We held the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft on Saturday. 10 owners competed. The owners came from the readership of this blog, and they themselves are not public figures in any way. The intellectuals they chose are shown below in the order they were selected. Because one owner arrived well after the draft had begun, the order in which teams picked was a bit mixed up.
Scoring for this season, which starts April 1 and ends June 30, is based on three categories:
(M) memes. These are phrases that are associated with a certain intellectual. For example, Black Swan is associated with Taleb (pick 31). If during the season the term Black Swan is used in at least three prominent places (well-known podcast or blog, newspaper, new book), that scores one M for Taleb. No more than one M per season for each catch-phrase. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme,” was not chosen, although picking him would have guaranteed his owner at least one meme point.
(B) bets. An intellectual scores a B by expressing a belief in quantitative probabilistic terms. Oddly enough, Annie Duke, who would be credited with a meme if the phrase “Thinking in Bets” were to appear three times during the season, was not selected, either.
(S) steel-manning. The intellectual presents a point of view with which he or she disagrees in a way that someone who holds that point of view would consider to be representative. It is the opposite of straw-manning. I believe that Peter Thiel (pick 70) coined the term, or at least popularized it, and his owner is all but certain to pick up an M point. S’s are most likely to be earned by bloggers and podcasters and least likely to be earned by tweets or political speeches. They are more likely to be earned by centrists than by hard-core Red or Blue team members.
Tyler Cowen (pick 2) is a solid three-category player. He sometimes states beliefs in terms of probabilities, he tries to steel-man (although at times he can be too terse to earn a point), and he has meme candidates, such as Great Stagnation or “mood affiliation.”
Scott Alexander (pick 4) is likely to be a monster in the S and B categories.
I think that for next season I would add a category (R), for summarizing the research on two (or more) sides of a controversial issue. I would score one R for every 2 examples. I don’t want to give away an R to someone who just looks at research on a single topic during the season. Adding the (R) category would make Tyler and Scott even stronger candidates.
I will note that I thought that about a third of the picks reflected mood affiliation, and I would not have chosen them. I don’t want to pick on any owner in particular, but I’ll just say that I don’t think politicians will score points, and I will not be rooting for whoever took Oren Cass. By the end of this season, all of the picks will have track records, and those should inform owners who compete in a follow-up season.
I would caution the reader not to pay too much attention to relative ranking within this list. If there had been ten drafts, with ten different sets of owners, the average order would represent a consensus rank. But with only one iteration, the results reflect individual idiosyncrasies. In your comments, I am not interested in what picks you don’t like or what picks you think should have gone higher. I am interested in suggestions for intellectuals who seem likely to earn at least 3 points but who were not chosen.
Much as I poor-mouth my connections, I can brag by saying that in recent years I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages with pick numbers 2, 5, 13, 32, 37, 38, 42, 95, 97, 132, and 147. I have met several others in person, but not recently. I believe that a social graph of the picks would show Tyler Cowen (2) and Marc Andreessen (97) as having the most dense connections with other picks.
1 Joe Rogan
2 Tyler Cowen
3 Joel Kotkin
4 Scott Alexander*
5 Russ Roberts
6 Steve Sailer
7 John Cochrane
8 Coleman Hughes
9 Matt Yglesias
10 Sam Harris
11 Noah Smith
12 Glenn Greenwald
13 Martin Gurri
14 Jordan Peterson
15 Brett Weinstein
16 Matt Stoller
17 John McWhorter
18 Matt Ridley
19 Lex Fridman
20 Heather Heying
21 Roger Kimball
22 Glenn Loury
23 Jonathan Haidt
24 Eric Weinstein
25 Wilfred Reilly
26 Cass Sunstein
27 Donald Trump
28 Elon Musk
29 Julia Galef
30 Kmele Foster
31 Nassim Taleb
32 Bryan Caplan
33 Robin Hanson
34 Judith Curry
35 Andrew Sullivan
36 Ezra Klein
37 Yuval Levin
38 Megan McArdle
39 Bjorn Lomborg
40 Lee Smith
41 Scott Sumner
42 Alex Tabarrok
43 Deirdre McCloskey
44 Ross Douthat
45 Tim Ferris
46 Lyman Stone
47 Emily Oster
48 Stephanie Kelton
49 Ann Althouse
50 Razib Khan
51 Bari Weiss
52 Oren Cass
53 Douglas Murray
54 Timothy Taylor
55 Nate Silver
56 Miles Kimball
57 Eugene Volokh
58 James Lindsay
59 Tim Harford
60 Ben Thompson
61 Dan Senor
62 Matt Taibbi
63 Rand Paul
64 Jeffrey Tucker
65 David Brooks
66 David Shor
67 Balaji Srinivasan
68 David Sacks
69 Joe Lonsdale
70 Peter Thiel
71 Thomas Sowell
72 Naval Ravikant
73 Amy Chua
74 Chamath Palihapitiya
75 Ayan Hirsi Ali
76 Paul Graham
77 Ben Shapiro
78 Richard Epstein
79 Mike Solana
80 Nick Gillespie
81 Vitalik Buterin
82 Joseph Henrich
83 Josh Blackman
84 Angelo Codevilla
85 Daniel Kahneman
86 Eliezer Yudkowski
87 Heather MacDonald
88 Lee Jussim
89 Robert Wiblin
90 Charles Murray
91 Ron DeSantis
92 Jesse Singal
93 Jim Meigs
94 Peter Zeihan
95 Patrick Collison
96 Bruno Macaes
97 Marc Andreessen
98 Stephen Bainbridge
99 Anne Applebaum
100 Eric Kaufmann
101 Paul Krugman
102 Larry Summers
103 David Henderson
104 Rod Dreher
105 Agnes Callard
106 Zvi Mowshowitz
107 Victor Davis Hanson
108 Velina Tchakarova
109 Zeynep Tufekci
110 Steven Pinker
111 Peggy Noonan
112 Luigi Zingales
113 Sari Arho Havren
114 Megyn Kelly
115 Jocko Willink
116 Arthur Brooks
117 Alister McGrath
118 Tanner Greer
119 Peter Attia
120 Josh Barro
121 Anna Khachiyan
122 Alexei Guzey
123 Tony Heller
124 Marvin Olasky
125 Mike Levine
126 Mike Nayna
127 Larry Elder
128 Michael Schellenberger
129 Phillipe Lemoin
130 Matthew Crawford
131 Jonah Goldberg
132 James Manzi
133 Christopher Balding
134 Peter Boghossian
135 Niall Ferguson
136 Conor Friedersdorf
137 The New Neo*
138 F. H. Buckley
139 Applied Divinity Studies*
140 Venkatesh Rao
141 Gwern Banyam
142 Nintil*
143 Todd Zywicki
144 Robert Barnes
145 Chloe Valdary
146 Christina Hoff Summers
147 Erik Torenberg
148 Inez Stepman
149 Curtis Yarvin
150 Condoleezza Rice
* means pseudonym
Seems almost impossible for DJT to score points outside the ‘meme’ category, and I predict he will get 0 there too.
Selecting him was still a huge move though, and made me laugh when I scanned the list.
My team (my dad and I) picked DJT. Despite his lack of earning potential for Steel-manning and Bets, we believe he’ll perform pretty well in Memes. Without much effort, we rattled off a bunch of DJT memes that still have a good bit of traction. Perhaps we’ll even get a point for Covfefe.
Love it! Please stick to your strategy!
Memes seem like the most difficult category to rate for an owner entering the draft. Does a catch-phrase qualify as a meme? Who originated which meme? How would you find qualifying uses – googling doesn’t seem to turn up a lot of recent use. There is also the question of the value of a meme in general. Not sure what they add. Is “mood affiliation” that much different than Jimmy Walker’s “Dy-no-mite!”?
Exactamundo!
I’m just happy to see there are 23 women on the list at least. I hope someday soon there will be a lot more.
I’d bet against it.
The trend right now is for autistic girls in high schools everywhere to absolutely reject the idea that a girl can have an analytical mind without therefore being literally male in some essential, metaphysical, inner, non-physical but absolutely real and 100% literal sense.
Previously if you’re a teenage girl who likes the economic way of thinking or philosophy or logical paradoxes or mathematics then you’d grow up to be an adult autistic woman with a particular interest in one subject or another, studying some subject obsessively and boring other people with your arcane pursuits. No more.
Me and Plato part ways when he says that his forms aren’t just ideas but reality itself. Somehow both transcendental and real.
So although I can’t personally steel-man the concept of a noumenal, non-empirical reality to “maleness” floating free in the ether, a lot of high school kids are natural Platonists, as it turns out, and they understand it easily.
To them there’s nothing mystical about it. To me, if you have an analytical mind and you’re interested in ideas and you’re something of a high school intellectual then “essential reality” and somehow having intuitive access to it, to me that’s not substantial enough.
Shouldn’t the concept of some essential noumenal “maleness” sound, to the autistic kids, pretty much perfectly anti-intellectual, ineffable, and a rejection of analytical thinking? Shouldn’t the autistic girls want to examine the concept to try to make sense of it?
But the trend is the trend, so although there will definitely be more academics and intellectuals with two X chromosomes, fewer of them will identify as women.
the Very Bad Wizards:
David Pizarro (@peez) and Tamler Sommers (@tamler)
I was glad to see a few names picked with whom I am unfamiliar. Hopefully will learn new perspectives from them over the course of the season.
What might seem idiosyncratic in my case was based on a strategy. I tried finding people with legal or literary backgrounds for whom steel manning should be second nature. I also went for climate experts who should be talking a lot in terms of quantitative probabilities and who should also be able to clearly and accurately state points of contention. Then among these I looked for the most prolific posters and people who have books coming out or are associated with hot topics likely to get a lot of play (and that is how I came to land Oren Cass with whom I have a number of sharp policy disagreements) . The players have to put the ball in play if they are going to get runs. The worst part of this strategy is waiting for the season to begin on April 1st as my players do interviews and publish book reviews that might have scored points.
There is definitely an element of “mood affiliation” to the extent I was unwilling to pick people for whom I know I would not pay for a substack subscription. And there are a probably a good number of high scorers that I overlooked because it would be too tedious to follow them closely. I did wind up with quite a few libertarians with whom my classical leveler sympathies conflict so my team has people with a pretty good range of conflicting positions. Nevertheless I am sympathetic at least in part to every player on the team and am happy to root for them to put on point-worthy performances.
I’m pretty sure the Gwern you mean is “Gwern Branwen”, not “Banyam.”
Right. Also It’s “Heather Mac Donald” – the Mac is like a middle name.
My general approach was to try a “mood affiliation arbitrage” strategy by keeping an eye out for high-volume left-of-center pundits who are heavily involved in the podcast/blogging circuit that have the potential to stack up lots of points but wouldn’t be well liked by the majority of the people drafting — hence them getting picked lower than they ought to have if everyone were viewpoint neutral.
In general I tried to favor people who had the trifecta of published book / podcast / blog — it gives you lots of bites at the apple. There’s no accounting for a batting average or missed opportunity, so I figure my approach has a good shot if I can stomach the work in following all of them closely.
Many, perhaps most, of the names on this list are unfamiliar to me. But I would like to know who among them built or created something tangible and lasting – for example, a structure or a business – as opposed to a theory or an opinion.
I agree that is a more meaningful measure of someone’s intellect, but unfortunately the point system does not reward picking people along those lines.
A few of them have, but it depends on what you mean by ‘tangible’.
Here are some of people on that list who have been in business beyond merely selling intellectual or academic products like books, talks, or journalism.
1. Scott Alexander is a practicing psychiatrist who is starting his own clinic.
2. Steve Sailer worked in the marketing analysis business for many years.
3. Eric Weinstein handled some of Peter Thiel’s investments
4. Donald Trump – Real Estate development
5. Elon Musk – Paypal, Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX
6. Balaji Srinivasan – Counsyl, Teleport, 21.co
7. Peter Thiel – PayPal, early investor in Facebook
8. Paul Graham – YCombinator
9. Vitalik Buterin – Ethereum
10. Patrick Collison – Stripe
11. Curtis Yarvin – Mobile Web Protocol (or something), Urbit
The above are all real accomplishments and achievements in the competitive real world of business. These aren’t people who have lived their entire lives in the rarefied air at the top of an ivory tower.
That being said, many of the world’s most influential intellectuals never did much of value besides being an influential intellectual, so in terms of this game, it shouldn’t count against them.
Conquest #1 is extremely noticeable on the rare occasions Yvain talks about psychiatry instead of not-psychiatry.
No Richard Fernandez? The Belmont Club output over the past two decades has been perceptive and impressive.
I had him on my alternate list, but as it turns out I drafted 14 of my top 15 picks.
I don’t expect my team to score a lot of points as I didn’t really pay attention to the scoring rules when thinking about it; I picked people who I follow on various platforms and who I find interesting. Although I did select some well known names, I think several of the names with which readers are unfamiliar come from my roster.
Great list! Picks I’m most excited about:
25 Wilfred Reilly
30 Kmele Foster
35 Andrew Sullivan
77 Ben Shapiro
87 Heather MacDonald
90 Charles Murray
00 Arnold Kling
“I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages”
Pretty sure that the cops would show up at my door if I ever invited Arnold to lunch or a text session. It’s all good!
I fully agree on 00 Arnold Kling – tho he’s NOT available to be a team member in his own league.
However, if Tyler or somebody else had a league, he could be involved (I would have had him high on my list.)
On Ben Shapiro – do you listen to his videos/podcast, or read a transcript?
He’s on my team Sam-I-Am, but I far prefer transcripts.
Thanks for participating and best wishes to your team!
Full disclosure: right now I’m actually more Matt Walsh (also at the Daily Wire) over Ben Shapiro. We listen at night right before bed and my wife struggles with Ben’s slightly annoying voice and cadence. Both are awesome though, so great pick!
Please also consider a mid-season pickup of sleeper pick Candace Owens. She just moved from DC to Nashville and she’s embracing it! Love them boots and hat! Firearms are next on the list.
https://twitter.com/johnrich/status/1374394640833552398?s=21
Was good fun, great experience. Still have scoring questions and interested in more examples:
Here’s Don Surber criticizing 3-time Pulitzer winning NYT Tom Friedman on his prior Mid East policies & predictions (so often wrong).
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2021/03/nyts-expert-on-middle-east-smacked-down.html#more
Would this be a steelman?
Don used to do shoe-leather journalism, but now is reading news as a pundit.
Still feeling weak on Bets, too.
For the next season, after Spring Season ends, I’d think of other scoring options, 2-4 of your post:
2) major Projects on-line (P),
3) high level Discourse (D),
4) great Commentary (C).
I’d suggest you have the owners do more work – for each suggested point, have 3 owners give Yes/No within 2 (3??) days; only if 2 yes & 1 no do you, Arnold, have to decide. Others are clear majority. You might find out this could work for this season, to some extent.
A Fantasy Intellectual League of 10 FI Teams with 10 FI owners willing to look for great content could be the start of a new on-line movement for “better intellectual” content.
What is it? Who decides? Who is making the best stuff?
Status is more limited than money, tho they are related. Eyeballs are the main criteria.
No. A steel-man means explaining the other point of view, explaining why it seems plausible, and making the best case for it, before criticizing it.
I think that your other three scoring categories pose too many problems of judgement. Your idea of having multiple owners judge could be a solution, but it would lead to other problems.
But if we were to have negative points (such as subtracting points for straw-manning), we might need to assign each owner the task of monitoring his own team for positive points plus monitoring someone else’s team for negative points.
Seems like you spelled #122 “Alexi Guzey” when it should be “Alexey Guzey” : https://guzey.com
That is correct, should be Alexey
Whether you like him or not, Nick Fuentes should be on this list. For younger conservatives, he is more influential than 80% of the people listed here, despite being banned from most social media.
Additionally, Bronze Age Pervert should be on here, even if it is a pseudonym. His book has received more reviews on Amazon than all of Tyler Cowen’s books combined.
Sam Harris? I didn’t know he was still alive.
Reading over it again, this is a very “gatekeepery” list.
Experienced fantasy sports manager here: a lot of the picks seem to reflect a belief in underlying quality. But that won’t help if the picks don’t get “playing time”. Lifetime achievements won’t help if your star stays out of the news for 3 months.
Trump is a “Public Intellectual” … surely you gest.
We did not pick Donald Trump because we agreed with his behavior or ideology. Many “Public Intellectuals” express vapid damaging ideas.
When I was in college, I hated “intellectual history”, aka history of ideas. So much of it was things that were now obviously wrong but that had been taken seriously by smart people and/or became popular. Then I decided that was exactly the value of intellectual history. An idea isn’t right just because smart people believe it or it’s widely accepted. It can even be terribly, tragically wrong.
Disagreeing today might make life difficult but in fifty years, you could well be vindicated 🙂
Completely weird. Boring irrelevant neocons like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro with standout names of right and left like Sailer and Greenwald? Does anyone like Josh Barro? No John Derbyshire or Peter Brimelow but Joe Rogan is the number one “intellectual”?
I suspect that If I selected Scott Adams with pick 151 , I’d win. Classic triple threat, who might win the triple crown.