The War on Pattern Recognition
26th October 2010
Steve Sailer points out that most of our Emperor class are buck naked.
What we really need is an in-depth analysis of the systematic causes of anti-empirical bias in elite discourse.
The first is the professional deformation that journalists and fictional storytellers experience in their hunt for non-boring Man Bites Dog stories.You make more money coming up with interesting stories about anomalies than for pointing out the same old same old.
The second is the Platonic Temptation among intellectuals to think only in terms of absolute categories: e.g., Vedantam projects his own bias against thinking probabilistically when he claims, without citing any evidence, that there are “Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism…”
The third is The Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome: the presumption that the more moving parts and unlikely assumptions in your theory, the smarter you must be to hold it all together in your head, so, therefore, you win.