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Convulsive Correction!
I work in the world of business and technology. And I have seen an endless stream of terrible, awful, no-good technologies receive billions in funding. The standard worldview among financial “experts” has been that if everyone is investing in something, it must be good. This is not because intelligent people are stupid. It is because people intelligently rationalize stupidity.
The way people think dominates: if you see things through one lens, then everything is filtered through that perspective. It is why people who adhere to different religions never really consider data that would suggest to someone else that their religion is wrong. The same thing is true for notions about health: a person who is focused on macrobiotics or sugar or bran or vaccines will explain everything through that lens. People don’t really care that other people, with different health beliefs, may live just as long as they do. We are all very stubborn about changing our minds just because the data might not agree with what we already think.
So people – politicians and businessmen and investors, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry – have an instinctive gut belief that what most people do and think is the right way to go. And so they follow the herd. Does anyone believe Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, really believes in Free Minds and Free Markets? Apparently, he does now, because the winds have shifted. The same can be said for all the huge companies that have changed their DEI policies. The old giants are toppling.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, explained how ways of looking at data can be entirely dismissed when a new way of thinking comes along. He points out that science does not build linearly – in normal times we may stand on the shoulders of giants, but when everything changes, we stand on the shoulders of giant killers. Kuhn invented the common use of the idea of a Paradigm Shift.
There are lots of fads in the world, including investment and technology worlds. It was not long ago that everyone fixated on drinking eight extra cups of water or thought that getting in 10,000 steps was the Key to a Longer/Better Life. And now it is living without added sugar, processed food or GMOs. In history, humans have lived through every imaginable fad about human health – macrobiotics, bran, organic, you name it. Every supplement under the sun seems to come into vogue. Almost all of them go out again. But people still remain credulous to a fault. Somehow we desperately read up on, and cling to, the latest “discovery” that eggs are good – or bad.
In the realm of overarching economic expectations, people have been predicting the end of fossil fuels since they were first discovered. And if you go back 20 years, everyone KNEW oil would be $200 a barrel and climbing by now. Go back to the start of Covid, when everyone was sure aviation would not recover to be the same as it was – Zoom meetings would replace travel, and businesses would stop spending money on expensive tickets… all the certainties faded away. But they faded slowly.
Most of these changes are slow, slow enough that most people are surprised when they are confronted with their previous beliefs and assertions. And the shifts, when they occur, do not bring everyone with them. There are always some True Believers left behind when the common perspective changes. Many people are still hydrating like crazy, eating bran supplements, or wearing masks. They might do it for the rest of their lives. But they are still just mere remnants of a no-longer-popular ideology.
Think of all those trends: New business models that rarely, if ever make money – think of Uber and AirBnB and all their competitors. World-beating mobility like Segways, or Scooters (not profit centers even if popular). And think of technologies that also failed or are failing: Blockchain and eVTOLs and EVs in general; battery technologies, hydrogen, wind and solar energy.
But right now, we are in extraordinary times, times that we have never seen before, and almost certainly will never see again. Right now, in this moment, the world is in a wormhole. Everything is changing very, very quickly. And a lot of things that everyone knew to be certainly true are simply disintegrating. It is a paradigm shift – when the world view shifts.
Electric vehicles were very hot – and now they are a lodestone for every car maker except for (maybe) Tesla. I know Ford dealerships who are trying to get all EVs off the lot for good. Everyone knew EVs were going to dominate. But now it looks like they will remain a niche product for those who have a driveway and can afford at least two vehicles.
In aviation, things I have been predicting for years are now coming true. All the eVTOLs have failed or are failing despite billions of dollars in investment. See Lilium, Volocopter, CityAirbus. The electric aircraft, like Eviation and Airbus Electric and Heart and Tecnam – all failed or failing. Hybrids will follow suit for all but the smallest of niches. And hydrogen? Complete collapse. ZeroE, Universal Hydrogen, Airbus… all of the above are being relegated to the “send them research dollars to keep the nerds employed while we try to think of something else” assisted living facility.
Expensive bio-fuels, such as SAF, will absorb billions more before they, too, will succumb to reality. If I truly thought global warming/climate change was the biggest threat to mankind, I would be furious that the cause has been used as an excuse for political kickbacks and shenanigans. Whether or not climate change is real, the funds allocated toward it that were pure corruption have undermined its validity and made a mockery of what were supposed to be noble goals.
In aviation, the tide has turned so quickly that in the past 2 weeks alone, all the previously giddy pundits have turned into skeptics (see AirInsight, Leeham and AviationWeek).
The crazy thing is that the facts have not changed. The bad ideas were bad a year ago, and two years ago. Investing billions in battery technologies has been contraindicated since forever (the net ROI on leading-edge battery investments is awful). But most people, most of the time, are not trying to get it right. They just don’t want to stick their heads up.
This explains why, when ESG was hot, everyone needed to show that they were ESG. The same was true with DEI. Now that two major crashes have happened in short order while DEI hires were behind aircraft controls, I think DEI will be abandoned. No airline, even Delta, can afford to have a reputation for having pilots based on qualities other than their merit as pilots.
The True Believers? Casualties of war. Those companies that believed in government-backed climate change, the ones built entirely on the backs of the terrible, no-good assumptions that underpin ESG and DEI? I mean the ones that did not realize it was all a scam or at least a fad, the ones that went all-in instead of merely paying lip service or sponging up the free money. I hope they rest in peace.
Europeans remain largely True Believers. And so they are either behind on this massive correction, or they will stick to their “principles” and commit suicide. Given the posture of most European countries on Muslims, civilizational suicide is probably the odds-on favorite.
Just as Trump is forcing the Deep State to go back to its Constitutional roots as working for the president, so, too, the fundamental reality is reasserting itself across the entire swath of technology and innovation. What makes this so gobsmackingly, head-shakingly dizzying is that it is happening so quickly that people cannot keep up.
We live in interesting times. And I am loving it.
Published in General
Heh. I’ve spent time there.
Eh. You still have to poke your head up above the parapet periodically. Breakthroughs never come to those cowering in the bottom of the trench.
On the other hand, poking your head up too long will get it blown off.
The battery research was and is unlikely to produce a game-changer, mainly because game-changers are extremely rare and there have been a lot of people plowing that field ever since Alessandro Volta said “hey look!”
I eat what I like, and try not to eat (or drink) too much of it. A person could make himself sick worrying about eating the “wrong” thing . . .
It is a combination of herd behavior and not really caring that much about Other People’s Money.
The other side of this is the “no prevailing wisdom can change until the academic in charge of this department dies” rule.
Leaving the hard issues to the smarties to sort out has been the American way for a long time. We still have a civilizational trust in the ruling class that financed and built hoover dams and interstate highways. It has taken a lot to make us normies realize that our current elites are uniformly terrible and we need to pay attention.
The EU’s current leadership class has followed some dodgey theories lately, and suffered economically as a result. The curse of parliamentary democracy has slowed the inevitable correction.
Still not sure I love it, myself. Good post.
I agree with everything you said here! And I am a big Thomas Kuhn fan–I wrote a paper on that book and it got me out of the Freshman Composition class at Wash. U. School of Engineering.
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If I see any of those small-minded Ricochet pedants nitpicking about irrelevant details, like ‘Well, not through jet engine compressor fans’, or ‘Strictly speaking, nothing can be explained through a lens’, or ‘Technically, nothing is ever filtered through a perspective…
Well, I will let ’em have it!
Me and IWe against the world.
You do. And I do. But the vast majority of people are not in the “breakthrough” business. They design their lives to get to the end with as little uncertainty and risk as possible. They are in good company, because that is how 99% of the world thinks and acts.
So “what do other people think/do?” is the only reality checker they need.
I’m always amazed when people I thought were pretty darn smart don’t seem to have functioning BS detectors. This is most often because they are not willing to take off their party political spectacles.
But even more sadly, while truth seekers and genuinely curious people are shamefully rare, the love of money has a strong pull on a significant portion of them too.
My rule is that Faith and Belief belong in the religious realm, everything else better have proofs.
I think your thoughts regarding stupidity are confused. What is the difference between being stupid and rationalizing stupidity?
Stupidity is not a lack of general intelligence. It is behavior, not a trait. Like all behaviors, it requires skill to perform well, and requires practice to obtain the skill. Of course intelligent people are better at being stupid.
People can show great ingenuity in retconning stupidity into something not quite as dimwitted as the original.
Yep – being good at stupidity requires average or better intelligence.
Socrates was considered the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing.
“Stupid” is a strange judgement. Anyone who is “smart” like Socrates realizes that their pitiful knowledge next to the sum total of all knowledge is effectively nothing.
Geniuses are often poor practical thinkers. They make “stupid” choices because they are overconfident or very specialized.
I hate the term “stupid” because I’ve worked with some “near savants” (think “Rain Man”) and they are AMAZING in a narrow field. Are they “stupid”?
My personal belief is that humility is among the greatest virtues. The more “learned” we are, the more we realize how “stupid” we are about 99%+ of the total known. The “unknown unknowns” almost certainly exceed the knowns by a high exponent.
All of that may be true, but it does not mean that good judgment and wisdom do not exist.
I love your logic that “The standard worldview among financial “experts” has been that if everyone is investing in something, it must be good. This is not because intelligent people are stupid. It is because people intelligently rationalize stupidity.”
Of course there is another principle at work. This is the monetary principle.
Once the people who handle hedge funds, plus those who control the various chartered banks of the Fed Reserve and thus influence Wall Street, as well as the Wall Street financial whiz kids themselves understand that a political philosophy is not only a philosophy but a matter about which our Fed government thru its agencies is going to shift billions upon billions of dollars, then almost any one inside the world of finance will decide to invest in it.
Think about this: going back to 2007, George W Bush’s two daughters were hot on environmental matters. The young women are from a family who made their fortune in oil. So I am sure they understood that the new world of alt energy was upon us.
This should not surprise us. In 1992, George Walker Bush signed off on the Sustainability Pact in 1992, which committed our nation to the goals of the Rio De Janero Environmental Summit. (I think that this summit was from the same year. I have posted several times the young Nancy Pelosi’s impassioned plea to Congress in 1992 to wake up and realize that the goals of Sustainability Movement were crucial goals, and that unless the Agenda for 2021 was honored by our going that route, we were in trouble. The video of that speech is on my other computer and when I am back on that one, I will post it in this topic.)
Outside of the Bush family, Big Energy itself invested in alt energies. At first various big oil producing and distributing companies might have used the solar farm they invested in as a public relations matter. But as time went on and ever increasing subsidies came about to help whoever wanted wind farms or solar farms to spring up, Big Energy threw their hats in the ring and took these investments seriously.
I have little belief in any of these technologies. For instance, the Tesla car might be fine for wealthy people here in California to go out and buy. However should they try to use that vehicle to travel to the ski resorts on a winter’s day, I can only say “Good Luck.” Traffic heading to the mountains is often grid lock on roads experiencing high winds and below freezing temps. So that environmentally-concerned family might be facing inconvenience when the electric battery fails or great peril if enough snow covers the car so that it is not discovered til spring. Thirty other significant problems afflict the Tesla.
Meanwhile the scientists in our nation who have been working on “free energy”* are either dying off from afflictions hitting old people, as well as dying from suspicious deaths. This past June, a close family friend involved in such matters died of a stroke, a natural health occurrence, just as he was undertaking bringing free energy to the people of Turkey. Babcock’s first undertaking to sell his technologies involved his attempts to have American companies show an interest but none did. It was left to him to realize this would not change so he had to go off to Saudi Arabia and to Turkey to have his technologies bring about a difference to humanity.
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*Free energy is for the most part not really free, but simply making use of energy that is available but which is ignored. For instance water moving through irrigation pipes generates energy. It would be silly for a homeowner to try and capture this energy as the cost of doing it would be greater than the amount of energy then made available for their household’s use. But farmers and big ag companies in other countries with large scale irrigation projects find it beneficial to go this route.
As promised in Reply #12, here is the video from 1992 of a young Nancy Pelosi urging Congress to approve of the Sustainability Movement measures necessary for the US to align itself with Agenda 21. (Now called Agenda 2030.)
Note that as part of her ethos backing her enthusiasm for this “environmental movement,” she mentions that the current president, George Herbert Walker Bush, had already signed on to it.
Run time: a bit over 90 seconds. https://youtu.be/fbGOsBlDeU8
Also please note: The reason I am posting this video is to show how long ago the Paul Erlich/Club of Rome proposals have been in the works. “Sustainability”, which is the clever window dressing word for Deprivation was one of the primary goals of The Club of Rome’s founders even further back in history than Pelosi’s speech. That club came into existence in 1970.
I think you have the exact confusion I was trying to address. You dislike the term “stupid”, it gives you discomfort. If you were to fully adopt the idea that stupidity is not like a withered arm or a mental defect, but is instead something a normal person chooses to do, actively – would that change your response?
When we say someone is stupid, it does not mean we think they are lesser beings. It’s the opposite – if they were mentally defective, we might excuse whatever behavior. It’s not being stupid if it’s because they can’t reason. Stupidity is always a choice. In fact, one if its preconditions may be a lack of humility. In any case, stupidity should be reviled and ridiculed, never accepted.