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…
[…] via Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?. […]
This might be all about labeling. You label a package of attributes under a label and force someone to agree only to fit more or less under that label, according to the number of attributes met by a given subject case. There is like no debate if your chosen attributes are appropriate or not. At least that is the feeling that I got reading your article. Is like denying the censorship of premises that ultimately are leading to a conclusion. And that is a bad thing. …and especially that part is a relic of the traditional “old way”. That way was created and preserved by technical limitations, where knowledge was an expensive thing to pursuit and maintain, where there had to exist entire (organized) orders dedicated to that and immense amount of dedicated resources, where someone had to swallow almost everything to taste a particular something. That had good and bad sides altogether. But things changes. And I trust change. If there is something good in the old ways, I have the hope that it will surface eventually. Have faith, Mr. Sanger, it will do you good.
Corrections:
“You PUT a package of attributes…”
“Is like denying the censorship OVER premises that…”
I think it’s an error to confuse anti-intellectualism with a repudiation of academic red tape. Like a previous poster alludes to, geeks by-and-large have an engineer’s mindset and they’re very much focused on doing and problem-solving.
I believe that most geeks do, in fact, appreciate things like literature, art, and learning for the sake of learning. But at the end of the day, geeks, like engineers and many scientists, are problem solvers. And it’s pretty likely that one need not understand Tolstoy to solve a technology problem. That’s not to say I think Tolstoy shouldn’t be understood, but I don’t think that studies in the humanities is imperative.
I like geek culture because it actually values knowledge more than academic credentials. You don’t need a degree or letters to be a geek. All you need is a desire to acquire knowledge and then apply that knowledge to practical problems.
[…] of writing, though, is just how many technology boosters themselves are alarmed by it. Consider these gloomy paragraphs from a recent article, summarizing some of the benchmarks in the backlash against the dumbing down […]
Certainly, you have some interesting points. But this is not anti-intellectualism, but rather, an evaluation of value which finds certain forms to have less value than the effort that they require. This is not that geeks are lazy – far from it – but that there are far more efficient ways to get an education.
If there is a geek anti-elitism, it stems not from a non-appreciation of intellectual works but from an anti-authoritarianism that produces questioning minds – one that has been mislead for years by the experts and gatekeepers of society. This is why geeks are more apt to believe what they read on, say, Wikipedia or Reddit, than they are in the New York Times; the latter is less thoroughly vetted and has a single point of failure – the editor.
But anti-intellectualism is far more than not accepting expert testimony at face value and accepting, instead, the wisdom of the crowd. Anti-intellectualism is a pride in ignorance and a condemnation of education.
The geek may not read books because he doesn’t find them to be relevant enough to pressing issues, or worth the time to digest the information. He is not saying the book has no value; he is saying that the books value is less than the effort he would have to expend, presenting a *negative return on investment*.
The anti-intellectual doesn’t read books because he doesn’t believe that the book has *any* value. Indeed, the anti-intellectual may even take pride in the fact that he doesn’t read books, condemning them not as a waste of time, but even, perhaps that they’re worthless because expertise itself is worthless.
This is the key point. The anti-intellectual believes that information and knowledge doesn’t have *any* value. The difference is that the geek is still out there questioning, and learning, and improving. They do find value in learning about the world around them and thinking about what they have learned. But they want to do so in the most efficient and effective ways. Books – especially the paper kind – are especially inefficient compared to some of the newer offerings which are more portable, more accessible, more organized, more searchable, and more efficient.
This is especially true of the college argument. I don’t think any geek thinks college education is a waste. My college education and M.A. has presented enormous non-tangible value to my life. What they do believe is that the tangible value – the amount of money you spend vs. the amount of extra income you will make over the course of your career – simply doesn’t add up. (And it doesn’t – the cost of a college education has outstripped inflation while wages have diminished and the number of jobs requiring a college degree have declined.) I would not have gone to graduate school had I not gotten a full fellowship; I am one of the lucky ones.
It is the idea of college as a financial investment, rather than as a life-enriching experience, that geeks want to challenge. In 1970, a four year education at the University of Pennsylvania (a public school!) cost $14155.92, adjusted for inflation using today’s dollars. Today, that cost is $42,098.
In the meantime, a good, average wage for a college grad would be $48,000 in 1970 dollars – that’s $266464.34 in today’s dollars. $266k!!! That is a DREAM for most college graduates today – I don’t expect to earn anywhere NEAR that in my life. Yet, most college graduates would be happy to get *less* in 2010 dollars what our parents in the 1970s were getting in 1970s dollars! Most college graduates start out stuck at jobs where they earn much less – my first job out of college, in 2001, was for $33k. ($41k in 2011 dollars.) Most new college grads are still working for about $33k/yr today.
My point is this. In 1970, you would have give back **three weeks worth of labor** to pay back the investment in your public college education. In 2011, it takes **one year, three months, a week, and two days.**
That’s practically indentured servitude.
Do you really think geeks would be railing against college education if a four-year degree only cost about three weeks of labor to pay off? Hell no.
That is what geeks rail against when they rail against college education. It’s not that education isn’t valuable. It’s just not valuable *enough* to justify the cost. This is especially true in technical fields where practical experience does matter more to the bottom line.
ATTENTION all who found this via slashdot. Please file this article with all the others with headlines like: Books are dead, Newspapers are dead, and email is dead.
We can assume Larry is an intellectual. He feels a put persecuted by what he sees as a threat to his way of life. The net is making it harder for him to hold his hard won knowledge close and parse it out for money. Put yourself in his shoes. As knowledge becomes freely available, easy to access and curated, the role of intellectual writer is less valuable to society.
Just like a newspaper editor who claims people don’t read anymore, he is wrong. People read, just not the thing that is paying his bills.
Larry, I think you made a mistake by not trying to see the world though a geek’s glasses.
I throw out books on obsolete technology twice a year. The things I learned in college give me a good basis for learning, but the specifics have changed. The truth for geeks, technologists and most of the world that has to build real things is that knowledge is transient. What I know today will not pay my mortgage in five years. I have to pick up and discard learning at an accelerated pace.
I am sorry this threatens your world view. I wish the world did not spin so fast, but it does. You are pasting a label of anti-intellectualism on something you don’t understand, and pining for the good old days, that really were not all that good.
Please, don’t slap a label on someone. Try to see the world through our eyes. Yes, geeks have blind spots, but really it is a wonderful future we see, and seek.
Point of article missed. Nice chest-thumping though.
I am irritated (but not surprised) by the number of comments lumping “liberal arts” into some category or other that is in some way bad. Elitist, stupid, pointless,etc, whereas “practical knowledge,” presumably math, science, engineering, is held up as some golden god. Again, not surprising. Geeks, not nerds, are the intended audience. But geeks and nerds should learn to stick together, I should think. Learning, truly learning, in the liberal arts is valuable in more ways than I can count. Think you’re a critical reader? If you haven’t had much education in the liberal arts (either institutionalized or not), then you probably aren’t as critical as you think. Think stories are just nice ways to pass the time? Then when is the last time you read one and what are you reading? If you do read stories and still think that, then you’re reading them incorrectly. I am continuously flummoxed by smart people de-privileging that which is not their forte. I am a woman of words, not numbers, but I am not so blind as to think numbers are useless. Obviously, math, science, engineering, etc have a very crucial role to play in society. Why can’t people see that so too does all the myriad of things lumped under the heading liberal arts? Perhaps because with the sciences, it is easy to see the results: bridges get built (so do bombs), problems get solved (some just get further problematized), facts get uncovered (for a while, until someone comes along and proves it wrong). The liberal arts live in those parenthetical spaces, they give the lie to the unassailability of the sciences. They keep science honest (though its getting harder to do, what with lack of funding). But it is far easier to just poke fun at those of us who make our living, such as it is, doing and teaching the liberal arts.
– Being critical of the current educational system is different from being critical of intellectualism. The current system is useful but flawed and can be improved.
– For non-fiction books, making the books shorter and easier to read is very much pro-intellectualism. It helps spread knowledge faster and more accurately. If technology can help with this, it’s great. There’s nothing great about making books more complicated than necessary.
– Knowledge is important but extremely vast, and technology can allow us to spend more time on the more important knowledge. For example, in math, we can spend more time asking the right questions and translate those questions into mathematical models, and let computers handle the computation of those models. To me, learning to model the world is much much more important than remembering trivial facts, so being critical of the education of triviality isn’t anti intellectualism. (Memorization of facts is of course important to modeling the world, but the current system is over emphasizing it and much less on the modeling part).
– I don’t have problems with experts, but I have problems with being over dependent on experts, whose knowledge is deep but narrow. This is very much pro-intellectualism. We need to assign the correct weight to certain pieces of knowledge and have to see how they all fit together. For too long, we tend to look down at knowledge that are not mathematically formalized, and this is the wrong way to go. Our understanding and capacities with math is too small and narrow to explain the world. The financial crisis is an example of this. Financial derivatives are extremely sophisticated mathematically, but compared to the complexity of the real world, derivatives’ sophistication is nothing.
– I think the criticism has been about how education is conducted, not education itself. Education can be better and broader, and technology can help us with this.
tldr
[…] Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. […]
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