If you’re new and have a question, please read the FAQ post first.
Please refer to Definitions page for any terms or abbreviations that I use that you don’t understand. If a term is missing, please let me know.
This post will be too long for the email, please come to the substack website.
Substack has launched an iOS app for those of you using apple devices. I am an android peasant and can’t tell you if its good or not, but check it out if you have an iPhone or some other such trappings of royalty.
This was originally going to be my intro section for this weeks forecast post, but it got too long (4,300 words, lol). So now its a standalone post.
Table of Contents
The Midwit and Authority
IQ Is Real
Economics and Academics
The King Nerd
Ego and the Midwit
Conclusion
1. The Midwit and Authority
I’ll start with something I’ve said a thousand times before. The academic and credentialed class are mentally handicapped. I’ve covered the phenomenon of the midwit before, these are the people who are the most likely to make a mistake due to a combination of arrogance and moderately above average intelligence.
Midwit - A derogatory term used to refer to someone in the middle of the IQ distribution. Often too smart to accept common sense, and too dumb to be capable of meaningful insight. The midwit meme often outlines the truth that the left and right ends of the IQ bell curves often come to the same conclusion, while the middle is often ignorant and arrogant in their misguided beliefs.
When combined with a significant ego, having a 105-120 IQ is a mental handicap. It makes you worse at thinking than someone with an 85 or 90 IQ. People below average are more likely to believe they have a below average intelligence, and thus more likely to be able to readily identify competence than those in the 105-120 IQ range. People in the midwit range have to be told who to listen to and who to ignore. We unfortunately live in a society of people who are incapable of trusting the truth of their eyes and ears. Their ego is tied to making the “right” decisions and having the “right” opinions, but they are too terrified of being “wrong” so they do not ever try to form opinions of their own and instead look towards authority.
Most people at an opera could not reliably identify a talented opera singer if they were to walk by them singing at a train station. But they will clap all the same if they are at an opera house. They did not suddenly gain a discerning ear, they are instead clapping for the opera house itself. They trust the authority of the opera house, and assume that anyone singing there must be good.
So the majority of people rely on authorities to tell them what is correct, and what is wrong. Who is an “expert,” and who is persona non grata. There may have been a time when this sort of status signaling of hierarchy actually functioned. That time is likely over 100 years past, if it ever existed at all. Currently, the institutions are corrupted, academics are scarcely more than witch doctors, whose claims cannot even be repeated in semi-rigorous experiments. Over 2 decades of Alzheimers research is in the trash, because the scientists have only just now figured out that the main basis of their research was fake. That means that for 2 decades, nobody tested the primary assumption, or if they did, they shrugged and ignored it. “He must be good honey, why else would the Opera house choose to have him sing here?” Only 11% of landmark published cancer research of the past 2 decades could be repeated in a laboratory setting. Academia is bankrupt. The two ends of the bell curve above can see this, but the midwit is blinded by the great lie of society. The middle is clapping for the opera house, they are not judging the melody. They are mentally incapable of judging the melody, but believe themselves to have this capacity.
2. IQ is Real
I’m reminded now of a video I watched from Jubilee where 6 strangers had to figure out how to rank each other in order of IQ.
Spoiler, the lowest IQ in the room had a PhD, and worse, it was in a hard science. You can already see why only 11% of cancer research is even reproducible. The rankings are only tangentially important. What’s more important is that within 5 minutes of watching the video you could tell who was higher up and who was lower based on the verbal certainty they were willing to express combined with their displayed curiosity. Combine zero curiosity with high expressed certainty and you have the midwit. The more intelligent you are, the more you realize you need to gather information to inform your conclusions. This doesn’t mean having no conclusions, but it does mean always being open to adjusting and re-aligning your beliefs and conclusions. It also means not being afraid to be the person asking what may be the dumbest questions in the room. For instance, the 3rd highest IQ in the room is in the Marines, no college education. The 3 lowest scores did not ask him what his occupation in the marines was and made a conclusion with a small amount of information. The 2 above him held off on making any overt judgements and allowed the other 3 to dominate the decision making. He even stated one of his certifications, none asked what CBRN stands for (Chemical, Biological, Radioactive, Nuclear). If they had asked, and knew anything about the armed forces IQ testing for qualification they probably would have been less certain about putting him last. He even told them about the ASVAB requirements, they asked no questions, displayed no curiosity. For all intents and purposes, they did not turn their brains on for the entirety of the video. If they knew what the ASVAB was, then great, they would have made the right the decision, but they didn’t and were either scared to ask, or unwilling to ask because the military exists outside of the opera house.
There are people who will tell you that you can’t cold read someone from looking at them or listening to the things they say. There are people who will tell you that you can’t stereotype or make snap judgements about other people. These people are wrong. If your brain works well, the stereotypes you come up with only get more accurate as you age. Your brain is a pattern recognition device, that is it’s primary function. The higher your IQ, the quicker you can identify patterns, and you’ll be able to identify subtler patterns with a higher IQ as well. There are people who will tell you that IQ tests don’t work because of social, cultural, or economic reasons, this is a mid-wit take.
An example question from an IQ test
IQ Tests work just fine, and are culturally agnostic. Meaning that someone who has never learned to read and was raised by wolves can take one just the same as an American college student. Here’s an example of an IQ test that you can take. No, I’m not going to share my score, it’s irrelevant. It’s an example of what an IQ test is. 3 minutes, 12 question, then 3 minutes, and 11 questions. That’s all it takes. No math, no reading. When presented with a discernible pattern, how quickly can you identify the pattern. Put enough questions together like this and attach them to a ticking clock and you can reliably estimate how much problem solving horsepower someone has under the hood. Obviously, this decreases somewhat with age, you’ll probably get your highest score ~25 years of age.
Despite being a dystopian future, Idiocracy presented a society that functions far better than our own. Within a week of arriving into this society, the smartest man in the world was identified and sent to the White House. Academia and the entire higher education system exists to ignore the basic truth of an IQ test. We don’t need to waste 10 productive years of youth to get a piece of paper to figure out who should be doing what job. Obviously, there is a lot more to it than just “do brain work good?” many personality traits, and practical experiences are required.
Please do not think that I want nerds in charge of everything, I don’t. Quite the opposite in fact.
Bullying is pro-social behavior
If you happen to be on either end of the bell curve, you know that something is wrong with academia. Above 130 IQ and academia does not benefit you, it actually hurts you, as it allows the 115 and 120 IQ peasants to pretend to be your equals. If you are below 100 IQ academia also hurts you as well in its attempts to disprove common sense at every turn. The nerd rails against the real world and nature for constantly proving it’s dominion over him and his inferiority. It’s only the middle of the bell curve that gets fooled by academia, because they have much to gain from it’s hierarchical status games. A 112 IQ nerd is infinitely benefitted by an academic system that sorts on intelligence up to a point and no further. Say the bar is 103 IQ. His degree only proves that he is at least that smart, and no more. It’s a status game, and one becoming more expensive by the month while simultaneously becoming easier and easier every year as standards are lowered further. Standards are lowered for obvious reasons. University is a business, and appealing to the lowest common denominator increases potential income. 5% of the population is 130 IQ+. Why bother competing for them when you can instead appeal to the 50% that are 100 IQ+? The commoditization of university degrees makes them completely meaningless as a signifier of intelligence.
If you fall into the mid-wit IQ range, fear not. The antidote is curiosity and humility. Ask questions, don’t be afraid to appear dumb, and do your best to identify competence in others, especially when they excel at something you are weak at. Ego at any IQ range will kill the possibilities that currently exist in your life. As you tamp your ego down, and choose to just live in the moment as best you can, the mid-wit will not rear its ugly head. I am in the mid-wit IQ range.
3. Economics and Academics
So now, lets talk about how academics and experts are downplaying a key piece of the economic definition of a recession ahead of this Thursday’s GDP announcement which will most definitely be negative.
The Latest GDPNow Forecast from the Atlanta Federal Reserve
By all definitions, on this Thursday we should be announcing that the US has been in an official recession since January 2022. Meanwhile the White House is cheerily trying to change the conversation altogether and the professional class of ~112 IQ PhD economists are lining up to agree. But our current government is made up of the dispossessed and those suffering from Nietzschean Ressentiment.
As such, they rail against any obvious facts, and common sense whenever it proves their ineptitude and failure. The academic class does not do well with failure and often is incapable of improving and cleaning up any prior conclusions they have come up with. They have too much ego invested into the hierarchy of social status climbing that academics allows. Which is why fake Alzheimers research can be quoted over 1,000 times in 2 decades without anyone actually checking the initial research, it’s already in the opera house. These people are not smart enough to have their own opinions, and too attached to the status signaling system of academia to risk their place in it. If they were actually smart, they wouldn’t have much fear of losing their space, because if your brain works and can identify patterns, there is always a space for you.
"A recession is a broad-based contraction that affects many sectors of the economy. We just don't have that."
Like everything else she’s said, she will not later address it in the future whenever they do eventually admit that this is in fact a recession. Like all of her faulty statements, this will be lost in the wind. Academics do not like accountability, as that would be the first step towards a genuine meritocracy. Academics can’t deal with real competition based on performance.
4. The King Nerd
Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist, who has been basically wrong about every major economic event in the western sphere since the late 90’s. To his credit, I think he had a fairly decent read on some of the problems that would emerge in the mid-80’s as countries shifted out of Bretton Woods and away from gold backed currencies. But as I’ve stated before, every hero that survives their great struggle finds themselves the villain in the story of the future.
He won his Nobel Prize in 2008 for this work in the late 70’s, this was while he was in the middle of lecturing Obama for not encouraging the Fed to print even more money to bolster the economy after the housing crisis in 07. Similar to Kuroda, he’s an old man who’s ideas were once relevant, but are now dangerous if implemented. Unfortunately the west is entirely dominated by Krugman’s thought process. When Christine Lagarde and Jerome Powell say they are targeting an average inflation rate of 2%, they are directly quoting Krugman’s work. He was the first mainstream voice to be published writing about inflation targeting as a means of fiscal policy. They are trying to put his words into action and it’s essentially what the West has been doing for the past 15 years. It has not worked in any sense of what they set out to do, but just like Cancer research, and Alzheimers research, no one in academia is testing any of these theories or pointing out the obvious failures of western economics. Take this excerpt from Paul Krugman below that I swiped from Zerohedge.
Basically every academic in economics is a Keynesian, and some form of leftist. I won’t get too deep into the difference between the Keynesian (Chicago School of Economics), and the Austrian School of Economics. The main difference between the two, is that the Chicago school believes the economy can be centrally planned by manipulating the circulation of money, while the Austrian school believes that we do not have the capability to process enough information in a given time to be able to centrally plan the economy, and so the money supply should be managed so that it can best function as a store of value.
The west is utterly dominated by Keynesian thought, and these economists have been inside of their own echo chamber talking to themselves, and the status signaling system of academia has put them inside of a walled garden where no conflicting information can enter. Of course Krugman is confused about the current “stubbornly persistent” inflation. Of course, the west keeps repeating that no one could have predicted this.
Yet here is Jerome Powell admitting that 34 out of 35 of professional forecasters were blindsided by the increase in inflation.
They were blind-sided because they exist within academia. They are all professional mid-wits and nerds with Krugman as their King.
5. Ego and the Midwit
Krugman, and many other people exist solely through their status signals. Their entire identity is based around their degree, their title, and the level of prestige it offers them. This is dangerous to have entire economies of the West being led by people who would not know how to live if they couldn’t introduce themselves as their job title, their degree, or their accolades.
Such status strivers have two problems. The first is that their status is entirely dependent on outside approval. The University, the Government Agency, etc… the Cathedral has to constantly approve of them. In this case, it is no surprise that all of the economists being pushed to the top by entities dependent on continued government funding are those who say that infinite government spending will have no impact on the ability of government issued currency to function as money. And it’s no surprise that those who differ from or disagree with the Cathedral are often on the outskirts and typically not featured in mainstream media. This not only serves to keep the narrative fresh in the public’s mind, but also serves as a warning to those currently within the good graces of the Cathedral. “You will lose all of this if you don’t keep telling me I can print money with no consequences.”
The second problem is that these status strivers could not gain attention for their ideas on the basis of their ideas alone. If Paul Krugman was posting anonymously on 4chan’s /biz/ he likely could say nothing of interest to anyone there to standout. Without his identity he has nothing to offer.
4chan is not exactly a bastion of economic theory either
This is the true call that anonymity offers and why I am perfectly fine with disappearing from the internet and re-appearing with a completely different name. It’s why I have done this for free across numerous chat rooms and groups over the past 6 years. Consolidating myriad global events into a basic weekly outlook for asset prices is a compulsion for me. It’s in my head every week whether I put it somewhere or not. If my output is complete trash, people will leave. If my output is actionable, useful, and valuable, people will come. Maybe today I am useful, but tomorrow, next year, or next decade I will lose my touch. And when that happens, people will leave. Ego and identity are sticky, and those in the middle range of IQ are most likely to be outcome independent when judging competence and to instead look towards the agreed upon status signifiers. Which is exactly what is happening now, and the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
If someone gives you advice and it doesn’t work, it does not matter what title, degree or award they have, you can’t keep listening to that person. The midwit is incapable of making this decision when faced with it. Especially if their own status is dependent on this exact form of signaling.
Remember the Jubilee video in Section 1. The midwit woman with 112 IQ dominated the discussion despite her choices being entirely dependent on these status signifiers? Similarly, the midwits in the real world dominate the discussion on economics. Despite most being unable to identify that the price and supply of money is one of the largest drivers of economic failure/prosperity, these people are dominating the narrative. I have no solutions for this problem at the larger scale, sometimes the only lessons that are internalized are those that come out of catastrophe.
So these people are entirely dependent on maintaining their position within the Cathedral in order to have some form of self-identity that they consider valuable enough to match their belief about who they are. It’s no coincidence that the west is still clinging tightly then to its collective misunderstanding about inflation, and will very likely go down with the ship entirely.
The amounts government spends on large projects will soon be the amount citizens spend on everyday items if the government does not keep itself in check.
Anyone given the power to adjust the fortunes of an entire population should be driven by a massive sense of humility first and foremost. The ability to admit mistakes, while also make decisions with the gravity that they deserve. The decision to spend an additional $2 trillion should not be taken lightly by the government, unless their goal is to devalue the money so much that one day the decision to spend $2 trillion might be taken lightly by an average citizen trying to buy a coffee. Look at Krugman’s decision making in Section 4. He describes himself as “Team Relaxed,” when it came to supporting this level of additional spending in 2021. He’s glib. He should rename his “team” to “Team Catastrophic Failure.”
“Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, you don’t even - you’re glib.”
The problem is that the midwit believes he is smart so long as other people keep reinforcing that message to him. The midwit also, implicitly, believes in the status signaling to the point that if they were to have their own degree taken away, their Nobel prize revoked, or could not get a TV appearance, they would legitimately believe that they are not as smart as they once were. Image is everything to the midwit, while substance is often lacking. Their belief in being smart prevents them from accepting any challenge or risk of losing this status. Having someone like this in charge of you or anything important is extremely dangerous.
Self-esteem can only come from one of two places. This is often referred to as an internal or external locus of control. I spoke previously of humility in the face of the gravity of the decisions being made and the impact it will have on every single person using the currency. I now will speak of arrogance, because its just as important. The midwit lacks the proper arrogance to take his actions seriously. They often believe in nothing greater than themselves and as such cannot imagine themselves as a significant entity. This lack of arrogance about their own divinity weakens them to clinging to the kind of status an authority can grant. The work I am doing, I believe, is greater than myself. So if I run into information that counters my existing body of work, I owe it to myself to explore it and update my body of work if necessary. Because this must transcend the mundane. I am far too arrogant to ignore the chance to improve this, I seek perfection in my work because I am already absolutely certain of my own divine status. Only a lesser being would settle for a lesser product.
What does the midwit do when he runs into information that is counter to his body of work? He seeks to discredit it, because if he fails to do so, he loses his status. Someone with this much to lose, cannot be driving an economy; the only place he will drive it is into a ditch.
A University Educated Economist was driving this one
6. Conclusion
IQ Is real.
Academics and the Credentialed class exist as a form of hierarchy to protect the emotions of those in the middle of the IQ bell curve. This same academia is viewed as competent despite having no way to identify members above 105 IQ and differentiate them from those just at 105 IQ. As such academia has no way to benefit from a true meritocracy and instead affects a hierarchy of status signaling that benefits the middle of the bell curve the most while failing to serve both the low end, and the high end. This makes sense, as the middle of the bell curve represents the largest group of potential customers, but it is to the detriment of anyone wishing to grant academics any real authority or decision making.
University can either be a business focused on maximizing profit, or it can be a genuine signifier of the cream of the crop of society, but it cannot effectively be both. Economists formed within the US system of higher education are incapable of forecasting and understanding major movements in the economy because those who rise the highest within Academia are incapable of admitting failure and revising their approach and hypothesis for fear of losing their status among the hierarchy. If university were a genuine hierarchy based on meritocracy, this would not be a problem, but university is a business that exists to sell products to the middle of the bell curve, so it can’t be a meritocracy and is instead shaped to appeal to keep those of average intelligence ensconced within its system for as long as possible.
Western economies are doomed to eventually enter inflationary spirals as the current unchallenged prevailing thought within the west is that the supply of money can be adjusted without any major ramifications to consumer inflation, and that micro-managing of the money supply to support maximum employment is completely possible and those doing so do not need any more information than what they already have. This is false. The evidence of this is within the economies employing Keynesian tactics; their falling workforce participation numbers and rising inflation are damning. Both numbers are even worse than government statistics purport because the midwit is a sore loser.
The function of money to the end user is to operate as a store of value and to be readily exchangeable with most economic actors you interact with. If money can not do these things, or can only do one of these things, it ceases to be money. Keynesian Economists will force any money they are allowed to control into non-existence, and they will never be capable of understanding how or why it’s happening.
I took the IQ test out of curiosity and scored a 115.8, that .8 being enough for me to not qualify as middle but close enough to keep me humble for sure! I really enjoyed reading this post. The last part reminded me of an essay by Rothbard where he writes about how important the the Cathedral (he uses “State” but I believe Cathedral to be a better term) is to these mediocre status signaling creeps. It gives them exactly what they believe is most important in life. I think that has a lot to do with what makes them creeps, they elevate a particular “status” above all else, and it’s so shallow and worthless because they never actually come up with anything original, therefore requiring no courage whatsoever to back up their stances.
Deep down, even before I was familiar with the Austrian School of Economics, I respected the humility that it’s proponents shared, and the courage they had to hold unpopular and out of style beliefs. It’s a rare trait these days, to remain an individual in a sea of NPCs, but when have the masses ever been on the right side of history? I like the Mark Twain quote “whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”
Time to huff some gasoline and free myself from midwittery! Cheers.
I am getting close, I bought a house yesterday in this “relaxed” time.
I took the IQ test out of curiosity and scored a 115.8, that .8 being enough for me to not qualify as middle but close enough to keep me humble for sure! I really enjoyed reading this post. The last part reminded me of an essay by Rothbard where he writes about how important the the Cathedral (he uses “State” but I believe Cathedral to be a better term) is to these mediocre status signaling creeps. It gives them exactly what they believe is most important in life. I think that has a lot to do with what makes them creeps, they elevate a particular “status” above all else, and it’s so shallow and worthless because they never actually come up with anything original, therefore requiring no courage whatsoever to back up their stances.
Deep down, even before I was familiar with the Austrian School of Economics, I respected the humility that it’s proponents shared, and the courage they had to hold unpopular and out of style beliefs. It’s a rare trait these days, to remain an individual in a sea of NPCs, but when have the masses ever been on the right side of history? I like the Mark Twain quote “whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”