Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots

On December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted. Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London… for the Vietcong.So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man. But the truth was that Pol Pot was as insane as he was cruel. And it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Upon taking power, Pol Pot nationalized the all land, kicked out or killed all foreigners, and began a sweeping genocide against the educated class. In the four years Pol Pot was in power, it’s estimated that he was responsible for the death of more than 20% of the country’s population.Bones recovered from the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime killed nearly 2 million people in less than five years. But when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.The world seems to be full of intelligent idiots. The examples are endless.There was a recent study that asked 30 behavioral scientists to predict which interventions would motivate people to go to the gym more often. Keep in mind that these are people who study human behavior for a living, and they were simply being asked to predict what will change human behavior.Not only were their predictions horribly wrong, but they were worse than the random guesses of a person off the street… or a coin flip. But this result isn’t unprecedented. Back in the 1980s, there was a debate within clinical psychology of which therapeutic modality was most effective. As a result, researchers spent years collecting data on thousands of patients and dozens of modalities. The goal was to determine, once and for all, which form of therapy would rule them all.But the study found that all forms of therapy barely work at all. In fact, it found that trained clinical therapists do not, on average, produce better outcomes than talking about your problems with a random person. And, in fact, even more surprisingly, giving therapists more training does not improve the outcomes of their patients at all. The entire field of clinical psychology, one could argue, was a marginal upgrade, at best, from having a beer and an honest chat with a friend.Or consider the fact that over 91% of hedge fund managers can’t beat the market, despite the fact that the entire purpose of hedge funds is to explicitly create better returns than the market.Or the fact that a Harvard Business Review study found that over 75% of corporate training actually makes employees less productive.Or the recent studies that have found that diversity and racism training actually makes people more racist, rather than less.What the hell is going on here? What are all of these “smart” people actually doing? In 1961, the newly elected president John F. Kennedy appointed the CEO of Ford Motors, Robert McNamara, to be Secretary of Defense. McNamara was an unconventional choice. He had no military background and his expertise was in the business of manufacturing. McNamara was a disruptor. And the belief at the time was that the US military had become stodgy, old and inefficient. McNamara was going to come in and shake things up.McNamara’s big innovation was that he brought quantitative analysis of manufacturing to the actual battlefield. When the US entered the Vietnam War, it partly did so because of McNamara’s confidence that he could track progress on the ground better than any military in world history. He had the equivalent of data dashboards measuring all of the key factors of the war — armaments, troop counts, casualties, supply chains, etc. And once in the war itself, his data analysis consistently showed him the same result: that the US was winning. Easily. Handily. Year after year. They were committing fewer resources, fewer troops, sustaining fewer casualties and controlling more land than the enemy. Military victory, McNamara promised, was right around the corner.But the years went on and that victory never came.Because here’s what McNamara’s data didn’t measure: the North Vietnamese willingness to suffer and die. The poor morale of the US troops. The corruption of the South Vietnamese government. The shifting political winds at home.The truth is, the US was losing and had been losing almost the entire time troops were there. Yet, none of McNamara’s famous data ever showed it.Intellectuals create models of the world. In theory, these models reflect and measure reality in a way that allows us to quantify progress and predict the future.The problem is, you can’t measure everything. It’s impossible. And if it turns out that the immeasurable factors are far more important than what’s measurable, well, then like McNamara, you’re screwed.Another issue is the question of getting accurate data. On the surface, data seems pretty straightforward, you just go out and measure whatever you need to measure. But it turns out, finding good data on just about anything is incredibly difficult.For example, there’s a popular concept in the health world known as Blue Zones. You’ve probably heard of them. Blue Zones are communities around the world that supposedly produce a disproportionate amount of 100-year-olds. People have suggested that we should study these Blue Zones to figure out how to live longer. As a result, the Blue Zone model of health has become incredibly popular over the past 20 years, spawning bestselling books, a multi-million dollar business, a Netflix documentary, and hundreds of popular YouTube videos.But, it turns out that upon closer inspection, a lot of the data behind the Blue Zones is… well, bad. For example, conspicuously, each of the Blue Zones happen to be in places where birth certificates were either adopted oddly late or were largely destroyed in a war. All of the Blue Zones involve countries that were at war in the mid-20th century and had drafts with upper age limits, giving young people incentives to lie about their age. Two of the five Blue Zones had major pension law changes in the 1960s that gave older people more money, another incentive to lie about one’s age. One is a religious community that has claimed they have supernatural powers. And most interestingly, while the Blue Zones are over-represented in 100-year-olds, they are under-represented in 90-year-olds.Hmm…The point here is that the Blue Zone Model of health and longevity isn’t necessarily a bad model, the problem is that it’s built on top of bad data. Therefore, it’s not accurately reflecting reality.Yet, of course, nobody thinks about that. Netflix definitely doesn’t, at least. But here’s the problem… Intellectuals forget that models are just models. They begin to believe their models are actual reality. And the consequences are often catastrophic.Malcolm Caldwell spent 20 years studying Southeast Asian history and development. He created a model of understanding of that part of the world that was largely Marxist. Then, when he actually went to Southeast Asia and met a Marxist and tried to tell that Marxist all about his model — i.e., when his model finally had to confront reality — reality won.Reality always wins.But Intellectuals are rewarded for their models, not reality. And the data and analysis that looks elegant on paper is often disastrous on the ground. Yet, when their models are contradicted by reality, most intellectuals don’t have the courage to accept the reality, instead they double down on their models… …and this is what turns them into idiots.In 1968, the biologist Paul