That something is buried in the word ‘culture’. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb was arguing passionately at dinner last night, a man without culture is not really capable of understanding anything. Bankers did not just make themselves vile by abandoning their culture, they also made themselves incompetent. Lost in their culture-free abstractions, they all went bust. Or, an entirely different example, you can see how people become ignorant when they ignore culture in the debate about IQ which James Flynn so brilliantly took apart.

via Bryan Appleyard » Blog Archive » What ‘Plebs’ Really Means.
HatTip to Dave Lull