人人皆智者？

人人皆智者？

智慧是时间，智慧是金钱。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

twinge 刺痛

resilient 弹性的

scorn 轻蔑

jury 陪审团

prizefighter 职业拳击手

We are all sophists now — or should be（697 words）

By Janan Ganesh

If you feel a twinge in your neck,it is from looking over your shoulder. Western professionals can sense threats to their livelihoods closing in. Technology and foreign wage competition stalk graduates these days,if not quite as cruelly as they hunted down factory workers in past decades. Doctors know that a medical diagnosis can be Skyped in from India. Bankers know that trades can be executed by algorithms. Some swine is probably working on the automation of political commentary,too.

Our thoughts turn to that existential question: what do we have that cannot be mechanised or outsourced on the cheap?“Creativity”,supposedly,but this can mean anything. It has joined “disruption” and “network” in the weightless lexicon of the TED age. Less a skill than a cast of mind,creativity is also hard to teach. Parents anxious about their children's prospects cannot very well exhort them to be inventive.

The real answer is more specific and less high-minded. The most resilient skill in the modern world is argument. We are all sophists now,or should be. The ancient Greeks saw these teachers of rhetoric as amoral transients. In a culture that prized civic loyalty,they wandered from city to city instructing locals in the art of argument for a fee. In a civilisation that believed in eternal truths,they would,as a matter of professional pride,make the case for or against any proposition.

Scorned then,imperious now. What unites the elite professions in any international city is their command of sophistry. Barristers and management consultants,political advisers and advertising executives,public-relations strategists and even certain types of investment banker: all trade on the same skill. It is the ability to frame any given problem on your own terms so that your conclusion is irresistible to the client（or jury,or investor,or politician,or reader). To be clear,this is not the same thing as being right. What matters is being persuasive.

Before any of these professions take offence: there is nothing innately wrong with sophistry. The paying party,who is usually smart and well-resourced,can walk away if dissatisfied. And yes,newspaper columnists practise the same craft. Each week we try to hem you into a corner,dear reader,with premises,syllogisms and flurries of language until you accept our argument — or at least feel uneasy if you do not. In boxing,they call it “cutting off the ring”. A prizefighter uses guile and footwork to steer his opponent to the ropes,at which point the poor guy has few options.

The likes of Bain and McKinsey do not win clients by simply flashing their famous brand names. They go into businesses and make systematic arguments about how things might run better. They use facts,yes,but also analogies,invented categories,three-point plans and other forms of rhetoric. They cut off the ring.

London is built on sophistry. Foreigners hire our lawyers and consultants because their skills are hard to find among machines or cheaper labour in countries with less-developed service sectors. Our species is a hundred Sergey Brins from the kind of robotic technology that can reproduce the argumentative flair of a Jonathan Sumption,the QC（and now judge）who earned a reportedly vast fee for defending Roman Abramovich against another rich Russian,Boris Berezovsky,in a lawsuit in 2012.

Politicians mean well when they talk of the “knowledge economy” and the importance of training ourselves for it. But as a description of reality,it fails. The professions with lustre and durability do not rest on knowledge as such. Even barristers often convert to the career quickly after studying something else at university.

A computer programmer has more hard knowledge than a brand consultant: but who is more likely to withstand technological change?A London taxi driver literally possesses the Knowledge,through years of learning and several failed attempts. But it took only pocket-sized satellite navigation to make his life harder. Meanwhile,the sophisticated blagger in his back seat has his pick of employers.

Learn to code,runs the received career advice of today. It is shrewder to learn how to argue. If the sophists were still around,they could charge a fortune.