I suspect a usual linguistic handle was lost when 'nerd' and 'intellectual' collapsed into each other to mean 'people interested in things' without drawing any epistemological distinction between them. These people are nerds, taking their long-avowed revenge- people whose talents latched onto a tractable puzzle in some intellectual pocket universe, saw that other people hadn't followed them there, and concluded that meant they'd won all the games. Computers are cool! They can be useful! People that can figure out how to make them do things have a useful skill that is perhaps related to other useful skills. But ultimately 'I can type things into the rule-following machine that make things appear in the universe behind the screen' really sets horrible precedents for, oh, most human endeavors- including the science that gets nodded towards as a polestar but isn't really what most of them are interested in learning or doing.
This is savage and I love it. This is the most concise and honest distillation of what is wrong with these nerds. Also, I really think the "reification" of "intelligence" as IQ has been the SINGLE most corrosive development in social science of the past 150 years. Not only is the psychometric notion of IQ/Intelligence/g-factor irrevocably tied to eugenics ... it also fails on it's own merits. It's all "pocket universes" all the way down: a type of pathological super positivism where only things that can be measured, are normally distributed, and correlate to each other are defined as having any utility. WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF HOW REALITY WORKS!
Well, and hell, color me unconvinced that most of the usual suspects have ever gone and spent many hours and hundreds of dollars with a psychometrician and would be pleased with the results- they know these tests do things like ask about vocab, right?
I dunno. These people obsessed with intellect as some monolithic property (and its inevitable godlike emergence in computer form) which they possess and other don't and which merit their riches then proceed to tell on themselves ala Sam Bankman-Fried by admitting they don't read books because it's just too inefficient for their capacious minds compared to tweets, or abandon their obligations to play mid-tier freemium strategy games they got into because 'chess was too simple.' Ah yes, the most parsimonious explanation for not actually consuming knowledge and ditching competitive traditions you were bad at for blinky shit on your phone is that you're just tooooo smart. I'm sure there are no less-smart people that have arrived at those same behaviors for less-smart reasons.
There was a fun little agent based simulation a while back that essentially randomly allocated lucky events, and randomly allocated from a normal distribution talent defined roughly as the ability to take advantage of luck. It makes some sense- there exist levels of un-talent and disability that simply make certain 'lucky breaks' useless. If you let that run for a while, what you see is that the agents with the most material success in the simulation are not the least talented, but they aren't the most- they're overwhelming from one notch right of center, because there were more of them.
Ring the confirmation bias alarm if you like, but that feels right. There are no doubt real geniuses deep in the research departments of some of these giants, but the tech bro vanguard mostly consists of people that are smart enough to impress dumb people, and they have a lot of money to wave in the face of smarter people to make them feel dumb.
The last bit is what I came to say, it's interesting (also worrying and a bit scary) how much the industry lost track of anything beyond correlations as a method. I think it starts with the success of A/B testing for Google/FB regarding their ad businesses.
The problem is, that this seems to be pervasive across many social sciences as well: the ol' Correlations are everything. The whole point about a single scalar that predicts life outcomes, having some greater meaning, comes from taking the correlations to things you cherry-picked to already correlate with each other way too seriously ... IQ as a proxy to some g-factor is literally about using correlations in lieu of an actual theory. Our whole current concept of "intelligence" is literally running off of correlations and tendencies!!!
All boundaries are of course artificial, but I think it does bear repeating that engineers are not scientists (though one can be both) and that software engineers are a different kind of engineer in turn. 'I did something and got an answer that I'm going to use' of course accumulates a particular kind of knowledge, but the history of science is one big pile of sorting out why that isn't the whole game.
Self-reported coding acumen as legitimizer of authority means two-beer me is the rightful God-king of all I survey, while me with a mild case of the sniffles is a plebeian worm unfit to govern a pet rock.
It'd be great if there were actual consequences to the manifestly inept way DOGE went about its work and the cracked coder dorks with 0 experience who were enabled and empowered to wreck shit they didn't understand. I'm sad they will instead experience even more power, money, and success from this because their community thinks they're in fact awesome
Yeah this gets brought up in the article about the scroll boy Doggy dork. How his future is still bright because this is exactly the big swing and miss that shows courage to the Silicon Valley types. Thank god because I was worried he would have to work retail or something.
That arrogance you describe very well is also the reaction to the fact that the tech industry itself is out of truely breakthrough ideas and has been for these 22 years olds entire life. The AI and crypto bubble/scam is the last desperate grab for Wozniak type fame and financial success.
Could you change Wozniak to Jobs? From everything I understand, Wozniak is actually a decent guy and therefore not a role model for these "cracked" 22 year olds, unless they're reeeeally confused about who did what and how and why. But otherwise, yes, totally, 💯
Jobs is no more a model for these guys than Woz. He had an aesthetic, a vision for actually useful things. Not a cracked coder and certainly not a good person, but he thought a lot more deeply about his world and the world around him than any of the current coterie of tech guys and venture capital lunatics.
Maybe if any of these little geniuses had taken a humanities class they would have encountered the phrase “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
"Farritor is certainly very smart, in the sense of being a good programmer and problem-solver.": Big wow. So am I. (Google-Scholar me if you care.) However ...
"a total lack of curiosity about how the agencies D.O.G.E. [is] gutting might work, or why a government source might suggest that even an impressive 'Python A.I. thing' is not a sufficient C.V. for this kind of government work.": I'd say a lack of curiosity is a diagnostic trait of stupidity. Likewise a lack of awareness of or caution about what you may not know.
In contrast, Albert Einstein said, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
The people this piece describes, from Musk to Farritor, appear to be just smart enough to be a menace to the world, ultimately including themselves. It's a great folly of this society that it allows such fools to become powerful.
By the way, Max, this post is an outstanding example of what I had in mind when I wrote, in a comment on "Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging", "Stick to quality over quantity, and you won't [have to worry about being replaced by 'AI']." This is a terrific piece. Neither Matt Yglesias nor what passes for "AI" these days would ever have written it.
This is probably the worst development of the modern era – not only do these guys not know what they don’t know, they’ve got no sense of how badly they’ve cooked their own brains within their information bubbles.
Ignorance and arrogance have long been endemic in the computer science community. I remember a campus talk given in the 1990s about this very issue; I don’t think many of the comp sci undergrads in attendance took it to heart even then.
Really great essay and I appreciate the insights. Having worked in the tech industry since the dotcom bubble and been a founder myself, I’ve seen the arrogance you’re articulating. The silicon valley and tech culture has many positives but also negatives that I think should be assessed together. The psychology of it is very interesting to think about, especially from observers outside the bubble.
Great article, but that bloomberg article is not declaring war on tech right and positioning itself by taking out doge members. It's clearly just an attempt to arrest any political ambition the guy has. It's hard to tell the difference between sensationalist news and a feature in a huge newspaper, but everything is literally just centered to work against them and strike fear about them and insinuate the only thing lacking for him is experience. I'm not sure what their styles are. Maybe took political classes by reading goosebumps. They could just want him out immediately. I'm not sure what the point of it is, but you should delineate your points from what you're saying because you're only talking about the article.
It’s perfectly reasonable to think that US AID was used for harmfully US-centric political goals while acknowledging that they also saved a ton of lives that no one else was saving (who are now just dying instead). The current admin’s issue with US AID wasn’t its harmful meddling; its harmful meddling was merely not aligned with their own preferred meddling and its methods for doing so were too indirect/sophisticated. The real issue was they hate the idea of paying to help anyone beyond well-to-do whites, so the genuinely good things US AID did had to be stopped.
If the current admin only cared about ending the harmful stuff, they could have reformed US AID’s operations or transitioned into some new org or a smarter option that experienced professionals came up with. Instead, they demolished the entire house as a means of alleged pest control and have no plans to rebuild anything.
As always, I should have scanned your profile before replying.
You describe yourself as a “holocaust enjoyer” and you do the “((( )))” dog whistle shit in multiple recent comments. You are scum, I’m not surprised you don’t care about a massive number of people dying in other countries, and I have zero interest in “debating if (stopping people in poorer countries from dying of easily prevented reasons) should be replaced with a real aid org” with a bad faith shithead like you.
You proudly claim to be a literal “National Socialist” across multiple recent comments on your profile. You are the embodiment of the “Nazi bar” substack argument.
Speaking of your profile, there’s nothing wrong with being wall-eyed and pig-nosed, but I don’t think I’d associate myself with master race claims if I looked like that.
I suspect a usual linguistic handle was lost when 'nerd' and 'intellectual' collapsed into each other to mean 'people interested in things' without drawing any epistemological distinction between them. These people are nerds, taking their long-avowed revenge- people whose talents latched onto a tractable puzzle in some intellectual pocket universe, saw that other people hadn't followed them there, and concluded that meant they'd won all the games. Computers are cool! They can be useful! People that can figure out how to make them do things have a useful skill that is perhaps related to other useful skills. But ultimately 'I can type things into the rule-following machine that make things appear in the universe behind the screen' really sets horrible precedents for, oh, most human endeavors- including the science that gets nodded towards as a polestar but isn't really what most of them are interested in learning or doing.
This is savage and I love it. This is the most concise and honest distillation of what is wrong with these nerds. Also, I really think the "reification" of "intelligence" as IQ has been the SINGLE most corrosive development in social science of the past 150 years. Not only is the psychometric notion of IQ/Intelligence/g-factor irrevocably tied to eugenics ... it also fails on it's own merits. It's all "pocket universes" all the way down: a type of pathological super positivism where only things that can be measured, are normally distributed, and correlate to each other are defined as having any utility. WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF HOW REALITY WORKS!
Well, and hell, color me unconvinced that most of the usual suspects have ever gone and spent many hours and hundreds of dollars with a psychometrician and would be pleased with the results- they know these tests do things like ask about vocab, right?
I dunno. These people obsessed with intellect as some monolithic property (and its inevitable godlike emergence in computer form) which they possess and other don't and which merit their riches then proceed to tell on themselves ala Sam Bankman-Fried by admitting they don't read books because it's just too inefficient for their capacious minds compared to tweets, or abandon their obligations to play mid-tier freemium strategy games they got into because 'chess was too simple.' Ah yes, the most parsimonious explanation for not actually consuming knowledge and ditching competitive traditions you were bad at for blinky shit on your phone is that you're just tooooo smart. I'm sure there are no less-smart people that have arrived at those same behaviors for less-smart reasons.
There was a fun little agent based simulation a while back that essentially randomly allocated lucky events, and randomly allocated from a normal distribution talent defined roughly as the ability to take advantage of luck. It makes some sense- there exist levels of un-talent and disability that simply make certain 'lucky breaks' useless. If you let that run for a while, what you see is that the agents with the most material success in the simulation are not the least talented, but they aren't the most- they're overwhelming from one notch right of center, because there were more of them.
Ring the confirmation bias alarm if you like, but that feels right. There are no doubt real geniuses deep in the research departments of some of these giants, but the tech bro vanguard mostly consists of people that are smart enough to impress dumb people, and they have a lot of money to wave in the face of smarter people to make them feel dumb.
The last bit is what I came to say, it's interesting (also worrying and a bit scary) how much the industry lost track of anything beyond correlations as a method. I think it starts with the success of A/B testing for Google/FB regarding their ad businesses.
The problem is, that this seems to be pervasive across many social sciences as well: the ol' Correlations are everything. The whole point about a single scalar that predicts life outcomes, having some greater meaning, comes from taking the correlations to things you cherry-picked to already correlate with each other way too seriously ... IQ as a proxy to some g-factor is literally about using correlations in lieu of an actual theory. Our whole current concept of "intelligence" is literally running off of correlations and tendencies!!!
All boundaries are of course artificial, but I think it does bear repeating that engineers are not scientists (though one can be both) and that software engineers are a different kind of engineer in turn. 'I did something and got an answer that I'm going to use' of course accumulates a particular kind of knowledge, but the history of science is one big pile of sorting out why that isn't the whole game.
Self-reported coding acumen as legitimizer of authority means two-beer me is the rightful God-king of all I survey, while me with a mild case of the sniffles is a plebeian worm unfit to govern a pet rock.
It'd be great if there were actual consequences to the manifestly inept way DOGE went about its work and the cracked coder dorks with 0 experience who were enabled and empowered to wreck shit they didn't understand. I'm sad they will instead experience even more power, money, and success from this because their community thinks they're in fact awesome
Yeah this gets brought up in the article about the scroll boy Doggy dork. How his future is still bright because this is exactly the big swing and miss that shows courage to the Silicon Valley types. Thank god because I was worried he would have to work retail or something.
That arrogance you describe very well is also the reaction to the fact that the tech industry itself is out of truely breakthrough ideas and has been for these 22 years olds entire life. The AI and crypto bubble/scam is the last desperate grab for Wozniak type fame and financial success.
Could you change Wozniak to Jobs? From everything I understand, Wozniak is actually a decent guy and therefore not a role model for these "cracked" 22 year olds, unless they're reeeeally confused about who did what and how and why. But otherwise, yes, totally, 💯
Jobs is no more a model for these guys than Woz. He had an aesthetic, a vision for actually useful things. Not a cracked coder and certainly not a good person, but he thought a lot more deeply about his world and the world around him than any of the current coterie of tech guys and venture capital lunatics.
Maybe if any of these little geniuses had taken a humanities class they would have encountered the phrase “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
"Farritor is certainly very smart, in the sense of being a good programmer and problem-solver.": Big wow. So am I. (Google-Scholar me if you care.) However ...
"a total lack of curiosity about how the agencies D.O.G.E. [is] gutting might work, or why a government source might suggest that even an impressive 'Python A.I. thing' is not a sufficient C.V. for this kind of government work.": I'd say a lack of curiosity is a diagnostic trait of stupidity. Likewise a lack of awareness of or caution about what you may not know.
In contrast, Albert Einstein said, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
The people this piece describes, from Musk to Farritor, appear to be just smart enough to be a menace to the world, ultimately including themselves. It's a great folly of this society that it allows such fools to become powerful.
By the way, Max, this post is an outstanding example of what I had in mind when I wrote, in a comment on "Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging", "Stick to quality over quantity, and you won't [have to worry about being replaced by 'AI']." This is a terrific piece. Neither Matt Yglesias nor what passes for "AI" these days would ever have written it.
This is probably the worst development of the modern era – not only do these guys not know what they don’t know, they’ve got no sense of how badly they’ve cooked their own brains within their information bubbles.
Has anyone else watched Angela Collier's takedown of vibe physics? I think the tone might be a good fit for this audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY
(to be fair to LLMs, without overstating what they can do, here's a counterlink: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/07/25/ethan-mollick-ai)
Ignorance and arrogance have long been endemic in the computer science community. I remember a campus talk given in the 1990s about this very issue; I don’t think many of the comp sci undergrads in attendance took it to heart even then.
Really great essay and I appreciate the insights. Having worked in the tech industry since the dotcom bubble and been a founder myself, I’ve seen the arrogance you’re articulating. The silicon valley and tech culture has many positives but also negatives that I think should be assessed together. The psychology of it is very interesting to think about, especially from observers outside the bubble.
Great article, but that bloomberg article is not declaring war on tech right and positioning itself by taking out doge members. It's clearly just an attempt to arrest any political ambition the guy has. It's hard to tell the difference between sensationalist news and a feature in a huge newspaper, but everything is literally just centered to work against them and strike fear about them and insinuate the only thing lacking for him is experience. I'm not sure what their styles are. Maybe took political classes by reading goosebumps. They could just want him out immediately. I'm not sure what the point of it is, but you should delineate your points from what you're saying because you're only talking about the article.
Dropping this the same day as Doomscroll releases the Aella interview on podcast is… *chefs kiss.* (well, it’s an interesting coincidence, at least)
It’s perfectly reasonable to think that US AID was used for harmfully US-centric political goals while acknowledging that they also saved a ton of lives that no one else was saving (who are now just dying instead). The current admin’s issue with US AID wasn’t its harmful meddling; its harmful meddling was merely not aligned with their own preferred meddling and its methods for doing so were too indirect/sophisticated. The real issue was they hate the idea of paying to help anyone beyond well-to-do whites, so the genuinely good things US AID did had to be stopped.
If the current admin only cared about ending the harmful stuff, they could have reformed US AID’s operations or transitioned into some new org or a smarter option that experienced professionals came up with. Instead, they demolished the entire house as a means of alleged pest control and have no plans to rebuild anything.
As always, I should have scanned your profile before replying.
You describe yourself as a “holocaust enjoyer” and you do the “((( )))” dog whistle shit in multiple recent comments. You are scum, I’m not surprised you don’t care about a massive number of people dying in other countries, and I have zero interest in “debating if (stopping people in poorer countries from dying of easily prevented reasons) should be replaced with a real aid org” with a bad faith shithead like you.
You proudly claim to be a literal “National Socialist” across multiple recent comments on your profile. You are the embodiment of the “Nazi bar” substack argument.
Speaking of your profile, there’s nothing wrong with being wall-eyed and pig-nosed, but I don’t think I’d associate myself with master race claims if I looked like that.
It’s interesting that you seem to care what Chomsky thinks given that half your feed is rank antisemitism lol