Thread by @CherylRofer

The Jeffrey Epstein story intersects with Jonathan Franzen's climate ignorance at the point of male ego. [thread]

JE supported a number of organizations like Edge and Media Lab that are supposed to be Thinking Big Thoughts. He himself liked to Think Big Thoughts. He made friends with actual scientists who said they appreciated his Big Thoughts. 2/

I've been fascinated by those Big Thought organizations. I think we need more thinking across boundaries, more making sense of abstractions, breaking down the dusty academic distinctions. I sometimes like to think that I Think Big Thoughts. 3/

So when one of them would show up, I'd look at it and try to figure out what it was doing, how it was moving some of my objectives forward. I always found them disappointing. 4/

Often, the same folks would show up in the new organization, people we now know were in JE's orbit. Stephen Pinker and Lawrence Krauss are two examples.

It began to seem to me that this was a closed group, as stuck in its own thinking as any other. 5/

And, of course, most of the members of the group were white males. 6/

A while back, one of those organizations, TEDx, asked me to give a talk. I was pleased for almost a full minute.

"You can go to our website and fill out the application."

"Wait, you are asking me to give a talk but I have to apply?"

"Yes, we find it works out better that way."

That's pretty manipulative. I'm more than happy to speak to a group and do it a few times a year. But put myself in the position of a supplicant when they're the ones who asked me?

No thanks
8/

I haven't actually seen many Big Thoughts come from these places. I saw a discussion on Twitter about the Media Lab, and it appears they've produced some things. But do they qualify as Big Thought?

I'll leave that as an open question. I haven't seen it, but I don't entirely know

Coming back to JF, you've probably seen that in his latest article, he does climate modeling in his head, AND adds in a psychological dimension. No clunky computers for him.

Now that is Big Thought. 10/

It's male ego, approached and inflated via the intellect. It seems to me now that those Big Thought organizations should maybe have specified a goal, like figuring out gravity, and worked toward it.

That would have excluded both JE and JF, since they lacked knowledge for it 11/

We need more thinking that pulls disparate issues together, that brings new approaches to old problems. But it's clear that those Big Thought organizations weren't the way to do it. 12/12