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October 15, 2015

Comments

Doug

Many public figures have been through an education process that makes them confident and articulate in expressing their opinions, even when they're lying, talking hogwash or just repeating government propaganda e.g. BBC political and economic correspondents.

theOnlySanePersonOnPlanetEarth

Captain Pugwash wasn't even a pirate

Matt Moore

"I suspect that one contributor to this is the outcome bias: we assume that because someone has gotten rich or won elections they must have superior knowledge and ability, and so under-rate the role of luck."

This is a question of degree only. Someone successful enough to be an outlier was probably both lucky and good. We correctly rate them as having superior knowledge than most based on a noisy signal. People probably do underrate luck, but they are still focusing on the right people.

Blissex

«lying, talking hogwash or just repeating government propaganda e.g. BBC political and economic correspondents»

I recently saw a BBC report from the Labour conference about a Jeremy Corbyn speech in which the subtitling was "redistribute the wealth" while Norman Smith explained how dangerous J Corbyn was.

It all seemed calculated to terrify homeowners, not that they would vote Labour regardless...

Dave Timoney

@D, ideology, such as the entrepreneur and tech genius tropes, does not arise from an attempt to control the means of production (e.g. restricting market entry) but from the characteristics of those means. For example, it is the structural tendency towards global monopolies inherent in the Internet that has given rise to the Zuckerberg syndrome.

Similarly, the growth of the media entrepreneur - i.e. someone who sells themselves as a brand, from Branson to Berlusconi - cannot be divorced from the growth of financialisation and privatisation since the 80s. Likewise, the "obliviousness" that is central to the Jobs/Apple cult reflects modern supply-chain management. Ideology is symptomatic, not programmatic.

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