17 ms·

Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world

99 points by jonathansizz 10y ago

smeyer 10y ago
I was having trouble loading the page, so here's a cached version I used: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPTwvKUJ:thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPT...
rubidium 10y ago
Glad to see someone acknowledging the myopic view of most intellectuals. During my time in academia (PhD), I'll admit now I had very little idea of what life was like for the majority of people. Since then I've been living among many working class and poverty-level folks. Average household income in my neighborhood is <$22K (U.S.). As a result, my thinking has changed to unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish, and ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do!
- yarrel 10y ago
  Why do you regard UBI as foolish given that real-world context? I'm interested as opinions for and against it do tend to be from 30,000 feet.
  - hahooooo 10y ago
    The danger I see with UBI, is (in addition to possible inflation, etc.) is that commentators on HN tend to be of higher education, curious, and simply "hackers". Most people here would love to be payed money so they could sit and program some cool OSS, start a new company or simply change the world. For them, UBI is fantastic. How many more Googles/GNUs/Apples would there be if engineers could quit existing companies and form, all while guaranteed basic sustenance. The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around. And then you start having issues convincing people to go for higher education (even assuming its free). Wait, what about lower education? Go to school, get good grades, or else you'll ... get a livable wage anyways? Why should I write essays when I can play video games instead? Then, until everything is automatable, you still need to get people to work under the hot sun, picking potatoes. If you have a livable wage without it, why would you go? And how much will the farmer need to pay workers to go?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      The problem you point to is self-limiting. Regardless of the nominal level of UBI, it won't provide a satisfactory income unless a sufficient number of people remain working to provide the goods and services required to provide a satisfying style of life for the UBI-only recipients and sufficient additional value to workers for them to continue working. Prices will adjust to make this the case. As the quality of life provided on UBI-only declines, the incentive for additional productive work will increase. (of course, lots of people now continue to expend additional effort beyond what is necessary for a minimally livable existence, so I don't see this as likely to be a great problem.)
      - hahooooo 10y ago
        In other words, the tragedy of the commons. My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI (such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century), for every Newton or Voltaire were many more unknown nobles who spent their life grooming their mustaches. I don't believe our society is that much better now.
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        > In other words, the tragedy of the commons. In a sense, but in this particularly case it operates as a negative feedback control mechanism which prevents the actual feared problem from occurring, so is hardly a "tragedy". > My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI There are no societies with UBI to look back on. > such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century A benefit restricted to a particular social class is not a UBI (or, at least, not much like what modern UBI proposals target, and not likely to serve as a guide as to what one can expect from them), nor, even ignoring that aspect, did the upper class of Europe through any of that time have anything remotely resembling a UBI, which is a flat, equal, unconditional grant to all members of a society. Now, in much of that period, individual nobles had (either by definition or just disproportionately, depending on the particular time and place) either claims to income from substantial properties or family connections to those who did and who would support junior family members with, often quite conditional, support, but that's more the position of a wealthy capitalist or their associates in the modern era than that of a UBI beneficiary.
- ryukafalz 10y ago
  >As a result, my thinking has changed to ... UBI is foolish Could you elaborate on what made you change your mind regarding UBI? It'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this.
  - cylinder 10y ago
    Working class wants to work.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      "But robots," someone said, apparently distracted by futurism from noticing the existence of manual trades.
    - sillyarg 10y ago
      That's one of the benefits of UBI over many welfare programs. Because it's universal, it's not cash for not working; it's cash.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Working class wants to work. One of the principal selling points for UBI as a replacement for existing means tested social benefit programs is that it eliminates the perverse incentives created by means tested programs in which benefits are reduced by outside income (especially from work), at a rate that, in aggregate across the programs a person may be eligible for, may even exceed the after-tax income from work. A selling point it has as a replacement for minimum wage is that it provides a quality-of-life safety net without preventing work that people would willingly do, and which would be economically valuable for employers, by setting a floor on minimum hourly pay. UBI is, arguably, more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo it is offered to replace.
      - justinpombrio 10y ago
        Translation: Currently, many social benefit programs give people less money the more they work. If a person is eligible for enough of these programs, they can even make less money by working than they would by not working. UBI (universal basic income) doesn't have this problem because it pays people the same amount regardless of weather they work. Thus, it is arguably more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo is. EDIT: Made translation more precise.
- klank 10y ago
  > ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution I'm confused about your stance on education. At first blush you seem to be diminishing it's impact while promoting it. Care to elaborate?
  - eitland 10y ago
    If by education GP means higher education then I can possibly add something: IIRC there already seems to be a shortage of craftsmen (carpenters, welders, plumbers etc) and a surplus of people with various higher educations.
    - endzone 10y ago
      a shortage that's not reflected in the wages for skilled jobs (outside of powerful unions)
      - petra 10y ago
        I know that in Israel there's shortage in those professions, but the pay isn't good. So maybe it's more complex that simple supply vs demand ?
        endzone 10y ago
        i can't think of any reason why basic economic principles wouldn't apply.
        petra 10y ago
        Say you have a small factory ,employing 50 older welders doing a risky job at relatively little pay. Say you need 10 more welders - but those guys really don't like risk so they would need a big increase in the salary, maybe 50%-100%. But you know that than the word will get out and the older workers will demand similar salaries. So it's a big jump in total labor-costs per work-unit. And let's not forget - revenue per employee can be quite limited in many places. So maybe paying low is the better state for the business.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do! Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions that provided this: regular neighborhood hangout spots, social clubs, adult recreational leagues, and especially churches. > unions are overall good ideas Maybe. Depends. I frequently see union demands oriented around last decade's operational patterns instead of next decade's. Like requiring specific outdated jobs be filled (like toll booth workers) when it would be more value-added to have the same person clean or provide general customer service. A union looking out for its members would embrace that some jobs would fade away and provide (or demand) retraining for its workers so they're qualified for new jobs, even in other industries if need be.
  - idrios 10y ago
    > Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions True, though I think new institutions will come back. Things like Meetup groups seem to be gaining more traction--The groups are just slow to adoption because they're so new that nobody can be grandfathered in yet by friends or family who have been long-term members. > Unions are overall good ideas -- Maybe. Depends. I see unions as just another corporation - they're satisfying a need of "workers should not be exploited", their revenue model is "members pay X% and in return get our strength in numbers", and their activity streams are "fight for favorable legislation" and "Threaten uncompliant businesses". The problem with unions is they are not treated as corporations in their own right, so unions have become monopolistic, heavily involved in lobbying and partaking in generally corrupt behavior--responding more strongly to incentives to survive and make money than incentives to keep its members happy. Unions are still powerfully beneficial, but I'd wish there were multiple unions for any industry that competed with each other, some with stricter requirements to get in, each offering different freedoms and protections to its workers
    - mbostleman 10y ago
      Unions are monopolies by their nature - it's not something they become. They only exist due to a statutory exemption of anti-trust law. I personally have not been able find a justification for a monopoly of any kind in a free society.
- unabridged 10y ago
  >unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish UBI would be much better than unionizing the entire country (the IWW is the only union I know of that would accept all people regardless of skill). Everyone would be guaranteed unlimited strike pay that can sustain them. The effect on employee-employer relationships would be amazing, every degrading/dangerous job would instantly have to 2x or 3x its salary to keep workers. Every worker would be able to negotiate from a position of safety knowing they effectively have 'fuck you money'.
- mindslight 10y ago
  The article is a swing and a miss. The problem is much deeper than the bias of being more educated and intellectual. It's that they believe singular "policy" can be made and then dictated top-down - that effects will be quickly visible and easily understandable. They're up against a hard problem in the computational complexity sense, yet it is in none of their interests to be honest and admit their limits. Most of their ideas lack intellectual rigor and merely follow the fashions of power. BI in particular is a simplistic continuation of printing money to overstimulate the economy.
PaulHoule 10y ago
The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate. In particular, when it comes the issues of the humanities that revolve around "how should you live your life?"; a professor who is tenured has nothing to say to people subject to the "flexible economy" other than to implant false conciousness.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  The isolation of the intellectual and the pundit is larger than the question of the university. Human civilization has been based on increasing specialization and that specialization has been both an adaptation and a marker of the ruling elite - the first specialists were essentially priests, which makes it clear specialization has always a signal[1] of power even if said specialization involved some efforts find truthful representations of the world. The scientific method, which to some extent verifies specialized knowledge and beliefs, is much younger than specialization and it's much harder to apply to knowledge about how human - both because human society is hard to do repeatable experiments on and because it can offend the existing specialized beliefs that order society - religion, political beliefs, morality, etc. [1]Broadly, a display signifying various evolutionary or social traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
- tottenhm 10y ago
  > The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate. Yes... but for context, we can compare an academy with a factory, a military, a primary school, a hospital, a ride-share, or a church. If a person spends the majority of his time on writing papers, shaping steel, marching in formation, tagging on a playground, tending to sick people, driving strangers around the city, or praising god... well, all that focused labor is going to warp his world view a bit. And that is quite deliberate. Institutions are defined by how they isolate their members, direct their members' focus, and acquire comparative-advantage. Of course, institutions in our time are not absolute. If we turn our attention away from categorical institutions... and instead look at individuals... then the situation gets much more interesting and less dark (but still imperfect)...
chm 10y ago
This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I'm interested in knowing if people actually read the article or upvoted the title?
- Donwangugi 10y ago
  Would be nice to only allow upvotes from those who have visited the site, but that would be a privacy problem.
- morninj 10y ago
  It would book interesting if HN tracked which upvotes come from people who actually clicked the link. Maybe that would be too intrusive or brittle to implement, but the data could be interesting and might improve the ranking algorithm.
- 1439205948 10y ago
  hahaha, it would seem the sort of people who immediately agree with an anti-intellectual title are the same people who don't read the articles!
- dbgllm 10y ago
  It seems to load again. Stability issues perhaps?
- MollyR 10y ago
  It's working intermittently. The first time I clicked it, it worked, but not the second.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I suspect that that sentence would have been just as accurate with "and so" replacing "yet"... The various errors (I got a 500 when I first tried to read it, but got through later; others have reported DB errors) are because the infrastructure can't handle the attention.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that. By the way, if I understand correctly, this was the death blow to logical positivism. Michael Polanyi pointed out that logical positivism required objective observers, and all we had were human beings, who were never really objective.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    >But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that. Really, no, absolutely not. The bias is assumed, that's why double-blind is the gold standard too. I'd argue that at its best, intellectualism is all about building a deeper awareness of our limitations and foibles, while developing systems to compensate for them.
- dbgllm 10y ago
  Yeah it felt like a superficial reflection the author wanted to concretize in words. It certainly prompts discussion but it provides only fragile arguments.
- allemagne 10y ago
  Not a bad article, but the piece as a whole appeared to be an exercise in justifying the author's own populist, conservative ideology.
beat 10y ago
pg's essays are a nice antidote to some of this nonsense. One that stood out for me was the idea of cities that concentrate intellectuals, which was studied much more deeply by pg in "Cities and Ambition".
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  I don't think this article contradicts anything that PG says. These are just different facets of the broad reality out there. What PG says applies pretty well to the elite group who create startups and push technology forward. This article highlights the discrepancy in first-hand experience between elites and average folks. Both are valid.
pnathan 10y ago
One must argue that intellectuals are freaks, if one wishes to denigrate their opinions and understanding. One must pointedly ignore any possibility of the experts spending in-depth to understand a field to claim that they are out of touch[1]. Having come out of this Glorious Peasantry the author idealizes, I suggest the author quit idealizing it. Chasing egalitarianism leads to Know-Nothing nincompoops being selected as presidential candidates. edit: [1] The author did not specifically claim that. But this is the inference chain used in blue-collar land to ignore what experts say: Professor X studies field F; Professor X doesn't do the common folk things and is incompetent at handyman work W; because he is incompetent at W and out of touch, he is incompetent at F. QED, ignore professor X in his discussions about F. This leads to all sorts of problems in public policy because the experts are ignored & insulted regularly because they are "out of touch and ignorant". Frankly, these kinds of articles are pretty repellent, and the click-bait title could have been lifted from a certain notable real estate agent's Twitter.
- throwanem 10y ago
  I'm not sure what it is to which you're responding, but I do not think it's the argument Lind makes in the article theoretically under discussion here.
throw_away_777 10y ago
This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence. This sentiment is completely ridiculous, yet I'm sure a lot of people believe it because it makes them feel superior. Pundits and professors are often wrong, but it isn't because they are highly educated. I still trust the opinion of a professor rather than someone working at Pizza Hut.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence. Not at all. It says highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks because these categories have very different ranges of first-hand experience.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    Why do you think they have different ranges of first-hand experiences? It is undeniable that by any objective measure professors are smarter (in the sense of being better able to tackle intellectual problems) than the average population. Do you honestly think someone working at Burger King has a better understanding of the world than a professor? I urge you to actually have a conversation with such a person.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      There are a few well-read would-be intellectuals stuck working at a fast food joint simply due to not knowing how to do otherwise.
      - throw_away_777 10y ago
        The existence of some very smart KFC workers doesn't mean that on average McDonald's workers are as intelligent as professors.
oli5679 10y ago
Anyone else getting this error message? Error establishing a database connection
anotherhacker 10y ago
An easier explanation: variation. Systems can be tremendously complex. There are countless unknown and unknowable variables in play. Moreover, the interactions between those variables can also be unknown and unknowable. The intellectual world (academia) is based upon professors and schools who can teach the "right way" of doing things and thinking. That's how PHDs work--you have to come up with a "new" idea to get your PHD. As you can see, it creates a conflict of interest. It would be much better if academia taught simple principles, variability, and how to think.
hyperion2010 10y ago
"The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment..." << Someone care to explain to me how being atypical distorts my judgement? This piece is not very substanative beyond enumerating how PPPs are different, it then merely says "they don't understand because of their difference." That seems rather like ad hominem.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  I see nothing wrong with it. I am very sure I don't understand the situation of poor working people. It has nothing to do with my IQ but with the fact that I don't live there live, never have. What makes you think you know about other people's lives if you don't live among and with and as them? Just reading a few essays now and then? You would not accept that view if a committed layperson tried to give advice to physicists (referring to yesterdays thread that pointed to https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...) but instead insist they'd have to study physics and not just read a few papers. Thinking the issues of the "working class" are different because "how difficult can it be" doesn't seem consistent or right to me.
  - hyperion2010 10y ago
    I'm not claiming that I know anything about other people's lives. In fact I might go so far as to say that when it comes to understanding the world as a whole trying to do so by enumerating the personal experiences of all the members of the human race might not be the best way to do it. Our brains create the world for us, they tell us things and give us imperatives that even the smartest of us often don't realize. Most importantly the lie to us, all of us. Reality is not a matter of experience, when an intellectual makes a statement from his experience he is just as likely to be wrong as anyone else. What tends to set some intellectuals apart is that the occasionally apply data to a situation. I will grant you that because they do this on occasion they are far (infinitely some might argue) more likely to think that explantations that actually come from their limited (fallible) experience come from data.
oli5679 10y ago
Here's a cached link to the text from this article if anyone is having problem with the link above: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals. So... intellectuals were right about the issues that they were focused on, but somehow populists are right that they are out of touch? Those seem contradictory to me, if they are problematically out of touch, then why were their ideas still correct? Who cares? At worst these seem like separate qualities, clearly being out of touch didn't make them wrong about the actual issues directly.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  No, populists were wrong about the issues that they were focused on. That doesn't mean that intellectuals were right, about anything. Intellectuals can be wrong on any given issue (especially since, for any issue, you can find an intellectual on both sides). But more to the point, intellectuals can be wrong (or at least completely out of touch) in the choice of questions that they think are important.
- jerf 10y ago
  Those were two cherry-picked examples of things intelligentsia got right. It was not a claim that they get everything or almost everything right. I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real world that so often leads the common man to be more correct about some very simple things that the intelligentsia misleads them here, because money is not a very concrete thing. It can seem like it is, because you've got this "cash" and this "gold" and it all seems very concrete, but the true driver of the economy, how people subjectively measure value, is very abstract. But intellectuals can also say some blitheringly idiotic things, like promoting the glorious Five Year Plans when anybody who has ever had to make real plans for the future knows that you generally encounter important divergences in the first week of implementation, or that battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, etc. I also do not endorse economics in general; it is true that "the gold standard" is not good, but economic's track record of telling us what is good is bad. Intellectual pursuits can be a very powerful and noble thing, but when it fails to correctly ground itself in reality it can become a very powerful and evil thing. I have great respect for intellectuals who admit error and craft new theories or ideas in response to failure and great, great contempt for the majority of those who fancy themselves intellectuals who instead cling to words and theory far, far beyond what is justified when evidence of error confronts them. (Yes, one can't drop a theory the instant one slight deviation is seen, but there are theories still alive today in the intellectual world that should have died decades, and in some particularly sad cases, centuries ago.)
alricb 10y ago
Very American-centric (but then this is by someone who helped found the "New America Foundation"); for instance outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts. Intellectuals all over can still have their heads up their asses, but that's not particularly new. The figure of the out-of-touch intellectual was common in the 19th century (e.g. Peter in War and Peace). Many professors do realize that their lives are quite different from those of most folks, but they're not often found in American elite institutions, so they don't show up on CNN.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts Inside the US, too. Many of our academic institutions were founded on the strength of such gifts, but that's hardly where their money comes from today.
dragonwriter 10y ago
This is, frankly, crap. It both ignores the diversity of experience that people that are not "professors, pundits, and policy wonks" have, and implicitly dismisses the idea that an understanding of the world can be gained by systematic study of the world (what academics actually engage in) that is superior to what is gained by isolated, unsystematic, experience with some small slice of it that happens to be at a lower socioeconomic status. Its essentially a radical rejection of the idea of study and transmissible, shareable knowledge of the world.
- someone7x 10y ago
  I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times. When I say this I think of the anecdote in the article about how "intellectuals" prescribe more education as a panacea for social reform instead of the ideas offered by the author. This as a possible case of their own biases precluding a systematic approach. As I write this, the "frankly crap" part comes to mind again. There's not much substantive here, just a bunch of opinions.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times. If that was the problem the piece hoped to address (and it certainly is a problem in, e.g., media punditry -- though I'd argue that's not because of any general problem with "academics" but with the process by which media pundits get selected), one would expect that it would say so, and that the solution would be some better scrutiny to assure prescriptions come from systematic study, not a solution unconnected to the problem like suggesting that "every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse." EDIT: Additionally, if this was the issue, you'd expect that the author would actually support the argument with evidence from systematic study supporting the nature and source of the problem and the utility of the recommended solution.
- sramsay 10y ago
endzone 10y ago
witness the hysteria about brexit among academics and london based commentators who have no idea about the reality of life in britain
snockerton 10y ago
tl;dr privileged, circle-jerking elitists think they're smarter than the rest of the world and don't know what it's like to be a stupid, poor person.
alistairSH 10y ago
Couldn't I just as easily state "the french-fry cook doesn't know anything about the life of a philosopher"? Everybody's view of the world is limited by their own experiences. Does that mean everybody therefore misunderstands the world?
- usefulcat 10y ago
  Yes, you certainly could state that. I think the point is that the french fry cook is much less likely to have an outsized influence on public policy compared to the philosopher/professor/pundit.
  - wfo 10y ago
    And, in particular, there are many, many more french fry cooks than philosophers. So the french fry cook understands the perspective of a larger proportion of people in the world than the philosopher does. Or so the argument goes. I'd disagree -- a large part of academic education, the humanities, is about learning to understand the perspectives of others. I'd say the philosopher understands the french fry cook's perspective better than vice versa, and that the philosopher is better positioned to misunderstand /less/ across all walks of life (though misunderstanding is inevitable) than most everyone else. For intellectuals trained exclusively in STEM/social science who sprint from the humanities as quickly as humanly possible, yes the critique is spot on.
gsmethells 10y ago
Even though I have a Master's of Science in Computer Science, I also spent a few years of my youth (more than they suggest in this article) working as a groundskeeping for several apartment buildings across town. Mowing, weeding, edging, planting, etc. On the flip side, my father had a PhD in Physics and taught at the local university. I believe I probably did better than most when it came to genes and funding, but I graduated high school with people who got up and milked the cows before coming into school and I know their lifestyle as well as my own. I think this article itself is out-of-touch.
return0 10y ago
Just because we have Brexit, Trump and the rise of populists everywhere doesnt mean that pundits have suddenly strayed. Pundits have since the time of Socrates been out of touch with society. What i see as the failure of today's pundits is lack of rigor, perseverance and their tendency to lazily put their eggs in questionable baskets (e.g. universal income). O tempora, o mores, this is the world of 140-character-worshippers and high h-indexes.
juhanima 10y ago
What a confusing article and discussion! I have a vague feeling we are witnessing a very significant breakdown of something, but I'm not sure what it is. So I'll just post some random thoughts - The idea of educating intelligenzia by having them work on the fields for a year sounds a bit too much like the cultural revolution of China in the 1960's. It was bad. - It seems very silly to me to question the value of education. Learning about earlier mistakes is a great way to avoid repeating those mistakes. Learning is good. - If education is only available for those with a lot of wealth, it certainly brings about both an alienating effect and a lot of bitterness. That's too bad. I'm from a country with free universities and government subsidized students' loans. I think it's a good system, couldn't have afforded any university education without it, being from a poor family. - In the discussion an idea seems to loom that a less informed opinion is evened out by the fact that more people share it. This I can not abide, although it is the basic idea of democracy. I always thought democracy is mostly a safety measure against tyrants and a pretty ineffective mode of government in its weakest. An enlightened democracy is much better than a populist one. Both are better than a non-democracy, at least most of the time. - The difference between an enlightened democracy and a populist democracy is evident in its leaders. John Stuart Mill was an enlightened democrat for one. The bad ones can be spotted out by their spitefulness. - Too bad some populists riding on the tide of anti-intellectualism have managed to turn democracies into tyrannies. Sometimes ships capsize.
Falkon1313 10y ago
To put it in perspective, a recent research study[1] conducted by a team of elite PhD economics researchers discovered the astonishing fact that people who face a sudden unexpected financial crisis (such as medical bills, car breakdown, job loss) are surprisingly less likely to become homeless if they can pay their rent/mortgage, while those who cannot pay for their home are more likely to become homeless. (In truth, they went in-depth in calculating percentages and timelines and cost-benefits, etc. That summary trivializes their work.) But the basics of this discovery made by this elite team of academic researchers is something that every single working-class person in the country, even high school dropouts, knows as a simple basic fact of everyday daily life. The idea that you would need to educate and train several people for many years, to the level of being professors at top colleges, then assemble a team and give them a grant to do a study to discover such a common part of daily life seems a bit ridiculous to non-academics. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694

99 points by jonathansizz 10y ago

I was having trouble loading the page, so here's a cached version I used: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPTwvKUJ:thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPT...

rubidium 10y ago

Glad to see someone acknowledging the myopic view of most intellectuals. During my time in academia (PhD), I'll admit now I had very little idea of what life was like for the majority of people. Since then I've been living among many working class and poverty-level folks. Average household income in my neighborhood is <$22K (U.S.). As a result, my thinking has changed to unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish, and ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do!

yarrel 10y ago
Why do you regard UBI as foolish given that real-world context? I'm interested as opinions for and against it do tend to be from 30,000 feet.
- hahooooo 10y ago
  The danger I see with UBI, is (in addition to possible inflation, etc.) is that commentators on HN tend to be of higher education, curious, and simply "hackers". Most people here would love to be payed money so they could sit and program some cool OSS, start a new company or simply change the world. For them, UBI is fantastic. How many more Googles/GNUs/Apples would there be if engineers could quit existing companies and form, all while guaranteed basic sustenance. The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around. And then you start having issues convincing people to go for higher education (even assuming its free). Wait, what about lower education? Go to school, get good grades, or else you'll ... get a livable wage anyways? Why should I write essays when I can play video games instead? Then, until everything is automatable, you still need to get people to work under the hot sun, picking potatoes. If you have a livable wage without it, why would you go? And how much will the farmer need to pay workers to go?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    The problem you point to is self-limiting. Regardless of the nominal level of UBI, it won't provide a satisfactory income unless a sufficient number of people remain working to provide the goods and services required to provide a satisfying style of life for the UBI-only recipients and sufficient additional value to workers for them to continue working. Prices will adjust to make this the case. As the quality of life provided on UBI-only declines, the incentive for additional productive work will increase. (of course, lots of people now continue to expend additional effort beyond what is necessary for a minimally livable existence, so I don't see this as likely to be a great problem.)
    - hahooooo 10y ago
      In other words, the tragedy of the commons. My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI (such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century), for every Newton or Voltaire were many more unknown nobles who spent their life grooming their mustaches. I don't believe our society is that much better now.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > In other words, the tragedy of the commons. In a sense, but in this particularly case it operates as a negative feedback control mechanism which prevents the actual feared problem from occurring, so is hardly a "tragedy". > My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI There are no societies with UBI to look back on. > such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century A benefit restricted to a particular social class is not a UBI (or, at least, not much like what modern UBI proposals target, and not likely to serve as a guide as to what one can expect from them), nor, even ignoring that aspect, did the upper class of Europe through any of that time have anything remotely resembling a UBI, which is a flat, equal, unconditional grant to all members of a society. Now, in much of that period, individual nobles had (either by definition or just disproportionately, depending on the particular time and place) either claims to income from substantial properties or family connections to those who did and who would support junior family members with, often quite conditional, support, but that's more the position of a wealthy capitalist or their associates in the modern era than that of a UBI beneficiary.
ryukafalz 10y ago
>As a result, my thinking has changed to ... UBI is foolish Could you elaborate on what made you change your mind regarding UBI? It'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this.
- cylinder 10y ago
  Working class wants to work.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    "But robots," someone said, apparently distracted by futurism from noticing the existence of manual trades.
  - sillyarg 10y ago
    That's one of the benefits of UBI over many welfare programs. Because it's universal, it's not cash for not working; it's cash.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Working class wants to work. One of the principal selling points for UBI as a replacement for existing means tested social benefit programs is that it eliminates the perverse incentives created by means tested programs in which benefits are reduced by outside income (especially from work), at a rate that, in aggregate across the programs a person may be eligible for, may even exceed the after-tax income from work. A selling point it has as a replacement for minimum wage is that it provides a quality-of-life safety net without preventing work that people would willingly do, and which would be economically valuable for employers, by setting a floor on minimum hourly pay. UBI is, arguably, more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo it is offered to replace.
    - justinpombrio 10y ago
      Translation: Currently, many social benefit programs give people less money the more they work. If a person is eligible for enough of these programs, they can even make less money by working than they would by not working. UBI (universal basic income) doesn't have this problem because it pays people the same amount regardless of weather they work. Thus, it is arguably more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo is. EDIT: Made translation more precise.
klank 10y ago
> ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution I'm confused about your stance on education. At first blush you seem to be diminishing it's impact while promoting it. Care to elaborate?
- eitland 10y ago
  If by education GP means higher education then I can possibly add something: IIRC there already seems to be a shortage of craftsmen (carpenters, welders, plumbers etc) and a surplus of people with various higher educations.
  - endzone 10y ago
    a shortage that's not reflected in the wages for skilled jobs (outside of powerful unions)
    - petra 10y ago
      I know that in Israel there's shortage in those professions, but the pay isn't good. So maybe it's more complex that simple supply vs demand ?
      - endzone 10y ago
        i can't think of any reason why basic economic principles wouldn't apply.
        petra 10y ago
        Say you have a small factory ,employing 50 older welders doing a risky job at relatively little pay. Say you need 10 more welders - but those guys really don't like risk so they would need a big increase in the salary, maybe 50%-100%. But you know that than the word will get out and the older workers will demand similar salaries. So it's a big jump in total labor-costs per work-unit. And let's not forget - revenue per employee can be quite limited in many places. So maybe paying low is the better state for the business.
humanrebar 10y ago
> Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do! Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions that provided this: regular neighborhood hangout spots, social clubs, adult recreational leagues, and especially churches. > unions are overall good ideas Maybe. Depends. I frequently see union demands oriented around last decade's operational patterns instead of next decade's. Like requiring specific outdated jobs be filled (like toll booth workers) when it would be more value-added to have the same person clean or provide general customer service. A union looking out for its members would embrace that some jobs would fade away and provide (or demand) retraining for its workers so they're qualified for new jobs, even in other industries if need be.
- idrios 10y ago
  > Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions True, though I think new institutions will come back. Things like Meetup groups seem to be gaining more traction--The groups are just slow to adoption because they're so new that nobody can be grandfathered in yet by friends or family who have been long-term members. > Unions are overall good ideas -- Maybe. Depends. I see unions as just another corporation - they're satisfying a need of "workers should not be exploited", their revenue model is "members pay X% and in return get our strength in numbers", and their activity streams are "fight for favorable legislation" and "Threaten uncompliant businesses". The problem with unions is they are not treated as corporations in their own right, so unions have become monopolistic, heavily involved in lobbying and partaking in generally corrupt behavior--responding more strongly to incentives to survive and make money than incentives to keep its members happy. Unions are still powerfully beneficial, but I'd wish there were multiple unions for any industry that competed with each other, some with stricter requirements to get in, each offering different freedoms and protections to its workers
  - mbostleman 10y ago
    Unions are monopolies by their nature - it's not something they become. They only exist due to a statutory exemption of anti-trust law. I personally have not been able find a justification for a monopoly of any kind in a free society.
unabridged 10y ago
>unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish UBI would be much better than unionizing the entire country (the IWW is the only union I know of that would accept all people regardless of skill). Everyone would be guaranteed unlimited strike pay that can sustain them. The effect on employee-employer relationships would be amazing, every degrading/dangerous job would instantly have to 2x or 3x its salary to keep workers. Every worker would be able to negotiate from a position of safety knowing they effectively have 'fuck you money'.
mindslight 10y ago
The article is a swing and a miss. The problem is much deeper than the bias of being more educated and intellectual. It's that they believe singular "policy" can be made and then dictated top-down - that effects will be quickly visible and easily understandable. They're up against a hard problem in the computational complexity sense, yet it is in none of their interests to be honest and admit their limits. Most of their ideas lack intellectual rigor and merely follow the fashions of power. BI in particular is a simplistic continuation of printing money to overstimulate the economy.

PaulHoule 10y ago

The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate. In particular, when it comes the issues of the humanities that revolve around "how should you live your life?"; a professor who is tenured has nothing to say to people subject to the "flexible economy" other than to implant false conciousness.

joe_the_user 10y ago
The isolation of the intellectual and the pundit is larger than the question of the university. Human civilization has been based on increasing specialization and that specialization has been both an adaptation and a marker of the ruling elite - the first specialists were essentially priests, which makes it clear specialization has always a signal[1] of power even if said specialization involved some efforts find truthful representations of the world. The scientific method, which to some extent verifies specialized knowledge and beliefs, is much younger than specialization and it's much harder to apply to knowledge about how human - both because human society is hard to do repeatable experiments on and because it can offend the existing specialized beliefs that order society - religion, political beliefs, morality, etc. [1]Broadly, a display signifying various evolutionary or social traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
tottenhm 10y ago
> The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate. Yes... but for context, we can compare an academy with a factory, a military, a primary school, a hospital, a ride-share, or a church. If a person spends the majority of his time on writing papers, shaping steel, marching in formation, tagging on a playground, tending to sick people, driving strangers around the city, or praising god... well, all that focused labor is going to warp his world view a bit. And that is quite deliberate. Institutions are defined by how they isolate their members, direct their members' focus, and acquire comparative-advantage. Of course, institutions in our time are not absolute. If we turn our attention away from categorical institutions... and instead look at individuals... then the situation gets much more interesting and less dark (but still imperfect)...

chm 10y ago

This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I'm interested in knowing if people actually read the article or upvoted the title?

Donwangugi 10y ago
Would be nice to only allow upvotes from those who have visited the site, but that would be a privacy problem.
morninj 10y ago
It would book interesting if HN tracked which upvotes come from people who actually clicked the link. Maybe that would be too intrusive or brittle to implement, but the data could be interesting and might improve the ranking algorithm.
1439205948 10y ago
hahaha, it would seem the sort of people who immediately agree with an anti-intellectual title are the same people who don't read the articles!
dbgllm 10y ago
It seems to load again. Stability issues perhaps?
MollyR 10y ago
It's working intermittently. The first time I clicked it, it worked, but not the second.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I suspect that that sentence would have been just as accurate with "and so" replacing "yet"... The various errors (I got a 500 when I first tried to read it, but got through later; others have reported DB errors) are because the infrastructure can't handle the attention.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that. By the way, if I understand correctly, this was the death blow to logical positivism. Michael Polanyi pointed out that logical positivism required objective observers, and all we had were human beings, who were never really objective.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  >But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that. Really, no, absolutely not. The bias is assumed, that's why double-blind is the gold standard too. I'd argue that at its best, intellectualism is all about building a deeper awareness of our limitations and foibles, while developing systems to compensate for them.
dbgllm 10y ago
Yeah it felt like a superficial reflection the author wanted to concretize in words. It certainly prompts discussion but it provides only fragile arguments.
allemagne 10y ago
Not a bad article, but the piece as a whole appeared to be an exercise in justifying the author's own populist, conservative ideology.

beat 10y ago

pg's essays are a nice antidote to some of this nonsense. One that stood out for me was the idea of cities that concentrate intellectuals, which was studied much more deeply by pg in "Cities and Ambition".

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
I don't think this article contradicts anything that PG says. These are just different facets of the broad reality out there. What PG says applies pretty well to the elite group who create startups and push technology forward. This article highlights the discrepancy in first-hand experience between elites and average folks. Both are valid.

pnathan 10y ago

One must argue that intellectuals are freaks, if one wishes to denigrate their opinions and understanding. One must pointedly ignore any possibility of the experts spending in-depth to understand a field to claim that they are out of touch[1]. Having come out of this Glorious Peasantry the author idealizes, I suggest the author quit idealizing it. Chasing egalitarianism leads to Know-Nothing nincompoops being selected as presidential candidates. edit: [1] The author did not specifically claim that. But this is the inference chain used in blue-collar land to ignore what experts say: Professor X studies field F; Professor X doesn't do the common folk things and is incompetent at handyman work W; because he is incompetent at W and out of touch, he is incompetent at F. QED, ignore professor X in his discussions about F. This leads to all sorts of problems in public policy because the experts are ignored & insulted regularly because they are "out of touch and ignorant". Frankly, these kinds of articles are pretty repellent, and the click-bait title could have been lifted from a certain notable real estate agent's Twitter.

throwanem 10y ago
I'm not sure what it is to which you're responding, but I do not think it's the argument Lind makes in the article theoretically under discussion here.

throw_away_777 10y ago

This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence. This sentiment is completely ridiculous, yet I'm sure a lot of people believe it because it makes them feel superior. Pundits and professors are often wrong, but it isn't because they are highly educated. I still trust the opinion of a professor rather than someone working at Pizza Hut.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence. Not at all. It says highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks because these categories have very different ranges of first-hand experience.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  Why do you think they have different ranges of first-hand experiences? It is undeniable that by any objective measure professors are smarter (in the sense of being better able to tackle intellectual problems) than the average population. Do you honestly think someone working at Burger King has a better understanding of the world than a professor? I urge you to actually have a conversation with such a person.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    There are a few well-read would-be intellectuals stuck working at a fast food joint simply due to not knowing how to do otherwise.
    - throw_away_777 10y ago
      The existence of some very smart KFC workers doesn't mean that on average McDonald's workers are as intelligent as professors.

oli5679 10y ago

Anyone else getting this error message? Error establishing a database connection

anotherhacker 10y ago

An easier explanation: variation. Systems can be tremendously complex. There are countless unknown and unknowable variables in play. Moreover, the interactions between those variables can also be unknown and unknowable. The intellectual world (academia) is based upon professors and schools who can teach the "right way" of doing things and thinking. That's how PHDs work--you have to come up with a "new" idea to get your PHD. As you can see, it creates a conflict of interest. It would be much better if academia taught simple principles, variability, and how to think.

hyperion2010 10y ago

"The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment..." << Someone care to explain to me how being atypical distorts my judgement? This piece is not very substanative beyond enumerating how PPPs are different, it then merely says "they don't understand because of their difference." That seems rather like ad hominem.

Noseshine 10y ago
I see nothing wrong with it. I am very sure I don't understand the situation of poor working people. It has nothing to do with my IQ but with the fact that I don't live there live, never have. What makes you think you know about other people's lives if you don't live among and with and as them? Just reading a few essays now and then? You would not accept that view if a committed layperson tried to give advice to physicists (referring to yesterdays thread that pointed to https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...) but instead insist they'd have to study physics and not just read a few papers. Thinking the issues of the "working class" are different because "how difficult can it be" doesn't seem consistent or right to me.
- hyperion2010 10y ago
  I'm not claiming that I know anything about other people's lives. In fact I might go so far as to say that when it comes to understanding the world as a whole trying to do so by enumerating the personal experiences of all the members of the human race might not be the best way to do it. Our brains create the world for us, they tell us things and give us imperatives that even the smartest of us often don't realize. Most importantly the lie to us, all of us. Reality is not a matter of experience, when an intellectual makes a statement from his experience he is just as likely to be wrong as anyone else. What tends to set some intellectuals apart is that the occasionally apply data to a situation. I will grant you that because they do this on occasion they are far (infinitely some might argue) more likely to think that explantations that actually come from their limited (fallible) experience come from data.

oli5679 10y ago

Here's a cached link to the text from this article if anyone is having problem with the link above: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

BookmarkSaver 10y ago

>For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals. So... intellectuals were right about the issues that they were focused on, but somehow populists are right that they are out of touch? Those seem contradictory to me, if they are problematically out of touch, then why were their ideas still correct? Who cares? At worst these seem like separate qualities, clearly being out of touch didn't make them wrong about the actual issues directly.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
No, populists were wrong about the issues that they were focused on. That doesn't mean that intellectuals were right, about anything. Intellectuals can be wrong on any given issue (especially since, for any issue, you can find an intellectual on both sides). But more to the point, intellectuals can be wrong (or at least completely out of touch) in the choice of questions that they think are important.
jerf 10y ago
Those were two cherry-picked examples of things intelligentsia got right. It was not a claim that they get everything or almost everything right. I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real world that so often leads the common man to be more correct about some very simple things that the intelligentsia misleads them here, because money is not a very concrete thing. It can seem like it is, because you've got this "cash" and this "gold" and it all seems very concrete, but the true driver of the economy, how people subjectively measure value, is very abstract. But intellectuals can also say some blitheringly idiotic things, like promoting the glorious Five Year Plans when anybody who has ever had to make real plans for the future knows that you generally encounter important divergences in the first week of implementation, or that battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, etc. I also do not endorse economics in general; it is true that "the gold standard" is not good, but economic's track record of telling us what is good is bad. Intellectual pursuits can be a very powerful and noble thing, but when it fails to correctly ground itself in reality it can become a very powerful and evil thing. I have great respect for intellectuals who admit error and craft new theories or ideas in response to failure and great, great contempt for the majority of those who fancy themselves intellectuals who instead cling to words and theory far, far beyond what is justified when evidence of error confronts them. (Yes, one can't drop a theory the instant one slight deviation is seen, but there are theories still alive today in the intellectual world that should have died decades, and in some particularly sad cases, centuries ago.)

alricb 10y ago

Very American-centric (but then this is by someone who helped found the "New America Foundation"); for instance outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts. Intellectuals all over can still have their heads up their asses, but that's not particularly new. The figure of the out-of-touch intellectual was common in the 19th century (e.g. Peter in War and Peace). Many professors do realize that their lives are quite different from those of most folks, but they're not often found in American elite institutions, so they don't show up on CNN.

throwanem 10y ago
> outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts Inside the US, too. Many of our academic institutions were founded on the strength of such gifts, but that's hardly where their money comes from today.

dragonwriter 10y ago

This is, frankly, crap. It both ignores the diversity of experience that people that are not "professors, pundits, and policy wonks" have, and implicitly dismisses the idea that an understanding of the world can be gained by systematic study of the world (what academics actually engage in) that is superior to what is gained by isolated, unsystematic, experience with some small slice of it that happens to be at a lower socioeconomic status. Its essentially a radical rejection of the idea of study and transmissible, shareable knowledge of the world.

someone7x 10y ago
I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times. When I say this I think of the anecdote in the article about how "intellectuals" prescribe more education as a panacea for social reform instead of the ideas offered by the author. This as a possible case of their own biases precluding a systematic approach. As I write this, the "frankly crap" part comes to mind again. There's not much substantive here, just a bunch of opinions.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times. If that was the problem the piece hoped to address (and it certainly is a problem in, e.g., media punditry -- though I'd argue that's not because of any general problem with "academics" but with the process by which media pundits get selected), one would expect that it would say so, and that the solution would be some better scrutiny to assure prescriptions come from systematic study, not a solution unconnected to the problem like suggesting that "every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse." EDIT: Additionally, if this was the issue, you'd expect that the author would actually support the argument with evidence from systematic study supporting the nature and source of the problem and the utility of the recommended solution.
sramsay 10y ago

endzone 10y ago

witness the hysteria about brexit among academics and london based commentators who have no idea about the reality of life in britain

snockerton 10y ago

tl;dr privileged, circle-jerking elitists think they're smarter than the rest of the world and don't know what it's like to be a stupid, poor person.

alistairSH 10y ago

Couldn't I just as easily state "the french-fry cook doesn't know anything about the life of a philosopher"? Everybody's view of the world is limited by their own experiences. Does that mean everybody therefore misunderstands the world?

usefulcat 10y ago
Yes, you certainly could state that. I think the point is that the french fry cook is much less likely to have an outsized influence on public policy compared to the philosopher/professor/pundit.
- wfo 10y ago
  And, in particular, there are many, many more french fry cooks than philosophers. So the french fry cook understands the perspective of a larger proportion of people in the world than the philosopher does. Or so the argument goes. I'd disagree -- a large part of academic education, the humanities, is about learning to understand the perspectives of others. I'd say the philosopher understands the french fry cook's perspective better than vice versa, and that the philosopher is better positioned to misunderstand /less/ across all walks of life (though misunderstanding is inevitable) than most everyone else. For intellectuals trained exclusively in STEM/social science who sprint from the humanities as quickly as humanly possible, yes the critique is spot on.

gsmethells 10y ago

Even though I have a Master's of Science in Computer Science, I also spent a few years of my youth (more than they suggest in this article) working as a groundskeeping for several apartment buildings across town. Mowing, weeding, edging, planting, etc. On the flip side, my father had a PhD in Physics and taught at the local university. I believe I probably did better than most when it came to genes and funding, but I graduated high school with people who got up and milked the cows before coming into school and I know their lifestyle as well as my own. I think this article itself is out-of-touch.

return0 10y ago

Just because we have Brexit, Trump and the rise of populists everywhere doesnt mean that pundits have suddenly strayed. Pundits have since the time of Socrates been out of touch with society. What i see as the failure of today's pundits is lack of rigor, perseverance and their tendency to lazily put their eggs in questionable baskets (e.g. universal income). O tempora, o mores, this is the world of 140-character-worshippers and high h-indexes.

juhanima 10y ago

What a confusing article and discussion! I have a vague feeling we are witnessing a very significant breakdown of something, but I'm not sure what it is. So I'll just post some random thoughts - The idea of educating intelligenzia by having them work on the fields for a year sounds a bit too much like the cultural revolution of China in the 1960's. It was bad. - It seems very silly to me to question the value of education. Learning about earlier mistakes is a great way to avoid repeating those mistakes. Learning is good. - If education is only available for those with a lot of wealth, it certainly brings about both an alienating effect and a lot of bitterness. That's too bad. I'm from a country with free universities and government subsidized students' loans. I think it's a good system, couldn't have afforded any university education without it, being from a poor family. - In the discussion an idea seems to loom that a less informed opinion is evened out by the fact that more people share it. This I can not abide, although it is the basic idea of democracy. I always thought democracy is mostly a safety measure against tyrants and a pretty ineffective mode of government in its weakest. An enlightened democracy is much better than a populist one. Both are better than a non-democracy, at least most of the time. - The difference between an enlightened democracy and a populist democracy is evident in its leaders. John Stuart Mill was an enlightened democrat for one. The bad ones can be spotted out by their spitefulness. - Too bad some populists riding on the tide of anti-intellectualism have managed to turn democracies into tyrannies. Sometimes ships capsize.

Falkon1313 10y ago

To put it in perspective, a recent research study[1] conducted by a team of elite PhD economics researchers discovered the astonishing fact that people who face a sudden unexpected financial crisis (such as medical bills, car breakdown, job loss) are surprisingly less likely to become homeless if they can pay their rent/mortgage, while those who cannot pay for their home are more likely to become homeless. (In truth, they went in-depth in calculating percentages and timelines and cost-benefits, etc. That summary trivializes their work.) But the basics of this discovery made by this elite team of academic researchers is something that every single working-class person in the country, even high school dropouts, knows as a simple basic fact of everyday daily life. The idea that you would need to educate and train several people for many years, to the level of being professors at top colleges, then assemble a team and give them a grant to do a study to discover such a common part of daily life seems a bit ridiculous to non-academics. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694