Where Have the Adults Gone? By Paul Frijters. Let’s start with a long article on a crucial issue that is almost never talked about.
The more that the knowledge held in people’s heads is super-specialised, the less any individual knows about the whole picture, and the more he must blindly trust that ‘the system’ functions properly.
Abuse of that trust then becomes possible by people in other parts of the system, and by those empowered to oversee the system. It also gets easier for anyone to get away with doing really stupid things, because so few people will be able to judge whether something being done is really stupid. …
Super-specialists are like smart, enthusiastic 12-year-olds who get great grades in science class but know almost nothing about how the world works and need an ‘adult in the room’ to stop them from making big mistakes. The adult in the room is the generalist, able to see far more than the 12-year-old and stop him and his inflated sense of understanding from breaking the TV, poisoning the guinea pig, or setting the garage on fire.
One of the major problems in Western society has become the retreat of the adults, and the gradual takeover of the tweenies. …
Generalists:
Generalists are people with a reasonable understanding of a very wide range of issues and processes, used to thinking in terms of solutions. They don’t need to have a high IQ or be highly educated, but they do need to be aware of how abnormal it is to have common sense and how easily most people can be misled. They take their own counsel seriously and are characteristically involved in changing the organisations they are part of.
The ultimate social value of generalists lies in the unavoidable fact that broad social problems, and their solutions, are general in nature. Specialists make bad overall decisions for whole groups (like industries, regions, or countries) precisely because they know nothing about general matters. …
A specialist is easy to bully into silence about broad matters because no specialist will know anything about the vast majority of what is relevant. Each specialist can then just be told to ‘trust’ the system as a whole and play his part, keeping quiet if he happens to know something small that goes against the overall narrative. …
Covid lockdowns:
The last three years show us what happens when specialists are in charge. If you want to know whether it is a good idea to lock down a whole city, it helps if you can quickly see the many effects lockdowns will have among many different parts of the city’s population and economy. Only with a broad view of many factors do you have hope of making a reasonable judgment. …
On top of that, when every specialist is the only one in the room who knows what he knows, no other specialist has the recognised expertise to argue on substantive grounds against what he says. This explains why in covid times, the health specialists populating our systems were useless at stopping the madness emanating from other specialists, like the SIR model builders or the corrupted health advisers. Even most coal-face medical professionals had no expertise in ‘public health’ specialties and could be fooled into politically convenient lies after a few weeks of intense propaganda.
The group cognition problem we encountered in covid times is a natural outgrowth of super-specialisation. We have just borne witness to how stupid our societies have become about the system as a whole. …
Where have all the adults gone?
Explaining the disappearance of the generalists starts with answering the core question of how generalists are produced, and why our societies have stopped putting them in charge. …
The UK government bureaucracy is a good example of a system that used to create its own generalists. … Whitehall’s M.O. was to take smart early-career civil servants from many different departments and rotate them around different areas every few years. These youngsters would quickly find themselves shouldering quite a bit of responsibility for major parts of the machinery of state, and would form an informal club with each other as they gained a new type of knowledge in each new placement.
Someone trained in British history for example could enter the system at age 23, do a few years in the Department of Education, then a few years in the Foreign Office, then the Treasury, then Transport, and then the Home Office. That person could move from doing highly specialised analysis in his first role to running small teams in the next, to organising large reforms, to becoming Department Secretary responsible for thousands, and ultimately to filling the role of Cabinet Secretary responsible for the whole of Whitehall. …
Starting out smart and specialised meant they would know about the frontier of some area and be aware of the challenge of knowing anything with certainty and of doing anything very well. …
The demise of the generalists in government:
One problem that developed in Whitehall was that politicians began escaping the adults in the room, instead surrounding themselves increasingly with flatterers and communications specialists. Why? Naturally they enjoyed the flattery, but what had changed is that they found themselves in a 24/7 media environment that was looking at every moment for opportunities to criticise them.
Controlling ‘the message’ became crucial, and indeed came to be the key skill that made a politician successful. Tony Blair, who won three elections in a row, was a master at controlling the message, with his political party immediately losing elections once he no longer led it. Politicians of all stripes learned from this and other examples that they could not avoid setting communication as their top priority. The specialty of communication simply outcompeted the generalists in being useful to politicians.
The problem with young communications people — including those specialising in areas labelled “PR,” “marketing,” or “media” — is that they are specialists in manipulation and appearances, but are otherwise as ignorant as toddlers, just like almost all super-specialists. Surrounded by lots of toddlers talking about messaging and little else, politicians found themselves without adults in the room.
The flattery felt nice, their careers seemed in good shape and the system kept working anyway, so they did not really miss the adults. The extreme ignorance of the communications people on large policy matters meant that everything politicians said was not immediately challenged, but rather praised.
This dangerous trend interacted with a second development: the deliberate feeding of self-serving policies to politicians by special interest groups. Politicians would be given proposed legislation by ‘think tanks’ that represented housing interests, or Big Pharma, or large military firms, or whatever other special interest groups had organised themselves.
While Whitehall was still doing its thing, generating fearless policy advice and trying to craft sensible new policies, politicians were fed a steady stream of proposed legislation that sounded great and hence would play well in the polls, but in reality would serve only to advance some small interest group at the expense of the public.
The combination was like a perfect conspiracy against the adults in the room. The need to control the message led lots of message-moulding toddlers to pool around the politicians, who were simultaneously being fed more bad policy ideas every day by ever more monied lobby groups. These lobby groups would also manage the media by flooding it with diversions and fakery about the policy, crafted by none other than their own communications people.
Since most media professionals are not generalists and had limited time to try to understand any issue, they were defenceless against this fakery of the policy sponsors, and they had little incentive to object anyway since going along with the fakery opened up access to the politicians. Neither the politicians’ communications people nor the sponsors of bad policy ideas had any real need for or interest in good policy ideas, and hence did not value what the generalists could offer. The adults found themselves kicked out of the room.
Departments then started to purge themselves of the generalist structures they now had little need for, in favour of giving more power to toddlers. … The fakery industry ballooned, further obscuring the view of politicians and further reducing the power and prestige of true generalists.
Worse still, the dumber the advisors around a politician, the better, politically speaking, because more clueless and docile advisors would lead to less internal opposition to policies that were bad for the country but good for a lobbying sponsor. Driven by this political incentive, departments started to hire more and more communications people and more and more people who pretended to be generalists but were actually just ignorant fools.
This struggle is still ongoing right now in Britain and elsewhere. The remaining adults in the room know exactly what is happening and are trying to resist … Their main remaining fortresses lie in areas that most desperately need a general view of society as a whole, which are those departments in which trade-offs are made every day and many different interests must be balanced explicitly. Places like the Treasury, the Audit Office, and the tax offices.
Having lost much of their status, the generalists found it impossible to stop the covid nonsense. Still, in the UK, it was exactly the generalists in Whitehall who immediately spotted the lockdowns for the nonsense they were, warning their ministers about the collateral damage beforehand. Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, was seen on those leaked WhatsApp messages trying to push back against lockdowns, and found himself overruled by communications artists like Dominic Cummings, a classic communications specialist who is a policy toddler. …
The current PM Rishi Sunak, who was the Treasurer during lockdowns and who tried to push back against them at the time, has put the generalists in charge in order to make real progress on a lot of policy issues, leading to a recent mini-revival of generalists in Whitehall.
In places like Australia the generalists were defeated comprehensively a long time ago, replaced by top-down fakery artists, communication experts, corrupted fat cats, and hollow men.
In the lead-up to covid in the US, Trump had surrounded himself with people prepared to flatter him constantly, who were most definitely not adults. The long-serving civil servants around Trump, like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, were not generalists either but specialists of a particularly sociopathic type, pushing their own agendas but prepared to say anything and do anything to keep themselves in power. …
The demise of generalist academics
Academia has stopped supplying the media and society as a whole with adults who will speak plainly about what is going on. Instead, much of academia and the university education it offers have become part of the problem, producing lots of socially useless fakery and the next generation of fakers. …
A generation ago, academia abounded with generalists. … They were oriented towards the actual problems of their society, and saw publishing in journals as just a sideshow. …
Google and other quick-search innovations also reward specialisation: your name comes up when someone searches for a topic if you have written the same thing over and over and over. If instead you decline to inflict a mental lobotomy on yourself by saturating the market with the same message over and over, you simply will not get known.
Just as toddlers rebel against the adults, within academia generalists irritate everyone else because they tread on all the little specialist fiefdoms, essentially telling each of the toddlers how small their individual territory is. They are not only unpopular but shunned from the top journals where territorial animals and hence specialists rule. When generalists lack a specialty, the specialists in little territories can ignore them as irrelevant: what they say is simply not recognised as relevant to specialists, as when toddlers do not recognise the value of what adults know. …
Just as monks in religious monasteries debated how many angels could dance on a pinhead, many academic economists nowadays live in a world in which one supposedly determines the optimal flavour of lockdowns by solving a 5-dimensional dynamic equation. It’s idiocy, but well-paid idiocy that begets flattery and other rewards. …
Is Team Sanity immune?
Unfortunately, the same problem lurks in Team Sanity. Very few generalists in the resistance are wondering constructively about the whole system, while gobs of specialists make particular small points over and over. With regular reading, you get to know them over time. Person A is always blaming the Great Satan. Person B talks only about the vaccines. Person C bangs on about kids. Person D is known for cute videos about how wrong the models were. Person E repeats daily how bad lockdowns were for freedom.
The problem is not that any of them are wrong, but that their tiny bit of the truth does not link up with the truths of others in a way that spells solutions. Most specialists do not even try to enter the messy world of solutions, because the need to fight in their corner absorbs them. Worse, if persons A through E stopped repeating the bit they know, their spot in the limelight would be usurped by someone who did not slack off on the repeat button. In the competition for attention, Team Sanity is in danger of falling into the exact same trap as Team Lockdown: specialists ruling the airwaves while being mostly irrelevant to the problem of what to do. Slowly and gradually, they become part of the problem. …
Read it all.
There has been a general dumbing down of elected politicians in the television age, and the population has been dropping about 1 to 1.5 points of average IQ per decade since 1880. This combines with the well known communication gap between people whose IQs differ by more than 20 points — too many misunderstandings, different assumed knowledge, the speed of the conversation is wrong, and so on.
As the IQs of politicians fell, those elected felt less comfortable with bright generalist advisors. We now live in the age of the communicator midwits running ever bigger government. Competence is walking out the door, just as government and bureaucracy is taking over everything. The modern world is increasingly discarding the very bright, who in any case are becoming rarer. Incompetence and entropy are winning.
A drop in living standards coming up. In fact, it’s kind of being happening since 1971. Arguably, that’s when our civilization peaked.
