Thread by @KrisAtLarge

we weren't *great* students in college. we maybe got as many Fs as As, if not more. we failed out of @Caltech completely! still we struggled and pushed our way towards our degrees. here's two of them.

as a result, we've seen a lot of people like @NateSilver538. *fakers*.

(1/x)

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1632072470344638465

while we were at @SDSU especially, which was a very big and crowded school full of people studying every conceivable subject, it was impossible not to run into people like @NateSilver538, @mattyglesias, @mtaibbi, &c.—people who thought that "higher learning" was a crock.

(2/x)

likely they were there mostly out of a sense of family obligation: their parents had money and power over them and pushed them to get a degree chiefly because college degrees are vital to social status in "the West". #capitalism may hate education but it loves *degrees*.

(3/x)

and because the @NateSilver538 / @mattyglesias crowd seems to regard schooling chiefly as a matter of social climbing, they clearly never bothered to learn anything while they were there. probably Silver thought he was a "math genius" already, even though he's clearly not.

(4/x)

one of the most reliable signs that you're dealing with a total faker, like @NateSilver538, is that whenever he talks about something that he's read, he *never actually talks about it*. instead, he tells us how he _felt_ about the thing he read. that's the important thing.

(5/x)

"Love the title of the paper and while I don't necessarily agree with every last claim it makes" is probably something that the @NateSilver538 / @jonathanchait / @jbarro crowd mumble about literally every vaguely academic or sciency thing they bring up in conversation.

(6/x)

could @NateSilver538 give any sort of logical or coherent account of "every last claim" made in any paper that he wants to brag about pushing in front of his eyes, in public? (whether Nate Silver truly ever READS anything is to be doubted; looking at a page isn't reading.)

(7/x)

maybe @NateSilver538 would surprise us all but in all probability, Silver feels that he needs to show no such grasp of anything he's "studied".

he probably thinks of himself as an "effective reader", i.e. someone who picks a few memetic bits from his reading material.

(8/x)

this is very common in #business and #entrepreneur circles—the bookshelves of the United States are bursting with volumes aimed at go-getting men who crave #confidence and #success and winning #sales methods, and one such reliable method is pretending to be well-read.

(9/x)

hence @NateSilver538, faker, is in very good company. all the leadership roles in #capitalism are jam-packed with fakers like him—people who have learned and practiced a line of pseudointellectual patter that makes them sound much more knowledgeable than they really are.

(10/x)

"Love the title of the paper and while I don't necessarily agree with every last claim it makes" is @NateSilver538 doing something silly: he's *pretending to be superior* to the thing he's bragging about reading. the point is acting like he's ABOVE his reading material.

(11/x)

because @NateSilver538 has only a pack of other superficial bigots to impress, his line of semi-coherent blather is sufficiently impressive. it's other racist dullards he's jockeying with—he runs away from all real intellectual challenges, because they're *beneath him*.

(12/x)

because no matter how many scraps of scientific or statistical jargon @NateSilver538 or @mtaibbi or @jonathanchait have memorized in order to trot them out in conversation so they can sound like the grownups in the room, these people are children; they *resent* learning.

(13/x)

they think it's all fake and flim-flam—people saying big words in order to make them feel bad about themselves, and because @NateSilver538 is a bigot, he prioritizes his hurt feelings above just about all other entities in the Cosmos.

~Chara of Pnictogen