How WW2 made society worship intelligence — and why that era is ending
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-10-23
A long-form argument from Jeremy Noronha: WW2 made intelligence society's supreme value — a single physicist (Oppenheimer) outweighed any soldier, spawning the knowledge-worker era, codified peer review in the 1970s, and the office-job archetype. But the tide turned in recent decades: the Great Stagnation plateaued novel scientific knowledge just as the internet made information free and abundant, demoting physicists to zero-sum financial games. He uses this arc to frame how AI is forcing another revaluation of intelligence.
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