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I like the idea of EHC as a character profile of the type of people who have disproportionate influence over institutions, but it seems to fall apart when you start getting into ideology or ideas. Like you've defined EHC to exclude everyone but liberals. Libertarians aren't EHC because despite caring about ideas, most are closer to conservatives in that they would rather make more money than influence institutions as a low paid journalist (even though the entire idea of libertarianism is trusting markets and economic incentives over government institutions). Socialists and communists aren't EHC either despite also caring about ideas because they are authoritarian. But then how is Luigi Mangione EHC? Isn't murdering your opponents the ultimate form of authoritarianism? The way you are defining it comes off more as liberal self-aggrandizement than an actually useful term.

You say wokeness requires an "unnatural" dogmatism to maintain its hold over smart/idealistic people. This is just a way to excuse liberals for acting like authoritarians, as if there wasn't massive overlap between liberals and wokes. If the stifling dogmatism wasn't coming from EHC liberals, where was it coming from?

Another problem is simply the nomenclature, which I imagine most the pushback you get on this topic comes from. Using the actual definition of human capital, meaning-maximizers do not necessarily possess more human capital than wealth-maximizers. Saying Brian Thompson is low human capital and Luigi Mangione is elite human capital just sounds ridiculous. Saying it's your definition of elite human capital doesn't make it less ridiculous.

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Richard told James Miller that he can have his own definition of EHC while Richard has his separate one https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1867947553955979605

But I don't see the point if everyone has their own different definition. Communicating via language requires shared meaning of words.

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I’m still hazy on what Richard’s thesis is despite having read all of his essays on this topic.

Your posts have been impressive so I’m hoping you can explain to me the story he’s trying to tell.

This is how I read his argument. I promise I am not trying to strawman, if I misrepresent him it’s because I genuinely don’t understand:

1. EHC are people who are intelligent, intellectually curious, principled, and care about ideas.

2. These people form benevolent, truth seeking organizations

3. We should bestow status on these people while demeaning others as “low human capital”.

Am I missing something here?

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I think he's inconsistent:

https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1837312139276537871

That can make the reader seem like they are missing something, when the fact is something (consistency) is missing from the thing being grappled with. I think he would benefit from more rigorously defining his terms. As an example, Greg Cochran defines "moxie" as "a tendency to effective action that favors [...] what works for themselves" rather than "the best interest of society as a whole" (with the latter being "merit"). https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/natural-aristocracy/ If Richard talked in such terms, rather than whether liberals approve of you (as I quote him in the tweet I link at the top), we would be getting somewhere.

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The tweet about Kamala Harris raises another issue I have with the concept. As you said, it’s really not clear and consistent as to who the term even applies to.

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With all due respect, I think in 2024 Richard is in a bet with himself, to see how little sense he can make, and still have huge paying subscriber base.

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I wouldn’t put it past him!

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He has frequently said that libertarians are the EHC of the right.

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"Individuals begin to signal virtue. Truth becomes a lingua franca through which smart people communicate with one another. An individual tries to show that he is honest and caring."

The first sentence here is redundant. Individuals at EVERY level of society and class signal their virtue, only the means and virtues differ. A trucker wearing a MAGA hat is virtue signaling. Trump has frequently been accused of virtue signaling (draping himself in the flag, etc). This is not a unique characteristic of your EHC. You can easily find many articles on the topic comparing leftist political correctness to the Right's 'patriotic correctness'. You're surely also familiar with the concept of "Luxury Beliefs", yes? The beliefs that characterize our elite signaling are NOT notable for being significantly more truthful, in fact, they are often already proven counterproductive for society (with the actual negative externalities of these fashionable beliefs concentrated outside the elite class).

"Truth becomes a lingua franca..." It's amusing that you immediately gave an example that also implicitly contradicts your premise: peppering one's speech with foreign languages and phrases is a typical "I'm better educated and more culturally cosmopolitan than thou" 'virtue' signal, but it's deliberately contrary to clear communication. Your EHC doesn't use 'Truth' as their primary mode of communication, much the opposite, they more frequently use deliberate obfuscation and ambiguity. Although much of this can be put down to the liberal enjoyment in playing word games, it's also often deployed as a shibboleth. The euphemism treadmill likewise. In fact, deliberate ambiguity that enables the Fallacy of Equivocation is something of a trademark for this social class given their frequent fondness for Motte and Bailey arguments.

I'll grant you that college students tend toward the upper end of the IQ distribution, but the study results are rather clear that they rarely start or end their education with any superiority over the average populace in either critical thinking or morals (which is frankly a horrific failure of our education system at every level). They may be better 'problem solvers' in a strictly narrow technical sense, but they generally aren't 'better people' in any demonstrable sense beyond theoretically having more to lose if they get caught (although they also often seem to suffer less severe consequences when caught). You might particularly want to avoid using a supposed lack of cheating in academia as your example since plagiarism scandals have become commonplace and teachers actively complain about administrations deliberately discouraging them from accusing students of plagiarism even when it's obvious. Along with rampant grade inflation, 'equitable grading practices' that factor social justice into grading, and drastically reduced academic standards themselves (less reading and homework assigned, fewer and shorter essays, the proliferation of "easy A" classes that substitute activism for academics and 'group participation' for individual merit) higher education is very much in crisis right now and the credentialing it provides of dubious value.

Claudine Gay serves as a perfect example that even Harvard first didn't check for plagiarism, even when selecting for its highest office, then attempted to cover it up with lawfare, then publicly defended it and attempted to smear anyone pointing it out as racist/sexist/etc, then finally even when effectively forced to remove her from that position by public pressure still kept her on as highly paid faculty actively teaching. You can attempt to differentiate EHC and Woke, but it's not the people you consider EHC that revealed the scandal, stood up for academic standards, or tried to hold her to account for violating them. It's disingenuous to nominally uphold EHC as a culture dedicated to truth and characteristic of our universities when our current university culture has demonstrably become hostile towards truth and made a point of punishing the tellers of inconvenient truths.

You're caught on something of a fork here: either your EHC isn't actually running the campuses or they've caved to the woke mobs because their virtue signaling (regarding truth-seeking) was hollow, but in either case the surveys out of FIRE show large majorities on campus (both student and faculty) who are self-censoring out of fear, even not saying facts they believe to be true. Ironically, American universities have become some of the LEAST intellectually curious, open to debate, and socially accepting of diversity of views places in America.

As for being more empathetic and caring? You ought to already know this is false. The alleged asymmetry of empathy is thoroughly debunked. They're just as biased and prejudicial against others as anyone, they simply have different outgroups they express it against. The numbers on charity are instructive: although liberals will self-describe as more empathetic, rate empathy higher on value scales, appeal to empathy more frequently as an argument, express greater desire to be empathic, and will give away more money in carefully constructed social science lab experiments... But it's conservatives, especially Blue collar, who donate higher percentages of their money, time, and even blood, than liberals do. Liberals virtue signal empathy more, but conservatives actually practice it more in the real world. You're going to have a hard time defining EHC in a way that your demographic doesn't actually demonstrate less empathy in measurable action than people you dismiss as LHC. Tolerance likewise, although the sides are very similar in terms of hostility to the outgroups, some studies are showing conservatives as currently the less vindictive and authoritarian than liberals in regards to enforcement against their outgroups.

There's even some fairly recent studies looking into victim culture (as opposed to honor culture and dignity culture) that have found that much of liberal empathy signaling is a mask for malevolent Narcissism, that they often prioritize harming their disfavored groups over actually helping the supposed objects of their empathy, and that falsely signaling empathy for alleged victim groups is frequently used as a way to strip the alleged victimizers of protection so that the signalers may action their sadistic impulses on them without being socially censored for doing so. Now, there's a decent case to be made that this is mostly a side effect of liberal capture of institutions and that the same kind of terrible people infect and abuse any power structure, liberal or otherwise, but it's not exactly a credit to your EHC's supposed intelligence, truth-seeking, or empathy, that their institutions folded to the Woke easily and thoroughly, rarely defending truth or virtue against attacks from the Left.

Your fundamental premise doesn't hold. You can certainly demonstrate that there is a class of intelligent people oriented toward abstract thought, sure. That's well substantiated. Then the idea immediately breaks down as closer examination shows them to be more novelty-seeking than "truth-seeking". Yes, that's often just as effective in producing innovation and discovering new things, but the distinction matters greatly in regards to any area where we already know the truth and any system that is already highly optimized. It's not just a pattern of elites continually building on the past up to bigger and better things, it's more frequently a pattern of Sandcastle Syndrome where the elite seekers reject the known simply because it IS the known and embrace the new simply because it is the new.

Disdain for the vulgar might be a virtue if it reliably motivated the elites to genuinely be better than the rabble. That's a very medieval concept of 'nobility', at least as romanticized by later historians. OTOH, the historical track record of aristocracy suggests that such a class identity as "their betters" rarely results in actually being better, merely an empty pretense and unfounded assumption of such. Even the pretense is perhaps worth something to society ("hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue"), but it's clearly not sufficient in itself to prevent the elites from becoming ideologically (and too often genetically) insular, inbred, and corrupt. Your EHC is NOT consistently self-correcting. They ought to be, if they weren't hypocrites, but the evidence suggests that they are hypocrites more often than not, and course correct only in the face of an angry rabble that has finally amassed enough power to credibly hold them to some accounting.

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Can you really claim that communism/wokism is unnatural to EHC? I have the impression that communist, woke or anti colonial factions were or are a pretty significant or even dominant in most universities in the world. (Communism more in the past, today woke).

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Communism has never been able to dominate the left in a free society. Woke hasn't really either except for a brief interval from around 2017-2021. These things form authoritarian subcultures like in certain university departments and then influence the left.

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Einstein was a socialist, probably socialism was the dominant ideology among scientists and intellectuals pre-1956. It's strange to define EHC in a way that excludes most of history's prominent thinkers.

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In postwar (West) Germany & France, the Socialist Party was larger than the Communist Party. But in Italy it was the Communist Party which was larger. Of course, the German Social Democratic Party is what the Communist Party had split off from in 1918.

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Italy’s GDP per capita in 1970 was $2,000.

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Does that make it not a "free society"?

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I said you need to reach a level of technological and economic development. Find me examples of a medium or high income democratic country where communists are the dominant force on the left.

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I think Italy would have been considered at least a medium income country in 1970. It had the 25th highest per capita GDP, while the UK (surely what most people would think of as a developed liberal democracy) was #22, just a couple hundred dollars per capita higher. https://database.earth/economy/gdp-per-capita/1970

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You're right - Italy refutes Hanania's point. Pretty much the only reason Italy didn't get a Communist Party gov in the 70's was that far left terrorists overreached when they kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro. The country was incredibly close to getting one.

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I really, really, really think the woke are lying in wait in universities and nonprofits and other Democratic strongholds for Trump to mess up and give them another shot.

We've seen them back off a little on pushing the harder-core stuff, but haven't re-embraced unwoke 'liberal' ideas like meritocracy, free speech, or equality on the law. Diversity is still a goal.

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I think communism/wokism is inherent to EHC. The work of Musa al-Gharbi often centers around the theme of “smart people are much more likely to be partisan and ideological” because they are better able to rationalize new information to fit their priors or scrutinize information that would disagree with their pre-existing worldview. In general, elites are more opinionated about politics and ideology because elites are more interested and knowledgeable about these things. People who “just want to grill” just don’t know or care enough to be woke or interested in objectivity. Given this, the norms of the woke and the norms of scientists and journalists, in the former case every observation about the world must be interpreted and scrutinized on the basis of intersectionality, and in the latter case, every observation about the world must be interpreted and scrutinized to see if it conforms to the standards of journalistic integrity or adheres to the scientific method or is a replicable study, are similar. They are simply cultural norms/rules that EHC will ascribe to. It’s not that smart people are ALWAYS drawn towards good institutions and ideologies like liberalism, it’s that the only people who can create good institutions and ideologies are smart anyway.

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Agree with Oldman -- and "somewhat unnatural" is a claim that is asserted, not argued.

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Regarding seeking income vs meaning in work, recall that we tax income but not meaning. Some economists have "bit the bullet" and acknowledged that we should tax taller people more, because they earn more and height is supply-inelastic, so there is less deadweight loss. With polygenic risk scores, we can guess what kind of IQ people are likely to have and apply a head-tax to them, thus preventing them from avoiding taxes by seeking lower-paying but higher-prestige work.

> That said, we can treat them as distinct in the sense that they are somewhat unnatural, requiring a stifling dogmatism in order to maintain their hold on smart and idealistic people.

Communism attracted smart and idealistic people before it had the political power to enforce a dogma. Smart and idealistic people that wanted to avoid the stifling internal culture of communist movements could have done so by not joining, but they chose to.

> Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in Why Nations Fail (2012), attempt to provide a historical account of how well-functioning institutions form

I would recommend reading pseudoerasmus instead. https://pseudoerasmus.substack.com/p/summary-of-all-my-thoughts-on-ajr

> Elite Human Capital is far from indifferent to financial incentives, but is more likely to want others in their community to believe that they are smart, talented, and fair-minded.

Status can come from either dominance or prestige. Kevin Simler has written about the distinction, and you can read responses to him on that in these two posts:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/prestige-is-mob-enforced-dominancehtml

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/21/contra-simler-on-prestige/

> Because it is constantly engaging in higher-level discourse, it can also self-correct based on preexisting principles, and even change its values over time. In academia, the replication crisis refers to the growing recognition that many scientific studies, particularly in psychology and other social sciences, fail to produce consistent results when repeated.

Paul Meehl pointed this stuff out in the 60s. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/05/06/needed-an-intellectual-history-of-research-criticism-in-psychology/

If you want to understand why academia didn't change in response to Meehl generations ago, you must think about how it insulated itself from external forces that could cause it to change:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/conquest-and-liberation-of-academia

> There has therefore been a reorientation towards practices like the pre-registration of studies, open data sharing, and increased emphasis on replication in the scientific community.

Studies which are supposedly pre-registered will ignore the failure of their pre-registered measurements to have the results they want, and will then proceed to trumpet measurements they didn't pre-register, as if it wasn't a pre-registered study at all. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/03/24/hey-heres-a-study-where-all-the-preregistered-analyses-yielded-null-results-but-it-was-presented-in-pnas-as-being-wholly-positive/ There is currently no real penalty for that approach to pre-registration.

> Businesses, religious organizations, or governments tend not to do so

Businesses go out of business when they do a sufficiently bad job. Governments are much more insulated, but do feature some selection pressure in that they can lose wars and get conquered (this pressure has reduced since WW2).

> The fact that there are so many American elites who have filed PhDs and so few plagiarism scandals

I think the main limiting factor might be the attention of "plagiarism police" like Aaron Sibarium. Other people could have done what he did earlier, but they didn't bother. October 7 kicked things off, and there's no inherent connection between that and academic plagiarism.

> Just as importantly, I feel bad when I make an error, even if no one notices it

You have to notice it to feel bad, and as Feyman said, the easiest person for you to fool is yourself.

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This comment is a much better read, in every sense, than the article it is under. Thank you, especially for including links to relevant recommended reading.

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I probably should have included this near the top: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/tax-the-tallhtml

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I do enjoy well done argument to the absurd. That particular concept seems almost reminiscent of Vonnegut's satirical story 'Harrison Bergeron' in the totalitarian degree of the State penalizing even the most minor of inequal advantages a citizen may possess.

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Greg Mankiw treated it as a joke, but both Karl Smith & Robin Hanson seriously endorse it. As do I.

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I don't agree with the policy. I'm not particularly tall, but it's a fairly straight line from there to imposing an 'IQ tax' on me for being smarter than the average and yet not giving me a tax rebate for me likewise being an Aspy, so either the policy unfairly penalizes me for my narrow hypercompetence or becomes unduly complicated and invasive of my medical privacy... and that's even before getting into the weird edge cases like amputees.

Mostly though, I would prefer that tax policy be kept simple enough that literally every high school graduate knows it, understands it, and the average citizen can file their taxes on a post card without difficulty. I'm willing to accept some marginal inefficiency in tax rates in return for extreme efficiency and transparency in the administration and enforcement of taxes, the cessation of politicians using taxes as "hidden subsidies" and weapons against disfavored groups, and, while I'm at it, maybe a full transition to consumption taxes rather than distorting economic activity by slicing and dicing income in inconsistent ways based on type, source, and timing.

That's me though. I miss the days when the biggest political arguments I had were over tax disputes. In my nostalgia glasses that was a kinder, simpler time. Anyway, we can agree to disagree. I respect that you are intellectually consistent in your position despite the seeming absurdity and widespread mockery of it. You know what you believe, have openly considered the opposing view, and haven't let peer pressure decide for you. That takes a degree of personal courage that I wish more intellectuals would have. I look forward to reading more from you in the future.

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I started out by discussing a tax on expected income for genotype above, inspired by the height tax. Taxes aren't about "fairness". They're about efficiently raising income. Taxes that you can't avoid strike people as less "fair", but because they induce fewer distortions as part of avoiding them, they are more efficient.

I agree that consumption taxes are better than income taxes, but that's because income taxes tax capital/investment along with consumption.

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Richard, Thank you for sharing your essay—it was both thought-provoking and insightful. I wanted to share a perspective on entrepreneurship that I believe complements and perhaps broadens your discussion of wealth-maximizers.

In my experience, many entrepreneurs are driven less by a desire to accumulate wealth and more by a deep motivation to build something sustainable and impactful. For these individuals, the money generated or wealth acquired serves more as a way of "keeping score"—a measure of the success and viability of their creation—than as an end in itself.

What’s particularly telling is how many of the wealthiest entrepreneurs, after achieving financial success, will reinvest their fortunes in new and often riskier ventures. If financial gain were their sole motivation, they would likely adopt a far more conservative approach to protect their wealth. Instead, their willingness to "bet it all" on new ideas underscores their passion for creating, innovating, and solving problems. This suggests that their primary drive is the pursuit of meaningful impact, not just financial security or status.

For many entrepreneurs, the satisfaction comes from seeing their ideas come to life, overcoming challenges, and building something that endures. Wealth is simply a byproduct of this creative and value-driven process.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how this perspective might fit into your framework of Elite Human Capital. It seems to bridge the gap between your archetypes of wealth-maximizers and meaning-maximizers, highlighting a hybrid motivation that values both tangible outcomes and deeper purpose.

Thank you again for sharing your work—I look forward to seeing how your ideas continue to evolve.

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In many or even most successful businesses, money is a side effect, not primary motivation. Weber's protestant ethics makes a related argument - the point of work is self-improvement of sorts, not wealth. Meanwhile, a lot of people who pursue PhDs are not only looking for meaning, but are also attracted to academic lifestyle (seemingly secure jobs, long summers, flexibility etc) which they don't initially realize will never materialize. I've been to quite a few grad level philosophy seminars and surprising number of students don't really care all that much. Cynicism in respect to the actual value of the "meaningful work" they would be doing as philosophers sets in pretty early.

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I think the analysis with LHC/Reading is off.

When I read Islamic scholars writing about how/why something is forbidden or permitted, I see the same patterns as EHC: honest consideration and weighing of the evidence, careful thinking, good logic, a willingness to challenge themselves and what is convenient to them, etc. The problem is they believe a 7th century pedophile warlord was the ideal moral and spiritual leader and he perfectly related the one true God's views to the world. When you go look back at, say, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was written by Lenin in 1916, there's a very clear and purposeful marshaling of the facts towards an understanding of social systems. (In general, socialists writing around 1900 was just a lot of guys Posting at each other before Twitter or the blogosphere.)

To the extent there is something to this division, beyond just agreeing/disagreeing with the people in question's general political vibes, I think it's the way that in a place like Iran or the Soviet Union, the ideology became the state. In such conditions, you see increasingly ridiculous twistings of facts to produce a justification within the ideology that could support an increasingly moribund, nonfunctional social order, but this is true of any authoritarian regime in an ideological state - when Islamists and communists exist outside such an apparatus, they act as pretty normal EHC, other than believing some things you may find facially wrong. I'm sure the current generation of EHC believes things that will seem facially wrong to people in 2200, though it seems presumptive to say what they would be.

Also:

> Regardless, the common understanding here is that elites can never be compared unfavorably to nonelites.

Typo, I think? Elites can never be compared FAVORABLY to nonelites.

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My view is that you need to have a closed epistemology to accept Islamism/communism, and then you can reason within that framework. But what to do with Islamists/communists is a difficulty of the theory. I think that if you had freedom of speech and economic growth in Syria it would correlate with increase in EHC values but not Islamism. It requires repression for this ideology to rule over modern people.

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In Turkey the military had to repeatedly suppress Islamism, overthrowing elected governments multiple times. But now Erdogan has taken power and cracked down on military officers, along with what you'd call EHC. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan

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Very good, thank you. You are definitely at the 'accept with minor revisions' stage. A few comments:

1) I appreciated your discussion of Authoritarian Learning, and am following up on the citations. It is clear that you know this literature. But it feels a bit out of place. This is the place in the book where you need to solidify basic concepts. Authoritarians learning to suppress EHC is more of an implication of the thesis. I recommend moving that section to after chapters, after you define e.g. LHC/Reading vs LHC/TV, because then you can discuss how authoritarians promote LHC/Reading cultures as a replacement for and simulacra of EHC culture.

2) Tying in the Dreyfus Affair is good for a sophisticated audience, but most people have no understanding of what it was, or how culturally significant it became. You should probably explain how it was The Current Thing for years worldwide, and for an American audience it might help to talk about how Mark Twain wrote about it extensively, because he's the only literary figure from that time that much of your audience will have any connection to.

3) "Regardless, the common understanding here is that elites can never be compared unfavorably to nonelites." I think you mean 'favorably'.

4) "In the modern world, class conflict looks to be all but embedded in the DNA of advanced democracies." I'd suggest tightening up this language. Just say "Class conflict is endemic is modern democracies" The whole section could use a plain language rewrite.

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I love your inputs Richard. So good-natured, devoid of any note of malice or anger, and actually likely to help the first Richard.

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I'm not sure I buy the thesis that EHC's are higher in openness. Ideas and beliefs are central to EHC's egos. It thus seems natural that they would react more strongly to dissident ideas that challenge their ego. In contrast, the average trucker doesn't really give a fuck if you challenge his theory of the world because he cares much more about his paycheck. I find in practice that everyday people are far more chill when you disagree with them compared to academic elites.

However, EHC's are higher in IQ and thus less impulsive, which may make them seem more open. For example, the trucker might take a swing at you if you something that upsets him. While EHC's will more subtly organize to sabotage your career.

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I think they're higher in the Big Five 'Openness to Experience' fact (that's N rather than S for you Myers-Briggs fans). The local ideology has moved away from late-20th-century 'let's let all ideas be explored' to 'ensure equality of result', becoming something a lot more similar to Marxism in its goals of equality of result ('equity not equality'), though without Marxism's focus on class.

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Great! Very interesting.

I would have 2 questions for you:

1) Would you agree with me that the EU / EU institutions are the pinnacle of EHC? And that consequently, America's advantage in economic prosperity and some other liberties is partially thanks to the political dominance of EHC being more limited (compared to corporate power and LHC)

2) EA/LessWrong has shown remarkable resilience with respect to some of the worst ideas of the left (woke, socialism, degrowth). I believe this is partially due to the demographics and its liberal discussion culture, but also partially through having a clear and explicit orthodoxy. In that sense it seems a bit more like LHC | Reading ideologies like communism or theocracy? Would you agree?

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LessWrong spun off of Overcoming Bias, where such bad ideas never had traction.

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Thank you for putting this together. It substantially fleshes out a thought I've been having as some have been "taking aim" at higher education. As a professor, I can see some things changing around the margins (e.g. funding for "X studies" programs and departments) or maybe larger scale (subsidized enrollments decline, though there I suspect that vocational two-year postsecondary would increase proportionally always). But I simply don't see much change at a fundamental level for reasons clear from what you say. In my own words, academics simply value truth, curiosity and clarity, and so authoritarianism or dogmatic belief systems (one only needs to read the Bible and maybe what the Founding Fathers wrote) are not going to go far. I find "sad" the people who believe that Hillsdale College and Liberty "University", or whatever it is they are doing in Texas are going to take over, so to speak.

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It would be interesting to see this framework of analysis applied to the post-Communist eastern European countries/regions. Were EHC institutions suppressed? Have they grown since then?

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Where you write, "In the last two decades, we have seen the emergence of an entirely new field that has been referred to as historical genomics." it would probably be clearer if you inserted a paragraph break and continued "For example, in the last two decades ..."

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This is a very ambitious argument, and I salute that. It's an attempt to get the heart of what human history is about, and why progress occurs, how knowledge advanced. That makes it almost inevitable that it will seem naive or vague or fall short in lots of ways, but it's so important that it still rewards the effort of reading it. There are lots of ways to rewrite our reorganize it, and I'd recommend trying a few of them, but in a way you can't lose, because just giving salience to the concept of elite human capital is a win.

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There's a lot of wisdom here. I think EHC maps roughly onto some other class concepts in recent years, such as David Brooks' "Bobos," Richard Florida's "creative class," Charles Murray's "Belmont," and Musa Al-Gharbi's "symbolic capitalists."

I think this whole argument would benefit from a large infusion of virtue ethics. You mention "virtue" but never really define it. You compare "wealth maximizing" and "meaning maximizing" archetypes, but really human purposes are more diverse than that; however, virtue ethics can cast a wide enough net to include them all.

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> Consider, if the goal was to appeal to a broad audience, why haven’t newspapers been more sensationalist? Leading never ending public crusades against sex offenders or publishing celebrity gossip can help build a large audience without offending any substantial part of the population.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers aimed at the lower classes did often run on this model! Lots of sports, lots of crime, lots of gossip about the doings of various misbehaving aristocrats (such as the Bright Young Things), as much sex reporting as they could get away with given the constraints of the time. (There was also a bunch of other journalistic misbehavior: for example, financial newspapers often accepted bribes for good coverage of scammy stocks, or blackmailed companies into giving them money to kill negative stories.) I don't know when or why the transition happened.

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tl, dr: unless you want to delegitimize the concept of Elite Human Capital *in the opener,* suggest reframing your Hobbesian statement about human lives away from “for all of human history…” towards some shorter timeframe.

The historical arc is probably the least important part to critique given the unspoken context is “modern”, but when books start off in the first several paragraphs with a patently wrong or at least woefully naïve statement about human history, it casts doubt on the entire subsequent analysis.

Suggestion: frame the time horizon for your version of “nasty, brutish, and short” as “since the advent of printed writing” since your statement is generally talking about the exposure to ideas that are not known to the community where people live.

The assertion that for most of human history, most people were parochial and lived and died within a tiny radius is not in any meaningful way true unless “human history” is defined as “while cities have existed.” And even that statement would be extensively caveated.

There’s basically no period of human history between the LGM back to 200k BC when your average person stayed with a short distance of their birthplace for the entirety of their lives. Typical max travel radius for people between the LGM and the advent of the Yamnaya was 25-100 miles.

During the Yamnaya expansion + 1k years, millions of people lived in spots 100-1000 miles apart during their lifetimes. There’s plenty of evidence from other areas of the world during that period of the diffusion of ideas, and travel between towns and cities.

Then things close up more for most people during an average life again, during the Bronze Age and up to the Roman period. Then longer travel distances in most areas of the world again 2000 years ago. Then hard core parochial lives in most places during the Dark Ages.

The latest possible milestone that you could pick and keep the “most people have been particularly isolated from ideas that existed contemporaneously” statement and be likely numerically true is “since just before the advent of steam powered ships.” But “since the printed press was created” seems more thematically aligned with the notion of the existence of an EHC aspect to modern history, living among modern rubes.

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