By Steve Sailer
02/26/2013
From KCRW, the NPR flagship of Los Angeles:
This just reminds me of how bad I am at intuiting what will strike other people as cool in the future.
A couple of decades ago, historian Paul Johnson argued that since Anglo-Americans had stopped eating dogs and horses, the next thing would be to stop eating pigs, which are notably more intelligent than, say, chickens or turkeys. Granted, pigs don’t have the people-pleasing personalities of dogs, horses, or cats, but they are reasonably smart and share certain personality traits with us (e.g., take a dog to the beach and he runs and runs; take a pig to the beach and he lies down).
This struck me as not unreasonable, and something that I, personally, would do (if only pigs weren’t so tasty). So, ever since, I've felt a little bit guilty while eating delicious pork.
I also figured back then that NPR-listening foodies would by now have taken up this cause, with bacon being relegated to a class marker of fast-food customers.
As usual, I was all wrong. Bacon is currently in; not just with fast-food fans, but with NPR foodies as well, who are infusing bacon into all manner of things, some of which sound pretty gross to me.
A lot of successful people got to where they are because they figured out one thing ahead of most other people (e.g., Bacon cocktails are going to be big!) and then used their new eminence to cling to positions even as they aged out of the zone in which they could intuit the next big thing.
In contrast, my proven track record of lacking a sixth sense about what’s going to be the Next Big Thing just encourages me to redouble my efforts to understand factually How Things Work right now. I've learned a huge amount about how the world works because I’m like a blind man who has to hone his hearing to make up for his missing fifth sense.
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