[jerf]

"Would your smartest citizens really make such dumb life choices?"

Oh, my, yes. One of the biggest problems with being smart is that it makes one especially prone to listening to and trusting in words, because one is so used to doing so due to the fact that it was the rewarded and reinforced behavior throughout their entire life, which remember, has consisted of little but schooling for such people up to that point. It takes additional training or practice to break out of that. After a lifetime of words about how wonderful this career path is, how suited to it they are, and how it's their natural goal, it cuts down to their personal identity to realize that the words were not true, and that's a hard thing to go through. (I am not being even slightly sarcastic. That can literally drive people to suicidal levels of emotional pain.)

[saschajustin]

My thesis is that people who are this naive and manipulable are not actually that smart.

But I do get your point and have lived it and seen it first hand.

Having said that.. I truly believe that academia is now SELECTING for these types of people: naive, foolish, simple-minded, trusting, innocent, gullible.

Only people with those traits are dumb enough to get into it.

The smartest people, who have not just intelligence but foresight, self-control, cunning, and guile, are found at Wall Street, in med school, or as high-level executives in major corporations.

They aren't doing science because they are too smart for science. Science is for dunces.

[Fomite]

It's not actually all being naive and manipulable. If nothing else, there's also an intense selection bias in your sample - if you are talking to your professors, generally speaking you're talking to people who made it. As a university student, its very hard to find the bitter postdoc who left to go work for a defense contractor.

[saschajustin]

Wouldn't a smart student realize that they can't trust their Professors?

If you can't spot a dishonest salespitch from an academic, doesn't that make you gullible?

Smart people make decisions based on evidence. Gullible people trust their elders.

I can't see any better solution to human gullibility than to herd all the gullible people into a reproductive dead end. This means gullible men should be put into a situation of poverty so they can't find mates, and gullible women should be made to work in careers until they turn 38 and their likelihood of reproduction drops into the single digits.

If we can't make gullible people smart, we can at least make sure their genes leave the gene pool.

[jjoonathan]

There's more than one kind of smart. I'm sure you know this to be true, which is why I'm puzzled that you seem so hung up on it.

I am of the opinion that having a building full of head-in-the-cloud brainiacs chipping away at hard problems in medicine, nanotech, industrial chemistry, etc will do more good for society than having a building full of the meanest, savviest businessmen brainstorming new innovative ways to trick people into buying comparatively poorly priced insurance / advertising / savings plans. Due to the non-excludability of scientific progress, we have an economic system designed to incentivize the latter at the expense of the former. That's a bug, not a feature.

Markets are very good at sniffing out and rewarding some kinds of value creation. They're not so good at sniffing out and rewarding other kinds of value creation and sometimes they create perverse incentives that are downright terrible. There are enough instances of this happening that I don't think it should be controversial to demand that "markets know best" philosophies should only be taken seriously if they come with a string of conditions for (at the bare minimum) identifying dysfunctional markets and rejecting their conclusions in such cases (e.g. Enron's rolling blackouts, pay-for-service health care incentivizing longer wait times, the Chinese Businessman strategy, Ponzi schemes, etc). "Markets know best" should never be taken as an article of faith, especially if you identify as a libertarian.

Libertarians philosophers that have won respect from the academic community (self-test: name 3, excluding Ayn Rand, otherwise you have homework to do) know how to qualify their arguments. "Markets know best" is a conclusion to be made (or not) under specific circumstances for specific reasons. There is no branch of libertarianism I am familiar with that has both survived the competitive back-and-fourth of the philosophical community and managed to uphold "markets know best" as a tautology. If you're taking "markets know best" as an article of faith, I would recommend examining this foundation for cracks. The most popular one (and the one I "fell" for during my libertarian phase) has to do with using a transaction-centric model for value creation. There are others. Perpetual vigilance is the only defense.

Sorry if I've read too much into your opinion, but it seems very similar to one that I used to hold and I'd be remiss if I didn't point that out.

[wfo]

Honestly I think you're wasting your time - you can't argue with a teen-at-heart who's channeling Ayn Rand. All of the ingredients are there - the narcissism, the arrogance, the reflexive assault on anyone perceived to be a threat (professors, advisors, anyone with wisdom or experience or authority) to his decisions (to give up his intellectual pursuits) or his perception of himself as a brilliant mind who pierces through all the bullshit the lesser minds that surround him are taken in by. He's the only one 'brave' enough to say and to see that deep thought or high-minded goals or hope that society could be better or anything other than a short-term cost benefit analysis where value is measured only in dollars is moronic. These comments like his are toxic in any intelligent discussion and don't really deserve a thoughtful response like yours.

[Humjob]

This is a great summary of the pitfalls of laissez-faire economics. Do you have a blog where you write about your political/economic beliefs? Also, what books/resources have you found most useful in attaining a more accurate perspective on the way economies actually work?