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Why don't Americans elect scientists? Because current American culture is anti-intellectual. I can't really back this up concretely, but as an American, it's
by prewett 15y ago
Why don't Americans elect scientists? Because current American culture is anti-intellectual. I can't really back this up concretely, but as an American, it's hard to find anything intellectual around. A long time ago, people went to hear lectures on the weekends, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were well attended. Now, TV "news" is a joke, and even NPR is becoming a bit entertainy. I get the feeling that few Americans want to think.
- peteretep 15y agoThat'll be the same reason Americans don't elect a Juris Doctor who was President of the Harvard Law Review, right?
- Nate75Sanders 15y agoI'd bet fewer than 25% of American adults can tell you both of those things. Plain and simple: Obama got elected because he is a great speaker and he's charismatic. Qualities much closer to being a popular actor or religious figure got him elected rather than his intellect. It didn't hurt that people were tired of the previous party (this is a common pattern).
- barry-cotter 15y agoA JD is not a research degree. It is a second entry degree, meaning there is no necessary reason it could not be an ordinary bachelor's degree. A JSD is the US Law School equivalent to a real doctorate. Obama was the first President of the HLS in yeeears not to publish. He's a very, very smart man but calling him an intellectual might be pushing it. His popular works are not brimming with ideas.
- sidww2 15y agoDon't forget that 46% of the country still voted for John McCain - a person was extremely terrible academically even after the Republican Party had launched two disastrous wars, exploded the deficit and their lack of regulation and oversight had caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. And as others have pointed out, Obama wasn't really elected because of his intellectual ability but because of the state of the economy at the time and because he's a charismatic speaker.
- smsm42 15y agoPeople still go to lectures - or find them on YouTube, download them from the web or torrents, etc. And the debates are as much "attended" and more - people just don't have to be physically there anymore. It's all right with Americans and thinking - it's just most of them don't turn their thinking towards government. Which is a blessing - it is brilliant minds who brought us the current financial crisis, for example, with their delusions about their ability to calculate risks and always stay on top of the game (check out Nassim Taleb about this). Mediocre people bring mediocre failures, brilliant people would bring spectacular - and catastrophic - ones. If a brilliant scientific theory fails, well, a couple of egos are brused, but nobody's hurt. If a brilliant political theory fails, millions die. Look what happened to marxism. They thought of themselves as political scientists building society on a rational scientific basis. No emotions, no stupid democratic politicking, just straightforward implementation of proper science. Worst nightmare of the century. I'd rather take the bumbling mediocrities in the government, thank you very much. I don't like them but at least they are less dangerous this way.
- adrianN 15y agoExcept Marxism was extremely anti-intellectual. You didn't have scientists in positions of power, instead peasants became majors. Children of intellectuals were forbidden to attend universities and forced instead to work in the industry.
- vidarh 15y agoThere's nothing marxist in what you describe. Maoist or Leninist, maybe. Then again that's the case for the description you responded to as well.
- 9diov 15y agoReally? Have you read Marx at all?
- smsm42 15y agoI think you are referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (I can not think about anything that fits your description in the Soviet history, for example) - but that has little to do with Marxism and does not follow from it. Of course, almost all communist regimes feature mass purges, especially at the beginning of their rule, but usually these purges are not specifically aimed at intellectuals but at "old elites" in order to destroy the existing power relationships and establish the new ones. I do not see anything specifically anti-intellectual in Marxist theory or practice.
- cdavid 15y agoThe idea that gvt should be run by common people is quite old in the US (Jacksonian democracy). I am not American, and this traits always made me wonder every time I go the US, as this is the only developed country where I heve been to where this is so pronounced. This article by Fukuyama was quite interesting in that regard: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/fukuyama/2012/01/31/what-is-governance/ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/fukuyama/2012/01/31/w.... He explains it by the fact that the US existed before a bureaucracy, which is the opposite of pretty much any other developed country.
- dalke 15y agoI don't think that essay says what you described. There was a bureaucracy before the US - how did the British, French, and Spanish Empires run without a bureaucracy? And of course the Chinese bureaucracy was established long before the Americas were settled by Europeans. It looks more like it's saying the US started with a distrust of bureaucracy, which it inherited from experience with the European empires, which caused us to "hobble" our bureaucracy, which were therefore less effectual, which lead to continuing distrust.
- cdavid 15y agoThis may be a syntax error of my part: I meant that the US existed as a nation before a bureaucracy existed in the US. Obviously, bureaucracies elsewhere predates the US declaration of independency.
- dalke 15y agoI still don't think his essay says that. Before the US independence, the colonies were part of the British Empire, with local legislatures in each colony. How did the British Empire manage the 13 colonies without any sort of bureaucracy? Instead, the essay you pointed to suggests that the bureaucracy existed, but the new Americans were distrustful of it.
- cdavid 15y ago
- olalonde 15y ago"Intellectuals and society" by Thomas Sowell is an interesting book on the subject. His central thesis is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects. http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046501948X http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp...
- uuilly 15y agoFantastic book. He also talks a lot about how being good at one thing doesn't make you good at another. Sowell's notion of effective intelligence is rooted more in experience than in aptitude. So a scientist with no political experience is less likely to be good at politics than someone of lesser intellect with that experience.
- yardie 15y agoOne example is president Jimmy Carter. Brilliant thinker, scientist and business man. Mediocre skills in leadership and absolutely dismal in working through beauracracy. He had the one-two punch of having an oil crisis and recession, unlike Obama he just couldn't get it turned around in time for the next election.
- arethuza 15y agoI could remember that Carter was in the US Navy - turns out he had a pretty interesting career there - including being in charge of a team disassembling an onshore experimental reactor after a meltdown! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career
- ams6110 15y agoYeah I recall him touring Three Mile Island not long after the accident. Carter is not lacking intelligence, but his political skills were certainly lacking and his presidency was pretty much a debacle.
- kolinko 15y agoAnti-intellectuality aside. Understanding science is important, but a good scientist ≠ good manager. A scientist is usually someone with narrow, but deep knowledge/experience, as a politician I want someone with a broader set of experiences & knowledge. I mean, MSc president - sure. PhD president - probably no, thank you :)
- wisty 15y agoBut the same is also true of lawyers.
- Retric 15y agoIt's unusual for a 'scientist' to be working alone now days. In academia it's fairly common for a single 'scientist' to manage 2-12 graduate and post doc students. And groups of 10's or even 100's of people working together on the same project is increasingly common. PS: By 'scientist' I mean someone with a PHD doing research. Plenty of people do research that don't fall under that umbrella, but that's a side issue.
- gcp 15y agoThis. Also, getting grants is for a large part doing politics as well.
- Erunno 15y agoThere's also the fallacy that scientists will only make pure objective decisions but scientists are in the end only humans and have their own believes, failings and political agendas. The whole system of peer reviewing and the acknowledgement that every scientific theory can be falsified is a testament to this realization. Unfortunately I have the impression that in politics too often individual experts are only heard and thus the whole system of checks and balances in science is circumvented and particular scientific opinions might get more weight than justified. Still, I believe that the scientific methodology (not necessarily individual scientists) is still our best hope to actually achieve improvements as shown by our rapidly expanding knowledge since it was more formally defined. It just has to be tempered with clear political goals.
- tehayj 15y agoYou sir, nailed it.
- thecabinet 15y agoOne thing I absolutely despise about the phrase "anti-intellectual" is the ambiguity about what it means. There was a great explanation of why people should be suspicious of "intellectuals" in an HN comment from a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310. ESR also had examined the various possible meanings: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001 In general, though, "anti-intellectual" seems to usually mean, "Why won't those damn hick Republicans just get out of the damn way!?"
- talmand 15y agoThank you. I often feel the term "anti-intellectual" is used on a person who simply disagrees with a notion thought up by someone that has been labeled "intellectual" by someone else or worse, themselves.
- jberryman 15y agoI think when people call the mainstream Republican party "anti-intellectual" they are referring to things like: the quite obvious skepticism of even the most mainstream scientific theories, constant rhetoric deriding intellectuals and artists, policies that are guided by puritan morality rather than a rational evidence-based approach aimed at a certain outcome (drug policy, abstinence-only sex ed., myriad other distracting culture-war issues), policies that place little value in the arts/education (Romney's recent proposed budget would slash the National Endowment for the Arts by half, saving something like $70 mil), etc.
- anamax 15y agoSurely you're not suggesting that the Democrats are more accepting of "science". (They're not - they just accept different things and want to do different things in response to said science.) As to grant-supported "artists", they've entered the political sphere. That has consequences. And, very little of it is art, let alone deserving of tax money. (Cowboys can pay for their own poetry and so can rich people.)
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- Jun8 15y agoI think America has always been "anti-intellectual" in the narrow sense that it didn't have a large elite class like many European countries have, the prevailing attitude has usually been the "self-made man" as opposed to egghead. This may or may not be a bad thing (e.g. elite classes by their very nature are hard to break into). As far as I understand from your command, you tend to correlate the sentiment you call anti-intellectualism with the right-wing politics on the rise in the US (this is what I infer when you say "even NPR"). This, of course, is true, but is half the story. Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior. An old but interesting read on this matter is The Closing of the American Mind.
- jberryman 15y ago> Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior. That's a good point, but I don't think you really see this reflected on the public stage like you do with the right. For instance, I'm not aware of any barefoot, herbal-medicine/astrology enthusiasts on the national political stage.
- rdouble 15y agoAmerican culture has always had an anti-intellectual component. The country was initially settled by merchants and religious fanatics, two groups not exactly known for intellectual curiosity. What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country, considering half the population has generally held them in contempt. This book is a bit dated but is a pretty good history of American anti-intellectualism: http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170 http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Ric...
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago> What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country They've been successful at delivering concrete, immediate results. Fundamental science at the highest levels is usually done elsewhere.
- sidww2 15y agoThat used to be the case in the past. However with the increased government expenditure on basic science in the wake of the cold war, more of the fundamental science did happen in the US (foundations of CS, foundations of Crypto, lot of AI & ML, string theory, lot of work in Math, etc.). Now with the decreasing focus on the funding of science, fundamental research (especially in high energy physics but in other areas too) is again shifting to other places like Canada, Europe, Israel, China and Australia.
- ckg 15y agoI wonder if this has anything to do with the shifting of industrial jobs to other countries as well? Maybe when more tangible goods were being produced in the US there was a higher respect for science/engineering, which is in large part a study of the tangible (or physical). Now that many jobs in the US are financial, legal, etc. there's more of a disconnect between what people see as the basis of the economy and what scientists are studying.
- 15y ago