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Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?
- nickolai 15y agoGeeks I know value skill and creativity over knowledge. Getting things done instead of getting stuck in pointless intellectual and political considerations. There is a growing contempt for the old academic intelligentsia more concerned with 'clan politics' than actual knowledge creation. The system looks like it is meritocratic, but whoever dwells there long enough knows how far this is from meritocracy. What seems to be the consensus is that academia has not brought in any revolutionary innovation for decades. Whenever practical innovation came, it came from characters as far from the 'standard intellectual stereotype' as could possibly be. As a result there is a haughty "keep debating while we get the job done" attitude, which may be mistaken for anti-intellectualism. In reality it is not that geeks dislike experts and intellectuals - it is that they've met too many would-be-experts who failed their most trivial relevancy tests, so the term 'expert' raises a BullshitIncomingException almost immediately in any geek's mind.
- mw63214 15y agosounds like a depth vs. breadth issue...only in this issue, both sides are being validated.
- gaius 15y agoDo you know how crazy that sounds, typed in a medium invented by a theoretical physicist? Of course I am referring to Tim Berners-Lee. What counts as "innovation" these days is what, LOLcats?
- fleitz 15y agoTim Berners-Lee created something practical to solve a problem he and many other people actually had. What most geeks are against in terms of 'anti-intellectualism' is the difference between X.400 and SMTP. You can build a somewhat functioning SMTP server/client in a day, try doing that with X.400.
- nickolai 15y agoI think you missed my point. It is not against theoretical science. It is against scientific politics that seem to dominate academia. Regarding Tim Berners Lee, he is imho all but an 'average theoretical physicist' - which further proves my point.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoAn average physicist in an international particle physics institution and collaboration, supported by grants, developing for the sake of sharing science, especially experts so they could collaborate with other experts.
- te_chris 15y agoBeing against "politics" in anything always seems to be shorthand for being against having one's world view challenged. This old meme gets trotted out by corpratists all the time: "X process has become so politicised, if only it were more efficient". It's becoming quite tiring and doesn't actually help advance anyone's argument forward - which I guess is the point.
- piguy314 15y agoIt's valid to argue that systems which allocate resources based on political processes rather than market processes ARE in fact less efficient, with the caveat that government intervention can produce either positive or negative externalities (or both). This is why it's a good idea to have the government subsidize scientific research which is not imminently monetizable (positive externality) but it's a bad idea to use the government to enforce domain monopolies (credentialism, cartelism, negative externality).
- forensic 15y ago"Politics" seems to be an excuse for giving up these days. I think baby boomer parenting techniques have left a generation with very little resolve in the face of adversity.
- lallysingh 15y agoWhat's worse is that if you ask, you'll be given a long list of "innovations" created by people who "get things done"... only that they started as research projects in academia before that. The thing is, anti-intellectuals don't look at history to see if their claims are valid. Very convenient. Also not far from the same-styled groups in the political spheres these days.
- sophacles 15y agoOf course they don't, history is just intellectual propaganda :P
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deskamess 15y agoAnd lets not forget hardware... high brow physics, snooty maths, prima dona chemistry, diva material science all go into the design and fabrication of IC's. These are not 'Learn X in a weekend' and show someone my weekend project. Those spouting anti-intellectual dribble often forget the well worn, time tested shoulders they are standing on.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoExcept "geeks" often live in their own little warped world where trivial relevancy tests might be something like meme recognition, something I'd be more proud of failing than passing half the time.
- contextfree 15y agoThose geeks you know (and I really wish you wouldn't generalize here) are being extremely shallow, since those practical innovations almost always build on decades of academic and industrial research. Yeah, the people who put in the last piece of the puzzle needed to commercialize those innovations (which is a great accomplishment in itself, don't get me wrong) tend to be more practically oriented, big surprise there.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYes, but it is more romantic to attribute everything to one man cough Steve Jobs cough than to the decades of development that went before. Generally folks who have seen far recognize the shoulders upon which they stand, but those who idolize them seem to see them floating in air.
- kenjackson 15y agoThere is a growing contempt for the old academic intelligentsia more concerned with 'clan politics' than actual knowledge creation. But lets be clear, this is the case everywhere. Geeks have the same clan politics. The difference is rarely the politics, but where you sit in the pecking order, that changes your perspective. I actually think the problem with academia in CS today is it's too applied. They should NOT be focused on today's problems. The Cloud is not something one should do research on in academia. Industry will tackle the cloud from a million different angles. But what's after the cloud? What after touch and Kinect? Precise mind control and HUD in glasses/contacts really should be the mainstream in academic research today, but it's actually a fringe. I think academia should be way out there more than it is. The geeks will protest that they do nothing of relevance, but that's how it should be. :-)
- swolchok 15y agoI don't think that "mind control" is the most PR-friendly term for the tech in question.
- fecklessyouth 15y agoTraditional "Great Books" academia, or even the liberal arts, has never made the claim to produce innovation. It's quite the opposite. They produce students.
- benwr 15y agoI'm reading Anna Karenina right now. It's enjoyable. I think many people would get something out of it if they read it. But most people never did. The majority has never been "well-read". And so, if we can make the majority well-equipped with information (by destroying impenetrable silos and distributing their grain), who cares if that doesn't have any other effect? The person who is well-informed will not necessarily be the same person who has received an excellent liberal arts education any more, but at least ze'll be well-informed. Edit: clarity. I never intended to say anything about the classics' value, only their past and future popularity. (in hindsight, the former could easily have been an interpretation of the post)
- lhnn 15y agoI can read a wikipedia article on Libertarianism, or I can read "Stranger in a Strange Land". I can read about the dangers of absolute power and lack of free will, or I can read "1984". The lessons learned from classics are constantly quoted, and it's beneficial for people to read and learn.
- benwr 15y agoI absolutely agree that reading some classics would be valuable for anyone, but I think it would be hard to learn anything concrete from a lot of what is considered "art". My argument was that we aren't destroying the silos because we hate the information, we're destroying them because we hate the silos. And if that's beneficial, who cares if most people, who wouldn't have otherwise read Russian literature or listened to Mozart, still don't?
- noahth 15y agoI think that in a lot of cases, if you're looking to learn something "concrete" from a piece of art, or art in general, you might be looking at it the wrong way. A lot of the best art is instructive in some way, but not the same way that a wikipedia article or a technical how-to is.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
- madamepsychosis 15y agoIt's more that geeks oppose old institutions having a monopoly on knowledge than that they oppose any sort of knowledge at all. Maybe there's some resistance to the rigid, hierarchical structure of "intellectualism" as well.
- fleitz 15y agoDefinitely agree with you, most of the value in a the school system comes on the day they hand you a piece of paper. The school system is not intellectual, it's elitist. It's the whole idea that someone thinks their answer is right because someone dropped two hundred grand on an education they could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late fees at the public library. I hear it all the time, "is he good engineer?" "yeah, he went to <who fucking cares>" If that kind of thinking is anti-intellectual than sign me up for the anti-intellectual camp.
- fogus 15y ago"Most of the value in a the school system comes on the day they hand you a piece of paper." Then you're doing it wrong. Like many things in life, what you get out is proportional to what you put in.
- danking00 15y agoI want to really emphasize what the parent post says. I'm currently an undergraduate and I am having an exceptional experience. Two summers ago, I worked with a professor one-on-one to build a compiler for a subset of Scheme. From last summer through to the fall of 2010, I was working at Intuit which is by no means the epitome of excellent software engineering, but I got to live in San Diego, experience a whole new culture, learn to sail, and experience software engineering in the "real world". Finally, this summer and fall, I get to work with Olin Shivers (yes, him[1]) and some erudite, poignant grad students. Even in classes, you can take advantage of having an expert to ask questions of, and believe me, I take full advantage of it. I've spent hours inquiring about the LHC, Mandarin idioms, and the history behind and intricacies of English grammar rules during my time here. The school system is an opt-in, opportunity machine. carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero [1] http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
- aba_sababa 15y agoIn response to his accusations, I DO think that most classics probably ought not to be read. But that DOESN'T mean I'm anti-intellectual - rather, it means I believe that iteration is everything and we just need to upgrade our old firmware. Classics are, by and large, inefficient mediums of information. The fact that they are still around today is really just a function of the fact that they were still around yesterday. And what if every nugget of knowledge and insight that is contained in a classic could be transmitted in a much smaller package? We'd have trouble remembering and applying it all, sure, but not if they were a part of our collective consciousness - as many ideals found in the classics already are. Believe it or not, you already know most of what Kant, or Twain, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare has to tell you. They were all human, just like us, and we are more than capable of thinking what they thought without reviewing what they said first.
- tomjen3 15y agoI properly know all that Shakespeare has to say to me, but the importance of him is how he says it, how he makes English come alive and sing. I have never read anybody who has mastered the English language so completely has he has.
- Homunculiheaded 15y agoI always find it somewhat ironic that these discussion about anti-intellectualism always seem to lack any knowledge of how old this very discussion is. Plato's Phaedrus spends plenty of time discussing the effects of new technology (writing) on current intellectual practice (memory), and yet I rarely see it even touched on when people write on the topic, so much for those old books. More important: the real anti-intellectualism to look out for is the 'trial of Socrates' kind, not disregarding one form of transmitting knowledge because of your own intellectual curiosity. Certain classes of 'geeks' feeling they have found a better model of knowledge transmission, even if they are wrong, than the academic model is not anti-intellectualism.
- rfrey 15y agoBeautiful comment. There might be some parallels between the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley (drop out of school to go conquer the universe, etc.) and the warrior culture of Sparta and Athens. The spirited youth that Socrates seduced were bent on fame and fortune on the battlefield, and had little time for long-haired hippie freak philosophers.
- yters 15y agoSocrates recommends in the Republic that youth spend time in military service and business, and hold off on doing philosophy until they are around 40 and know a bit more about how the world works.
- rfrey 15y agoYet he takes two aspiring young warriors, and converts them to philosophy. Socrates' philosophy was not at all dependent on knowing anything about how the world works: in fact, those shadows were considered harmful.
- yters 15y agoThat's true that he convinces the youth of the value of philosophy. But, that doesn't mean there wasn't any value to the rest of life. In fact, it may give the rest of life more value, since the rest of life can be lived in light of the importance of philosophy. Socrates himself served in combat, and was noted for his bravery (recounted in Symposium). If memory serves, he attributed this bravery to his interest in philosophy.
- knowtheory 15y agoI resent and disagree with the distinction that is being drawn up here. The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum, and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes, change is not possible from within. It is the opposite of conservatism (with the little "c"). Additionally in the world of the internet, where a thousand flowers bloom, and theories and movements are spawned and die every day, i put relatively little stock in each of the common wisdoms that spring up for their 15 minutes of fame, and then fade into the abyss. Fads like the notion of experts being unnecessary are ridiculous, and largely have no legs. And even to the extent that they do reflect some deep seated feeling, i would more likely attribute them to an antipathy to credentialism, rather than the notion that expertise is worthless. And if you want to put a political spin on this, posts like these are exactly the sort of false equivalences which make moral argumentation impossible. Sure geekdom has its share of charlatans and know-nothings pretending to be masters of insight, but this is different from demands of faith and fanaticism, and that if you disagree with orthodoxy, not only are you wrong but that you are forever damned, and in some cases, shunned by your friends and family. I've listened to David Barton (The "Historian", and yes, the scare quotes should indicate to you that he's not an actual historian.) make the claim that the Bible lays out specific prescriptions on tax policy, and that if you vote for a party that raises taxes, you are not on the right side with God. These are not the same caliber of argument, and i am extremely frustrated to hear them equated.
- fecklessyouth 15y ago>The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum, and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes, change is not possible from within. I'm not really sure what you mean here. Tearing down what--books? Schools of thought?
- knowtheory 15y ago
- Symmetry 15y agoThere are a lot of good reasons to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", but one thing I got out of it that I think is applicable to this discussion relates to our concept of "the classics". In fields of knowledge where they is progress the classics are often respected, but seldom read. Nobody learning about physics reads the original Newton[1] because there are better ways to phrase the same insights that are easier for students to digest. So we have fields that make progress like the sciences where students read modern textbooks, and fields that don't the original works of their discipline. The classics have their place as art and as sources of prestige, but if you're looking to learn things there are usually better places to look. Not that I disagree with everything Mr. Sanger said, but the truth is a complicated beast. [1] Some people studying the history of science read the originals, but thats different.
- Alex3917 15y ago"Nobody learning about physics reads the original Newton[1] because there are better ways to phrase the same insights that are easier for students to digest." I would take issue with that. The way kids are taught calculus in high school ignores everything Newton did because it's not the most efficient way to teach kids how to solve AP problems. But without going back and learning about the questions that Newton was trying to answer, you don't actually understand how calculus works even if you can do it by rote. So at best kids learn it for the test and then forget it because they don't actually understand how it works, and more likely they never really gain any ability to begin with. Sanger's essay is in praise of school and formal education, but in fact what's taught in school is more often than not just a showy pretense of false economy. It's only when you leave the classroom and have time to really engage with the classics and other substantive works on your own that you can actually start to understand how the world actually works. Don't get me wrong, some form of formal education would be the best way to learn if it actually delivered what people said it did, but it doesn't. This whole essay is intellectually dishonest because high schools and colleges don't even deliver anything remotely close to what Sanger is pretending, at least not for the vast majority of people who go through them. But then again, Sanger has been pretty much full of shit for the better part of the decade. If you actually go through and read his original writing on this topic, it's clear that what he really wants isn't a more intellectual culture, but rather a free pass on being able to make up facts without citing any sources because he has a Ph.D.: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
- stretchwithme 15y agoIs there a new jock anti-athleticism?
- reemrevnivek 15y agoI understand that you're trying to say that jocks are to athleticism as geeks are to intellectualism. Your tone indicates that you believe that jocks cannot be anti-athletics. By your initial analogy, geeks cannot be anti-intellectual. However, I disagree with at least the analogy. The word "geek", in this context, refers to a computer programmer, not an intellectual.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- _delirium 15y agoAn odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a pretty good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry! Here is what his bio on that page says: I call myself an "Internet Knowledge Organizer." I started Wikipedia.org, Citizendium.org, and WatchKnow.org, among others. Now I am lucky enough to be able to work full-time on creating free materials for early education, which I am using with my two little boys and sharing with you. Now, that all sounds pretty interesting. But does it sound like traditional academia? What are his formal credentials in Internet Knowledge Organization? What are his formal credentials in early childhood education? What does he publish in peer-reviewed journals in those areas? It sounds almost as if, despite no formal training in sociology, new media, online communities, pedagogy, etc. (all of which do have established academic fields, which he could've studied if he wished), he just brazenly went out there and started some projects. As far as I can tell, he didn't even read what had been written about those areas. That's cool, but why is he then all negative on the idea in general? If we wanted to apply some strict standard of expertise, Larry Sanger should be publishing in philosophy journals (an area he has formal training in), and staying out of online communities, education, and other areas in which he lacks academic expertise. In any case, I'm a computer science academic, and in our field I don't see it as a new sentiment: the idea that you can be a brilliant garage hacker with no degree is decades old. I don't think it's overall that negative a relationship, either. It's not necessarily idyllic, but plenty of non-academics are interested in the work of academic research (algorithms, PLs, operating systems, AI). Even in industry, researchy stuff, like what comes out of Google Research and MSR, gets a lot of interest. It might help that some respect is given in the opposite direction as well-- plenty of academics' heroes include non-degree-holding garage hackers.
- aidenn0 15y ago"An odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a pretty good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry!" His premise isn't that making knowledge more accessible is bad. It is that the growing attitude that is comprised of (among other things) "If it's on wikipedia, I don't actually need to know it"
- mechanical_fish 15y agoI think this essay's definition of anti-intellectualism is incoherent -- must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade school, disrespect War and Peace, or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in order to be labeled an anti-intellectual? -- so it's hard to make a definitive response. But here's a partial response, focused strictly on the phenomenon of college education: It would be easier to embrace academia if the inflation-adjusted cost of going to school were stable or decreasing, rather than growing at 6.8% per year between 1987 and 2009: http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition-explaining-the-increases http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition-expla... With a few exceptions -- gods bless MIT Open Courseware and the Khan Academy -- the academy does not scale, nor does it even try very hard. The Internet gets more inclusive every year. The academy does not. As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our public discourse, and the percentage of those people who've gone to Harvard just gets smaller and smaller. It would be easier to embrace academia if a young academic had more than a snowball's chance in hell of finding an academic job. Nostalgic baby boomers can look back at a time when new colleges were going up at a great rate and they were all hiring staff. Not so much anymore. I know lots and lots of people who would love to do laboratory research, for example... in a world where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career risk, incredible devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially the sacrifice of one's family life. It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all taxpayers could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that only other academics can access for "free" via their university libraries. And a lot more people would be touting the virtues of college degrees if the unemployment rate for college graduates weren't at its highest point since 1970: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-collegegrads06_ST_N.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-... It may not be entirely the intellectuals' fault that college education costs more than before and can take longer than ever to pay off [1], but you can't expect people not to complain about it. --- [1] AFAIK college education does pay off, handsomely, even now. Although if tuition keeps growing and wages do not, shouldn't we feel free to wonder, out loud, how much longer this can remain true? Isn't that what a numerate intellectual might wonder?
- 15y ago
- jacques_chester 15y agoI think Sanger has conflated multiple streams of argument here. The first is marxist and postmodernist critiques of the classics. "Dead White Men" and all that jazz. The second is the demoticism (not the democratisation) of the internet. These are unrelated, in my view. The PoMx/PoMo criticism is more political, in my view, than what it purports to critique. The change in demoticism is itself not a fundamental change but a rhyming riff on what has happened in the past. Today the classics have never been more accessible. But just as when Penguin Classics was introduced, most people want penny dreadfuls, potboilers, comic books and a generous helping of porn.
- KeyBoardG 15y agoThey're called Derp-sters.
- RandyHelzerman 15y agoThere is a new geek pragmatism, but that is not the same thing as anti-intellectualism.
- tomkarlo 15y agoThese kinds of discussions remind me of the people who said 20 years ago that calculators were going to make everyone math-illiterate.
- colomon 15y agoI just flashed back to one of many times in the last few years that the person behind the cash register couldn't handle basic making change without the machine telling him how to count. But then, if we're seriously talking about "the classics", then "everyone" is already classic-illiterate, aren't they? I mean, I took two semesters of Great Books and done a good bit of further reading on my own. I'd be willing to bet that puts me in the top 1% of the population. But I'm still fairly classic-illiterate by the standards of 100 years ago...
- hammerdr 15y agoHuh? I'm trying to get my head around today being less 'classically literate' than in the early 1900s. For example, in the United States, 10% of the populate was flat-out illiterate. Only 50% of people were enrolled in primary education (reaching a middle-school level education). [1] Secondary schools (High School) just started around the 1890s. Enrollment in schools that are now mandatory was 10%. [3] Since 1942, inflation-adjusted cost per pupil increased by 700%. [2] Some of that is surely inefficiency but most is because we spend more on education. This means better teachers and better materials. And this is in a country with one of the largest GDP in 1900. You can pretty safely assume we've had far less drastic changes in our own education system compared to the rest of the world. I'm sure Thomas Jefferson could destroy you in Classics knowledge. However, he was one of ten his age that had the means and passion enough to spend much of his life reading them. But, this all adds up. This leads to people reading War and Peace, Jane Eyre and Great Gatsby before they leave mandatory secondary school. And while not every country is at this level, technology and humanism has given people a much better chance in life to explore these types of works all over the world. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp [2] http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html [3] http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-20.pdf http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-20.pdf
- johnm 15y agoNew? No. Just the latest fad of rationalizations.
- spartyfan10 15y agoAll this article does is bash other peoples' opinions without providing and basis of its own. Why are the classics still worth reading? Why is practical knowledge not good enough? If I was supposed to be convinced by this, I wasn't. I still feel that reading "The Classics" is outdated. I see no real problem with them being considered "tl;dr". It doesn't seem unreasonable to me either to say that memorization is antiquated, I think that's true, though it certainly isn't done for all together and I do think you need to memorize things at first to learn them on some topics. I also am currently in university and feel like a lot of theory I've learned has been helpful and a lot of it has not. Frankly, the jury is still out for me on this topic and this article sure didn't put me on this guy's side of the fence.
- Apocryphon 15y agoI think at its core this issue is all about ease and speed vs. the classical idea of gaining knowledge through a long, pondering struggle of the mind, equally involving pouring over ponderous texts and memorizing facts. As far as the lightning speed of modern information technology, I must admit to be alarmed at that- I feel that my attention span has become so deteriorated in recent years that I find it very difficult to complete reading books. I haven't even finished reading this article (though I shall do so later). Certainly shortened attention spans + greater access to information -> absorption and retention of only a shallow subset of knowledge would be a great danger. Frankly, I'd like to see lifehacker-type articles that propose ideas to rebuild attention spans and teach memory techniques. Sort of blunting the anti-intellectual effects of prolonged exposure to the internet. I'd like to think that proper guidance, discipline, and training is the cure to anti-intellectualism. Perhaps that is something that Confucius would have approved of.
- georgieporgie 15y agoYears ago I read about a study with college students. They had one group read a book each night until they no longer wanted to read. The other group was told to do the same, but then to make themselves read just one more page. The latter group reported that they read more and more each night, and found their attention span increased significantly.
- etherael 15y agoWhat's the line between anti-intellectualism and being able to recognise an argument from authority fallacy? Sanger does not seem to be able to draw it.
- blahblahblah 15y agoThe ongoing attacks on academia have little to do with geek culture in particular. Academia is under attack primarily for cynical political purposes. Specifically, because the political right wing sees institutions of higher learning as bastions of left wing political ideology and because the employees of these institutions are largely unionized. What is happening is fundamentally a political battle dressed up in the guise of "concern" about tuition costs and the value of a college education.
- michaelochurch 15y agoI think the internet is, for those who can take it in, very humbling. The anti-intellectuals are the people who react badly to this overwhelming sense of one's own smallness. In 1900, colleges decided what it was important for an upper-middle-class person to know. One set of writers and texts was in the canon; the rest were not. Sometimes the selection was based on quality but it was often political as well. It wasn't actually possible to have "all knowledge" but one could get all the "important" knowledge in a few years of study. Any thinking person in 2011 realizes that this is no longer true (if it ever was). There's a million times more genuinely valuable knowledge out there than anyone can take in in a human life. Also, the authorities once trusted to decide what was important have been disrobed by technology; the increased power of technology has allowed us to discern that they aren't much smarter than the rest of us. Anyway, the result is that a lot of people get really insecure and overwhelmed when they realize how much they know nothing about, and there's a tendency among some people, as a defense mechanism, simply to declare large sectors of knowledge useless, unimportant, or outmoded. It's not just the less intelligent who have this attitude either. I've heard an esteemed computer scientist (someone with a name, but I'll withhold it here) argue that the only useful literature is science fiction because everything else is "just the seven deadly sins, over and over again".
- jwhitlark 15y agoIt isn't that the elites are about as smart as the rest of us, it's that they were usually found to have their own agenda, regardless of the ideals they espoused. Just another case of someone telling you "it's for your own good", when really it was for theirs. "Intellectuals" are the ones who are reacting badly, when their "authority" is challenged. It's not anti-intellectual to require someone back up their statements from authority, it's science.
- michaelochurch 15y agoThat's not anti-intellectual. That's just being discerning about what information you take in. Everyone needs to do that, especially with regard to, e.g., news media. Anti-intellectualism is when people start making ridiculous statements like "classical literature is boring and irrelevant" and "college is a waste of time" (rather than merely overpriced).
- DannoHung 15y agoShould people read a classic book because it is important or because it is a good book? I firmly reject the notion that a book should be read because it is "classic". But any book that's good should be read for it's intrinsic quality as exemplary writing. To that end, Ethan Frome can get fucked, Moby Dick is gonna (minus the incredibly inaccurate whale biology chapters) will be around forever.
- william42 15y ago«A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.» Guess which «geek anti-intellectual» said that. Mark Twain.
- localhost3000 15y agoI've learned more reading Dostoevsky than I ever have writing code. One is practical knowledge that might lead to a paycheck, the other is depth of knowledge that (for me) leads to a fulfilling and well-rounded life. The value is not mutually exclusive.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI don't think this article has much, or at least enough, to offer to stimulate a high quality debate on the subject. It conflates anti-intellectualism with skepticism about academia and authority, these are very different things though.
- tdignan 15y agoTest
- tdignan 15y agoI think the best examples of geek anti intellectualism are the groupthink cultures of reddit and 4chan.
- losethos 15y agoTL;DR after he started repeating himself :-) He's pompous. Brevity is the soul of wit. God says... schedule Greek ready wickedly write nourishing disease exposed continue gladdens dissolvest Italian Verily refund sighs Hierius animals silversmiths' earnestness EDITIONS EIN wayward rightly leaves propound already gainsayer starry fee lofty credulity opinions night wisdom hell piety intermission archive Infinite exact transparent tones I agree with some of his points, though, a little half-heartedly. Bible has some anti-intellectualism.
- GeneralMaximus 15y agoThis article is shallow trollbait. For example, this list summing up the beliefs of the anti-intellectual geek: > 1. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be. Who said that, and where? "Experts" are not excluded from Wikipedia or, in fact, any other online community. In a way, Quora, StackOverflow and friends recognize the value of the expert. The only difference is that now you don't have to pay thousands of dollars and travel to another country to ask these experts questions. You don't even have to attend university! It's about inclusion, not exclusion. Is the OP bitter about the fact that any teenager with a web browser can now learn how to write a radix sort whereas he had to go to university to learn it? Or is he bitter about the fact that said teenager has already learned a good chunk of important CompSci material even before graduating from high school and thus feels that a formal CS degree might be overkill? Sure, you can't learn philosophy at home, and you sure as hell can't build a particle accelerator at home, but anything that does not require special infrastructure that only a university can provide is up for grabs. Think maths, compsci, even design. > 2. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person speaking from authority. In the future, information will be developed and propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other websites. Once again, I don't know where he's getting this from. Does he know about the Kindle? Or iBooks? People still buy books when they need in-depth knowledge. The only time I look at Wikipedia instead of a book is when I'm doing initial research on a topic or when I feel I only need surface knowledge of the topic at hand. Sometimes I will buy a book because it was cited on Wikipedia. Does the OP know about the books people publish online? Real World Haskell, Dive Into Python, The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Clever Algorithms to mention a few CS-related books. Then there are a bunch of books on analog and digital electronics, math and statistics, all published on the web. A book does not have to be in the form of printed pages to convey knowledge. And remember: the people writing these books are still "experts", they still speak from "authority", they still have an "individual voice". Social media merely aggregates the work of individuals. > 3. The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant. What "classics" are we talking about here? Are we talking about philosophical texts? If yes, I don't think any geek questions the value of the work of Socrates. OTOH, the value of fiction is debatable. I personally love reading classics because I want to learn about people from another era. Some people prefer to read contemporary authors, and I don't think they're any worse off. David Foster Wallace has as much to say as Tolstoy. 4. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search. This is an age-old debate. What is more important: understanding why the Roman empire fell or knowing when it fell? Besides, if something is worth memorizing, you almost always end up memorizing it involuntarily. For example, many developers know regex syntax by heart. Same goes for human language: after looking up the same thing 20 times, you end up remembering it. The argument geeks are making is: why remember inconsequential data when you can be analyzing it instead? > 5. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek. You don’t have to go to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway. So going to college is the paragon of success? I'm sorry, but building and running a business is a far more difficult task than getting through college. IMO, of course. I do not judge people by the degrees they have. My opinions might be a bit jaded, though; college in India produces graduates who are pretty much unemployable. Looks like the OP met a crackpot on IRC and painted every geek with the same broad brush.
- wisty 15y agoSo there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college. I think this is the core of the article. Firstly, geeks are not opposed to knowledge, as such. There's knowledge, and the ability to apply it, and geeks value both. We don't all value both equally, there's a bit of diversity here, but "put up or shut up" is seen as a valid call. You can't just claim to know better. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it We dismis experts who flash their "expert card". We are deeply suspicious of experts of the esoteric, unless they can show they are also proficient in the familiar. you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far Here is where we start deeply mistrusting experts of the esoteric. Notice how the author refuses to actually specify which old books are important? Criticize Plato and he will say he is talking about Gothe. Or Victor Hugo. Or Sun Zi. Or Spinoza. you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible I advocate memorizing as much as possible. Cognitive psychology has a lot of evidence that low level knowledge is the foundation of higher order skills. A lot of modern educationalists dismiss this, but they don't have any evidence; just credentials of esoteric expertise. you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college Accessible knowledge is a good thing - would the author have opposed the Gutenberg press? Probably. As I've stated, I do want students to memorize as much as possible. If there are any geeks who think differently, they should read "Why Students Don't like School" - which presents a fair amount of cognitive psychology in a very easy format. Finally, we get to the real point. Because of our virolent anti-intellectualism, we discourage students from attending university. Bullshit. We discourage some students for going to university for three reasons: Firstly, we don't think it's necessarily the best way to educate themselves, mostly because class sizes are so big you might as well just watch a better lecturer on youtube. Second, it's not necessarily worth it, from an economic point of view. Finally, universities need a bit of competition.
- mikemaccana 15y agoHow does the author equate: "Recently, Sir Ken Robinson has got a lot of attention by speaking out–inspiringly to some, outrageously to others–saying that K-12 education needs a sea change away from “boring” academics and toward collaborative methods that foster “creativity.” " To: "Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known"? I recently attended a paid training course run by the authors of some well known toolkit. They are, without discussion, the experts on their own software. Nobody in the course got to 'hello world' before 2PM, the instructors constantly bickered between each other what tools the students should be using, and further discussion was limited to 'check our kitchen sink app for more demo code'. Everyone on the course This is because having knowledge of a topic, and being able to teach others, are separate skills. Both are required, however academics - people who spend their live in academia and are used to learning things for the purpose of learning, whereas most others are goal oriented - tend to lack the latter skill, despite their expertise in the former. This is not anti intellectualism. This is about requiring teachers to have the ability to teach.
- mikemaccana 15y ago(pardon the missing fragment above) "Everyone on the course...." later revealed they were either glad they didn't pay for it themselves or regretted that they did.
- goombastic 15y agoThe problem seems to be with the explosion of knowledge around us. Very often, beyond basic principles, what we are being taught in school is failing us in real life by being too general, too generic, and too broad to solve the problems we face. Given this, and given the lengths to which one must dig by oneself to solve a problem, a self reflecting geek tends to look back and see that his education has not been of much help. This is more so among information technology professionals and maybe among some in fundamental research. This doesn't make education unnecessary, just that there needs to be a way of making it more relevant to people, problems and choices.
- ignifero 15y agoTaking the author's point of view, one can spot 2 underlying assumptions about the world in today's digerati: 1) The more information we consume, the more likely we are to come up with a useful theory, tool etc. Our brain is designed to process and recombine stimuli and come up with innovative things, so the more combinations we do, the more likely we are to succeed. This is sort of like a darwinian theory of science and technology. There also an anti-specialization trend among geeks. 2) People have an equal opportunity to create new and significant knowledge. While (1) is debatable, (2) seems to be outright wrong. Some of our greatest scientists, from Newton to Einstein were "lucky" in coming up with great Ideas more than once in their lives. They also had a narrow field of focus, and it's doubtful they could keep up with Twitter today.
- CrLf 15y agoRecently there seems to be an increasing hate towards academia in particular, usually ranting about how it is too theoretical and how it doesn't prepare you for the "real world". Funny enough, this seems to come more often from people who either never went through college, or failed at it for whatever reason. Which can be fine, for people who are dedicated enough to actually learn on the job, instead of just acquiring habits and repeating them over and over. What isn't fine is this praise for superficial knowledge. What irks me the most is people praising their ignorance of what academic knowledge really offers, and how it can change some of your solutions (many times unknowingly) in the "real world". Practice does not replace fundamental knowledge. Practice only teaches you the solutions for the problems you encounter, not the solutions to the problems other people have encounterer over time, and the underlying reasons for the solutions you are using. It this particular case there isn't so much "anti-intellectualism", but a justification for ignorance.
- TikiTDO 15y agoWhile I am of mixed opinion on the article, the one part that really stands out for me is his insistence of the necessity of long, difficult texts. I am one of the people that seldom reads a book these days. It's not that I find it too challenging, or too long. I certainly read fast enough, and my background is sufficiently wide. However, I do find it far too repetitive and rife with personal opinion that does not aid my quest for more knowledge. Why would I read a book about a programming language when there is a set of APIs, tutorials, and articles that can convey the information in 1/10th the time? Why should I read a dozen chapters about the history leading to a new mathematical concept when I can just quickly read the research paper about that specific concept? Why do I have to read a hundred asides about what the author does on his days off, how he loves his wife and his dog, of what sort of stupid questions his students asked of him? I'm just here for information, and unfortunately books are rarely the most ideal way of getting it. Not to say that all books are bad, and should be deprecated as a medium. I have, and will always find good books enjoyable. However, to insist that they are an irreplaceable feature of the quest for knowledge is ignoring the reality of how the quest for knowledge has changed. In the end it's not about long, difficult texts; just difficult texts will often suffice.
- ap22213 15y agoAs others have generally pointed out, 'intellectualism' isn't the problem. Instead, it's a particular brand of intellectualism that economically benefits from maintaining its established system. These intellectuals have little incentive to change their established position from which they profit. and they profit a lot. Generally, the traditional intellectual world can't keep up with the pace of the rest of the culture. We consumers and participants of intellectualism want cheaper, faster, more variety and niche. The current intellectual establishment benefits from the opposite. Intellectualism is alive and well on the Internet. In fact this blog post and reaction to it is evidence. It's just that the traditional expert model doesn't scale into real economies. Many forces continue to work against it. As with other capital, intellectual capital will flow, like liquid, through the least resistant path. If one seeks influence and participation over intellectual topics, why would they spend many years going through the motions of attaining credibility and standing, when they can establish their presence much quicker along other routes? All of the objects and roles referenced in the article (e.g. books, experts, etc.) have continued value, and they won't disappear, they will just be augmented by technology.