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…
[…] Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? […]
[…] Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? Facebook, social media, the Web & anti-intellectualism: https://larrysanger.org/2011/06/is-there-a-new-geek-anti-intellectualism/ – ColleenBrennan-Barry (ColB) http://twitter.com/ColB/status/78872060906053632 (tags: via:packrati.us) […]
My first reaction would be that that expressions of anti-intellectualism are possibly being elided and confused with calls for radical education reform. God knows we need the latter in much of the English-speaking world. I’ve said myself that education needs wholesale ground-up structural reform, from primary to university level, to make it for fit for the digital era rather than for the old industrial era that it still panders to and the ancient agricultural-year/church-year calendar that it still broadly sticks to. I’m also very cautious about intellectuals attempting to pontificate about matters that lie far beyond their field of expertise (see Thomas Sowell for an excellent dissection of this very dangerous phenomena). But neither of these sentiments means that I’m anti-intellectual.
Providing someone with a university education, a technology oriented career and then labelling this increasingly large group ‘geek’ does not turn them into intellectuals.
The fact is that while the proportion of university educated individuals has increased, the proportion of intellectuals has not. The reason is that intellectualism requires intellectual giftedness.
TLDR version: Geeks used to be rare and highly intelligent. Today they are far more common and have intelligence levels much closer to the mean.
The kind of intellectualism that you talk about is a bit disingenuous, It requires someone spend their entire life pursuit of knowledge of a specific nature and requires that society pay the burden of caring for that individual simply because they’re knowledgeable. That is a bit unfair to the rest of us who are both knowledgeable and hard working. Implying that practical application is not knowledge and that one must spend an entire life time in a specialized field robs individual of choice. Though I disagree with the idea that you should skip college, some of us have not started 1,000,000,000 dollar companies when does not have the luxury to do so or to tell others too. Yet I do not see my college degree as experiential learning but rather as a means to an end. I think you both have valid points, Theil in his wanting to disrupt the system and you wanting to preserve what’s good about it. Yet I believe you both are wrong, societies have never last that long when they take on extreme notions of change rabbit to understanding of that change they balance ideas. You cannot expect current system in place to say the same, in any intellectual circle that would be foolish. Yet we cannot remove system either because the world would only we run by the most brilliant among us that is more of a recipe for disaster then we can ever fathom. Balance is the key here, not necessarily 1 way or the other.
I was under the impression that people specialize and dedicate themselves to a single field of knowledge because that is the only way to advance knowledge. I’m sure farmers 2000 years ago where quite happy with learning how to live a good life based on current knowledge, but that doesn’t get you to where we are today, or where we might be in 2000 years.
Personally, my opinion is that people should never forget that they are not wrenches for other people to utilize. You can make whatever you like out of that opinion.
[…] twenty years from now, will the word “tweet” still make sense?) about the phenomenon of anti-intellectualism in the geek world. Sanger’s article was quite interesting (if depressing), touching on the recent popular topic […]
I agree and am seeing this happen, quick-fixes instead of thinking holistically.
For the reading averse – watch a short movie “Idiocracy”.
[…] flow along with the digital current and do not take the time to read extended, difficult texts. –Larry Sanger, Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? (ht: […]
[…] Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? […]
Reading books, or anything from Google, or any other place does not make any one an intellectual. That is equivalent to storing more data in memory, regardless if the memory is biologic or electro-mechanical. Data does not make any one/thing “smart.” The purpose of study to become intellectual is a multi-step process in which two of the steps are: 1) Inputing data, whether by reading or downloading, and 2) relating the new data with old data for the purpose of developing wisdom. That is, the relationship building process is the part in which the intellectual determines what the new data means and its importance to everyday life and to whatever project is at hand. At the same time, that process may well begin a re-evaluation of the meaning and importance of the old data. The importance of the second step, relative to the first step, in the achieving of some degree of wisdom is as one hundred is to one.
The Anti-intellectuals don’t understand the importance of wisdom, relative to simple data gathering. If wisdom were obtained by simply reading books, there would be no difference in the qualities of education provided by the top rated universities and the lowest rated diploma mills – given that they both can start with identical reading lists. The difference in the qualities of the educations obtained is determined by how effectively the professors of each make their students analyze what they have read and what they learn from it.
There is no doubt that some people are capable of towering intellectual achievement through self-education. In fact, one of the goals of a good university education is to equip the students to be able to self-educate themselves for the rest of their lives, i.e. to go forth to do research, make discoveries and develop inventions. Generally, most people have neither the ambition nor self-discipline to effectively become intellectual through self-education. Such an effort requires that books and digital sites presenting contrary arguments to favored beliefs must be studied and carefully evaluated. Most people dismiss contrary arguments as wrong, worthless, and things to be ridiculed without any attention being given to the rationale of those arguments.
The world, at least the portion occupied by the United States of America, has become politically polarized with wild and blatantly nonsensical statements being bandied about to be accepted as true and the basis for further decisions and actions. This habit of accepting unexamined nonsense as the basis of political actions will ultimately lead to disaster. Once that happens, thinking historians will look back on the disaster to try to determine how it happened. They will have a difficult time trying to believe that people had united under such loudly proclaimed slogans of self-contradictory nonsense without the slightest urge to think about what was truly being proclaimed by those slogans. Nevertheless, they will conclude that such events will always occur in an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism.
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