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Notes -
I don’t think all of the PMCs are elites. It’s mostly pretense. In fact most of them are specifically useless and don’t have the attention span or the ability to do anything that doesn’t involve “sit at de ask, stare at screen, type up summaries of work other people have done (and write it at a sixth grade level, the people reading the report to summarize the reports written by you and your colleagues don’t read above maybe an 8th grade level)”, and most of their day is taken up by pretending to work and looking busy. They are not inventing new things, they’re basically Confucian Mandarins who exist to churn characters. I don’t think most of them, if presented a problem to solve would be capable of solving it unless the method was something they already knew. They’re doing what they were trained to do at school— fill in worksheets, write book reports, follow the directions their boss told them to.
It’s true we have far too many of these people, but the reason that we have a problem is that we’ve been turning worksheets into a professional career, then invented a program that can do those worksheets.
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