A parable from my time in American academia: One day, the Gates Foundation descended on a field related to mine, with enormous bags of money. They wanted to fund /encourage a certain flavour of historical research. The orders had come on high, from Gates himself.
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Someone told me that it was during a period when Gates was spending a lot of time walking on a treadmill trying to lose weight & reading various dumb books while doing so & getting ideas. I don't know if that's true, but it's the level at which we were operating.
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All kinds of dumb mediocre academics claimed suddenly to be interested in this fake field, to already be working in this field, and so on. Conferences were organised, campus talks organised, guest professorships, the works.
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Then Gates lost interest and the whole thing basically went away, except for a few dumb stragglers who are still doing that stupid shit, probably to this day. This is what I mean, when I say that elites are mostly stupid, and that there is no goal.
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Gates wasn't trying to achieve anything. He just got out of bed one day, scratching his ass, & thought this was a good idea. Then, after his money had caused various disruptions, he forgot all about it & went on to fund some other stupid shit. There was no plan, no point, nothing
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which book?
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Wait, third-rate Malcolm Gladwell... Third-rate version of something that is itself third rate?pic.twitter.com/8LyGFVyOg9
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yes indeed. turns out gladwell is actually rather good at his particular con, but you only really notice it when you see imitators trying the same act and doing it much, much worse.
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