I watched this a month or two ago, solid video. I think more could have been done to connect this to popular media especially from the 90’s about physicists. Gordan Freeman of Half-Life, Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves) and Dr. Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz) from Chain Reaction, and others all portrayed physicists as some kind of superheroes whose work could solve all relevant human problems. I think popular media about physicists was probably a big part of it, and I was just slightly disappointed the video didn’t touch on that very much.
Inverting things, I’ve recently begun wondering whether a good way to subvert the pervasive ideology of “the super-rich are super-rich because they are geniuses, so it’s fair” is by increasing the visibility of mathematicians and physicists, so that people be exposed more often to actual off-the-charts intelligence.
This can still degenerate into undue IQ worship at times, but at least the ego trips of scientists tend to take much more benign forms than those of billionaires, generally speaking.
More broadly, everyone can participate in this, simply by using terms like “intelligence” and “genius” in reference to pre-eminent individuals involved in any endeavor other than business and tech (the fact that these two have become the only fields where people unironically talk of geniuses actually is high up on the list of dystopian feature of our time).
by increasing the visibility of mathematicians and physicists, so that people be exposed more often to actual off-the-charts intelligence.
While I like this idea, there’s a general rejection of the intelligence and knowledge of Academia in America. I’m not sure exposure to it would change minds as much as re-enforce the feeling that they need to bully “nerds” who speak too eloquently for them to understand.
Related: Billionaires want you to know they could have done physics (YouTube, 50 min.)
That’s funny. Jeff Bezos dropped out of the physics program at Princeton. Because it was too hard.
I watched this a month or two ago, solid video. I think more could have been done to connect this to popular media especially from the 90’s about physicists. Gordan Freeman of Half-Life, Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves) and Dr. Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz) from Chain Reaction, and others all portrayed physicists as some kind of superheroes whose work could solve all relevant human problems. I think popular media about physicists was probably a big part of it, and I was just slightly disappointed the video didn’t touch on that very much.
Inverting things, I’ve recently begun wondering whether a good way to subvert the pervasive ideology of “the super-rich are super-rich because they are geniuses, so it’s fair” is by increasing the visibility of mathematicians and physicists, so that people be exposed more often to actual off-the-charts intelligence.
This can still degenerate into undue IQ worship at times, but at least the ego trips of scientists tend to take much more benign forms than those of billionaires, generally speaking.
More broadly, everyone can participate in this, simply by using terms like “intelligence” and “genius” in reference to pre-eminent individuals involved in any endeavor other than business and tech (the fact that these two have become the only fields where people unironically talk of geniuses actually is high up on the list of dystopian feature of our time).
While I like this idea, there’s a general rejection of the intelligence and knowledge of Academia in America. I’m not sure exposure to it would change minds as much as re-enforce the feeling that they need to bully “nerds” who speak too eloquently for them to understand.