Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots
Intellectuals are F*cking IdiotsWhy the Smartest People Get Trapped by Their Own MindsMark MansonApr 14, 202610,1421,3761,912ShareOn December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.Thanks for reading! He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development.
- ▪Intellectuals are F*cking IdiotsWhy the Smartest People Get Trapped by Their Own MindsMark MansonApr 14, 202610,1421,3761,912ShareOn December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia
- ▪It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.Thanks for reading!
- ▪He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (Front Page) |
| Canonical URL | https://markmanson.substack.com/p/intellectuals-are-fcking-idiots |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:14:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T10:51:07.526Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T10:51:07.526Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Vs8OB8UUXc0M · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Intellectuals are F*cking IdiotsWhy the Smartest People Get Trapped by Their Own MindsMark MansonApr 14, 202610,1421,3761,912ShareOn December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.SubscribeMalcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Front Page).
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