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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Sometimes it's dangerous to read Ayn Rand when one is young.
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.
Average people are so mediocre! This must be remedied!