Living on the Edge: Aggressive mediocrity at the summit of America’s intellectual culture
Throw in an ambassadorship and a college presidency and you’ve hit the EGOT of intellectual celebrity culture for the talentless.
– The connection to Ted talks. I had no idea! But it fits. Money and bullshit go together like liver and onions.
– “Bill Gates and his wife.” What is this, Gilligan’s Island??
– I’d never heard of Jesse Dylan or Jeff Skoll so I googled them. Skoll’s a standard-issue internet billionaire: he made a bunch of money from Ebay and now makes investments. But Jesse Dylan is more interesting–or, I should perhaps say, less interesting. From Wikipedia:
Jesse Byron Dylan is an American film director and production executive. He is the founder of the media production company Wondros and Lybba, a non-profit organization. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and TED. He is the son of musician Bob Dylan . . .
Jesus Christ. This is the American aristocracy in a single sentence. A nepo baby who made it onto both the Council on Foreign Relations and Ted? Throw in an ambassadorship and a college presidency and you’ve hit the EGOT of intellectual celebrity culture for the talentless. I mean, sure, “American Wedding (known as American Pie 3: The Wedding or American Pie: The Wedding, in some countries)” is a modern classic, but what’s Jesse Dylan done lately? Like the man said, I don’t believe in Zimmerman.
The Council on Foreign Relations, indeed.
It’s pure meritocracy, just like the Lutnick boys.
The only thing more ridiculous would be if they included the talentless second son of a minor branch of a German royal family . . . uh oh!
There’s also this page:
Every year, publisher John Brockman publishes a query on his Edge website, whose membership consists of some of the world’s most powerful, famous, thinkers, and achievers. . . . Brockman will just put a question out there. No strings attached on how you answer it. Some answers could be short like Jeffrey Epstein’s above, but others can read like virtual theses, which go on page after page. Sometimes, much more is said within the shorter pieces, and less in the longer pieces. . . .
Distinguished Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn wrote:
Kosslyn’s First Law: The body and mind might appear separated but they are actually not. Not only does the state of the body effect the mind, but vice-versa.
As the saying goes, what a pretentious asshole. Your mind is mostly inside your brain, which is encased by your skull and attached to the rest of your body, so it would take a truly overeducated idiot to think that it appears separated.
Recall that the Edge Foundation also featured the pretentious idiocy of notorious science faker Marc Hauser. Also from the Harvard psychology department! Don’t worry, Harvard’s a big place, they do lots of solid research there too (just not the stuff discussed here).
OK, at this point you might say this is all old news. And it is. But look where America’s intellectual culture is now! Look who’d running the country. They’re telling kids not to take vaccines, and they’re still aggressively promoting junk science (see the link at the end of the previous paragraph). I do see a connection between the promotion of celebrity junk science and a country run by insanely wealthy bullshitters.