‘The Intellectual Yet Idiot’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

‘The Intellectual Yet Idiot’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Liberty Blitzkrieg:
"In particular, they all (totalitarian systems) seem to have in common an intense dislike of the more abstract forms of thought –a dislike characteristically also shown by many of the collectivists among our scientists.
– From my 2010 review of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
The following is an excellent takedown of the so-called “elite,” the status quo, whatever you want to call them.
We all know the type.
It’s the self-assured people who constantly get things wrong, constantly screw up on issues of national significance and yet somehow never face any consequences or accountability for their actions.
Here’s the meat of the piece, originally published at Medium:
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities — but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. 
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. 
They can't tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science..."
Read on!!!