Source: TW
We have seen many “crackers” in our life. They were (& might still be) particularly common in the H IQ cohort in elite colleges & institutions. The cracker performs particularly well when then yardstick for his measurement has been laid out as objectively as possible. He also develops well when there is single-valued reward function with no noise in it, viz., he can accurately estimate what the output y would be for the effort x he invested in. In such a regime he usually wins over all competitors & is locked in stiff competition with fellow crackers. If such an environment was stable it selects for increasingly better crackers – those who have increasingly honed abilities to calibrate their input for the perfectly calculated output.
The philosophy & the foundations of why a certain type of input do not matter to them as long as they are developing increasingly better predictors. Certain techno-academic landscapes in the Occident offered such opportunities for the H crackers in the past. However, the cracker does not do well in the long term when the environment changes unpredictably. When the measurement rod is taken away he finds himself at loss. This might be undoing of the whole cracker ecology & shift it towards those who craft the measurement yardstick.