"They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.
"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."
"Adam Becker: I've got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they've misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they've got to grapple with it because it's the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase."
"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."