This Needs Fixin'

Ed Zitron has been on something of a tear lately.

And I am here for it.

I don’t agree with everything he says.

This is mostly because I think he’s too generous in saying that LLMs surely have some practical use (they don’t) but also because I think he’s a bit susceptible to the one true cause fallacy and ends up attributing all the modern world’s problems to an epidemic of bizness brain.

There are more things wrong with the world than just that, sadly.

He also tends to make up new terms a lot to label his ideas, which is probably his PR/marketing background showing. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about this, but aesthetically it squicks me out a little.

“Rot Economy”, for example, and now “Business Idiot”.

I gotta admit they’re descriptive, at least.

But he does make a very compelling case that the cultural dominance of the Business Idiot, which he traces primarily to Milton Friedman and Jack Welch, is very, very bad for our society.

And he is not wrong about this.

So go read Ed Zitron’s latest post: The Era Of The Business Idiot.

He says in the intro:

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I’ve written on this newsletter. I do apologize.

And he’s right that it is quite a long read. But he’s wrong to apologize.

It’s totally worth it.

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