It's hard not to notice a certain pattern in the videos and―more importantly―the people that YouTube promotes to me.
Sam Harris: Uses fake erudition in the defense of the kind of bigotry you can practice just as well without literacy.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Undoubtedly an intelligent man in person, but never produces anything but thought terminating clichés.
Adam Conover: The show title "Adam Ruins Everythng" is the kind of self-deprecation you practice when you think highly of yourself.
I'd gotten used to classing them as the stupid person's idea of a smart person, but then it hit me: There's no other kind.
The purpose of smart people at this point is to keep you stupid. Intelligence is indeed not just the memorization of facts and figures. It starts with questioning things. It continues with being able to see those questions through. No one really wants a bunch of people who are smart by those criteria. The safest thing is just to give them a bunch of false idols.
1 comment:
I'm not quite sure what you mean about youtube promoting certain people to you. I've found that the site has videos next to the one I've chosen to watch with other broadcasts by the same person or others made about similar subjects. Maybe I missed your point.
I do agree with you about the impetus that compels some people in the public eye to promote their own views on subects they have no business declaiming about. Of the three you named the only one I'm moderately familiar with is Neil DeGrasse Tyson because he was advertised as the return of Carl Sagan and didn't match the charm and erudition of Sagan when I watched one episode. I blew off the obvious attempt to turn a pretender into someone who'd introduced so many to interesting scientific concepts - not that he was always right but you could feel as though you had been free to differ. Tyson presents everything as proven fact.
"It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
This is one of my favorite quotes as it's more true with each passing day.
I agree about the purpose of smart people is to keep you stupid but intelligence doesn't necessarily prevent stupid - plenty of smart people do and say stupid things. Evolutionary pressures push organisms to the most adaptive characteristics, so the logical conclusion is that average intelligence is the best, most adaptive level of intellect a human can possess.
It also appears that as time has gone by the general level of discernment has been lost. There are very few truly brilliant masters and many more who pretend to be.
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