Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas?

theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."

Comments

Re:Mweeehhhh

[CrimsonAvenger]

In Starship Troopers (the book anyway), the bugs were non-sentient. But every time a colony was distressed, the workers bred this "brain bug", and then the problem would magically go away. Then the brain bug became irrelevant to it again.

Might want to reread the book, if you think that was part of it.

Hint: it wasn't. Wasn't part of the movie, either, by the by.

In The Mote In God's Eye, the Moties are led by a political caste, with other castes obeying them, as they went about their political machinacions and wars. The Engineer caste was ungodly brilliant, but otherwise completely mute, and specifically he juxtaposed it against the yabbering schemes of the political class.

Might want to reread Mote in God's Eye, also.

The groups you describe as "castes" were actually subspecies. And the Ruler subspecies didn't do the machinations and politics stuff, their Negotiator subspecies did that part.

Note, for reference, that the Negotiator subspecies was actually a hybrid of the Ruler and Engineer subspecies...

Come to that, the Engineer wasn't especially brilliant - "idiot-savant" was a description used more than once about them.