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> What makes you think engineers are anti-intellectual? FWIW, I’ve encountered the thing I call anti-intellectualism here among experimental physicists as well

> What makes you think engineers are anti-intellectual? FWIW, I’ve encountered the thing I call anti-intellectualism here among experimental physicists as well, and even in some theorists and mathematicians as well, to varying degrees. I don’t mean being stupid or not using your brain for work; I’m sure some of the people I’m thinking of here are much smarter than me and/or have contributed much more to society than I ever will. I’m not thinking of all engineering or science people, either; the maths teacher I had in high school is perhaps the strongest counterexample of this stereotype I know. What I mean is a certain lack of wonder and ... suspension of disbelief(?) when it comes to other kinds of intellectual pursuits (sciences, arts, humanities, philosophy, mathematics), like a feeling you’re doing Real Work while those other quacks do pointless things to amuse themselves, and are not even particularly successful at that. “Shut up and calculate”, if brought out among people who are past the basic level of understanding of the subject in question, is a manifestation of this (even though the originator of the saying in the context of quantum mechanics, David Mermin, is now a proponent of the “quantum Bayesianism” school of philosophical thought). Lest it seem that I’m dunking on physicists here, the “Two cultures” essay and Hardy’s “Apology” also contain some of this. If you’ve read the book, the shortest definition is perhaps to say that my “anti-intellectualism” is the opposite of The Glass Bead Game, even if Hesse intended it as his anti-Enligtenment manifesto. And I cannot say this sort of skepticism is always wrong—that way lies Fashionable Nonsense and New Age mysticism, and epistemic relativism scares me like little else. We do owe some advances in quantum foundations to New Age people, though, so sneering in that direction might not be right either. (If you think that this anti-intellectualism thing and the negation of the hacker spirit seem remarkably similar, you’re getting it.)

pmoriarty 5y ago
That sounds more like intellectual snobbery and scientism rather than anti-intellectualism. This is especially evident towards fields one knows little about, towards the so-called "soft sciences" and the humanities.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  ... And also towards fields that are very close, like the famous characterization of the appearance of group theory in particle physics as Gruppenpest. (Lev Landau was perhaps the last of the physics greats to share this view, but he still made it live on as the absence of a standard group theory course in physics curricula throughout the ex-USSR. Of course, the problem is not that Landau was somehow especially shortsighted, but that keeping a university curriculum essentially unchanged for half a century is stupid and that a single school of theorists, however mighty, should not be able to dictate the course of a field in the whole country.) I know the term scientism came to be used as a pejorative in humanities discourse and consequently in journalism, but I’d prefer not to use it here, both because of the contemptuous connotation and because it was originally coined to mean something much more interesting: a counterpoint to a naive, maximalist sort of positivism, of attempts to dismiss any picture of how the world actually is as unverifiable and therefore the question itself as meaningless. (This is the pop culture impression of Popper, though AFAIU Popper realized the problem and said far more nuanced things than that.) The argument went along the lines of, “if talking about the ‘real world’ is meaningless and science is exclusively about experiments in labs, then it sure is peculiar that those experiments appear to be so remarkably coherent, even with things outside of labs—almost as though there actually is something worth calling the ‘real world’ and that science is in fact about that thing?” Thus, scientism. (Cf. Liberalism Unrelinquished[1] on a similar issue of terminology.) [1] http://liberalismunrelinquished.net/ http://liberalismunrelinquished.net/
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I disagree. Popper introduced the idea of scientism in a manner that comports with how it is used here.

pmoriarty 5y ago

That sounds more like intellectual snobbery and scientism rather than anti-intellectualism. This is especially evident towards fields one knows little about, towards the so-called "soft sciences" and the humanities.

mananaysiempre 5y ago
... And also towards fields that are very close, like the famous characterization of the appearance of group theory in particle physics as Gruppenpest. (Lev Landau was perhaps the last of the physics greats to share this view, but he still made it live on as the absence of a standard group theory course in physics curricula throughout the ex-USSR. Of course, the problem is not that Landau was somehow especially shortsighted, but that keeping a university curriculum essentially unchanged for half a century is stupid and that a single school of theorists, however mighty, should not be able to dictate the course of a field in the whole country.) I know the term scientism came to be used as a pejorative in humanities discourse and consequently in journalism, but I’d prefer not to use it here, both because of the contemptuous connotation and because it was originally coined to mean something much more interesting: a counterpoint to a naive, maximalist sort of positivism, of attempts to dismiss any picture of how the world actually is as unverifiable and therefore the question itself as meaningless. (This is the pop culture impression of Popper, though AFAIU Popper realized the problem and said far more nuanced things than that.) The argument went along the lines of, “if talking about the ‘real world’ is meaningless and science is exclusively about experiments in labs, then it sure is peculiar that those experiments appear to be so remarkably coherent, even with things outside of labs—almost as though there actually is something worth calling the ‘real world’ and that science is in fact about that thing?” Thus, scientism. (Cf. Liberalism Unrelinquished[1] on a similar issue of terminology.) [1] http://liberalismunrelinquished.net/ http://liberalismunrelinquished.net/
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  I disagree. Popper introduced the idea of scientism in a manner that comports with how it is used here.