Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane looks at how one of the initial assumption of democracies changed over the centuries. Which assumption is that? The one that most citizens knew what was happening around them. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption in simpler times – at some level, it was reasonably true. But as the world got more and more complicated…   At that point, the solution was “an enlightened oligarchy of experts” who would guide and influence policy making. Further, since politicians were (and are) swayed by whatever is popular, the role of experts to act as guardrails only increased their importance. Experts thus became central to most democracies.   Not surprisingly, experts (often in good faith) started to differ in their opinions and advice. This led to the next logical step in the sequence: “In a marketplace of ideas, lobbying is natural.” Lobbying wasn’t the bad term it is today, at least not initially. Until: “Vested interests willing to o...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan , wrote this semi-literal, semi-satirical piece titled “The Intellectual Yet Idiot” , IYI for short in the rest of his article (and this blog). So who is an IYI? “(The) class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.” Sound familiar? IYI’s are theoriticians, with no connection in real life to what they like to preach about. Or as Taleb says, they have no skin in the game. The IYI is smug and arrogant: “The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is  his  understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests  and  he knows their interests.” And: “What we generally call participation in the political process, he cal...