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This tendency is very widespread. It appears that the smarter and better educated you are, the more carefully you have to defend your mind against nonsense. I would argue that to really, fall victim to insanity like Effective Altruism or Communism, you need to be smart enough to absorb and follow a totalizing ideology to its logical endpoint and you need to live enough of your life entirely in your head to be seduced by pretty ideas about how you could fix the world if only someone made you king. Normal people are too concerned with the practicalities of the ordinary world around them find such batshit crazy unconstrained visions compelling. Intellectuals have no such mental constraints and have a false and dangerous sense that they should be in charge of everything.
perrymetzger ↗