Discussion about this post

User's avatar
apxhard's avatar

It's remarkable how widespread the premise is that 'intelligent people won't fight at all', instead of "intelligent people will fight like hell to defend their homes but aren't interested in fighting to take someone else's."

How much of the selection filters for western elites include "willingness to leave your childhood home in pursuit of career opportunities?" Does this explain the continued surprise that intelligent people are perfectly willing to fight for causes that actually make sense?

I write from a basement in southwest Ohio, 10 minutes from where i grew up. I left home because of economic opportunities, and when I was younger, I was much more on board with progressivism and the idea that conservatives were all stupid idiots. As I've grown older older and seen both how authoritarian progressivism is.

I've also how many intelligent people simply _didn't want_ to leave their homes, and how deeply biased the population who did move to places like stanford or harvard are. I see at trading companies, hedge funds, tech startups, VC firms, all located on big costal cities, this idea that stanford and MIT grads were selected primarily for intelligence instead of, say, willingness to relocate for an elite role. I now think much of the failures of the late 20th/ early 21st century come from 'meriotcratic' filters being much more heavily selective against people with strong levels of loyalty and commitment to tradition who didnt' grow up by elite schools.

The offer to fly Zelensky out of Ukraine seems like it typifies the kind of 'leaders' the west has had for decades. We're saying our leaders are selected for competence, but honestly there are far more intelligent people who couldn't work at Google because they didn't want to leave their homes, than there are who couldn't make the technical cut.

I'm applying for online jobs remotely now, and wow, the opportunities are crazy. Living in suburban Ohio in 2022, I have way more options to work remotely for elite businesses than I did in 2019 when Iived in the bay area of California where ostensibly i was paying literally 10x as much for housing, simply so I could have access to high paying jobs.

Expand full comment
Brian Chau's avatar

In my experience there are a lot of right-leaning rationalists in the public arena, it's just that they're typically called Libertarians.

Expand full comment
19 more comments...

No posts