They’re so proudly ignorant. Every policy board, every think tank, every council is full of people who do intellectual vibes but despise having to actually learn things or think about stuff. They’re completely obsessed with misinformation and being the smartest person in the room but have no tolerance for knowledge or curiosity.
Don’t ever let them get away with saying the common person is too stupid to understand the real world. They are epistemological vandals. They replace actual knowledge with markets and consider learning to be an exercise in marketing.
as someone who has done ‘the literature’ on various topics, believe it or not, all literature starts with someone who can ‘think relatively soundly about the world’ and yet nevertheless sometimes facts take you into surprising places that are not immediately intuitively obvious
Put another way: If something is a significant academic field then it likely isn’t something you can completely reproduce by intuition.