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…
The only thing that the internet has done is give a voice to the other half of the normal curve. Now more than ever critical thinking is required to avoid drowning in an ocean of fairy tales.
I think you are confusing a problem with authority with anti-intellectualism. Personally, I’m a geek, and I read a ton. Sometimes it’s audio books, sometimes it’s paper, sometimes it’s on a kindle, but it’s (imho) a healthy mix of nonfiction covering science, economics, medicine, politics and history. I don’t personally have much patience for classic literature, mostly owing to a preference to read non-fiction where I can learn something as opposed to consuming a nice (if societally impactful) story.
I do however have some opinions that you would probably feel fit in with your post. The issue is not knowledge. most geeks I know thirst for knowledge, and consume it voraciously in many different fields. The problem is, geeks as a whole have a big problem with Authority. We are used to being a group of people, who create new capabilities, only to have the old guard experts poo-poo them because of personal preference that they are selling as their expertise. All you have to do is read any on of the authoriatarian responses to items like a kind. A kindle not smelling like a book being a problem isn’t expert judgement, it’s personal preference (just as an example).
The geeks I work with and know nearly universally have at least one hobby where they are amateurs producing near professional quality work. Why do they do this? Because they love doing, making, implementing and learning. What they don’t like are people who have lived their professional careers fiddling only with theoretical knowledge and never testing their knowledge practically. Engineers do, they build, they /test/ the knowledge that the theoreticians create, but they also deal with the practical knowledge that the professors conveniently overlook because that makes the models too complex.
Geeks are sick of these people looking down their noses as them when they are doing real, practical work in one of their pro-am pursuits due to the sheer fact that they are not credentialed by those experts. As a group, we don’t feel the need to pay homage to the authority to be granted their leave to work on things that interest us.
Devon. I read a lot of nonfiction too, and not a lot of fiction. But I’m convinced that there is a lot of truth in fiction, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of stuff that is practically useful. The knowledge in the literature classics, I strongly suspect, differs from “nonfiction” in that it generally deals with a different area of knowledge (how humans behave in practice when they deal with one another, and when they deal with non-human things – rather than how non-human things behave under conditions that are often tightly specified and constrained) and it present that knowledge in a different way (Not “Humans become agitated and aggressive when sexually frustrated and socially rejected” but “Alexandr Dimitriov felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising as he saw the clearly recogniseable figure of Olga Kotova, HIS Olga, in stark silhouette against the mid-afternoon sun.”) I strongly urge you to consider doing what I say and not what I do – try to have the patience to understand fiction. I’m going to. One day. When I get around to it.
Are you crazy, man?
Be it adopted or not, OpenFlow is a hell of a technology, born from academy – and that is shaking the world.
Be it more adopted or not, cloud computing is a hell of a idea, implemented from the architectural efforts, joint work and years of Distributed System’s true educated and classic nerds.
Routing algorithms. GPS. Virtual physics. Touch screens. Resistive/capacitive/whatever things.
Man, the true and educated and classic nerds still implement and build every single bit of your technology, and this will continue to happen for the foreseeable future!
I can say this because I’m a third-world citizen, I did not studied english in a school, but I can sort of communicate in this language. And even so, I enjoy being with my academic peers, being reviewed by them and being touted to cram as much knowledge as I can in my brain – because this will allow me to build and think and try to build great things, even more!
That’s because the practical and undisciplined knowledge is merely *instrumental*. Yeah, you can hack even the guts of a kernel module today, implement a so-so message system in Ruby or build a crazy mashup and get rich. C00l. But this is only possible because a true educated person, with a true background, translated all the real technology into a easy-to-play construct.
The persons with science and education inside will not get into this child’s play 🙂 Those persons generally don’t get interested in creating a new type of advertising, or creating fancy chat tools. OK, these may be important or even play an interesting role in our life – but that’s nothing compared to planning the infrastructure of the future! Of trying to attack a NP-hard problem. Or, specializing the former question, giving birth to an algorithm that will let your freaking iPhone get connected out from thin air (and allowing you to do something useful with it).
The persons who create the real tech are not geeks. Are nerds. Are ugly, are smelly, are anti-social. And are perfectly happy with that, and with being friendly only when – and how – they want.
Because they attach to things that other persons (and other geeks) doesn’t care about. And all the greedy ambition of other ends up concentrated elsewhere 🙂
Best regards. Peace. I really think that way, and I’m not saying you’re a moron. I swear that I don’t fight people over this.
My only sin is lying to hiring consultants when they ask me about this things.
I’am a student of Science Computer. and sometime one guy said that:
“Even read in paper books, upgrade and use a digital readout”.
In my opinion perhaps anti-intellectual is occurring in the uncontrolled and unconscious use of technology.
when humanity might extinguish the only thing that will survive a printed book of our history.
Continuous buying books printed each week, and I want to finish my career maybe to continue studying physics or mathematics.
Greetings from Mx.
I think that you are making the mistake here of addressing a result, and not analyzing the cause of that result.
It is not the case that the pursuit of knowledge has been rendered useless. It is rather the case that the body of human knowledge is so large that there is value in a new discipline: the discipline of cherry-picking and cross-pollinating knowledge.
So it’s not the case that specialists are no longer valuable; rather, it is the case that geeks are practicing a new discipline. And of course, they value that discipline more highly than they value expertise, just as many experts would tend to value their discipline more highly than other disciplines.
What geeks bring to the table, when they are doing what they do well, is the ability to gather together all the information they need to solve a specific problem. They were never experts on the topics that they cherry-picked to get the solution to their problem, nor would they have claimed to be; rather, the skill they brought to the table was the *ability* to quickly identify disparate sources of information, learn them in enough depth to have a useful, temporary understanding, and then integrate them into a solution.
So the attitude you see in geeks is precisely the attitude you’d expect. If you write a really long article explaining something, it will be ignored, because it can’t be digested quickly. Information sources, such as wikipedia, that can be digested quickly will be preferred. Errors in these information sources are tolerated, because they become obvious when you try to use the knowledge you picked up there.
It would indeed be unfortunate if everyone stopped focusing deeply on specific problems. It would be equally unfortunate if all the geeks one day decided to become specialists. And it would be particularly unfortunate if practitioners of both disciplines became antagonistic toward one another, which, I think, is the anti-intellectualism you are describing. Just don’t forget that it cuts both ways.
I think it’s not anti-intellectualism so much as the same kind of anti-establishment feeling that has ALWAYS permeated geek culture. We are the People Who Question Everything. We don’t generally trust someone based on their own claims of merit or expertise, we require proof of expertise. That, in itself, puts us at odds with most definitions of “The Establishment”.
If I can add… “Intellectual” is a label that members of a certain Establishment class give themselves. This class has often been found, in history, working with the conventional ruling class, to exert power over other people.
Some victims of the intellectual class of their times have been the very people who are responsible for modern science. “Intellectual” is not a synonym for “intelligent”, nor for “deep thinker”. It’s a social class.
I do believe that the general consensus is a group of individuals that are generally anti-establishment. Be it the Gen-X crew or just rebellious youth, there is a mass of “the general mass agreed to an establishment and that establishment is jaded.”
College graduates aren’t nearly the “elite” they used to be – between low quality community colleges, for-profit degree mills and the lowering of standards in education…. you aren’t stupid if you didn’t get a degree – you’re just lazy. “Geeks” could’ve invested a significant amount of time to find a quality Engineering school rather than going for some Liberal Arts Major like all of your peers. You would’ve found instructors and peers capable of challenging you rather than doing 42 book reports on recycled material in over-expensive and outdated textbooks that aren’t relevant.
And yes, most textbooks *and* courses aren’t relevant: The average “Religion in America” course talks about only Protestants and the Church of England. You’re omitting hundreds of years of history just to cover the same crap the old white guys with cigars in coffee bars did a hundred years ago. Imagine the surprise if “Archaeologists from the Future” discovered our *modern* textbooks saying there are only two religions in America and 6 in the entire world.
Further, no one recognizes what modern American colleges are primarily used for: networking and finding opportunities. On average, dude in a basement (geek) far more capable with *any* programming language is *not* going to get the job that Bob’s Sports Buddy does. *Especially* in the geek primary field of technology. Nepotism wins. Knowledge loses.
So yes – why waste time with college? I can find more accurate and relevant information about many topics instantly and easily. It’s far too much work to crank through a degree mill to end up like the blue collar masses that aren’t nearly as capable as the average geek.
The answer is: to find the best job by discarding your passion for technology.
The only other option is to keep your passion and be resentful of the current establishment’s bar-setting standard of “googling it.”
….. the best Java developer I ever knew was a garbage man by trade.
….. the best consultant I ever knew tried to make a SOAP method with 33 parameters. None of which were typed and all of which were strings.
….. one of the best computer scientist I ever met, didn’t finished College, but he is invited to many important computer labs around the world.
What would you accept as proof of expertise? A degree in a certain subject is apparently not enough, so what would you use to measure this? I ask this because I’ve heard a lot of people disregard experts within fields (especially scientists around such ideas as climate change when a commentor online really disagrees with it) so I am just curious. I’m not attempting to troll, I just fear that we will slow our advancement in all academic, or intellectual fields if it becomes totally commonplace to dismiss everyone we disagree with regardless of their credentials.
Who would prove your expertise?
The learning COMMUNITY on the field will prove your expertise, this community is integrated for people with and without degrees, children or adults, indigenous or urban, etc, etc. The most important is their practical and applicable knowledge they have on the field.
How you will prove your expertise?
In a practical and concrete way: helping to your community with your expertise, with a free and volontaire work.
Most of these “anti-” people are generally and quite simply too lazy to put their nose to the grindstone and acheive a worthwhile degree. The notion that one can, in a like timeframe, gain the tools and learn the theory to be something like an electrical engineer using nothing but the Internet and trial and error is simply absurd.
Having the discipline to learn abstract and inherently difficult subject matter is something that most will not be successful at without designated curriculum which exercises that specific gray matter. Also, learning to accept the proper criticism of your superiors and your peers is a priceless commodity. This is something that the younger folks are becoming increasingly less capable of. Hence, the “I don’t need college” rhetoric. Well, as Judge Smails once said, “The world needs ditch diggers too, Danny.”
Hate to break it to you Mark, but most intellectuals don’t think engineers are part of their little group. Take it from the son of one, the brother of another, and the holder of a similarly looked-down upon degree (B.S. in Genetics).
And if you went to a state school, then they definitely don’t want you as part of their little club. Intellectualism is a status thing, nothing more.
This has been on my mind for the last few days, and I certainly appreciate the point you are trying to make, I certainly do feel that there is a wave of anti intellectualism, and it is worldwide. It’s funny, because I started re reading the foundation novels and it only reinforced the idea in my head.
I don’t think I’ve got a handle on it though just yet, and I appreciate your article but I’m not sure that I agree with you on these key points:
1: Who is a geek intellectual? I don’t consider the people you quoted as geeks, certainly part of geek culture, but not geeks themselves, somebody else posted something along these lines. In truth anybody who is a geek cannot be anti intellectual by definition, someone who identifies himself as a geek, and holds strong anti intellectual views, does not behave as a geek.
2: There are real reasons for believing that academia is outdated, but if you watch the Ken Robinson talk you alluded to, he says that’s there is a need for REFORM, because schools are not teaching skills people need in the job market AND they don’t teach people to think, he essentially both proves your point and argues in favor of it.
3: The amount of anti intellectual discourse available on line can be disregarded especially because of anonymity, most people that say that your ideas are old, are probably too young to understand what they are talking about, I myself probably held similar views when I was 14. These are the people that believe that Wikipedia proves their point when in reality it doesn’t, but anyway, this will explain what I’m talking about: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
4: Wikipedia is not about the wisdom of the crowds per se because for anything to survive it needs to be verifiable, I’ll let XKCD make my point: http://xkcd.com/285/ In fact, as long as the moderation system in Wikipedia holds it helps fight the anti intellectualism wave. Meaning: As long as the information is accurate, then you are actually engaging in “scholarly” reference work by using Wikipedia, just like going to a library or consulting youre very own encyclopedia at home.
5: For anybody that may be interested TLDNR non withstanding, The current situations is that people that have a lot more free time to think about life in general (Philosophy) because their life is made easier by technology, and who do not understand said technology, believe that the pursuit of knowledge is fruitless, (Since we already know all we need to know to enjoy life) (Stop fighting, have a microwave burrito, smoke pot and lets go to a rave, Yes I’m misrepresenting, deliberately). The prediction is that since people do not understand the technology and don’t feel they need to learn how it works (And this of course includes reading “The classics” after all “If I have seen far it’s because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”) will live in slowly deteriorating conditions since they are making sure there are no more people that can understand the technology so it will stagnate. What happens after that is anybody’s guess.
I think this is a reflection of the Corporatisation of society. Corporations are insane – they pursue policies with little to no long term vision and that put profit above all else, despite this being obviously retarded and destructive.
The (vast) profits that are made in this manner are threatened by informed people capable of critical, analytical thinking.
Secondly, Corporate financing of further education, and even secondary education, is informed by this basic irrationality and so, ever mindful of the economics of every action, only that which is required to maintain that profit driven model is taught.
This is something of a simplification.
The so called “dumbing down” of education and media output is partially driven by the need to have an acquiescent population – happy to consume and happy to not question why things are as they are.
These factors, added to the speed with which “knowledge” (answers) can be found, which is really a reflection of the ‘ticked boxes’ nature of examinations (which are in themselves microcosms of the issue here under discussion), combine to produce an apparent anti-intellectualism. It’s as though the method, once learned, is all that is necessary – the actual content can be found using a browser. This misses the essential point that “the content” is the written output of those who have mastered the science/art in question.
So the net grants us access to the knowledge of others, by which we may take on the appearance of being learned without all that tedious mucking about with actually learning.
Well, at least you got the name right.
So you don’t actually have anything to say, just a casual insult. That sort of underlines everything said on the thread.
Go back to youtube, I’m sure there’s something entertaining for you there.
I got my BA, MA, and Unix admin skills. And now, I’m doing a job that can easily be done by a high-school drop-out. Why? Because the world is run by non-geeks with “people skills” who shit on knowledge (PHBs is the term). Actually, this is why I became convinced that God and Satan are real, because so many times when something good comes along, it’s completely transparent that there’s a force of evil which will work to stifle it.
As regards college, if I had to do it over again, I’d spend MUCH more time trying to find a wife. Behind every good man is a good woman. Single, nerds, they don’t go far in this pop culture dominated society.
That’s what all of my learning has taught me: Fat, dumb, happy is better than slim, smart, & sad.
Anonymous
I found this comment genuinely saddening, and I feel compelled to tell you that I hope you don’t still feel this way. If you value knowledge, you have the essential tool to navigate whatever terrain may come, and I can only implore you to keep trying.
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