The Cult of Smart
by Fredrik deBoer · first published 2020
8mentions
2recommended by
7HN commenters
2020–2024first – last mentioned
29% recommend71% neutral
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Funny, I was just talking with someone about The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer on another comments thread here. Every American should read it. I read Scott Alexander's critical review and I'd recommend it as a nice response overall but I have a lot of problems…
on “College became the default – Let's rethink that” ↗…one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game." -- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
on “Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)” ↗Some of the HN crowd might be familiar with the academic Freddie deBoer, who just recently published a book on this very topic with some suggestions of how to address it, _The Cult of Smart_[1] [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389
on “The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit” ↗…production, directly or indirectly”) is also heritable, and in the book this effect was amplified through eugenics. You can find a more modern and less satirical take on this argument in Fredrik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart.
on “Funkwhale – Decentralized, self-hosted music server” ↗…unemployed former coal miners in Appalachia. It turns out, the real secret sauce here is "be the kind of person who can get good at programming". I'm with Freddie deBoer here, as he says in his book The Cult of Smart: we need to accept that not everyone has the same intellectual abilities. Once we do that, we can start thinking about how we make a world that works for the half of the population below the median on…
on “How to Start Google” ↗…pedigrees. That has been true for a long time. And before then, the primary function of those institutions was training ministers. Joking aside, there's lots of evidence (assembled in a book like The Cult of Smart [1]) that the effects of education are saturated in developed countries. In other words, you won't get an appreciably better education at a prestigious school than you will at an unprestigious school.…
on “Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles” ↗…educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this. "Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true." What Alexander describes here is the reactionary progressive strain of anti-IQ that is only…
on “Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?” ↗…But still we hear the same old song about how we could close those gaps tomorrow if we really wanted to, an attitude that has distorted education policy and analysis for decades. > My first book, The Cult of Smart, was a commercial failure. It was released during the height of the pandemic and thus my ability to promote it was limited, but by any measure the market rejected it. It’s tough to produce a labor of…
on “Education Commentary Is Dominated by Optimism Bias” ↗