Never reading a book written by a modern Marxist ever again

Scott Alexander reviewed this book and gave both positive/negative critiques

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

I've complained about this before, but I can't review this book without returning to it: deBoer's view of meritocracy is bizarre. The overall picture one gets is of Society telling a new college graduate "I see you got all A's in Harvard, which means you have proven yourself a good person. To reward you for your virtue, I grant you the coveted high-paying job of Surgeon." Think I'm exaggerating? He writes (not in this book, from a different article):

Fred:I reject meritocracy because I reject the idea of human deserts. I don't believe that an individual's material conditions should be determined by what he or she “deserves,” no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it. I believe an equal best should be done for all people at all times. More practically, I believe that anything resembling an accurate assessment of what someone deserves is impossible, inevitably drowned in a sea of confounding variables, entrenched advantage, genetic and physiological tendencies, parental influence, peer effects, random chance, and the conditions under which a person labors. To reflect on the immateriality of human deserts is not a denial of choice; it is a denial of self-determination. Reality is indifferent to meritocracy's perceived need to “give people what they deserve.”

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you're a meritocrat with respect to surgeons.

More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

Stalking women might be one of the least offensive things about Freddie tbh

Gonna have to break out an old time favorite in celebration:

>Reading a book citing something called "Cuck philosophy"

Not surprising tbh

cuck philosophy is my favorite youtuber i watch him every day

What does that equality look like?

It looks thin and diabetes free.

Freddie DeBoer, the visionary genius who offered as a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, to close down Israel and move all the Jews to America?

"Looks like it's going to be another night on the Snorlax for me, wife brought home another man and isn't letting me watch this time."

I mean just looking at this effeminate guy in that curled up position, and then seeing his punk/butch butt wife, I already feel like I know everything I need to know about their "open marriage". I feel like I can be almost certain that he'd be perfectly happy in a monogamous relationship, and she's just a whore that's been railed so many times her brain is incapable of monogamy. He just listens to everything she says, and she can convince him of things even she doesn't believe because she's either more intelligent or better spoken.

Never reading FdB again until he fixes typos and embraces CICO, and also optionally goes off meds

No offense, but it sounds like some fricking commie gobbledygook

That youtuber isn't pro cuck. If you'd done 30 seconds of research you'd see it was a reference to who some 1700's philosopher wrote an entire treatise about cucking. He even changed the name because people were getting confused. The premise of the channel is a phd academic giving digestible lectures on continental philosophy

Oh I remember a video by this guy being entertaining