A brilliant article titled The Intellectual Yet Idiot, written by a guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts in words something that has been in my mind as well as the minds of others, more thoughtful than my myself for a long, long time. I have written about the pontifications of the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Mark Borg, Bart Ehrman and some others with respect to subjects in which I am interested, but the people about whom Taleb writes live in every segment of our society. At some level, they are all Social Justice Warriors. Even, if not especially, our the current president of these United States fits very comfortably into this category. The article starts off like this and just gets better and better the further one reads:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that 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.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities?—?but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Update: This fascinating and fun article titled Global Warming Alarmists Promote XKCD Time Series Cartoon, Ignore Its Mistakes from The Stream perfectly makes the point with respect to global warming.