Based Camp: Garden Gnomes are Destroying Academia

In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone critically dissect the nature of intelligence and the hierarchy of knowledge. Drawing on historical anecdotes and personal experiences, they lay bare the institutional bias, gatekeeping, and hurdles that prevent truly novel ideas from taking root within academia and society. From the stifling of innovation to the ironic role of performative intelligence, they bring to light some hard truths about our education system and the ways in which it determines who is seen as smart. As they navigate through academic consensus and fashionable ideas, join them for an honest exploration of how we shape, share, and value knowledge.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, .

Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.

Malcolm: Severely

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello,

Malcolm: gorgeous. Hello, Simone. I am excited to be chatting today. What are we talking about? Well, you're

Simone: being like Professor Malcolm because we have a quote to discuss. This is like homeworky. It sounds like.

Simone: It reminds me of my honors classes in college

Malcolm: the article was called The Mid Wit Menace, on a sub stack by somebody called Millennial Woes. And I don't think it's that much of a red sub either.

Simone: All right.

Simone: Because he has convinced himself by embracing fashionable ideas that he's very wise, he will not accept that [00:01:00] anybody is wiser than him unless they also embrace those fashionable ideas. In his mind, that is the only thing that could prove the person to be as wise as him, let alone even wiser.

Simone: But a person wiser than him would never adopt those b******t, fashionable ideas. So they would never appear in the mid wit's perception as wiser than him. Thus, the mid midwife is trapped in his midwifery.

Malcolm: I think this quote is describing a very real phenomenon in our society.

Malcolm: Hmm. With how people judge what intelligence is. Yeah. When they are creating this organically formed hierarchy that determines truth within our society. Okay. So if you say something that is very antithetical to the accepted truth of society. People will look at you as an idiot, right? Mm-hmm.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So it is very hard to say something that is genuinely innovative or [00:02:00] move things forwards without being looked at as an idiot. It actually can become dangerous to say things that move things forwards. Mm-hmm. And this mindset is particularly true in academia. I've worked in academia for a while, and

Malcolm: The hierarchy in intelligence is determined by an individual's ability to memorize, obscure things that other people who are widely agreed upon as smart have written or said determines a person's position was in this local hierarchy. Not their ability to override those things or come up with new ideas that counter those things.

Malcolm: Makes a lot of sense because the people at the top of this hierarchy, they're the people who everyone else is quoting, right? And so they have a vested interest in ensuring that you are not just disrupting the hierarchy. This is something even famously like Einstein got into when he got older, where he would.

Malcolm: Sort of snipe [00:03:00] at people's careers if they disagreed with his ideas. Yeah. Especially where it turned out that they were right later. Now they were right. Yeah. Oh, wow. And you see this across academic fields, and then when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, you know, all La Darwin. They're basically crazy.

Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.

Malcolm: Severely if it goes against either the consensus or things that are of interest to the academic consensus. Mm-hmm. And I think it's one of the reasons why Acade has been so slow at advancing, but I think we also see this within the comments on our videos sometimes, you know, you know, I've looked at some people who say negative things about our videos [00:04:00] and.

Malcolm: Cause I try to determine like, what position are they coming for? Cause I never know, is somebody mad at us because they're a far leftist, are they mad at us because they're a far rightist? , so I can never really tell, you know, and so I try to go into it and one guy who repeatedly comment sort of negative things on our videos, it seems that he's predominantly, he's just like, A generic philosopher, academic philosopher.

Malcolm: Yeah. I be a philosophy parrot. That parrots, what everyone considers like smart philosophers have said, and that is how he determines, that he's smart, and so he thinks that we are crazy because I would never do that. I find that to be very disinteresting to, I say this parroting some random sub stacker, but keep in mind I'm parroting a suber that doesn't have a big fan base.

Malcolm: So, I, I am recognizing that this concept here potentially has a lot of merit. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Simone, this idea of determining intelligence and how people determine who is intelligent around them.

Simone: Well, I think a lot of this actually has to come with something that, that [00:05:00] really blew my mind when I was first researching the careers of artists.

Simone: When, like back in 2012 when we first met and a bunch of the artists that I interviewed, Essentially said, well, I have to like, play up the extent to which I'm eccentric and weird and crazy and unstable seeming, because if I don't do that, if I don't have like paints like splattered on my face and my hair's all messed up, and I'm kind of like, oh, hi.

Simone: You know, like, like really crazy that people, you like their art cells for less, you know, they, they just aren't really, you know, succeeding as artists. They're not taken. Oddly, they're not taken seriously, so to speak. So I think what's really interesting is that there's this performative image of smartness that people are looking for instead of really like validating.

Simone: Is this idea interesting? It's more, does this person look like someone who's intellectual? Do they look like a philosopher? Do they look like a mathematician? In fact, we've even we've met people recently on a very different end of the spectrum. More like, on the technical or like data end of the [00:06:00] spectrum.

Simone: Who, who look very. Like analytical engineering and they just always get hired for these positions because they're seen as looking like a trustworthy, reliable engineer, even if actually their track record is abysmal and they don't work at all.

Simone: When I, what I think of when I see this quote is I think of the people who style themselves as intellectuals and also use really gatekeeper terms, , like very advanced vocabular