Glad to see someone acknowledging the myopic view of most intellectuals.<p>During my time in academia (PhD), I'll admit now I had very little idea of what life was like for the majority of people.<p>Since then I've been living among many working class and poverty-level folks. Average household income in my neighborhood is <$22K (U.S.). As a result, my thinking has changed to unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish, and ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do!
>For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.<p>So... intellectuals were right about the issues that they were focused on, but somehow populists are right that they are out of touch? Those seem contradictory to me, if they are problematically out of touch, then why were their ideas still correct? Who cares? At worst these seem like separate qualities, clearly being out of touch didn't make them wrong about the actual issues directly.
This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence. This sentiment is completely ridiculous, yet I'm sure a lot of people believe it because it makes them feel superior. Pundits and professors are often wrong, but it isn't because they are highly educated. I still trust the opinion of a professor rather than someone working at Pizza Hut.
What a confusing article and discussion! I have a vague feeling we are witnessing a very significant breakdown of something, but I'm not sure what it is. So I'll just post some random thoughts<p>- The idea of educating intelligenzia by having them work on the fields for a year sounds a bit too much like the cultural revolution of China in the 1960's. It was bad.<p>- It seems very silly to me to question the value of education. Learning about earlier mistakes is a great way to avoid repeating those mistakes. Learning is good.<p>- If education is only available for those with a lot of wealth, it certainly brings about both an alienating effect and a lot of bitterness. That's too bad. I'm from a country with free universities and government subsidized students' loans. I think it's a good system, couldn't have afforded any university education without it, being from a poor family.<p>- In the discussion an idea seems to loom that a less informed opinion is evened out by the fact that more people share it. This I can not abide, although it is the basic idea of democracy. I always thought democracy is mostly a safety measure against tyrants and a pretty ineffective mode of government in its weakest. An enlightened democracy is much better than a populist one. Both are better than a non-democracy, at least most of the time.<p>- The difference between an enlightened democracy and a populist democracy is evident in its leaders. John Stuart Mill was an enlightened democrat for one. The bad ones can be spotted out by their spitefulness.<p>- Too bad some populists riding on the tide of anti-intellectualism have managed to turn democracies into tyrannies. Sometimes ships capsize.
Very American-centric (but then this is by someone who helped found the "New America Foundation"); for instance outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts. Intellectuals all over can still have their heads up their asses, but that's not particularly new. The figure of the out-of-touch intellectual was common in the 19th century (e.g. Peter in War and Peace).<p>Many professors do realize that their lives are quite different from those of most folks, but they're not often found in American elite institutions, so they don't show up on CNN.
The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate.<p>In particular, when it comes the issues of the humanities that revolve around "how should you live your life?"; a professor who is tenured has nothing to say to people subject to the "flexible economy" other than to implant false conciousness.
"The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment..." << Someone care to explain to me how being atypical distorts my judgement? This piece is not very substanative beyond enumerating how PPPs are different, it then merely says "they don't understand because of their difference." That seems rather like ad hominem.
Couldn't I just as easily state "the french-fry cook doesn't know anything about the life of a philosopher"?<p>Everybody's view of the world is limited by their own experiences. Does that mean everybody therefore misunderstands the world?
To put it in perspective, a recent research study[1] conducted by a team of elite PhD economics researchers discovered the astonishing fact that people who face a sudden unexpected financial crisis (such as medical bills, car breakdown, job loss) are surprisingly less likely to become homeless if they can pay their rent/mortgage, while those who cannot pay for their home are more likely to become homeless.<p>(In truth, they went in-depth in calculating percentages and timelines and cost-benefits, etc. That summary trivializes their work.) But the basics of this discovery made by this elite team of academic researchers is something that every single working-class person in the country, even high school dropouts, knows as a simple basic fact of everyday daily life.<p>The idea that you would need to educate and train several people for many years, to the level of being professors at top colleges, then assemble a team and give them a grant to do a study to discover such a common part of daily life seems a bit ridiculous to non-academics.<p>[1] <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694" rel="nofollow">http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694</a>
Just because we have Brexit, Trump and the rise of populists everywhere doesnt mean that pundits have suddenly strayed. Pundits have since the time of Socrates been out of touch with society. What i see as the failure of today's pundits is lack of rigor, perseverance and their tendency to lazily put their eggs in questionable baskets (e.g. universal income). O tempora, o mores, this is the world of 140-character-worshippers and high h-indexes.
Here's a cached link to the text from this article if anyone is having problem with the link above:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a>
Even though I have a Master's of Science in Computer Science, I also spent a few years of my youth (more than they suggest in this article) working as a groundskeeping for several apartment buildings across town. Mowing, weeding, edging, planting, etc.<p>On the flip side, my father had a PhD in Physics and taught at the local university. I believe I probably did better than most when it came to genes and funding, but I graduated high school with people who got up and milked the cows before coming into school and I know their lifestyle as well as my own.<p>I think this article itself is out-of-touch.
An easier explanation: variation.<p>Systems can be tremendously complex. There are countless unknown and unknowable variables in play. Moreover, the interactions between those variables can also be unknown and unknowable.<p>The intellectual world (academia) is based upon professors and schools who can teach the "right way" of doing things and thinking. That's how PHDs work--you have to come up with a "new" idea to get your PHD. As you can see, it creates a conflict of interest.<p>It would be much better if academia taught simple principles, variability, and how to think.
pg's essays are a nice antidote to some of this nonsense.<p>One that stood out for me was the idea of cities that concentrate intellectuals, which was studied much more deeply by pg in "Cities and Ambition".
This is, frankly, crap. It both ignores the diversity of experience that people that are <i>not</i> "professors, pundits, and policy wonks" have, and implicitly dismisses the idea that an understanding of the world can be gained by systematic study of the world (what academics actually engage in) that is superior to what is gained by isolated, unsystematic, experience with some small slice of it that happens to be at a lower socioeconomic status.<p>Its essentially a radical rejection of the <i>idea</i> of study and transmissible, shareable knowledge of the world.
I was having trouble loading the page, so here's a cached version I used:
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPTwvKUJ:thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPT...</a>
Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.
This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I'm interested in knowing if people actually read the article or upvoted the title?