> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written.<p>I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would have answers on all the world problems, sort of a panacea-man, which is clearly not a smart approach.<p>If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.
I'm not seeing a very sympathetic analysis of this. This phenomenon is as old as time, with Socrate's students hanging on his every word.<p>In my view its an entirely reasonable thing: you encounter a person who can articulate a coherent ideology, method, system (etc.) which is entirely new to you. You use that person as a means of learning this system; and when you've learnt it all, you move on.<p>The key thing is you arrive at a critical point where you have seen their pov and can criticise it; and that you dont end up in a cult-like following of their ideas.<p>This cultishness is everywhere in academia, see, eg., all the departments that are "Kantian" or "Wittigensteinian" --- people forever trapped in the work of one author. I am very suspicious of "History of"-type disciplines for this reason.<p>I dont see this as having to do with social media, but if at all, maybe it accelerates it. I certainly think you need much more than 6mo with any substantive person.
It's noteworthy but sadly not surprising[1], that someone like Peterson is listed as an 'intellectual'.<p>This man talks like ChatGPT when asked to clad a text of the most basic ideas, frequently completely missing the point, into sophisticated-sounding language.<p>The other names tell me nothing; but having the former in the list kept me from looking up the latter.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-d...</a>
It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit.<p>The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions.<p>Here's some people to get you started:<p>On Malik (some interesting photography too): <a href="https://om.co/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://om.co/</a><p>Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): <a href="https://www.anildash.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.anildash.com/</a><p>Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public.<p>bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading)<p>Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@tested">https://www.youtube.com/@tested</a><p>Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): <a href="https://wilwheaton.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wilwheaton.net/</a><p>Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast">https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast</a><p>Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/">https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/</a>
The author has completely the wrong approach to absorbing wisdom from public intellectuals. Yes, of course every thinker is limited. They produce some beautiful work, some good work, and some mediocre work, some bad work. The trick is to consume the former and avoid the latter. Furthermore, we ought to evaluate writers based on their best work (use max(..) instead of average(..) as the aggregation operator). Of course Nassim Taleb, after getting famous, became cranky and overeager to engage in tawdry public insult-slinging. That does not detract from the beauty and depth of his best work. Of course George RR Martin's later books are not very good, and he will probably not finish the series. That does not reduce the magic of Tyrion Lannister's defense of King's Landing. I could produce an endless stream of examples like this.
"This guy had something interesting to say" is not a good heuristic for finding people who you can trust on multiple subjects.<p>A little bit better heuristic is if the person can publicly admit they have been wrong about something and change their mind.<p>I have been more and more disappointed by analytical analysis, in other words "wiseacring" of all kinds of intellectuals, so I have started to believe the problem is more in the analytical approach itself, and less in the person doing the analysis.<p>I am gravitating towards people who talk from experience, not from analysis. I expect them also to not appear to be reactive, talking from fear. An example of a person talking from fear would be a kind of junior developer who can never admit they are wrong, and who tries to cover up their mistakes.
A lot of negative comments in here.<p>It seems that everyone has their own whipping boy "public intellectual" in mind that once loudly said a thing that they disagreed with, and this is the opportunity to really stick it to them for that audacity.<p>Here's my hot take: consume what you want, just don't let it consume you. All of these people have probably said something worth mulling over, whether you ultimately end up agreeing with them or not. Learn what you can and then move on.
The only difference between a public intellectual and an entertainer or other content creator, is that the public intellectual had at least one novel idea about something important. I mean idea very broadly here, it can take the form of a reframing, an intuition pump, a system for reasoning, etc. That makes them known as "the guy who came up with x" vs. "the guy who makes videos about y". Rogan has a podcast, Taleb is the fat tails guy.<p>But even the best public intellectuals only have a few novel, high quality ideas a year. Most have only a few during their whole career. If someone only writes a book when they have something to say (a rarity for professional authors, more common amongst people who don't like writing). That book probably contains a few, maybe only one, novel idea. That's the case for books, what about tweets or videos?<p>Entertainers and public intellectuals compete for the same bandwidth. They show up in the same feeds. In order to compete, the intellectuals have to lower their standards, and the result is that many public intellectuals are only in the intellectual business 1/100 of the time, and in the hot takes business the other 99/100.
This relates to one of the topics I want to get to on <a href="https://rationaldino.substack.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://rationaldino.substack.com/</a> but which will take a while.<p>There is a very simple litmus test to tell which are likely to fade, versus which aren't. How certain are they?<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d...</a> reports on a long-term study about pundits. Basically they can be divided into two groups:<p>1. Hedgehogs. Have one overarching theory that they are certain of.<p>2. Foxes. Can pick and choose from a variety of sources.<p>Both groups are smart, informed, and interesting. But when you follow them for a long time, a clear pattern emerges.<p>- Foxes do much better at making future predictions that come true.<p>- Hedgehogs become far more popular pundits, and generally wind up getting paid far better. Most pundits with popular shows are hedgehogs.<p>Why? My theory is that we listen to pundits because it is comfortable to outsource our thinking to them. We find that comfortable if they are smart, well-informed, and certain. It is easy for us to think, "Well if this smart and well-informed guy is so certain, I'd surely agree if I did the work. So now I don't have to bother."<p>There is a problem here. We become certain when it is easy for us to think a thing true, and hard for us to think it might be false. We feel that the evidence is truly overwhelming. It may be overwhelming. But it is more likely that we're simply being intellectually dishonest. So we actively choose intellectually dishonest pundits who agree with our presumptions, and then become sure that they are right. We enjoy listening to them. But, being intellectually dishonest, they are probably wrong. And now we're emotionally committed to their brand of insanity!<p>Try this rule of thumb out. Assume that a person who is certain, is probably wrong. And when you find yourself feeling certain, nurse that little doubt about how you REALLY know. It takes time, but consistently making this choice can change your life. For a start, you'll start actually thinking about things that you currently only think you're thinking about.
Comes with the territory when you are on the lookout for Rockstars and fueling the influencer economy. This post should reach 1 on HN to close the circle for max universal irony.
It’s unfortunate that there is not an “intellectual media network” that does all the hard public relations stuff for intellectuals and allows them to easily share their work with a public audience. Since this doesn’t exist, you end up with people that are willing to play — and are good at — the media game, which usually means making outrageous attention-grabbing claims that are far outside the person’s expertise.
What is most off here is the analysis. The idea is that either someone is totally right about everything they assert because of extreme caution and care, or they are terribly wrong and flawed in a way that makes all of their ideas poison. But most intellectuals are in between there in a way this piece almost describes.<p>Take this specific example of Peter Zeihan. He dares to get out of his areas of expertise and gets somethings wrong and some things very wrong. But much of his core analysis is extremely relevant and useful. He tends to start from population demographics and the raw material sources of industrial supply chains. There is a lot of interesting stuff there and much of what Peter Zeihan points out is quite right and well ahead of the curve. For example, he was talking about Chinese demographic shrinkage well before it started to make major economic and political impacts.<p>So the idea here is that because Peter Zeihan tries to go as far as he can with what he has and ends up in the weeds much of the time that all of his work can be dismissed as foolish wandering about in the weeds. But that is false. The core issues of demographics and industrial supply chain roots remain and have very large impacts that are not particularly well hidden from careful examination. This implies that the real challenge is not deciding if a public intellectual is truly great or disgracefully fallen, but rather defining which points they make are solid and where it is that their reasoning falls off.
Cult of Personality.
The strong man for one, the celebrity for the next, the intellectual for the other.It presumably makes one's own lack of power,fame and significance bearable.
Egoprothesis in a deficient mental model of the world.
> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written.<p>Read books. Watch Harvard/Yale lectures on humanities. Write notes on them. Think for yourself and write essays on the those topics. Once you get comprehensive education, random YouTube celebrities will stop being deep and fascinating to you. Or at least you will have 30-40 other perspectives from renowned thinkers to complement your worldview.
(Edited/extended per nonrandomstring's comment below)<p>Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it seems to me that the Author expects to find a human that is to be right on their subject matter, all the time, and never goes beyond that narrow scope.<p>It's quite possible to be right in a carefully enclosed area, but you have to expand that area as much as possible to make it applicable to the modern world. Thus, mistakes (and the experienced gained from them) are part of the territory.<p>I see the authors quest as one bound to be fruitless in the long run.<p>I curate my information sources, and I readily accept their flaws. I know that Peter Zeihan sometimes gets out over his skis intellectually, but that's a part of his schtick. I know the general biases, strengths and weaknesses of those I pay attention to. I give them authority with my attention, they didn't get it from anywhere else. I believe everyone should take similar care.
This seems obvious in the new social media.<p>Say something boring and true and don't get attention.<p>Say something counter culture, evocative but ultimately wrong (or atleast not durable as an idea). Get attention.<p>Rinse. Repeate.
> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan.<p>These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.
Im no longer catholic, but i use Jesus as a comparison to thrse figures. It's what i call the jesus principle: "Would jesus have this many things to say?"<p>Jesus was 'the son of god' and yet he didn't have that much to say when it comes down to it. Really. When you compile all the things he said, without duplication, it would probably fit in a one hour podcast.<p>Now, take joe rogan's guest. Let's say Alex Honnold. He lives a really interesting life and one hour into the podcast he would be struggling for things to say.<p>Should you listen to these public intellectuals you mentioned? sure. But after one hour or so, thats really enough to get an abstraction.<p>Because when it comes down to it : There's really not much to say.
My relationship with "intellectuals" is more stable.<p>From time to time I'm looking what's up with:<p>Nassim Taleb<p>Andrew Gelmam<p>Adam Tooze<p>Scott Aaronson<p>John Mearsheimer<p>Noam Chomsky<p>Bernard-Henri Lévy
Intellectuals undermined their credibility when they said protesting lockdowns was killing grandma, but protesting the police didn't kill grandma and is more important than lockdowns
<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette...</a>
Reminds me of another letter that has aged just as gracefully
<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/521823-50-former-intelligence-officials-warn-ny-post-story-sounds-like-russian/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/521823-50-former-intel...</a>
A much better-written essay on a similar thesis: <a href="https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-s...</a>
Get into ideas, not the people who introduce you to them. It's probably still an interesting idea well after the person loses their novelty to you. Don't lose yourself so readily to our bizzare celebrity worship/parasocial culture.
Kill your heroes; every single “intellectual” on YouTube can and should be ignored.<p>Follow the field, not any individual. This need to have some special, unique insight, the hottest take, is death to understanding.
Peterson seems strongly influenced by Jonathan and Matthieu Pageau who are doing quite a job at restoring meaning to the western world, linking rational and irrational thinking into a kind of universal theory with mathematical notations across verticals. It's really mind-blowing and imho, Matthieu Pageau is one of the greatest intellectuals of our time and he remains quite isolated and hidden. His content is infrequent, freshly brilliant, and challenging for those curious to learn it.
The debate about the "public intellectual" is a very old one by now. Most date the emergence of the public intellectual to the Dreyfus affair. I read the author's list here with sadness, thinking that the younger generation is being cut off from the history of an important modern phenomenon by youtube's algorithm. Youtube videos just aren't a good medium for this. Sustained, in-depth conversation across journals and magazines and periodicals was much better.
I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, maybe some of you want to follow: ALWAYS SUPPORT THE UNDERDOGS. They are the ones experimenting with new ideas and hopefully sharing both what worked and what didn't.<p>Unfollow all the players with a huge following. They stop producing quality.<p>Start by supporting underdogs, people who have a following, but small and growing.<p>Eventually they'll become bigger in terms of following. Then unfollow them.
Zeihan's synthesis view of geopolitics is pretty interesting, but he does display glaring faults when he ventures beyond that niche, e.g. when he tries to summarise the economic systems of the world in his most recent book he says all of Europe is socialist, which is what I would consider a very basic American layman's take on economics, not really fitting for any kind of public intellectual in the social sciences. I try to look past it, though, since his demographics and culture-focused geopolitics analysis is still interesting to me.
Why does this fucking article keep lagging my entire browser and keeps reloading? I have a constant loading bar. Just let me read the damn text.<p>Of course reader mode is broken.<p>Decide what you want to do: Do you want to publish content, or visual art? Don't try doing both when you're not great at either.
I have a similar effect with TV series, getting excited at a new premise at first, but then often losing interest midways once the pattern-matching kicks in and I get a grasp on what their shtick is. The magic is usually only in the beginnings.
I really like the text. Short, concise and to the point. I also felt like you were describing a little bit of me lol. The one thing I fail to capture is, what is the solution to this problem? How can these intellectuals not "die"?
Popularity is not a good filter for importance, especially about future importance. In old times, editors would decide what gets popular, now algorithms do and they are quite dumb and don't take risks.
This is inevitable when you have to publish content at a weekly frequency.<p>Scientists often have something new to say at a frequency of years (if productive).
This post treats the constant stream of "new public intellectuals" as some kind of organic, natural phenomenon. It's not, these people reach the top of your YouTube feed because someone wants them there. There's nothing organic about Eric Weinstein or Lex Fridman.<p>People on this site are quick to call something "enshittification" when there are some obvious cash-grabs by megacorps, but are reluctant to admit that the algorithm feeding you content is manipulating you in a similar way.<p>> And take note when one doesn’t fall, study them the hardest.<p>I did, and they subsequently got banned from every social network, and even their website isn't linkable from Facebook or X or YouTube.
> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan.<p>Man repeatedly falls for the worst "public intellectuals" (really, pretentious charlatans), discovers that they're not trustworthy, and runs to the internet screaming "THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IS DEAD." nah brah, you just have bad tase.<p>Jordan Peterson -> an incoherent rambler. He's incapable of putting together straightforward premise1-premise2-premise3-->conclusion arguments. If you ask him "how's the weather?", you'll get an hour long brain spew about Ancient Rome, Napoleon, woke feminism, and the worst Holocaust takes you can imagine.<p>Eric Weinstein -> a narcissist mathematician who came up with a theory of everything, but refused to publish it because real physicists might criticize it and hurt his feelings. He wanted to be recognized as the new Einstein based solely on a video of a talk to a non-physicist audience. His podcasts are mostly rants against the Physics Deep State and Big Science, which he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex", because they're all in a big conspiracy to suppress his genius ideas.<p>Chamath -> don't know him.<p>Peter Zeihan -> just another hyper-caffeinated prognosticator who claims to know the future.
The author seems to only be interested in people who appear on podcasts targeting lonely men between the ages of 20-40.<p>I can assure him that there is a whole world of serious thinkers and authors that have never appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Develop interests of your own and go beyond public intellectuals. Don't let all your information get recommended to you, only some of it. Reach out for the rest yourself. Books are very efficient at conveying information, so read some to get a lay of the land before going deep.<p>Also, consider that there is more to know than you have time to learn, so be selective. Are you going to act on it? Is it going to give you pleasure?
My idea of a public intellectual is someone like Scott Alexander or maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I suppose being on camera makes you more public than anything else.
I'm surprised he didn't mention lex Friedman or Joe rogan. The people I admire on YouTube still continue to resonate with me. If anyone is looking for 'leftist Jordan Peterson' I suggestion Gabor mate, he's a much more holistic and less authoritarian, and continues to inspire me.
oh ye people, you always need a golden bull to worship. turn your attention inside and listen to the truth that is always there. that's where the revolution starts. otherwise, you're just a consumer of the latest YouTube fad.
"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source."<p>No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith.<p>What counts is the connection of statements to reality and their logical integrated cohesion as a whole. And that's regardless of the source.<p>Experts/Authorities are neither automatically right or wrong. No honest expert or authority ever demands that their statements be taken on faith. If they actually know what they're talking about, their statements can be logically defended and tied to reality. This is the standard that <i>everyone</i> should be held to.
WARNING: libertarian content ahead.<p>> And take note when one doesn’t fall, study them the hardest.<p>Here you go, all three of them (including Ludwig Von Mises too):<p>Hans-Hermann Hoppe on “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard at 50<p><a href="https://mises.org/wire/hans-hermann-hoppe-new-liberty-50" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mises.org/wire/hans-hermann-hoppe-new-liberty-50</a>
This post has sloppy editing:<p><i>then it i was Eric Weinstein</i><p><i>You’re basis for truth</i> (should be "Your")<p>Hasn't been corrected in ten months?