5 ms·

I think this essay's definition of anti-intellectualism is incoherent -- must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade school, disre

I 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?

timtadh 15y ago
> 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. In principle I agree with this point, in practice it is moot. Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. No, they can't read the articles without leaving their office, but, yes, they can get all of the research articles and other scholarly publications for free. Libraries exist for a reason, they still provide the service they advertise. This is a false criticism of the flawed and broken publishing system. > I 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. As in a discussion on religion it depends entirely on how you scope the word "intellectual." It could and does mean a variety of things. I believe the author of the original article was leaving it open to many meanings. This is not good writing. He should have said what he meant, instead of the feeling of what he meant. > 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. Those are all fair statements on the cost of pursuing a life in academic research. However, only the pay cut really differentiates academia from any other competitive field. People engage in academia because they love it not because they get rich. > As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our public discourse Interesting factoid, the amount of academic publishing has pretty much only gone up in last century. So even discounting the Internet public discourse (and I do believe academic publications are public) has been growing.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a Nature subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's talk about modern information technology. Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the day to waste. It is seriously addictive, mostly because it's a sterling example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references N generations back, you click N times. You can't not follow the links on tvtropes.org, unless you simply hate all pop culture. It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links. Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more delightful CMS cruft before you found the article. Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross-linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot. I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or care about how hard I had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture, so why do we make it even harder?

timtadh 15y ago

> 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. In principle I agree with this point, in practice it is moot. Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. No, they can't read the articles without leaving their office, but, yes, they can get all of the research articles and other scholarly publications for free. Libraries exist for a reason, they still provide the service they advertise. This is a false criticism of the flawed and broken publishing system. > I 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. As in a discussion on religion it depends entirely on how you scope the word "intellectual." It could and does mean a variety of things. I believe the author of the original article was leaving it open to many meanings. This is not good writing. He should have said what he meant, instead of the feeling of what he meant. > 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. Those are all fair statements on the cost of pursuing a life in academic research. However, only the pay cut really differentiates academia from any other competitive field. People engage in academia because they love it not because they get rich. > As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our public discourse Interesting factoid, the amount of academic publishing has pretty much only gone up in last century. So even discounting the Internet public discourse (and I do believe academic publications are public) has been growing.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a Nature subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's talk about modern information technology. Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the day to waste. It is seriously addictive, mostly because it's a sterling example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references N generations back, you click N times. You can't not follow the links on tvtropes.org, unless you simply hate all pop culture. It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links. Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more delightful CMS cruft before you found the article. Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross-linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot. I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or care about how hard I had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture, so why do we make it even harder?