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I don't think it's proud of being ignorant, but rather an anti-intellectual. Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem Children Z

I don't think it's proud of being ignorant, but rather an anti-intellectual. Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem Children Zone) had an interesting comment during an economic competitiveness summit on a similar trend: "There is a sense in this country that in my belief is anti-intellectual. There is almost a case to be made against smart people and that has penetrated I think from the top leadership in this country right through the ‘hood’ where people look down on folk who are academically prepared gifted and we’ve gotta change this culture, America is fascinated by whether you can drink a beer. That’s not, that should not be the qualification for a president. A president ought to be able to lead the nation in a direction where young people aspire for the kind of genius that’s around this table." "Smart" people have sometimes done mean things and deserve some of the disdain they get, but I'm just disappointed how much social value is placed on silly things like excessive beer drinking which leads to popularity and thus what some young people aspire to do because intellectuals are seen as irrelevant and dull. I think there is some connection between this perception and lower desire by students to want to enter into math and computer science... right at the point in history where such skills are in demand. (p.s. video of summit where Canada made the comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
OTOH we have the issue of smart people thinking they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences.
- KirinDave 17y ago
  That is not a trait of "smart" people, that is a trait of "assholes." You need not be smart to be an asshole. You might find "smart" people are particularly well equipped to wage effective verbal arguments, which can be frustrating. But some of the biggest prescriptivist assholes are incredibly stupid people. My favorite example is the Westboro Baptist Cult. These people actively eschew any kind of real education, history, science, or even causality. And yet they protest everyone's activities ceaselessly with offensive signs. Surely the WBC members think "they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences." But are they "smart"? Surely not.
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    the difference is that smart people can cloak such proscriptions in pseudo science (see: happiness research) and a lot of people don't have the expertise to debunk them. edit: jerf13 is making this point better than I am.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      > the difference is that smart people can cloak such proscriptions in pseudo science (see: happiness research)" How is that any different from cloaking the prescriptions (or proscriptions, I suppose) in biblical claptrap? Or historical or cultural nonsense? A lot of people believe things are in the bible that are actually not there, at best. Why? Their minister told them. I was one of these people in my youth; I assure you it happens. Personally, I think this is a classic example of anti-intellectualism. A lot of people get angry arguing with "smart" people because they seem to have "an answer for everything." This is far more infuriating to deal with than the relatively static arguments of Wu Proponents or Creationists, who simply reiterate the same tired nonsense over and over until you can simply ignore it the way you do any droning, repetitious sound.
      - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
        you honestly don't see a difference between something that is backed up by "well that's what we believe" and "I have compiled statistics that prove my point!". I have the training to debunk their nonsense, but the vast majority don't. how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off. The authority of the FDA and pharmas derives from their panels of scientific experts.
        KirinDave 17y ago
        > you honestly don't see a difference between something that is backed up by "well that's what we believe" and "I have compiled statistics that prove my point!". I have the training to debunk their nonsense, but the vast majority don't. You left out the part after "well that's what we believe" where they say "because...". Usually that's what gets people. And I grew up around people from whom the existence of math and statistics for something almost guarantee'd they dispute it. Perhaps you find the scientific claptrap more ugly because you understand it better, but science and pseudoscience are far from the biggest masters of people's lives in the wide world. > how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off. There are these countries–incredibly populous countries–where one dude spouting off religious nonsense is the literal law of the land. You disagree? You die or are imprisoned indefinitely.
jerf 17y ago
'"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things' Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots. That's just one example of the problem, I could go on. But those examples alone are sufficient to establish my point. While it's true that America's distrust of intellectuals has blurred into a distrust of learning, there is a kernel of truth there. Intellectuals have a great failing that has cost millions their lives and caused misery for billions more, which is trusting their beautiful theories too much, even when reality is smacking them across the face with the fact that the theories are wrong or not working. (For the love of Pete, some "intellectuals" still study Marxist economics as if it has some sort of bearing on reality! Studying it for historical reasons is one thing, but not as if it's real.) Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position. If the 20th century taught us anything it is that reality is irreducibly complex and the beautiful-but-invariably-oversimplified theories beloved of intellectuals can not possible capture reality, but this lesson doesn't seem to have filtered out of the mathematical domain very well. The problem is that to really understand what's going on you have to detach "learning" from "intellectualism". I like learning, I distrust intellectualism and still see no overwhelming reason to start trusting it. We're in the middle of one failure of intellectualism even as we speak, as the global warming consensus falls apart; I don't know what truth will replace it but I feel very confident it will be much more nuanced. That came close to beggaring the entire world in the service of an intellectual theory. And more quietly, IMNSHO we're in the middle of the intellectual dietary consensus falling apart. And if I'm right about that, you can chalk up tens of millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of people in unnecessary fat misery into intellectualism's column, in the service of the simple-but-wrong theory that the body can be modeled as just a passive rubber bag. That's hard to get across to a large mass of people, of course, and easy for it to get blurred. But if you don't understand this, you won't understand the real reasons for the anti-intellectual strain of American thought. It isn't just "we hate dem dare learnin' folk", which is just an excuse for not understanding.
mhb 17y ago
There is also an interview with Canada on this This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1262 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=126...

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

OTOH we have the issue of smart people thinking they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences.

KirinDave 17y ago
That is not a trait of "smart" people, that is a trait of "assholes." You need not be smart to be an asshole. You might find "smart" people are particularly well equipped to wage effective verbal arguments, which can be frustrating. But some of the biggest prescriptivist assholes are incredibly stupid people. My favorite example is the Westboro Baptist Cult. These people actively eschew any kind of real education, history, science, or even causality. And yet they protest everyone's activities ceaselessly with offensive signs. Surely the WBC members think "they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences." But are they "smart"? Surely not.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  the difference is that smart people can cloak such proscriptions in pseudo science (see: happiness research) and a lot of people don't have the expertise to debunk them. edit: jerf13 is making this point better than I am.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    > the difference is that smart people can cloak such proscriptions in pseudo science (see: happiness research)" How is that any different from cloaking the prescriptions (or proscriptions, I suppose) in biblical claptrap? Or historical or cultural nonsense? A lot of people believe things are in the bible that are actually not there, at best. Why? Their minister told them. I was one of these people in my youth; I assure you it happens. Personally, I think this is a classic example of anti-intellectualism. A lot of people get angry arguing with "smart" people because they seem to have "an answer for everything." This is far more infuriating to deal with than the relatively static arguments of Wu Proponents or Creationists, who simply reiterate the same tired nonsense over and over until you can simply ignore it the way you do any droning, repetitious sound.
    - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
      you honestly don't see a difference between something that is backed up by "well that's what we believe" and "I have compiled statistics that prove my point!". I have the training to debunk their nonsense, but the vast majority don't. how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off. The authority of the FDA and pharmas derives from their panels of scientific experts.
      - KirinDave 17y ago
        > you honestly don't see a difference between something that is backed up by "well that's what we believe" and "I have compiled statistics that prove my point!". I have the training to debunk their nonsense, but the vast majority don't. You left out the part after "well that's what we believe" where they say "because...". Usually that's what gets people. And I grew up around people from whom the existence of math and statistics for something almost guarantee'd they dispute it. Perhaps you find the scientific claptrap more ugly because you understand it better, but science and pseudoscience are far from the biggest masters of people's lives in the wide world. > how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off. There are these countries–incredibly populous countries–where one dude spouting off religious nonsense is the literal law of the land. You disagree? You die or are imprisoned indefinitely.

jerf 17y ago

'"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things' Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots. That's just one example of the problem, I could go on. But those examples alone are sufficient to establish my point. While it's true that America's distrust of intellectuals has blurred into a distrust of learning, there is a kernel of truth there. Intellectuals have a great failing that has cost millions their lives and caused misery for billions more, which is trusting their beautiful theories too much, even when reality is smacking them across the face with the fact that the theories are wrong or not working. (For the love of Pete, some "intellectuals" still study Marxist economics as if it has some sort of bearing on reality! Studying it for historical reasons is one thing, but not as if it's real.) Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position. If the 20th century taught us anything it is that reality is irreducibly complex and the beautiful-but-invariably-oversimplified theories beloved of intellectuals can not possible capture reality, but this lesson doesn't seem to have filtered out of the mathematical domain very well. The problem is that to really understand what's going on you have to detach "learning" from "intellectualism". I like learning, I distrust intellectualism and still see no overwhelming reason to start trusting it. We're in the middle of one failure of intellectualism even as we speak, as the global warming consensus falls apart; I don't know what truth will replace it but I feel very confident it will be much more nuanced. That came close to beggaring the entire world in the service of an intellectual theory. And more quietly, IMNSHO we're in the middle of the intellectual dietary consensus falling apart. And if I'm right about that, you can chalk up tens of millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of people in unnecessary fat misery into intellectualism's column, in the service of the simple-but-wrong theory that the body can be modeled as just a passive rubber bag. That's hard to get across to a large mass of people, of course, and easy for it to get blurred. But if you don't understand this, you won't understand the real reasons for the anti-intellectual strain of American thought. It isn't just "we hate dem dare learnin' folk", which is just an excuse for not understanding.

mhb 17y ago

There is also an interview with Canada on this This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1262 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=126...