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I still think he's confused. I've never yet met a geek that was anti-intellectual. Anti-college, anti-snob, anti-something... But not anti-intellectual. The
by wccrawford 15y ago
I still think he's confused. I've never yet met a geek that was anti-intellectual. Anti-college, anti-snob, anti-something... But not anti-intellectual.
The 2 are too much at odds. The geek loves information, and (often) spreading that information, and using that information. Information is a geek's stock-in-trade.
He continues to claim that he's only talking about geeks, but by definition he can't be. Because anti-intellectual means anti-geek. And I've never yet met a geek who hates other geeks. Okay, maybe some particular brand of geek rubs them wrong, but not all geeks.
- smokeyj 15y agoI think he's trying to imply anti-academia is anti-intellectual, which would be hilariously ironic.
- kstenerud 15y agoThe quality of academia has been in decline for almost a century now as the bar has been progressively lowered by financial and political pressures in order to make them more "accessible to the common man". A post-secondary education is still somewhat useful in teaching one how to think, and in exposing one to higher ideas, but it's nowhere near the level of excellence of previous ages. A simple reading of theses and journals past expose the stark differences in thought.
- logicchop 15y agoI teach philosophy at a university. Whenever we discuss basic issues about the mind, my computer science students are always dismissive about any and all positions that don't simply say "the brain is a computer, the mind is software." It turns out that this is a pretty naive and simplistic way of thinking about the issue; but that's the "easy" way for them to frame the problem, and they often think that, because computer science is difficult subject, this response must be pretty good.
- Symmetry 15y agoJust computer science students? I would generally expect most scientists or engineers to have have a developed antipathy to anti-reductionism. "The brain is a computer, the mind is software" is in fact a very naive statement, but I hope your problems with it have more to do with the non-existent in reality hardware/software distinction than silly constructs like qualia.
- joelangeway 15y agoI find this deliciously ironic. I can hear myself arguing as a sophomore CS student, "but whatever is going on that constitutes the mind is observably a process on information that happens entirely inside your skull, of course we can model it with software," to which I would today answer "you can model any phenomena with software, stating as such doesn't constitute a model."
- turbojerry 15y agoPerhaps I am being naive, but hasn't the study of the mind now shifted to the neuroscience department?