[rayiner]

I’m in favor of Americanism. That means giving more respect to the college dropout who built a startup than the college professor who never built anything. That means bottom-up, participatory democracy, where the masses decide what direction to go and the experts figure out how to get there. And it means little-c conservatism—contrast the American revolution to the French revolution.

I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.

[jaybrendansmith]

You are arguing for the thing you are claiming to dislike. You think the college professor can't get a job at AWS? You think the college dropout deserves more respect than the professor? What's a lane? I would argue against lanes. This country should avoid having lanes, and classes, and castes. It should have as big of a middle class as possible, to allow for maximum numbers of college dropouts to become elite billionaires. Too bad killing colleges will destroy the middle class. Oh, well.

[rayiner]

Okay, when you make a classless society, you get back to me. In the meantime, we have classes. We have a cognitive elite who run almost everything that, from the civil service, to the internet, to the legal system, to the public health system, to the educational system. To use a net neutrality analogy, I think those people, at least in their professional capacity, should be “dumb pipes.” They shouldn’t use their control over the infrastructure of society to impose their own values onto society. They shouldn’t use their power to countermand what the majority wants to do.

[jaybrendansmith]

They do it because they are educated. By definition, it cannot be a dumb pipe. The very process of education creates a perspective that is logical, balanced, and informed. An educated person understands that climate change is real, that CO2 warms the planet, how could they not? It is physics. They know that sex is informed by both the body and the brain, how could they not? That is physiology. They know that skin color is arbitrary. They read books, and they work with other cultures and races. A professor of Economics cannot teach trickle down, it's based in nonsense and simply untrue. No more than would a professor of Medicine teach you that someone can be told what sex to be. They don't mean to be elite in the same way that the rich don't mean to be rich: They just are. If you are truly educated, you would likely hold the same values that they do, because you've been exposed to the same set of clear and verified facts. I cannot understand this insistence that someone's faith or ignorance should be held with equal regard to my facts. Ignorance is they cause of most of the evils of this world, I do not confuse wrong from right, nor do I confuse educated from ignorant.