The smartest guys are the stupidest guys

Jim VandeHei is an extremely successful journalist who went from a high-profile job at the Washington Post to founding two of the indispensable online-only news sites, Politico and Axios. Clearly he’s a savvy businessman. I am unsure if he still does any actual reporting, but I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was once very good at it. All this is to say that, without knowing him personally, I don’t find it a stretch to conclude that he’s an intelligent person.

He’s also one of the dumbest fucking people alive.

How is this possible? How is it that so many people who display brilliance or even genius in some areas can be so easily snowed in others? Part of it, I’m sure, is the rich person’s disease, whereby successful and wealthy people are trapped within a self-reinforcing bubble of praise, adulation, and material reward. Anyone who could or would challenge you gets marginalized before disappearing altogether. You’re left only with those who see nothing but your success, and who probably came into your orbit because of it. They don’t want to derail the gravy train.

When you think about it that way, it’s obvious why people who are surrounded by sycophants would be so enthralled by the sycophancy machine. Many of them conceive of themselves as intellectual renegades, despite having been fully absorbed into the establishment years ago. That’s how you get sentences like this, from VandeHei: “I fed AI every medical record I have — MRIs, blood work, heart rate — and told it to be clinical and brutally honest.” (my emphasis)

See? I told the software that lies and flatters people to be brutally honest with me. Therefore when it flattered me, I can be certain that it wasn’t lying! This is obviously moronic, but a very common belief among converts.

Similarly, I’ve read in way too many articles about online scams that putatively smart people can actually be among the most susceptible. The most infamous recent example was probably the one that was summed up as “I write a personal-finance column for a living. How did I end up handing $50k cash in a shoebox to a stranger?” (original article at The Cut; archive.ph link) I honestly thought it was brave to write that column, knowing what a roasting the author would be in for. But it underscores another point: gullibility is often a matter of psychology and situation, not intellect.

Now, I don’t know what Jim VandeHei’s excuse is for voluntarily turning himself into an “AI lab rat.” It’s not like he got a phone call from someone pretending to be his kidnapped grandson and saying they needed him to burn 80 kajillion tokens or he’d die. But his conclusions certainly read much less like the results of sober analysis and more like a guy emerging from a five-day ayahuasca trip in the desert. He’s cracked the code! Don’t you see?

I think the common traits of your VandeHeis and your Andreesens and all the rest are really more a toxic mix of self-regard and self-delusion. They are smart, but believe themselves to be uniquely so — not just smarter but different from other people — and their success proves it. They reject common knowledge in some areas while rejecting expertise in others. They are vigilant against the wrong things. Most of all, they spend their lives in an echo chamber while believing they’re the only ones outside of one. It’s not a good place to be.