a bit more performance than academia. I know that in my field of economics the median published paper has 0 citations, for instance. That is a lot of work that no one either reads or thinks is useful enough to mention in their papers, which is notable considering how many bloody papers with ridiculously large "literature review" sections there are. I am pretty certain that in terms of advancing human understanding, most academics are very close to zero productivity, with many well on the negative productivity side of things. Most academic papers and conferences are just awful.
There's a problem here in that this sort of analysis is obviously correct but I don't think its explanatory power is very useful or conducive to practical advice.
That is, this theory has the look of inexorable Marxist determinism, doesn't it? ALL INSTITUTIONS WILL BE CAPTURED AND DECLINE. And THE ONLY SOLUTION IS EXIT AND START FRESH.
That can all be true but still miss the important part of the action. Why do some institutions last a long time and others not? Why do some regimes and stable alignments make coalitions of midwits and true creative elites that are more productive than others?
Isn't this the institutional equivalent of "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"? Offhand, I'd expect *most* institutions to decay, much as businesses do.
Right. In Nature bad mutations happen a lot, but the reason that genetic load doesn't accumulate is because there is "creative destruction" and constant ruthless culling of the less well adapted. Lasting a long time by itself doesn't prove much, since it often means that something just didn't have any serious competition for a long time.
I find Arnold's post and references as well as other readers' comments totally irrelevant to understanding both the political fight and the federal government's collapse. I suggest first reading Grygiel's Return of the Barbarians (the first paragraph in Chapter 7, p.210, should be read before reading the whole book) and then applying the lessons to the U.S. Good luck.
All this strikes me as a rehash of the bell curve and reversion to the mean. However one measures human talent, the vast majority of people will be in the broad middle. Of course their institutions are going to reflect that. Average people are going to enjoy working in institutions run by average people. They chafe at anyone who claims to know better, even if they do know better. Look at our presidents from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Most of them had some particular skill, enough to attract sufficient positive attention to get themselves elected. But clearly none were geniuses, wildly successful entrepreneurs, or scientists. Along most dimensions they were just average. Some of those average leaders are going to profess qualities and expertise they clearly don’t possess, hence, “midwits” I suppose. But their only outstanding quality is hubris: average people with above average moxie.
I thought Democrats were supposed to be "elitists," not "furiously (?) " attached to mid wits? And why wouldn't every political party want attract "midwits" AKA median voter theory? This meta stuff it pretty far away from neo-liberal concerns of trying to figure out how to reduce the structural deficit, free international trade, increase immigration of highly skilled people, replace the wage tax with a VAT, pass a child tax credit or tax net CO2 emissions.
The MidWit hypothesis is that the Democrats are elitist without being elite. Their contempt for others is not based on having superior cognitive ability. It is based on the assumption that mouthing progressive pieties puts one in the elite (or the elect, as McWhorter would put it). I think it would be hard to say whether Neil Young is smarter than Joe Rogan, but one enjoys admiration from Democratic elitists and the other draws their contempt.
And hostility to neo-liberalism is one of the pieties that the MidWits insist upon--these days in both political parties.
This makes sense except the "contempt" part if that means for "non-elite" voters. Yes, I have great contempt for Mitch McConnel or Donald Trump, but not for the millions of people that voted for them. That's becasue we Neo-Liberals have just not been persuasive enough about taxes and immigration and trade and net CO2 taxation.
??? It's we Neo-Liberals who have been unpersuasive to voters of the benefits of freer trade, greater immigration, deficit reduction and taxation of net CO2 emissions. If Trump and McConnell are neo-anything, its fascists. :)
1. The Democratic regime favors non-commercial organizations that, being less subject to the cycle of creative destruction, are safer places for midwits.
2. The worst part of Democrats being "elitists" is they're mostly "midwits" acting like elitists. On top of statist safety, the Democrats offer the midwit the flattery of status.
3. In turn, this sort of statist, sclerotic regime is incapable of addressing Neo-liberal policy concerns (and perhaps any other sort of policy concerns) beyond in a performative sense.
A fun thing to test out: observe the Subreddits r/overemployed (two jobs & savings, conservative), r/antiwork (unionization & strikes, socialist), and r/fire (side hustle & investment, libertarian).
My experience is that there are people who like to create and people who like to conform. The conformists have a very difficult time with the people who create. The creators experiment and question. The conformists see this as troublemaking. The conformists do what’s been done before without question, and they defer to the judgment, expectations, and preferences of their perceived betters, who they hope to emulate and replace. I don’t think IQ per se has a lot to do with it: frequently the conformists did quite well in school, and the creatives did well in spite of school.
If conformists did quite well in school, and the creatives did well in spite of it, what do you call those the can't work with schools at all (either only able to function outside of it, or generally mal-productive)?
The IQ range of 85 to 115 may be in the middle distribution but this is not the kind of people actually described in the hypothesis. To become a mid-level bureaucrat or a run-of-the-mill academic you need to be 115 and up.
The conflict posited in the hypothesis (with which I partially agree BTW) is mostly between the 115- 130 crowd and the 145+ crowd, with the 131 - 145s sometimes aspiring to the higher level and sometimes conforming down.
This said, I think that although the conflict stratified by IQ level exists, the reason for institutional decay has more to do with infiltration by high-functioning status-maximizing psychopaths. Psychopaths are attracted to power like flies to shit which is why every movement, club, religion, company, or party that achieves some success tends to accumulate them in proportion to the amount of power that is available. Looking from the outside you may think that power corrupts but the real mechanism is that the corrupt are attracted to power, and they corrupt everything they touch.
Whenever Psychopaths gets thrown around, Danco's theory comes in handy about how they are equivalent to the entrepreneurs (or the cultural 1%). The idea that midwits/idealists/gentry always play zero-sum games whilst topwits/opportunists/elite always play positive-sum game is a weird analysis, and does not catch the nuance of organizational maneuvering https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/ and https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1480293650621865985
And better still, is the niche idea that "power does not corrupt, responsibility does" draws the distinction between midwits/idealists/gentry vs topwits/opportunists/elite, however it only stems from an exclusively Machiavellian bent, and not a moral one. https://archive.fo/C6t8V
BTW The terms Idealists and Opportunists are brought from https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ and https://daedtech.com/hacking-your-career-as-a-non-developer/ (and activism wise https://www.researchfraud.com/activist/duchinformula/ for posterity)
They corrupt everything they touch, unless incentives are present to get them to keep the BS down to a dull roar.
Such incentives could include the MSM, but most of that crowd are now too busy pushing Wokeism.
Well, I agree strongly with the first half of your comment, but not so much with the second.
By which I mean I have no doubt whatsoever that there are indeed some psychopaths within the midwits who do disproportionate damage, but the ordinary midwits exactly as AK describes do plenty of damage themselves. If we weren’t sure of this before, it can be clearly seen among the institutional woke DEI crowd, and its most pernicious effects seen amongst college students who have drunk the woke kool aid and oppressor- oppressed theory so deeply that they actually chose “Back Hamas” in the wake of that group’s murder, rape, baby decapitation and hostage-taking rampage. And do so thinking themselves virtuous.
If it were only 3-5% of such people, we could reasonably label them all psychopaths, I suppose. But when it’s about 50% of 18-24 year olds (and thus clearly a much higher percentage still of college-“educated” 18-24 year olds, it’s clearly not just a function of psychopaths. (Admittedly, while that group is headlined by midwits, there are clearly plenty of less than midwits in the ranks, too to have such appallingly high numbers. But dollars to doughnuts the radicals leading the effort are almost all midwits. How many of *then* are psychopaths, I couldn’t begin to guess).
Those used to be called Organization Men, after the famous 1956 book by W.H. White, Jr. The same cycle from the point of view of non-midwits was described by Venkatesh Rao in his 2009 essay on the Gervais Principle [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/] which is really required reading on the subject. Rao writes:
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Back then [i.e. in 1956 - C.], Whyte was extremely pessimistic. He saw signs that in the struggle for dominance between the Sociopaths (whom he admired as the ones actually making the organization effective despite itself) and the middle-management Organization Man, the latter was winning. He was wrong, but not in the way you’d think. The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.
---
One problem with this solution is that non-commercial organizations are not subject to this cycle, at least not in recent times, for various reasons. For instance, in olden times, states that grew too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality were routinely cannibalized by their neighbors, but more recently this approach has been strongly discouraged.
"One problem with this solution is that non-commercial organizations are not subject to this cycle, at least not in recent times, for various reasons."
USG has other specials problems too. Many non-profits can at least change their total compensation packages with great flexibility in order to adjust to market conditions and recruit and retain people with the necessary amount of experience and talent. CEOs of technically 'non-profit' Hospitals and Credit Unions can earn eight figures. Even public universities often have a number of people paid high 6 or even 7-figure salaries (and this is even ignoring the athletics coaches pay thing, which is at a whole other level).
But, with a few very special exceptions, the vast majority of USG top managers, senior executives, nearly all of Congress, and top Generals and Admirals can't get more than $200K, with even District Court Judges and Cabinet Secretaries making about $225K. At the top, many jobs are really kind of terrible in ways the public doesn't appreciate because they think the jobs are so 'powerful' and 'high ranking'.
The confirmation process is totally awful and the level of disclosure for uncertain prospects is more than most people would bear. Literally no sane person talented enough to have other options or perhaps not completely fanatical about 'the cause' they think they are helping would agree to accept such a position until they really believed that it was just an investment for the real payoff later.
In practice this means that the peculiarly legal manner of first world corruption in the form of post-government employment - so long as you do the winking just right, which your lawyer will teach you how to do - is not just an occasional thing, but in fact and by necessity almost universal. As I understand it, these considerations are of high importance in the recruitment of individuals to do these jobs and at the forefront of negotiations (or indirectly provided assurances by the 'real sponsors').
A lot of big companies and universities are pretty open about being willing to (wink wink, you'll be taken care of) compensate some of their top people for doing a revolving-door stint in government during which they are paid a small fraction of their normal salary, precisely for the influence they think those individuals will exert in favor of the preferences and interests of the institution.
One advantage of this scheme, er, I mean, common pattern of arrangements, er, I mean, random collection of mere anecdotes, is that it *does* allow you to get some top notch folks in that you couldn't otherwise get if the official government salary you were paying them was actually the expected present value of their pecuniary gain. On the other hand, what are those top-notch people really doing with their top-notch talents when officially working for one master - the public interest - but really working at least in part for another - whoever will be taking care of them afterwards.
The IQ range of the Midwit is more like 105-120.
Their elitism is based on the fact that they were considered "smart" in school, and probably graduated from college (though probably not with physics degree).
They are the kind of people who will pedantically correct someone else's spelling and think they won the argument.
However, they typically don't realize on their own that being merely above average does not make them noteworthy or unique. When confronted with this reality, they invest in status markers of being "smart" to reassure themselves.
Here is an interesting read to consider in regards to possible relations to education level or IQ... https://danco.substack.com/p/michael-dwight-and-andy-the-three and https://archive.fo/lj98e
The weird idea is that there are at least three different class of Midwits: spergs/labor, cynics/gentry and manipulators/upper.
The "spergs" (est. 110-115 IQ or trade/community college) of the laborite are more likely to talk in terms of trivia, and evoke a sense of success and merit. They are more likely to have dead-pan cookie-cutter humor that are more-or-less "punching up". They think of rules as what is written on paper, and that it is sacred.
The "cynics" (est. 115-125 IQ AKA "island 120" or mass university core) of the educated professional class are more likely to talk about abstractions, and are serious about work and perceived impact/status. Their humor is juvenile, and are the most likely to involve one-upmanship and self-deprecation as false humility. They think of rules are "living" and are subjected to change, but are unable to change it.
The "manipulators" (est. 125-135 IQ or top alumnis) of the sub-elite class are more likely to gossip, and wanted to hint as a sense of integration and superiority. Their frat boy humor is often an impotent version of the one person "sociopathic" humor (see The Gervais Principle by V. Rao) They understand that there is a distinction between ceremonial rules and effective social conventions, but has difficulty conversing with power.
Secondary thesis: Midwit IQs (Clueless Gentry) are best for management,
but they are also socially uncomfortable to be with. Sociopathic IQ are not hostile, just awkwardly tolerable patronizing. https://viragconsulting.blog/2017/06/26/optimal-iq-for-managers-is-120/ https://archive.ph/HRU3i https://archive.ph/nyB1W
Intriguing subject. And a cause for introspection. I’m a Midwit, having been exposed to bonifide elites in the corporate world. My strengths are: work ethic, personality, willingness to get out of my comfort zone (but not to the extent of an entrepreneur), and here’s the big one… recognizing and working around my weaknesses. And I am incredibly disgusted by those Midwits posing as Elites, and especially Elites pretending to know more than they actually do.
And for some reason, this type of phrasing is what made the middle or lower rungs of midwits looks foolish, the "self-improvement" industry is specifically made for these people to feel good about themselves. (Rao is very antagonistic on this point in "Curse of Development") Also, elites often have connotations of "sociopaths" or "opportunists" and thus their nastiness is likely part of a big picture (or just profit). Do midwits realize they engage in tit-for-tat social games rather than added-value coalitional games? See also: the Midwit Matrix
Midwit probably has some correlation with IQ, but it's much more a kind of mindset. There are obviously lots of people with 130 IQs that are thoroughly Midwit as discussed here. If anything, such people are more dangerous than actual Midwits (they are more capable advocates for the Midwit way).
Hypothesis: the hierarchy is defined by extraversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability. But there is a gap between midwits/idealists/gentry (Agreeableness, Light Triad, Authoritarianism) vs topwits/opportunists/elite (Openness, Dark Triad, Social Dominance).
Secondary guess: Midwits have really strong verbal tilt (wordcel lol), and therefore are less analytical and more semantic. They are also more creative, but at the same time more likely to have mental issues.
I think this is very important. Sunstein and Holmes are both probably high IQ, yet their constant "Regular people are too stupid to make their own decisions, and so we smart people must give them proper guidance for them to conform to," is probably more responsible for the rise of midwittery than anything else they do.
When someone like Andreessen makes such generalizations about the academy as a whole, they just look foolish. Physics departments aren't swimming in mediocrity. Math departments aren't swimming in mediocrity.
Does anyone seriously think Einstein would've been a venture capitalist in today's world? Or von Neumann? Of course not. Same goes for Nima Arkani-Hamed, Terry Tao, and all of the people making difficult advances in science today who are frankly doing things that no one in VC would be able to achieve if they tried for a thousand years.
These fields are just the clearest examples; this blanket anti-academic rhetoric is laughable.
To be fair, though, the vast majority of academics are not mathematicians or physicists. All the hard sciences together are likely a small minority, I would guess under 25%. I am almost certain it is not over 50% in the US.
But are more than 25% of venture capitalists as able as these scientists? I don't think so; it's just that the contributions of the small handful of folks in VC who are good at what they do get magnified by the economy. This is a good thing, but it can lead folks to exaggerate the actual skill level of the total VC talent pool.
And like I said, I was just talking about the clearest examples that everyone should agree on. There are many life sciences fields, and several social science and humanities fields, that are far from being dens of mediocrity.
It probably depends a bit by what one means as "able". I don't have a strong sense that VCs are not made up of many conformist midwits myself, but it does seem to be a realm that demands a bit more performance than academia. I know that in my field of economics the median published paper has 0 citations, for instance. That is a lot of work that no one either reads or thinks is useful enough to mention in their papers, which is notable considering how many bloody papers with ridiculously large "literature review" sections there are. I am pretty certain that in terms of advancing human understanding, most academics are very close to zero productivity, with many well on the negative productivity side of things. Most academic papers and conferences are just awful.
There's a problem here in that this sort of analysis is obviously correct but I don't think its explanatory power is very useful or conducive to practical advice.
That is, this theory has the look of inexorable Marxist determinism, doesn't it? ALL INSTITUTIONS WILL BE CAPTURED AND DECLINE. And THE ONLY SOLUTION IS EXIT AND START FRESH.
That can all be true but still miss the important part of the action. Why do some institutions last a long time and others not? Why do some regimes and stable alignments make coalitions of midwits and true creative elites that are more productive than others?
Isn't this the institutional equivalent of "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"? Offhand, I'd expect *most* institutions to decay, much as businesses do.
Right. In Nature bad mutations happen a lot, but the reason that genetic load doesn't accumulate is because there is "creative destruction" and constant ruthless culling of the less well adapted. Lasting a long time by itself doesn't prove much, since it often means that something just didn't have any serious competition for a long time.
Sometimes it's dangerous to read Ayn Rand when one is young.
How so, I wonder?
I find Arnold's post and references as well as other readers' comments totally irrelevant to understanding both the political fight and the federal government's collapse. I suggest first reading Grygiel's Return of the Barbarians (the first paragraph in Chapter 7, p.210, should be read before reading the whole book) and then applying the lessons to the U.S. Good luck.
All this strikes me as a rehash of the bell curve and reversion to the mean. However one measures human talent, the vast majority of people will be in the broad middle. Of course their institutions are going to reflect that. Average people are going to enjoy working in institutions run by average people. They chafe at anyone who claims to know better, even if they do know better. Look at our presidents from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Most of them had some particular skill, enough to attract sufficient positive attention to get themselves elected. But clearly none were geniuses, wildly successful entrepreneurs, or scientists. Along most dimensions they were just average. Some of those average leaders are going to profess qualities and expertise they clearly don’t possess, hence, “midwits” I suppose. But their only outstanding quality is hubris: average people with above average moxie.
I thought Democrats were supposed to be "elitists," not "furiously (?) " attached to mid wits? And why wouldn't every political party want attract "midwits" AKA median voter theory? This meta stuff it pretty far away from neo-liberal concerns of trying to figure out how to reduce the structural deficit, free international trade, increase immigration of highly skilled people, replace the wage tax with a VAT, pass a child tax credit or tax net CO2 emissions.
The MidWit hypothesis is that the Democrats are elitist without being elite. Their contempt for others is not based on having superior cognitive ability. It is based on the assumption that mouthing progressive pieties puts one in the elite (or the elect, as McWhorter would put it). I think it would be hard to say whether Neil Young is smarter than Joe Rogan, but one enjoys admiration from Democratic elitists and the other draws their contempt.
And hostility to neo-liberalism is one of the pieties that the MidWits insist upon--these days in both political parties.
This makes sense except the "contempt" part if that means for "non-elite" voters. Yes, I have great contempt for Mitch McConnel or Donald Trump, but not for the millions of people that voted for them. That's becasue we Neo-Liberals have just not been persuasive enough about taxes and immigration and trade and net CO2 taxation.
Do McConnell & Trump both deserve to be lumped together, here as Neo-Liberals?
??? It's we Neo-Liberals who have been unpersuasive to voters of the benefits of freer trade, greater immigration, deficit reduction and taxation of net CO2 emissions. If Trump and McConnell are neo-anything, its fascists. :)
OK, I misread your drift. So, opposing "freer trade, greater immigration" etc. is neo-fascist?
BTW, I didn't know that Mitch was anywhere near as opposed, to "freer trade" or greater immigration, as is Trump.
I've always read Mitch as being part of the Fortune 500 wing of the GOP.
Maybe he used to be. I think he was in the tax cuts for the rich and anything else needed to get tax cuts for the rich enacted.
This comment explains a lot to me now.
Candide's answer explains this pretty well:
1. The Democratic regime favors non-commercial organizations that, being less subject to the cycle of creative destruction, are safer places for midwits.
2. The worst part of Democrats being "elitists" is they're mostly "midwits" acting like elitists. On top of statist safety, the Democrats offer the midwit the flattery of status.
3. In turn, this sort of statist, sclerotic regime is incapable of addressing Neo-liberal policy concerns (and perhaps any other sort of policy concerns) beyond in a performative sense.
Average people are so mediocre! This must be remedied!
A fun thing to test out: observe the Subreddits r/overemployed (two jobs & savings, conservative), r/antiwork (unionization & strikes, socialist), and r/fire (side hustle & investment, libertarian).