My dad and I have one of the ten teams competing in Arnold Kling’s “Fantasy Intellectual* Team” challenge.
Arnold has published a list of the drafted “players” and two picks (from among 150) seem to have raised the most eyebrows, both of which “belong” to our team, Clan Graham:
Joe Rogan (our 1st pick)
Donald Trump (our 3rd pick)
What were we thinking? Well, I’ll answer that with a quote from Nassim Taleb**:
“There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.”
Let me explain why these two controversial picks are going to earn us serious points and lead to the decimation of our competition. Per Arnold’s rules, players earn points for Steel-manning, having the Memes they created be cited by others, and making public Bets.
Rogan, which is obvious to anyone who has listened to him more than a handful of times, is a generous “Steel-manner.” We think we can count on one point for every three episodes—that’s at least a point a week for thirteen weeks.
And I am genuinely curious to know what other living person has created more memes than DJT. He is the originator of dozens, from Covfefe to Fake News. I expect he’ll earn us at least ten points during the season, but I wouldn’t be surprised to get over 15.
The best competitor we could think of for the third category (Bets) was Bryan Caplan, but even he is not all that prolific with his betting, so he was much lower on our pick list. Another team snagged him in the fourth round.
* Given the rules for awarding points, I will be putting “intellectual” in quotations when referring to the competition; this will be more of contest over citation frequency than a ranking of intellect.
** We wanted NNT, also for his meme-strength, but someone else got him first.
Geoffrey Graham 