141177
  • Log in
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Once More on Renowned Fool Emily Oster, and the Malign Influence of Head Girls More Generally

by Eugyppius
2 November 2022 6:49 PM

Alas, Emily Oster’s proposal that we just forget and forgive the pandemic insanity of the past few years has pleased no one. This is partly because her op-ed is tone deaf and stupid, of course, but it’s probably also down to Emily Oster herself, and a growing cultural exhaustion with the kind of person she represents. Oster is, in the terminology of Bruce Charlton, an almost archetypal Head Girl – the typical “all-rounder” who “performs extremely well in all school subjects” and “is excellent at sports,” while being “pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved”:

The Head Girl will probably be a big success in life, in whatever terms being a big success happens to be framed… But the Head Girl is not, cannot be, a creative genius.

Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes… Modern colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military…

The Head Girl can never be a creative genius because she does what other people want by the standards they most value. She will worker harder and at a higher standard in doing whatever it is that social pressure tells her to do – and she will do this by whatever social standards prevail, only more thoroughly. …

We live in a Head Girl’s world – which is also a world where creative genius is marginalised and disempowered to the point of near-complete invisibility.

Oster ticks all the boxes here. She was a star student and athlete in her school years, and her public presence is about projecting a pro-social, positive conformist image, while using superficially analysed Science and Data to calm neurotic mothers worried that they’ve strayed beyond the boundaries of what is medically optimal or socially acceptable. She doesn’t like closed schools very much, but she just loves vaccines.

There’s probably some reason to be sceptical of Charlton’s concept of the creative genius, but he’s dead right about the malign influence of Head Girls like Oster. Modern social institutions – particularly schools – have been caught for decades in an escalating spiral of harsh selection for conscientiousness and conformity. Since 2000 especially, Head Girls have cemented their dominance across a great many bureaucratic institutions and white-collar professions, and they have used their growing influence and seniority, above all, to recruit and promote more Head Girls like themselves. The problem is that traits like conscientiousness correlate not at all with raw intelligence and ability. Thus, our world has come to be steered by fleets of extremely agreeable, deeply concerned, highly productive and overly socialised Emily Osters – midwits who have very few original thoughts, and who make up for that by caring a lot about what other conformist midwits of similar status think about them.

There’s nothing wrong with Head Girls, when their worst tendencies are counterbalanced by a sufficient number of disagreeable, intelligent, and less conformist colleagues. When they become the predominant personality type in newsrooms, faculties and government offices, though, you start to have serious problems. Then, your schools and your media organisations come to be dominated by committees and meetings, by the avoidance of open conflict, by the constant erection of and sheltering within consensus positions, and by preference cascades kicked off by clamorous organised minorities. All of these characteristic symptoms of government by Head Girl are intolerable to everyone who isn’t a Head Girl, and talented people with any other options at all will ultimately leave their influential positions in Head Girl-dominated institutions, driving the Head Girls to ever greater ascendancy.

One of the reasons things like lockdowns and mass vaccination frenzies have become possible in the first place, is the uniformity of outlook and opinion among the governing elite. When everybody, from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators, believes that with enough social distancing we can eradicate SARS-2, and that the unvaccinated are responsible for prolonging the pandemic, the result is a powerful if erratic and ever-shifting social tyranny. Social media technologies have been particularly noxious for the consensus formation of the Head Girls, widening the range of issues on which they have functionally identical opinions and enforcing conformity more thoroughly than was ever before possible. And should one of their runaway preference cascades go off the rails and destroy society, they’ll rapidly reunite around the new consensus position, that nobody could’ve known any better and all the worst offenders – especially their friends and colleagues – acted in good faith with the knowledge that was available at the time.

This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Tags: ConformistsEmily OsterHead GirlsMidwits

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

As the Lockdown Bill Comes Due, the Public Demand MORE Restrictions

Next Post

Zimbabwe Poised to Jail Dr. Jackie Stone for Prescribing Off-Label Covid Treatment

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

20 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

 

DONATE

PODCAST

Nick Dixon and Toby Young Talk About St. Gary’s Struggle to Call People Nazis, the Truth About January 6th and a Victory Against ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’

by Will Jones
14 March 2023
3

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editors Picks

mRNA Vaccine Contamination Much Worse Than Thought: Jabs “Up to 35%” DNA That Turns Human Cells into Long-Term Spike Protein Factories

13 March 2023
by Will Jones

Tilda Swinton Says She is Refusing to Wear a Mask on Set Despite Having Long Covid for Months

14 March 2023
by Will Jones

News Round-Up

15 March 2023
by Will Jones

In the Affluent West Our Fear of Death Has Made Us Susceptible to Public Health Tyranny

14 March 2023
by Dr David Bell

In Defence of Lineker’s Tweet

14 March 2023
by Andrew Barr

In the Affluent West Our Fear of Death Has Made Us Susceptible to Public Health Tyranny

65

In Defence of Lineker’s Tweet

40

Tilda Swinton Says She is Refusing to Wear a Mask on Set Despite Having Long Covid for Months

22

Guardian Pushes Alarmist Claim That Climate Change Threatens Coffee Production as Yields Soar

27

Is Bill Gates Trying to Depopulate the Planet?

14

Is Bill Gates Trying to Depopulate the Planet?

15 March 2023
by Eugyppius

Guardian Pushes Alarmist Claim That Climate Change Threatens Coffee Production as Yields Soar

14 March 2023
by Chris Morrison

mRNA Vaccine Contamination Much Worse Than Thought: Jabs “Up to 35%” DNA That Turns Human Cells into Long-Term Spike Protein Factories

13 March 2023
by Will Jones

Heavily Criticised Pro-lockdown Paper Cited Far More Than Anti-lockdown Papers

13 March 2023
by Noah Carl

The Flawed Fact-Check Being Used to Discredit the Damning Cochrane Review on Masking

13 March 2023
by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson

POSTS BY DATE

November 2022
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  
« Oct   Dec »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Please note: To be able to comment on our articles you'll need to be a registered donor

Already have an account?
Please click here to login Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment