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…
I really don’t agree with the attitudes you’re perceiving, in that I don’t agree that they exist at all. There are of course people who think this way, there are people who think ANY given way. You cite people with the same thoughts; just because somebody is loud enough to be ‘published’ on the internet doesn’t mean they represent any type of majority view: you should know this. The “books are done” view is a very small minority of people on the internet, and the rest of us just shake our collective heads at most things they say.
However, they are unfortunately right in a few ways. First off, college is changing. The degree means less and less that you actually learned something and more than you hung out with the right crowd. I say this as someone with a “right crowd” degree. I learned more from my first 2 months on my current job than I did in 5 years at college (through 3 majors). The other thing is, rote memorization does not equal intelligence. At all. In any conceivable way. Somebody who can tell me as you say, the date of the battle of Hastings, is much less intelligent than someone who can’t tell me the date, but can argue the impact of that battle in specific ways. Somebody who can memorize the entire C language specification can be an absolutely useless programmer.
Finally, and this might lump me in with the crazies, I think that “higher level” books are in fact written in an obfuscated, difficult-to-read way, either intentionally or accidentally. Intentionally would be like old-style Catholicism; the Bibles being in Latin, the services being in Latin, so that the common-folk could not have access to that knowledge. Accidentally would be because the types of person to write a super-scientific book or paper is most often than not, going to not be the most effective communicator. Flowery language and unnecessary phrasing only gets in the way of the expression of knowledge.
PS – No book or paper is ever the project of one single person. If it wasn’t for collaboration, we wouldn’t have gotten past “fire hot.” The internet has caused collaboration, humanity’s most powerful tool, to explode and evolve into something new. Education will soon follow as will all aspects of our lives.
[…] Who Speaks for Geek Culture? (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Yesterday an essay by Wikipedia and Citizendium co-founder Larry Sanger made rounds: Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?. […]
One critical issue regarding the new anti-intellectualism, and indeed one which has appeared in the comments already, is the delusion that reading is enough and a formal education is just a waste of time. For instance, I have a masters degree in archaeology. I cannot count the number of times that someone has told me that they love archaeology and read as much material as they can get their hands on. Which is fantastic. Unfortunately, I am also unable to count the number of times that those same individuals have proceeded to rattle off a disturbingly long list of books and theories that are crackbrained at best and outright lies or frauds at worst. Books and theories that these individuals give credence to merely by dint of having seen them in print at a bookstore or library. Books and theories that would be self-evident nonsense after just one freshman Intro to Archaeology or history course.
One of the most fundamental assets of the college experience is exposure to experts who know their field and know what you need to know to start understanding that part of the world. Reading on your own is great, but when a theoretical context for what you’re reading is lacking or missing altogether, it’s very easy to be conned by pseudo-academia and come out the other side with a very faulty understanding of a field of study.
And I suppose now a self-important, self-educated, Vine Deloria clone of a Luddite will tell me that colleges only teach what the “establishment” wants you to think is true…
One thing that is being confused here is that many of the self proclaimed geeks are nothing of the sort. Being able to program and use a computer doesn’t make one a geek. Once upon a time that would almost perfectly define a geek but not anymore, those guys were geeks then because they trudged forward pioneering a new field of KNOWLEDGE. They weren’t using something that was in almost every home in America. They were creating a new field of knowledge as they went forward and pioneered it.
These anti-intellectual *geeks* are actually hipsters and fakes, they just want to be considered geeks because in our digital society these days Geek is Sheik. These guys are nothing more than technicians, operators, and end users.
Real Geeks love Knowledge.
Real Nerds love Books.
To answer your question: Is there a *NEW* geek anti-intellectualism? No, there is not.
Anti-intellectualism of most any variety is nothing new, and geeks, being no more special than any other segment of society, are 99.999% anti-intellectual, just like ALL OF THE OTHER various segmented groups of human populations that have ever lived on Earth, except for some VERY small, VERY specialized, exceptional groups (think, “Ancient Greek Scholars”, for example).
The main other point that makes your screed so wrong-headed is one so many others have already made: being anti-, does not make one anti-intellectual, or most especially anti-knowledge.
Just because it makes more sense to use digital tech to help your brain doesn’t mean you stop using your brain. In fact, barring extraordinary measures, it’s really not possible for us humans to stop using our brains … we’re literally ALWAYS thinking. You’re not going to stop learning because you read something from an LCD instead of from paper, and using Google to look up things that no longer need to be memorized frees your brain up for thinking about more interesting things than remembering the specific year some historical event took place.
I’d argue that learning how Google helps you be smarter is, in fact, one of the most important intellectual lessons one can learn today …
Truth does not derive from authority. Whoever controls the flow of information controls the high ground of the game-space, and therefore your life and destiny. When virtually every ‘fact’ reported as news is a self-serving and often self-delusional opinion, you can hardly blame time-pressed taxpayers, barely able to make ends meet, for distrusting the ‘intellectuals’ who have brought us to political polarization. The intellectuals bring us a ‘free-market economy’ which any economist, the same people who use the term, knows not to be true, but is merely a ‘necesary fiction’ to ensure further corporate welfare and subsidies at the expense of citizens, many of whom are frankly hurting.
We have broken the monopoly on knowledge, and upon teaching, and maybe even of truth itself.
Louis Bertrand Shalako’s comment is an excellent example of the anti-authoritarian, vaguely marxist anti-intellectualism that’s now running rampant in the social sciences and humanities at many universities (ironically). The key is to equate all people in position of authority with one another so that professors suddenly become synonymous with senators and no clear rhetorical distinction remains between a literature post-doc and a prime minister. Then one can easily write off notions like fact and truth as “lies The Man is using to keep you down”.
It sounds great when you’re trying to pick up bohemians at the not-a-Starbucks, it lets you quote all the right people (Marx, Focault, etc.), and it’s absolute drivel.
I think that there is an anti-intellectualism problem with internet culture, but I don’t the the specific statements you have are at issue. The problem is the memorization-centric learning has created a system where people equate facts and knowledge. For example: know that a particular battle occurred on a particular date doesn’t do anyone any good, it’s knowing why the battle occurred and what it changed that is valuable.
The system has to move toward teaching process and technique rather than fact to really foster innovation and creativity, and the movement toward that state is really what causes this anti-intellectualism. The problem is that what’s taught in schools (facts and memorization, traditionally) and what’s learned out on the world (technique, style, efficiency) are fundamentally different and they should not be.
Ultimately, it is not knowledge that is the be all to end all. Books are great, having read some of the ‘classics’ myself (The Art Of War, Il Principe, The Odyssey, War and Peace, Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn, 1984 etcetera) I absolutely agree that these are very important texts. History should be cherished, not ignored. It should be learned and enjoyed within it’s individual context, not broken down into the ‘important’ pieces, summarized and paraphrased, and distributed en masse.
You learn from books like these. Learning is the key word – information is all good and well, but it means nothing without experience. Personally I rate information as ‘important’ when you can actually apply it to the real world, whether that be through morals (Aesop’s Fables), critical thinking (1984) or theory of applied skills (The Art of War). The fact is that there are several patterns that humans imprint on everything we touch, and to learn to read these patterns can enable somebody to apply factual knowledge in the correct context.
These patterns can be found everywhere, from the Art of War to Aesop’s Fables to the politicking in War and Peace – even ‘naive’ literature such as Harry Potter can contain useful information, when read between the lines (again, something learned through experience, not knowledge).
The argument that many talented and successful people will put forward is that true intelligence is not gained from reading about skills and ideas, but applying skills and ideas that are derived from ones that are already there, or cross-applying skills to different fields. You can, for example, apply the Art of War to sections of your own life with the correct adaptations.
In these days of instant access to information, with encyclopaedias available to anybody at the touch of a button, information is in abundance – the skill to apply that information requires humans, as always. I feel no disdain to those who pursue pure knowledge, just as I have no disdain to those who pursue pure experience – I am of the belief, however, that a balance is the best way to succeed in life in general (one route being a high-stake gamble, the other leading into a boring life).
I’m not religious, but if you want to read classics, try reading the Vedas, the Tripitaka, the Qu’ran, the Bibles, the I Ching, the Guru Granth Sahib and the Torah. There, you will find millenia of wisdom from all around the world. As before, by reading between the lines you learn the patterns of life, of love and of humanity. You will learn lessons that you can apply in every field, because in every field you work with humans or products of humans. One of the major lessons is ‘live and let live’, let people choose their own path and don’t criticize them for choosing different to you. Success, in the end, is about understanding.
[…] Larry Sanger […]
I couldn’t agree with you more! read long difficult books, go to University and get an education but never ever stop educating yourself – like my mother told me: ‘read everything you can get your hands on and always remain curious!’
the Interwebz is mosdef making people stoopit – I see it mostly among 20+30-somethings
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