Youtube Curation: Public and Private Imbeciles

 You are probably familiar, or at least have been exposed to the concept of 'public intellectual' other terms might be 'science communicator' or the prefix 'pop' as in 'popular' as in 'pop-psychologist' 'pop-philosopher'. 

A term I've recently felt increasingly necessary is 'public imbecile' and in the case of an alarmingly growing number of 'public intellectuals' a more accurate moniker.

I wish to briefly clarify this idea though. Imagine you were obstructed by a big wall. It was plastered over and painted white and tapping on it didn't tell you anything about its underlying construction. You start to think 'maybe if I just took a run up and charged at it, I could just smash through.'

Enter the 'public imbecile' in this case a one-tonne Spanish bull. It charges at the wall obstructing you both and crashes into it head first knocking itself out and not even making a scratch or indentation in the wall.

Now you are thinking 'shit, if the bull can't smash through the wall, I'm not going to.'

The public imbecile in my view is somebody who can serve the valuable function of teaching the public humility. A public imbecile is basically a 'public intellectual' + humility. 

At the beginning of the pandemic I recall Warren Buffet (one of the world's richest men, and I believe the most successful investor ever) being interviewed on the pandemic, and he is good friends with Bill Gates having willed most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (prior to their divorce and the Jeffrey Epstein affiliations) and he mentions that he was talking with Bill Gates about the pandemic and that he, Warren Buffet, just listens to people that are smarter than him like Bill.

Then he demonstrates a rare and amazing piece of discipline, the journalist asks him what Bill said and Buffet replies 'I shouldn't say, and you shouldn't be asking.'

Tom Nichols author of 'The Death of Expertise' writes to my own sensibilities when in his Politico Article he states:

And [experts] too easily fall prey to the arrogance of believing that their expertise in one subject can be applied to almost any issue—especially if there’s a healthy paycheck involved.

 A temptation that Buffet, an expert investor resists when he decides not to comment on epidemiology.

One experience of the Covid pandemic years for me, has been watching public intellectuals join the esteemed rank of Isaac Newton, famous for physics, but also the go-to example of how someone super intelligent can lose their entire fortune through malinvestment. 

First came the Weinstein brothers, I am speaking hyperbolically, but they almost immediately went insane. I wrote a whole thing about how Eric was rubbing me the wrong way, but by way of introducing the second video, I want to describe what happened to me with Brett Weinstein.

It was an intuition, there was something aesthetically off about he and his wife Heather Haying sitting in their studio that looks like a basement reading through the pre-print servers of medical papers to an anonymous audience distributed around the world. Their intelligence is not in question, but they exhibited enough behaviors to indicate they weren't really 'in touch' for a lack of a better phrase and that furthermore I got no impression that they had considered who their audience was.

There's a great and telling podcast clip between Tom Green and Joe Rogan where Tom puts his finger right on the nerve, that people listen to Joe, and he isn't an expert on anything but his own standup act. (He probably couldn't explain why his podcast is so succesful such that someone else could reproduce it).

So the first curation is good old Jordan Peterson who I have almost no surprise needs inaugurating into the category of public imbecile. And this needs some clarity - Peterson is from everything I've seen, a competent and ethical clinical psychologist, that he is so often wrong about religion, evolution, biology, atheism, law, the environment etc. likely because of the problems Tom Nichols describes this does not mean he is wrong about far-left progressive memes and their disastrous mental health repurcussions. I'd personally just prefer a better, more well rounded champion - like the people over at Heterodox Academy.

Peterson seems to now have been captured by his audience, the danger faced by public intellectuals and particularly, despite all the popularity, outsider intellectuals to attract an audience of outsiders sympathetic to the ostracism and marginalization efforts.

I watched all of Peterson trying to teach himself 'the Austrian School of Economics' by interviewing an Austrian School Economist because listeners had pointed out JP might be sympathetic to the Austrian School and saw many analogies.

But I have chosen his interview with a member of the Austrian School and Bitcoin evangelist to demonstrate the 'public imbecile' trap. Now Jordan Peterson, a Clinical Psychologist and teaching Academic is using his platform to talk about economics from a fringe school about crypto-currencies. I couldn't make it through this interview.

Nothing makes my eyes glaze over faster than cryptocurrency, and I have tried, I have really tried, to pierce through my own bubble and understand if there is a 'there' there at all and I shall leave in white text below the precise moment this interview lost me:

Interview 1:

Interview 2:

Interview two is yet another interview from Skeptic, quickly becoming my favorite place to hear out actual experts. Thankfully true to the philosophy of skepticism it doesn't fall prey to what JP and the Weinsteins and Heather Haying do, which is overexuberence. In fact I discovered Tom Nichols through his interview on Skeptic.

This clip though I recommend because it deals with the 'Private imbeciles' side of the title - largely the myths that create a cottage industry of 'experts' on 'millenials' who consult with companies, provide no value at all and get compensated.

I have friends that have feathered their nest based on expertise that turns out to be no expertise at all. People paid thousands of dollars of shareholder's money to fly somewhere and say things like 'Millenials all love Von Dutch hats, so offer a Von Dutch hat as a signing bonus.' This of course is a hyperbolic and dated example, but I hope it serves to illustrate that there are a lot of 'experts' that are compensated for peddling bad stereotypes. 

Generational myths are popular and prevail though, so I'm always interested to hear what holds up and what doesn't:

My thoughts in White (click and highlight to read):

So the point at which Dr. Saifadeen lost me was when he posited his theory that Bitcoin would become the dominant currency because it was something like "the hardest currency" ever. I am employing a heuristic here to allocate my scarce attention which is largely a presumption that if someone is making an argument they lead with their strongest one. With my limited economics training spanning from high school to a bachelors degree in Economics and finance, I immediately identified this claim as both a fringe view and a highly subjective interpretation of history. Sure he may have done his research and detected some kind of pattern, which he does describe. But it ultimately comes across as a narrative and one that is highly dubious.

This is my general experience of bitcoin enthusiasts and the materials they write and have been shared with me - they talk about shit that nobody has previously cared about, ad hoc rationalizations of why bitcoin is going to succeed and they'll show us.

I also got frustrated with JP as an interviewer, for missing obvious questions like 'So this is a really hard currency, limited by (intelligent) design to 21 million coins - then no more coins are produced... so the current price of a bitcoin is ~USD$50k, do I have to have $50large to buy one?' To which I imagine the response is 'Oh no, bitcoins are infinitely divisible the pirates used to divide gold coins into "pieces of eight" a bitcoin however can be divided into 'pieces of 50k, pieces of 50M, pieces of 50B if necessary' now this sounds to me like crypto has a problem of hyperdeflation which would describe a situation where on Monday 20c buys you an apple. You take a dollar to the store and you get an apple and 80c change. On Tuesday .0000000002c buys an apple so you take your 80c to the store and the shopkeep says 'I'm sorry I can't give you change.' 

The other thing being that JP doesn't ask 'okay, it's unhakable, uncorruptable, but it isn't backed by a state. Bitcoin and what army? what ability to pay its debts with taxes? It seems to solve a problem that is in its way a solution of devaluing a currency to pay off debts, but why should anyone care at all? How is a bitcoin different from a Tulip?

Anytime someone is spruiking bitcoin (and yes, sure people who bought it for 20k and sold it for 67k made money, real money by speculating on disneydollars, but people did that with Tulip bulbs and imaginary internet companies and British debt) I think of Kramer lecturing Jerry about 'that TV you watch, the sushi you eat even those kimonos you wear.'

Since JP recorded that interview, Bitcoin dropped 20% in value to historically obscenely grossly overvalued given that bitcoins actual value to pedophiles, drug dealers and criminals is probably in the vicinity of something like $0.4USD this interview temporarily will look stupid until the next wave of irrational exuberence takes bitcoin up to a bajillion USD a coin and still useless.

The real point though, is not that JP should 'stay in his lane' but exercise due humility.

The skeptic interview by contrast probably claims things that will later be debunked, but the attitude and approach is right - people are asked to explain their findings and express their uncertainty and this is a critical difference in my opinion between skepticism and prejudice. 

Peterson is just prejudiced against socialism, and inconsistently so. I have long speculated that the reason JP is progressive enemy number one is because of the Narcissism of Small Differences. Peterson can turn rational and offer plausible, credible consise critiques of social constructionism with the best of them. He will then turn around and do hours and hours of 'close reading' bullshit deconstructions of the Bible employing the same epistemology as a Queer Black Feminist might apply to Othello, with a similar lack of humility.

Bart Ehrman is an expert on Biblical Scholarship, and can answer the straightforward question of 'do you believe in God' and 'did this shit happen'. Peterson is not. and that's what qualifies him as a public imbecile - when he applies his considerable intellect and learning to a persistent societal issue, he more often bounces off that wall.