The Ones Beyond Deference

What happens when you're smart enough that you don't need to defer?

I’ve mentioned one of my best friends a few times before. He is, without a doubt, the smartest person I’ve ever met, and with even less of a doubt, the most effective debater. For years, I lost every argument I had with him on any subject; these days, I’m lucky to get a draw, and I’ve certainly never won.

He has a lot of idiosyncratic views on a whole host of topics. He’s looked into UFOs and thinks there’s a pretty high chance that they’re something very weird, perhaps even weirder than aliens. On foreign policy, he has a fairly Chomsky-esque view, believing that the U.S. does a lot more harm than good, often because of deliberate malice rather than incompetence. For a while, and perhaps to this day, he was sympathetic to Donald Hoffman’s fairly odd views about the nature of ultimate reality. Oh, and he thinks that there’s a decent chance that the 2020 election was rigged, making him perhaps the only person in the world who thinks that but is not a fan of Trump.

Most of your probably find these views implausible and strange. I certainly am not inclined to accept most of them. And yet he has a near unparalleled knowledge of the facts on every one of these topics, as well as superhuman powers of persuasion. It would take many months of preparation for me to be confident that I could debate with him on any of these subjects.

There’s something about his approach to these topics, however, that’s very different from my approach, something I find a bit unsettling.