This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
merciless in its evaluation
I think perhaps the new ‘anti-intellectualism’ could be summed up as a lack of skepticism. I really pity the person who goes to wikipedia to read all about Paul Revere, for example, who does not have an ounce of skepticism about what they are reading. That applies to both before and after Sarah Palin’s recent comments.
Classics are great reading and may even contribute towards what I believe would be a healthy society, however it is not really getting at the problem directly. The real problem is anti-intellectualism is lazy thinking. No where is this more obvious than in political discourse however this has leaked on over into general discourse, especially on the internet.
Political opponents (on both sides, however, IMHO the right generally do this more than the left these days) deride each others policies emotionally and rarely bring facts to the table. When they do bring facts to the table it is often a single fact (or factoid) presented in isolation and is then used to support a complicated ideology. I would mention supporting evidence, but space is limited – you see the problems of discourse on the internet in comment spaces already, right? Anyway, life is just not this simple, and yet in our sound-bite world this is the level of political discourse we have grown accustom to. I suspect the youth of today have come to expect this and assume this is what constitutes intellectual argument. It is so often paraded as such in all forms of media. This is even more striking in internet media like blogs and youtube where amateur ideologues (yes, I’m aware of how self-referential I am being right now) chime in with their 3 lines of emotional comments. People mostly act like this on internet boards – if you agree with the commenter, you go away happy, believing you are smart. If you don’t, you reply with 3 angry lines (far from intellectual) but you go away believing you are right (maybe you are) but you also go away thinking you are smart (you will find other commenters who agree with you so obviously you are smart).
This constitutes peoples intellectualism these days. None of this displays any skepticism about either your own views or the views of other people. There is no rational debate. There is no acceptance that things are hard. After all, isn’t the answer just on wikipedia? Surely my url that points to a blog post by some moron with an internet connection is proof I’m right and you are a douche bag???… this is how it is today. People are lazy – especially on the internet – and they are arrogant. Gen Y will kill us all (see even I can be emotional, but if you agree with me, you probably cheered that sentence).
To sum up, if there is solution I think it is that we should be teaching people (and I mean from the age of 3 months or younger) to be skeptical. We should be teaching people to think for themselves and teach them the value of thinking hard. We can start by doing this in universities with 18 year olds. Yes, when we teach them that CO2 is a green house gas, we should also be teaching them _how_ to ask, why is it? How bad is it? Where does it mostly come from? We should not be telling them the answer is in your text book or worse still, the internet. The answer is complex and documented in many hundreds of scientific articles. If you have a strong opinion of it, you have better read a lot of those articles. Also, I think we have to kill off the postmodernist philosophy that truth is relative. Now this is really lazy thinking. It makes me sick to my guts how stupid all postmodernists are.
While I don’t overall disagree that there are a lot of anti-intellectuals in society, I disagree with two main points.
1) Most of the geeks — defined for these purposes as IT people, programmers, and so on — that I know are readers, and interested in broad ranges of subjects. I think you’re being unfair to the majority simply because of what you see in a very vocal minority. Then again, my friends are weird, so they may be non-standard geeks.
2) “The classics.” Dear God are most of those books boring. I’m a reader. I generally read five to ten books a week. These days a lot of them are re-reads, because my library has run out of stuff I haven’t read and still want to, and I can’t afford to keep buying more books, but still… at least one or two a week are something new. I primarily read sci-fi and fantasy, but I also read biographies, philosophy, historical fiction, and whatever else catches my eye. “War and Peace”? I never got into it. And how about all those “classics” they wanted me to read in grade school? “Ethan Frome”? “Johnny Tremane”? “Tale of Two Cities”? The only things they had me read that I actually enjoyed were the Odyssey and pretty much everything by Shakespeare. And, in point of fact, if I’d read the Odyssey first in class, I would have hated it — they gave us a dumbed down and sanitized version rather than, say, the Fitzgerald translation, which is my personal favorite.
I think a lot of the reason people don’t bother reading the classics is that they just plain aren’t very good. It’s nothing to do with the length, necessarily — look at how popular Robert Jordan’s books are, or J.K. Rowling’s — it’s that they aren’t actually interesting or fun to read. That’s not anti-intellectualism, it’s an acknowledgement that I don’t like those books, and I’d rather spend my time reading something interesting.
This blog post is sensationalistic, has a predetermined conclusion with citations either cherrypicked or force-fit to appear to support it, and does not carry a sense of authenticity or plausibility. It is entirely consistent with the undergraduate’s tendency to beg for attention and validation by making an outrageous supposition and glue spurious proofs to it, trolling with a pedigree.
Your blog is bad and you should feel bad.
Thanks for the insightful armchair psychoanalysis Dr. Autism.
Allow me to clue you in; an essay does not have to be balanced or fair in the least. It’s an opinion piece, not a news article or scientific publication; of course it has a predetermined conclusion! Exactly like your worthless comment.
Why do you claim he’s begging for attention? Because he wrote an essay on his own website expressing his own opinions? What kind of small mind perceives every stance in terms of a popularity contest? The kind of mind that projects a bit too much, methinks.
I’m not sure if there is a group of people more conceited and pretentious than white 20-something loser geeks, but I’m sure they’re up there.
And something clearly went wrong during your aesthetic development, if you think a quotation from Futurama is a good putdown.
With memorisation being so passe, a brief trip to Google might have helped you learn (temporarily) that despite inhabiting the same small island within the same large city, the New York Review of Books has nothing to do with the New York Times.
Perhaps garnering 131 responses without a correction might give subtle support to your argument.
Sorry to be facetious.
Caught me.
Fiction isn’t getting any more interesting; non fiction is.
Wikipedia utterly trumps reference books e.g. Encyclopedia Brittanica, Physician’s Desk Reference, et cetera.
Important fields of study are changing too fast for universities to keep up especially at the undergraduate level e.g. least-angle regression analysis is six years old.
Books are outmoded because they’re bulky and hard to search, edit, annotate, share, et cetera; books can be collaborative e.g. encyclopedias and websites can be one-person creations, your statement that “Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person speaking from authority.” is clearly wrong. Your statement that “crowds” were wiser than people who had devoted their lives to knowledge ignores the fact that the crowd includes those devotees.
“Anyone who claims that we do not need to read and memorize some facts is saying that we do not need to learn those facts. Reading and indeed memorizing are the first, necessary steps in learning anything.”
Imprimus: illiterates learn too.
Secundus: reading is done on the internet; obviously, right? Reading on the internet does not preclude memorizing, though it certainly reduces the cost of not bothering to do so.
There are roughly 500 characters in War and Peace, how many can *you* name off-hand?
Does the Gutenberg Project – online classics – make your head explode?
Ideas are frequently not book-sized; a medium that permits them to be elegantly expressed at suitable length is *better* than a printing press.
Conflating disdain with academe and obsolete technology with disdain for learning is disingenuous, tut.
[…] st_type='wordpress3.0.1';Is Wikipedia anti-intellectual?Sander recently posted a provocative piece where he argues that geeks suffer from anti-intellectualism. To some extend, his stance is that […]
This is a very interesting post because it brought to the forefront of my mind something that I surely must have subconsciously known, however never really been aware of. Now that I think about myself, I am very much less inclined to read _any_ book, let alone a classic, now, as opposed to when I was 15 or 16. The only major difference between me from then and the me from now in regard to this essay is that the me from now has managed many websites and has worked in the web industry for a few years. The free/easy access to lots of information seems to be a tempting escape from the rigors of actually learning something, however I am curious as to how and why the human mind is prone to such shortcuts when they are offered.
Many of these comments make me sad – they’re so carefully constructed to miss the point.
Larry’s point isn’t about intellectuals, the value of college and so on. Those are cited as symptoms.
The point is the growing disrespect of expertise. Other symptoms: How many people figure the scientists who spend their lives researching climate change should be ignored specifically because they are experts in the subject (and so, supposedly, have lost their objectivity).
Likewise the number of people who don’t accept the theory of natural selection and propose that all biologists can be safely ignored … for the exact same reason.
What’s sad about technical professionals who practice this disrespect is their hypocrisy. When people outside their trade question their engineering judgment, they sneer at the ignorati instead of understanding they’re being hoist on their own petard.
Step 1. Goto MIT’s/Stanford’s website, watch their courses for free.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit.
…
Please recognize that the free distribution of knowledge is a paradigm shift. Yes, change is scary. No, we don’t need to go to a traditional university to acquire the skills and tools necessary to compete in today’s marketplace. Yes, most people are stupid, unmotivated, and lazy. No, a university isn’t going to change that.
Stop blaming technology and recognize that an individual’s actions and mentality have a much greater effect on their ‘worth’. If I don’t ‘know’ something, I look it up on my phone, using google. I can cross reference that with hundreds of sources to obtain a more objective viewpoint on the subject. How is that detrimental?
[sarcasm]Maybe we should just go back to memorizing the multiplication tables and throw away the calculators.
We’d get so much more done… heck, these computers are just a fad anyways…[/sarcasm]
anonymous, I completely agree with you 🙂
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