"Academia is a heartless cold bureaucracy"<p>This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up about something and then not changing it for anything.<p>"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia, so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself, something he hints at in the video.
If measured by IQ that's believed to be Kim Ung-yong at 210. Still. if he would not have had poor academia experiences (what did he do at liberal arts college anyway?), he might have been very useful to the world. Terrible waste.
"we need an alternative to academia" is correct<p>"stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading.<p>The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a good look at places where really smart people were in charge.<p>There is more to solving political problems than intelligence.<p>The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in democracies than less motivated, more educated voters.<p>This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly, smart people outside of academia.<p>It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.