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from You Must Change Your Life
  • The idea of acrobatics introduces another challenging aspect of the book – its elitism . Most people can՚t be acrobats, and the very idea seems closely related to the Nietzschean idea of the Ubermensch, always a bit suspect in a democratic culture. But at least the hierarchy proposed here is one of talent and spiritual advancement, not force or rule.

elitism

05 Jan 2026 - 13 Nov 2026
Open in Logseq
    • I really hate this, based on my leftist/democratic commitments but am starting to question it.
    • There's always an elite, simply due to the way societies work. You can't have everybody involved in everything, groups need direction which requires leaders and bam, you have an elite.
    • Of course I'm in an elite (how many people have a PhD from the MIT Media Lab?) even though I don't feel that way. I'm an extreme culture snob, and I have fights (in my head) with other snobs from different branches of the elite (eg, the WS guys who are art-snobs).
    • Hypothesis: there are two ways to be an elite: the snobbery/excluding mode, and the thought-leadership mode (sorry for that unfortunate phrase but it seems apt). A good critic is not trying to exclude anyone because they aren't good enough, but to bring people along who might not have the education training vision to see what is actually good.
      • I think by nature I'm the second kind, but all the machinery of social rank pushes me and everyon else into the first kind.
    • I was impressed by Marvin Minsky's habit of arguing with randoms on usenet. At the real top end, elitism disappears, Minsky had no need to reinforce his social status.
      • Find some examples
        • Ask Claude
          • This is excellent — there's a goldmine of primary source material here. Here's what the evidence shows:

          • Minsky on Usenet: Concrete Examples

          • The main venue: Minsky was a regular poster on comp.ai.philosophy, the Usenet newsgroup for philosophy of AI.
          • Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham AI professor) noted that he and Minsky "communicated publicly via 'usenet' from the early-mid 1990s (or perhaps earlier?)," and that Minsky made "frequent contributions to comp.ai.philosophy (which should be collected somewhere)."
          • **A documented example — the 2003 "father of AI bashes kids" thread:** This is the most vivid surviving example. A Wired article quoted Minsky criticizing the direction of AI research, which prompted an enormous Slashdot pile-on and spilled into comp.ai.philosophy. Minsky responded directly in the newsgroup — not through a press office or a formal reply, but just turning up and posting.
          • His post was from min...@media.mit.edu (his MIT address), and the thread title was literally "father of A.I. bashes kids."
          • In that post, Minsky laid out at length his actual views on what went wrong in AI — the failure to build commonsense knowledge, the dead-ends of neural nets and robotics at the time — things the reporter had mangled. The surrounding thread was a genuine free-for-all: random people calling him a fool, one poster writing multi-thousand-word screeds at him, another accusing him of being controlled by Illuminati and Freemasons. Minsky's one visible reply was characteristically low-key: he greeted a colleague ("Thanks, David. Long time, no see!") and simply posted his fuller argument.
          • His own stated attitude toward online flame wars:
          • "I have made many friends on Internet newsgroups whom I've never met, and in many cases I don't hope to meet. These 'flame wars' are wonderful: People tell you what they really think, or else they lie — it doesn't matter."
          • He elaborated:
          • "I don't like civility. The trouble with insulting somebody in their presence is that they'll hit you. And you can't express yourself very well."
          • His reasoning was epistemically serious rather than adversarial:
          • "Minsky was no troll. Trolls go for the 'lulz' (the 'joy' or 'achievement' of causing emotional distress); Minsky went for the truth."
          • He also preferred the online medium because, as he put it,
          • "face-to-face contact is almost impossible to penetrate."
          • The pattern noted by colleagues: The thread itself includes a regular noting that
          • "Marvin used to post often this group before the bots took over,"
          • with another replying that "he still will post here if he has something to say" — confirming it was an ongoing habit, not a one-off.
          • So the picture is clear: a Turing Award winner and MIT professor, posting from his @media.mit.edu address into chaotic Usenet threads, engaging with anonymous randoms, being called a fool by Ukrainian cranks and Illuminati theorists, and apparently enjoying it.
          • Other examples:
            • **2. "Annual Minsky Loebner Prize Revocation Prize 1995" — comp.ai, March 1995** 🔗 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.ai/c/dZtU8vDD_bk/m/QYaYB18qAToJ
              • This is a post directly authored by Marvin Minsky, dated March 2, 1995, in which he calls the Loebner Prize "stupid" and its annual campaign "obnoxious and unproductive."
              • Clean, unambiguous, from his MIT address.
              • A regular participant notes: "With the possible exception of Marvin Minsky, who sometimes posts on c.a.p, it's almost certain that McCarthy has done more for science... than anyone posting on this group ever will."
              • — confirming his presence there was well-known enough to be used as a reference point.
              • Sloman confirms: "We communicated publicly via 'usenet' from the early-mid 1990s (or perhaps earlier?)... I learned from his frequent contributions to comp.ai.philosophy (which should be collected somewhere)."
              • The Google Groups archive is the main repository. You can also search directly at groups.google.com for "Marvin Minsky" author:min...@media.mit.edu to surface more threads, though the interface is now read-only since Google ended Usenet support in early 2024.
    • Social status is such a fact of life and has to be constantly navigated. That's not elitism, its just basic society.