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> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan. Man repeatedly falls for the worst "public intellectuals" (really, pretentious charlatans), discovers that they're not trustworthy, and runs to the internet screaming "THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IS DEAD." nah brah, you just have bad tase. Jordan Peterson -> an incoherent rambler. He's incapable of putting together straightforward premise1-premise2-premise3-->conclusion arguments. If you ask him "how's the weather?", you'll get an hour long brain spew about Ancient Rome, Napoleon, woke feminism, and the worst Holocaust takes you can imagine. Eric Weinstein -> a narcissist mathematician who came up with a theory of everything, but refused to publish it because real physicists might criticize it and hurt his feelings. He wanted to be recognized as the new Einstein based solely on a video of a talk to a non-physicist audience. His podcasts are mostly rants against the Physics Deep State and Big Science, which he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex", because they're all in a big conspiracy to suppress his genius ideas. Chamath -> don't know him. Peter Zeihan -> just another hyper-caffeinated prognosticator who claims to know the future. |
I don't say this sarcastically or ironically... but isn't that one of the big things proper science actually does? Think about it for a moment, science is the business of suppressing all the stupid ideas humans have come up with over the centuries. And until it got started doing that, those ideas were everywhere, keeping everyone ignorant.
It has a somewhat careful methodology to this suppression. It designs experiments to falsify everything it can, conducts those experiments rigorously and exhaustively, until everyone is convinced that those ideas are wrong and the ideas are as dead as doornails.
But, if somehow it comes across one that is falsifiable but that can't be falsified by experiment, it moves on... plenty of other ideas to suppress.
Hell, science should adopt that moniker and run with it. Be proud of it. It's one of the things it gets right.
If that's his worst jab at science, he's just lazy and not very clever.