From Nassim Taleb’s “Skin in the Game”
“What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and…5) whom to vote for. WHERE TO FIND A COCONUT But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities—their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them.” (p. 123)
“people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.” (p. 123)
“The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a product of modernity, hence has been proliferating since at least the mid-twentieth century, to reach a local supremum today, to the point that we have experienced a takeover by people without skin in the game.” (p. 124)
“Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.” (p. 125)
“The Intellectual Yet Idiot knows at any given point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation. But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.” (p. 127)