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…
There are some typical mouth breathing responses, but I don’t think it is fair to claim just geeks. I’m seeing a lot intellectualism from the right wing and from popular culture. I would argue these forces are much stronger and that geeks are just a humble cross-section of humanity who happen to espouse these beliefs.
Had you picked on libertarians I would agree with you since the libertarian and geek overlap is annoying large, probably due to a love of simple rules that are analyzable and give you quick yes/no answers instead of dealing with the grey matter that is reality.
I was just thinking how that was true about conservatives and jocks.
It seems to me there are two groups being attacked here (maybe more.) There are the genuine opponents of the idea of an expert. They inhabit Education Departments all over the world. Read Richard Mitchell’s books to understand them. Then, there are people who disagree with the author. If your response to someone who disagrees with you is totally an appeal to authority, you might the real anti intellectual. Not all disciplines are on equally firm footing. Can you really say that physics is on the level with some grievance “studies” degree? Yet they both get doctorates. One mimics the other. When I attack the excesses of the university system it is the latter I am concerned with, not the former. Some things and fields are more knowable than others. Trying to appropriate the respect of one field to promote another is the problem. I am neither anti intellectual nor anti expert, but the field of AGW has serious problems, most of which are caused by its proximity to policy debates.
“Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.” -Nikolai Lenin
@Russell Snow, thanks for your response. As perhaps you can imagine, I am inclined to attack the excesses of academe as well, and if I had time, I’d do it a lot more. Indeed, plenty of academics do that, and nobody thinks them anti-intellectual for doing so. It depends on the content of your arguments, not your targets, whether you are anti-intellectual or not. If you’re standing up against lock-step conformity in academe and for the life of the mind, you’re in my camp. If you’re attacking academe because professors make you read irrelevant stuff like War and Peace, it’s much more likely that you’re (to that extent) anti-intellectual.
I love Richard Mitchell. Go to http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/ and enjoy!
@Anonymous I didn’t claim that just geeks were anti-intellectual. I see anti-intellectualism all over the place–even among many K-12 educators and some academics (as I explained in my more recent post on geek anti-intellectualism).
I tried to read this but it got too long and boring. (j/j ) Someone im’ed me a quote
“Knowledge exists only inside people’s heads. It is propagated not by being accessed in a database search, but by being learned and mastered”
I guessing you missed that episode of jeopardy where database searches displayed a pretty solid mastery of the task of responding to trivia knowledge base questions, using Wikipeida among others as their dataset.
Getting philosophical about embodied knowledge and whether Google is conscience or not, whether information is in our heads or in the cloud, does not really matter when it comes down to measuring excelling at a given task. I thought we were past “but can you solve this on a desert island line of thinking”?
I guess I don’t worry much about how people think about thinking as much as how they think to get a particular task accomplished.
If being “intellectual” means you read a particular journal that helps you arrive to the correct diagnostic of a given sickness, then that great. if being “anti-intellectual” means you have a computer read a wikipedia articles and a wider range of medical journals for you that lets you reach the same diagnostic then that great too.
If one way routinely outperforms the other then embrace what working better, and can augment any existing intelligence you already have.
I guess what your criticizing is people “augmenting intelligence” having much intelligence to start with? Which is valid, to ridiculously reduce this down … certainly 1+10 is better than 1+0
I’d like to argue against your point of view that this new disdain for college is “anti-intellectualism.” It’s not the learning that Peter Thiel questions, it’s whether your time in college is spent learning useful things, and how well that learning prepares you for the real world.
Such remarks about the lack of effectiveness of a college education are really without meaning until one goes to college and finds out. It is presumptuous both morally and intellectually to expect that to be a rhetorical question that doesn’t require an answer, without actually conducting the experiment.
I guess I will never know if crack cocaine is bad for me till I get addicted to it.
(And yes, I have been to college)
There’s a strong movement of anti-intellectual-authority, i.e. just because you have a college degree in field XYZ doesn’t mean you actually know anything more than I do. The world changes too fast for a 4-year degree. Geeks still hold those with knowledge in high regard, it’s just that -practical- and creative knowledge is held in higher regard.
If you’re the same Michael as above, I’m guessing you have a degree in trolling.
Funny, but I think people who are qualified experts (or at least professionals) in their fields would find your assertion laughable.
“So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such.”
I don’t read this as a defense of “intellectualism” but of the importance of your place in the world which “geeks” are not properly appreciating.
The truth is not that anyone “opposes knowledge as such” but that the breadth of knowledge people need to know and use in developing an understanding of the world is broader than the narrow canon you choose to consider “intellectualism”. The way in which people attain that knowledge and the selection of information that they need to retain is rapidly changing.
Given the volume of information available, so-called experts can no longer maintain real expertise except within a very narrow range of knowledge. As the world is exploding with access to new information and knowledge “intellectualism”, in your version, becomes the defense of a very narrow canon of information that is manageable by the self-appointed experts.
Intellectualism is about expanding knowledge, not constraining it. Like the Catholic bishops faced with expanding literacy and a printed bible that allowed direct access to the word of god, the high priests of western thought are losing their control over intellectual discussion and the ability to constrain that discussion to the narrow canon of their own knowledge.
How many Asian universities make their students knowledge of Tolstoy or the history of England priorities. Are these things really necessary for their “intellectual” development? I don’t think so. Which means they aren’t that necessary for American students either. Which is not to say there is not benefit to either set of students reading Tolstoy or studying English history, but those things are necessarily less and less important in a world of expanding knowledge and intellectual discussion.
Ross gets it exactly right.
This, I think, is the point exactly. As information and travel expands past current limits, culture based information (such as said reading of ‘War and Peace’) becomes less about education and more about backing current academic trends. For every great novel read there are a thousand others outside the current cultural paradigm that go unread – because they were forgotten or because they are in the wrong language.
Reading such liturature is not pointless, but seems to drift outside what is practical for establishing a common ‘general education’. And as higher learning becomes more devalued with every passing year, if colleges do not evolve to meet current employment needs then they themselves will become outdated.
Education, for the majority, is about income. It is no longer providing the very real value that it once did and therefore can be very properly evaluated as lacking. If higher learning does not evolve to use technology more and teach unemployable skills less, then it will, by economic nessissity, become outdated.
First, @Ross, I didn’t make any claims to expertise or intellectual authority, I don’t think. I regard myself as more of an outsider than an insider in almost all fields, and I have significant beefs with all sorts of intellectuals. So, when you say about my motives, “I don’t read this as a defense of ‘intellectualism’ but of the importance of your place in the world which ‘geeks’ are not properly appreciating,” you are guessing, and you are guessing wrong.
I’m quite frankly laughing at the suggestion that anti-intellectual geeks somehow stand for a broader base of knowledge than proponents of liberal education. To read “War and Peace,” together with other world literature and other branches of the liberal arts, is precisely to become broadened. This is not a “narrow canon of information”–it is a selection of works that, together, broaden and deepen our understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The problem you have identified, that there is far too much to know, has existed for centuries. This is why a canon exists in the first place; if you could read all the books and websites, then a canon wouldn’t be necessary.
Your claim, that it is not possible to maintain “real expertise” except within “a very narrow range of knowledge,” is very dubious. Take my own field of philosophy as an example. It is true that few philosophers would claim expertise in any but a few branches of philosophy. But one earns a Ph.D. in Philosophy, not in any branches of philosophy, and one’s training is in the whole discipline, not just parts of it. This is true of many other fields as well. The training one receives concerns not just expert knowledge of a very narrow field (or two or three), but also broader knowledge of methods, and deeper knowledge of all fields than one has at the undergraduate level. So there is still a very robust sense in which a philosophy professor has expertise in the entire field, Philosophy, which a typical philosophy B.A. graduate would not have. It is true that fields in which this sort of broad-based expertise have become more and more specialized; but this is why it is possible now to get more specialized Ph.D.s in broad subfields such as Molecular Biology or Analytical Chemistry.
You actually seem to be assuming that I think that intellectualism means shrinking one’s intellectual interests to the range of a flea. You couldn’t be more wrong. I, like any true intellectual, agrees that being an intellectual requires “expanding knowledge.” But the very best way to expand your knowledge is precisely to get a foundation for the rest of your knowledge in the best and most important literature and history, to say nothing of science and math and other disciplines. To do this is to train your intellect, to come to a finer-grained, more nuanced understanding of concepts and seminal events–and thereby, as the tired phrase has it, “learn how to learn.”
@K-R-X, the claim that “culture-based information” is “less about education and more about backing current academic trends” really does sound like knuckle-dragging anti-intellectualism to me. The idea that the literary and artistic canon, let’s call it, exists only to “back current academic trends” (as you say) is a complete non-starter, and doesn’t even merit comment, not without a long argument to support it in the first place.
Education never was “about income,” even if that’s why people go to college. What education is “about” is not determined by majority rule or the motives of college students, but by the nature of the thing. If college becomes increasingly vocational and leaves the liberal arts behind entirely, then it will cease to be about the most basic, worthwhile, and necessary sort of education–liberal education. In that case, if one wants a liberal education, one will not go to college; one will have to go elsewhere.
I don’t think geeks are becoming anti-intellectual. I think anti-intellectuals are becoming “geeks”. Of course a serious intellectual would need to operationally define the term, but people are already complaining that the article is too long, so nevermind.
Of course the masses resent the elite. That’s how it has always worked. Only now the masses are online. What was a geek 30 years ago can’t be considered geeky now can it? Geekiness to me means a certain attitude, not so many hours per day spent on a computer. And I agree with what Doctor Dork said about college being a waste of time.
salv0: “I don’t think geeks are becoming anti-intellectual. I think anti-intellectuals are becoming “geeks”. “
Agreed. Being a geek used to be something to be avoided by the mainstream, now it seems everyone with an XBox and uses Facebook from their iPhone is one.
Personally I regard myself as an intellectual and I definitely thrive on acquiring deep knowledge, but am I somewhat anti-academic in my own learning/thinking. In saying that I recognise the value of academia – I just don’t want to be personally constrained by it.
I think the anti-intellectuals you are referring to are not real geeks. Real geeks tend to geek out and search for as much knowledge regarding a subject as they can find. I think you are talking about the same blustering morons who have always found some way to succeed on the backs of geeks and proclaim themselves “geeks” or “digerati”. As for the classics, maybe it’s time for some new classics like Neuromancer and The Baroque Cycle. No one wants to sit around reading the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Well said. I’ve been bothered by this for years. I’m so glad to see geek anti-intellectualism finally getting the scrutiny that it deserves. This tendency, among others, is one of the major reasons that I don’t get along with other geeks.
It’s no accident that many different ancient cultures developed formal educational institutions and universities. These institutions were replicated widely because they have real educational and societal value, not because “there was no Internet back then.”
The biggest problem with universities today (in the U.S.) is that too many of them are admitting and catering to students who, to be frank, aren’t smart enough nor dedicated enough to have any business getting a 4-year degree. The idea that almost everyone should get a Bachelors degree after graduating from high school is absurd. This approach has ‘dumbed down’ the entire collegiate system as a whole.
I went to a state university, got a good education for the money, but felt the whole time that about half the students just didn’t belong in college at all. It was endlessly irritating to sit in classes that were so obviously dumbed down to high school level. The good education I got could have been a great education, if the profs didn’t have to cater to all the morons.
Today I learned that to suspect that higher education has become a racket that all but forces young people into indentured servitude in order to obtain knowledge they could get on their own is a sign of anti-intellectualism.
I suspect you didn’t learn anything today. You merely substituted self-righteousness for thinking. Its a clear sign that you can’t distinguish sophism from a reasoned argument. It is absurd to suggest that one will get a “better” education by poking around on the internet hoping to learn something, as opposed to actually learning how to learn, which is what a college education is about.
Wrong. I learned how to learn in high school.
If you feel you need 4 more years of this, or you need a piece of paper to practice legally, then sure go for it.
I don’t need to learn how pompous college grads are… that’s obvious. 😉
Ad (koff-koff) Hominem…
And so it goes.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Two comments:
1. “Amateur” is not necessarily the antonym of “Expert”. It is the antonym of “Professional”. There is a such a thing as a knowledgeable amateur; arguably, they often are more knowledgeable than the professionals because they have a love and a passion for the subject matter. Otherwise, I agree with your point. People who do not have competence in a field cannot render capable judgment on what is correct and what is not (c.f. Dunning-Kruger Effect).
2. Of the 5 points you make that indicate anti-intellectualism, I agree with you on 4 of them. The fourth: “The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search.” however, is a good thing. I wonder how many scholastics decried the printing press because people didn’t have to memorize whole books anymore because the books became more plentiful. I will admit that the tendency to be lazy and not memorize *anything* is stronger now than it ever has been, but spending less time checking basic facts leaves more time to create new knowledge, which is the cornerstone of true intellectualism, in my opinion.
I came here via Slashdot, and I’m glad I did. Though I’m not sure I agree with you completely, you do raise important points that should not be ignored.
Leave a Reply