Glad to see someone acknowledging the myopic view of most intellectuals.
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.
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!
> Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do!
Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions that provided this: regular neighborhood hangout spots, social clubs, adult recreational leagues, and especially churches.
> unions are overall good ideas
Maybe. Depends. I frequently see union demands oriented around last decade's operational patterns instead of next decade's. Like requiring specific outdated jobs be filled (like toll booth workers) when it would be more value-added to have the same person clean or provide general customer service. A union looking out for its members would embrace that some jobs would fade away and provide (or demand) retraining for its workers so they're qualified for new jobs, even in other industries if need be.
> Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions
True, though I think new institutions will come back. Things like Meetup groups seem to be gaining more traction--The groups are just slow to adoption because they're so new that nobody can be grandfathered in yet by friends or family who have been long-term members.
> Unions are overall good ideas -- Maybe. Depends.
I see unions as just another corporation - they're satisfying a need of "workers should not be exploited", their revenue model is "members pay X% and in return get our strength in numbers", and their activity streams are "fight for favorable legislation" and "Threaten uncompliant businesses".
The problem with unions is they are not treated as corporations in their own right, so unions have become monopolistic, heavily involved in lobbying and partaking in generally corrupt behavior--responding more strongly to incentives to survive and make money than incentives to keep its members happy.
Unions are still powerfully beneficial, but I'd wish there were multiple unions for any industry that competed with each other, some with stricter requirements to get in, each offering different freedoms and protections to its workers
Unions are monopolies by their nature - it's not something they become. They only exist due to a statutory exemption of anti-trust law. I personally have not been able find a justification for a monopoly of any kind in a free society.
This is what unions are now, because the NLRB institutionalized them, and Taft-Hartley defanged them, and they became another kind of entrenched power. This is not what they were, when they served as a democratic organ, a way for workers to make collective decisions outside of government.
If a union was not a monopoly, they would lose all the power they have - the power to withhold labor from an employer. How would a non-monopoly union work?
I don't see what benefits unions provide other than relieving their members from participating in a free market. The inefficiencies of such relief being paid for by consumers that have no choice in the matter.
One of the principal selling points for UBI as a replacement for existing means tested social benefit programs is that it eliminates the perverse incentives created by means tested programs in which benefits are reduced by outside income (especially from work), at a rate that, in aggregate across the programs a person may be eligible for, may even exceed the after-tax income from work.
A selling point it has as a replacement for minimum wage is that it provides a quality-of-life safety net without preventing work that people would willingly do, and which would be economically valuable for employers, by setting a floor on minimum hourly pay.
UBI is, arguably, more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo it is offered to replace.
Currently, many social benefit programs give people less money the more they work. If a person is eligible for enough of these programs, they can even make less money by working than they would by not working.
UBI (universal basic income) doesn't have this problem because it pays people the same amount regardless of weather they work. Thus, it is arguably more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo is.
That's not a precisely accurate translation, as there are plenty of social benefit programs that are not means tested beyond perhaps treating some of the benefit as normal income (e.g., Social Security), and my post was not making the "most social benefit programs" claim, only comparing UBI to those programs which are means tested (and which therefore are obvious candidates to replace with a UBI, given the usual arguments for UBI.)
Maybe true for the standard retired beneficiary, but not for everyone. A friend of mine is on SS disability. His condition changes over time and has improved some in recent years. When he can work, he has to make sure he doesn't work too much, or his benefits go away.
Yeah, it was bound to be inaccurate, because you clearly know more about this than I do!
It took me a few minutes (no exaggeration) to parse your post. But you made some excellent points, so I decided to simplify it for other unlettered folks like myself. (We have a hard time picking apart 70-word long sentences.) It would be even better if you could write for us directly. Even just capping your sentences at 30 words would make a big difference, I think.
The danger I see with UBI, is (in addition to possible inflation, etc.) is that commentators on HN tend to be of higher education, curious, and simply "hackers". Most people here would love to be payed money so they could sit and program some cool OSS, start a new company or simply change the world.
For them, UBI is fantastic. How many more Googles/GNUs/Apples would there be if engineers could quit existing companies and form, all while guaranteed basic sustenance.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around.
And then you start having issues convincing people to go for higher education (even assuming its free).
Wait, what about lower education?
Go to school, get good grades, or else you'll ... get a livable wage anyways?
Why should I write essays when I can play video games instead?
Then, until everything is automatable, you still need to get people to work under the hot sun, picking potatoes.
If you have a livable wage without it, why would you go? And how much will the farmer need to pay workers to go?
A thought experiment: Assume a near-future world where automation can provide a decent standard of living for everyone. Further assume there is a part of the population that just slacks off. Would you be in favor of some sort of punishment to make those folks conform to your standard of not wasting their lives?
My main point is that people tend to view everyone as themselves. So intellectuals tend to view everyone as intellectuals.
So we think that if only I'd have guaranteed income, I'd finally get around to fixing Firefox, or making an Open Source Google, or whatever. Therefore, it would be better for society if people would be free to leave "useless work" and innovate instead.
But once you see the "real world," you realize that it's not going to happen. Most people would just sit at home playing CS or chatting on FB.
Now once humanity is retired, and of no more use (singularity), then sure, why not. It'll be the AIs innovating everything, running everything, and no one will be doing anything useful anyways.
But until that point, I don't know if we can realistically afford three quarters of the population to just go into early retirement.
I'm one of those who views UBI as a way of dealing with productivity explosion implied by (some models of) the singularity (as opposed to a form of welfare.) It seems a realistic option, and more desirable than e.g. slavery or genocide, once things are getting closer to the limit, eh?
In other words, "those proles are so lazy that as long as they don't starve, they'd PREFER being poor"? People living on only UBI will still be relatively poor.
Look at all the lengths people throughout the ages have gone to to make money. People LIKE money. They like it so much they are willing to work for more of it, even when they already have enough to barely survive.
The problem you point to is self-limiting. Regardless of the nominal level of UBI, it won't provide a satisfactory income unless a sufficient number of people remain working to provide the goods and services required to provide a satisfying style of life for the UBI-only recipients and sufficient additional value to workers for them to continue working. Prices will adjust to make this the case.
As the quality of life provided on UBI-only declines, the incentive for additional productive work will increase.
(of course, lots of people now continue to expend additional effort beyond what is necessary for a minimally livable existence, so I don't see this as likely to be a great problem.)
My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI (such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century), for every Newton or Voltaire were many more unknown nobles who spent their life grooming their mustaches.
I don't believe our society is that much better now.
In a sense, but in this particularly case it operates as a negative feedback control mechanism which prevents the actual feared problem from occurring, so is hardly a "tragedy".
> My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI
There are no societies with UBI to look back on.
> such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century
A benefit restricted to a particular social class is not a UBI (or, at least, not much like what modern UBI proposals target, and not likely to serve as a guide as to what one can expect from them), nor, even ignoring that aspect, did the upper class of Europe through any of that time have anything remotely resembling a UBI, which is a flat, equal, unconditional grant to all members of a society.
Now, in much of that period, individual nobles had (either by definition or just disproportionately, depending on the particular time and place) either claims to income from substantial properties or family connections to those who did and who would support junior family members with, often quite conditional, support, but that's more the position of a wealthy capitalist or their associates in the modern era than that of a UBI beneficiary.
>The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around.
Which is cheaper than housing even a small number of them in prisons. One of the hopes is that by eliminating much of the desperateness from poverty, we'll save a bundle from the accompanying reduction in crime.
> People over a certain age get a UBI (in many countries).
> Maybe extrapolate from what they do...
People over the age for drawing public pensions (whether or not those are UBI-like; most I'm familiar with are not) are probably not representative of the broader population in their decisions with regard to engagement in the labor market, entrepreneurship, etc., and how those decisions are impacted by changes in available resources.
> ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution
I'm confused about your stance on education. At first blush you seem to be diminishing it's impact while promoting it. Care to elaborate?
I think the idea is rather than just pouring money directly into schools, focusing on creating communities and resources so that students can actually take advantage of what's available. Buying new textbooks and facilities doesn't help when half the students don't have enough to eat, don't have role models and tutors, don't have anyone telling them that education is important.
Quite the contrary. Welders, carpenters, or heavy equipment operators in my
country enjoy a decent pay, yet there is a shortage. For some weird reasons
those who studied so sought-after political studies or literature can't be
bothered with a job that consists of physical work and doesn't require
a degree.
In the UK, plumbers and electricians can make more than developers do.
It depends where they work - London and the SE pay a lot better than the run down cities in the North - and how good their network is.
I used to know someone with a well-paid City job who retrained as a plumber. He earns almost as much as he did and is considerably less stressed. The only downside is occasional snobbery.
Say you have a small factory ,employing 50 older welders doing a risky job at relatively little pay.
Say you need 10 more welders - but those guys really don't like risk so they would need a big increase in the salary, maybe 50%-100%. But you know that than the word will get out and the older workers will demand similar salaries.
So it's a big jump in total labor-costs per work-unit. And let's not forget - revenue per employee can be quite limited in many places. So maybe paying low is the better state for the business.
The risk of pushing "education" is that it's either duplicitous -- a well-rounded liberal arts education is a good thing, but doesn't guarantee the mythical "job" -- or just cost-shifting to potential workers: a lot of companies would prefer that a large number of potential workers pay for their own education as welders, machinists, and air conditioner repairmen, increasing their labor pool, driving down their own wages, and taking on the risk (of whether there is a need for their labor) themselves.
Education should be for the sake of learning; companies should be willing to train laborers, from machinists to drivers to software engineers.
The article is a swing and a miss. The problem is much deeper than the bias of being more educated and intellectual. It's that they believe singular "policy" can be made and then dictated top-down - that effects will be quickly visible and easily understandable. They're up against a hard problem in the computational complexity sense, yet it is in none of their interests to be honest and admit their limits.
Most of their ideas lack intellectual rigor and merely follow the fashions of power. BI in particular is a simplistic continuation of printing money to overstimulate the economy.
UBI would be much better than unionizing the entire country (the IWW is the only union I know of that would accept all people regardless of skill). Everyone would be guaranteed unlimited strike pay that can sustain them. The effect on employee-employer relationships would be amazing, every degrading/dangerous job would instantly have to 2x or 3x its salary to keep workers. Every worker would be able to negotiate from a position of safety knowing they effectively have 'fuck you money'.
>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.
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.
Those were two cherry-picked examples of things intelligentsia got right. It was not a claim that they get everything or almost everything right.
I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real world that so often leads the common man to be more correct about some very simple things that the intelligentsia misleads them here, because money is not a very concrete thing. It can seem like it is, because you've got this "cash" and this "gold" and it all seems very concrete, but the true driver of the economy, how people subjectively measure value, is very abstract.
But intellectuals can also say some blitheringly idiotic things, like promoting the glorious Five Year Plans when anybody who has ever had to make real plans for the future knows that you generally encounter important divergences in the first week of implementation, or that battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, etc. I also do not endorse economics in general; it is true that "the gold standard" is not good, but economic's track record of telling us what is good is bad.
Intellectual pursuits can be a very powerful and noble thing, but when it fails to correctly ground itself in reality it can become a very powerful and evil thing. I have great respect for intellectuals who admit error and craft new theories or ideas in response to failure and great, great contempt for the majority of those who fancy themselves intellectuals who instead cling to words and theory far, far beyond what is justified when evidence of error confronts them. (Yes, one can't drop a theory the instant one slight deviation is seen, but there are theories still alive today in the intellectual world that should have died decades, and in some particularly sad cases, centuries ago.)
It's impossible to take you seriously when you use Stalin's Five Year Plans as evidence that "Intellectuals" are negative. That's a flawed argument on so many levels:
1) It's ridiculous to conflate modern science and Stalin. It's worse than ridiculous.
2) Even if you can somehow convince yourself that it's reasonable to treat Stalin and modern scientists as a homogenous pool, Stalin's actions worked out quite well for Stalin. Which was pretty obviously his goal.
3) Your core argument is 'some systematic approaches to understanding have failed; so we should give up'. That's defeatist nonsense.
4) Your secondary argument is the intellectuals are actually good (and you pretend to respect them), but some aren't, therefore intellectuals are bad. That's not even an argument.
Please down vote me if you are an extremist ideologue.
It just sucks that the HN mods think it's fine for dishonest ideological warriors like Jerf to casually conflate modern academia and Stalin, just because he did so without using profanity.
It's such an intense and personal attack; and it's so wildly dishonest... It completely eliminates all possibility of a useful conversation in a single sentence. It's poo.
I think you're taking something personally that isn't at all intended that way, and I think that's making it difficult for you to appreciate the nuance in the statement to which you've responded. I understand why and I don't blame you for it, but I hope you're able to take a step back from the passion of the moment and reconsider; on the one hand, I think there's useful insight here, and on the other, I know it's not pleasant to feel yourself put so thoroughly on the defensive that you have to respond this aggressively, and I'm sorry to see anyone go through that, especially when it may not actually be necessary.
'jerf didn't say that academia is evil because Stalin, but rather that intellectualism which becomes too far divorced from reality can be an extremely dangerous force; he cited Soviet central economic planning as an extreme example of the sort of danger to which he refers.
I don't think it is controversial to say that Soviet economic policies were derived primarily from a political theory which was developed by people whom it's accurate to describe as "intellectuals", in the demonymic usage we seem to be taking as conventional in this thread. I also don't think it's controversial to say that these policies produced widespread, severe privation among the population on whom they were tried.
And I don't think it is accurate, or fair, to say that 'jerf meant this example as a general indictment of modern academia. Nothing in his comment seems to me to suggest anything of the sort. But I can see how, if I were myself an academic and an "intellectual", I might take some of what he did say as a very direct attack on my identity and sense of self-worth, and respond to that rather than to the arguments actually being made.
I hope I'm not coming across as patronizing here. I'm really not trying to be. It's just that, as a tradesman, I don't really have a dog in this fight, and as someone who's worked among academics in the past, I've had the opportunity to develop some insight into some patterns of thought which people who work in that paradigm might share. Among those, I think, is a general feeling of being constantly under attack by a populace which is both ignorant of what science and academia actually do, on the one hand, and on the other deliberately misinformed by a variety of demagogues for their own political benefit.
It wouldn't surprise me to see someone, who is accustomed to what I'd almost call this siege mentality, to react aggressively to anything which looked even a little like a critical analysis of the value of academia or intellectualism as a whole. It's very natural to respond in such fashion to an attack on one's livelihood. But I don't think what is going on here really is such an attack, and maybe the conversation we could all have about what 'jerf is saying would be more interesting and mutually satisfactory than the one we currently seem to be having.
Either that, or I'm completely wrong about what's going on and I've totally misread the entire situation. I don't think that's the case, but how can I be sure?
> he cited Soviet central economic planning as an extreme example of the sort of danger to which he refers.
Any intellectualism that's divorced from reality and impervious to critique and verification does not deserve to be called intellectualism. It's ideology. There's nothing preventing you from making 5 year plans, as long as you adjust them continuously enough. The word to best describe the Soviet "intellectuals" you mentioned would be "ideologue". A less polite way would be "a sold-out who sells credibility to a government that pays for it".
"Any intellectualism that's divorced from reality and impervious to critique and verification does not deserve to be called intellectualism."
True, but that's a definitional debate. I would be happy to see the huge pile of ideology today masquerading as academia correctly renamed, but before that can happen it seems a lot of people (in the general sense, not targeting this statement at any individual) must be introduced to the idea that there are a lot of things currently labeled "academic" that are just ideology.
It's hard because you have to separate it on a case-by-case basis. I'm broadly unimpressed by most of what is called sociology but Jonathon Haidt particularly impresses me, for instance. I'm sure there are others who would impress me if I took the time to learn. But the field as a whole seem to have a gestalt consensus that strikes me as quite resistant to falsification.
It's very hard to falsify something when you can't run experiments and the number of samples is very limited and the subject of your study changes all the time. Even something supposedly more grounded like Economics suffers from both humans that are not perfectly rational and from "theories" that are nothing more than propaganda (think Mises)
"1) It's ridiculous to conflate modern science and Stalin."
First of all, I absolutely place Communism in the domain of "intellectualism". The only reason to do otherwise is simply because it failed and you don't want the stain of Communism on the word "intellectualism", but there is no other reason. It was, and remains, an intellectual-driven movement, since Communism is hardly dead. It is impossible to understand it from any other point of view. There were no Communist revolutions I know of led and driven by "the people". There were no Communist revolutions I know of where "the people" ended up in charge, rather than an intellectual who drove it. It started with intellectuals sitting around and theorizing, and was continued by other intellectuals taking the theories as truth and then trying to put them into practice despite the complete lack of evidence in their favor. (One can't help but feel that the fact that it flatters their egos played a significant role.) If there weren't communist intellectuals still running around today, I would let it go, but it is absolutely one of the things I had in mind that are still alive that should have died decades ago.
Secondly... Five Year Plans are alive and well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China And I hear the phrase from other places every so often as well. The idea that you can make grandiose plan years in advance is hardly dead. (The word "grandiose" is not extraneous. I have multi-year plans to pay off my mortgage, for instance, but that's not "grandiose".) While I fully intended the Stalinist overtones, the general criticism is about glorious planning disconnected from reality, which many large institutions (governments, corporations, etc.) become prone to.
Finally, you missed the true core of the post, which is that I have contempt for so-called intellectuals who react to the failure of their theories by clinging to them all the harder. One of the things about being an intellectual is that you have the mental firepower to rationalize harder than the common man, and I have contempt for those who use their mental firepower that way. Words and theories must not take priority over the facts on the ground. That way lies madness. I do not theorize about how that way lies madness because I need merely look out at the facts on the ground and see a wide variety of "intellectuals" propounding insane theories with epicycles piled on epicycles that they should have given up decades ago, some of which have had devastating consequences on the world. For instance, I lay the bulk of the blame for the obesity epidemic on certain intellectual's disastrous failure to notice how blindingly wrong their theories about healthy eating were when the evidence was staring them in the face (and gut, and thighs, and heart, and cholesterol, ....). So if I seem a bit incensed about false intellectualism, it's this sort of thing that leads me in that direction. Most fat slobs you see waddling down the road next to you are caused by false intellectualism by my reckoning.
>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.
I was a little confused by this statement. I thought that the populists of yore like William Jennings Bryant were opposed to the gold standard, and the modern consensus is that the gold standard is a bad thing. So weren't the populists right about it?
No, populists were wrong about the issues that they were focused on. That doesn't mean that intellectuals were right, about anything.
Intellectuals can be wrong on any given issue (especially since, for any issue, you can find an intellectual on both sides). But more to the point, intellectuals can be wrong (or at least completely out of touch) in the choice of questions that they think are important.
> 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
One can be factually correct yet emotionally incorrect (indeed, in my experience that's been at the root of some nasty interpersonal unpleasantness).
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.
> This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence.
Not at all. It says highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks because these categories have very different ranges of first-hand experience.
Why do you think they have different ranges of first-hand experiences? It is undeniable that by any objective measure professors are smarter (in the sense of being better able to tackle intellectual problems) than the average population. Do you honestly think someone working at Burger King has a better understanding of the world than a professor? I urge you to actually have a conversation with such a person.
Well, that would depend on what you mean by "the world." Professors have first hand knowledge of a very particular set of social practices and institutions. These tend to be very important practices and institutions, but they are only directly experienced by a small group of people. Someone working at Burger King will typically have participated in a quite different set of practices and institutions. And there are a lot more of these people. Therefore the Burger King employee's experience with these practices and institutions yields first hand experience that is directly applicable to the lives of many more other people than the professor's.
I do think it is a mistake to leap from this conclusion to the much broader one that Burger King employees understand "the world" better. Not only does that claim not mean much of anything, it also discounts the fact that the institutions and practices to which a professor is exposed may be more powerful, despite having fewer participants. But I think GP's similar and more specific claim, that "highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks," is very plausible.
But if what the professor is theorizing about is, say, labor conditions for the less-educated and less-well-off worker, then the Burger King worker knows in a way that the professor doesn't, no matter how many statistics the professor looks at.
"Something something anecdote something plural something data," someone invariably said, having not yet realized that most people live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world.
> Why do you think they have different ranges of first-hand experiences?
Because the professor works at a university, having first attended the university and then graduate school, whereas the person working at Burger King most likely never graduated college, and works at Burger King rather than as a professor at a university. Those seem to me to be rather different "ranges of first-hand experience". I don't see how they could be considered anything but different.
And the professor has a better understanding of that slice of the world the professor lives in.
This is a facile argument, because the implication is that the outlook - which includes the interests - of ordinary people is morally more significant than the outlook of a minority of clever people.
It's effectively saying that intellectuals are worthless because sometimes they're wrong and/or out of touch.
In reality, if you round up all the intellectuals and kill them - something last tried by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot - you don't generally get an improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people.
Is that extreme? Then how about simply ignoring all experts and professionals? Many experts and professionals are clever, and some surely count as intellectual.
Will ignoring them make life better for everyone else?
The author seems to be implying so. Personally, I'm not convinced - precisely because this kind of anti-intellectualism is a reliable cheap shot used by demagogues and authoritarians to direct attention away from other groups that are more likely to be causing deep problems.
> It's effectively saying that intellectuals are worthless because sometimes they're wrong and/or out of touch.
Oh, hell no. I've seen that side of the story, too, and it's completely wrong. We agree on that.
> In reality, if you round up all the intellectuals and kill them - something last tried by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot - you don't generally get an improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people.
I lived under communist dictatorship for 20 years, and I have first hand experience with the results of those policies. Had to work my way through those mentalities, at times. To say you're not telling me anything new would be an understatement.
I've also participated to the 1989 anti-communist revolutions, and I've seen anti-intellectualism rearing its ugly head again - thankfully without dire consequences.
So the extremes are bad, as they always are.
But I don't think the article implies that intellectuals are worthless. The way I read it, perhaps biased by my own life track, is that intelligence and scholarly education are greatly enhanced by a broad range of experience. No matter how smart or polished you are, you'll judge the simple folk in a different way if you walk in their shoes for a while.
One example I can think of off the top of my head would be automotive repair. If I can afford to let someone else do it, I will. That's not to say I don't think I could learn it if I needed to, but I don't ever need to. So, I'm happy to let someone "less educated" who knows more about engines do it. There are teenagers who know twice as much about how to fix a car issue. They don't know what the inside of a computer looks like, but they don't need to. Now, take that example and extrapolate it to several other facets of life, and you can say there's a big gap in an educated person's world and that of his less-educated neighbor. Yeah, I know math and physics and how write computer code, but who cares?
> There are teenagers who know twice as much about how to fix a car issue. They don't know what the inside of a computer looks like, but they don't need to. Now, take that example and extrapolate it to several other facets of life, and you can say there's a big gap in an educated person's world and that of his less-educated neighbor.
Which is kind of irrelevant to the subject here, which is really about academics focused on areas of social and policy significance having gaps in that specific subject area that would be filled in if they were just forced to spend a year working in a random working-class non-academic job.
It is specifically not about gaps outside of the targeted academics' areas of work, which is what you seem to be focusing on.
Its more like saying that being forced to spend a year working construction instead of programming would fill in critical gaps in your understanding of computer programming.
>which is really about academics focused on areas of social and policy significance having gaps in that specific subject area
In not just car mechanics. If you're focused on areas of "social and policy significance" it's even worse to be out of touch with social reality and the effects of policies.
And in fact much much worse (and much much more common) than an engineering professor who can't fix a car.
In my experience, there's no reason to assume that a professor has a better understanding of the world than someone working at Burger King, either. You can be smart and lettered and still ignorant. The trouble is, being smart and lettered means you're a lot less likely to notice.
In general, I think a lot of people in this thread are confusing the stereotype threat they experience around the "unworldly intellectual" idea, and what Lind, who is himself an intellectual of no small repute, is actually saying. It seems like there might be more light and less heat in the discussion if everyone were to take a moment and reflect on the difference. But I'm sorry to say I don't have much confidence that will happen.
>Why do you think they have different ranges of first-hand experiences?
Because they had studied in a university (most people haven't), have a cushy academic job (most people don't), live in nicer neighborhoods, don't have to flip burgers or drive cabs to survive, more often than not have parents who were like that, and tons of other reasons besides.
>Do you honestly think someone working at Burger King has a better understanding of the world than a professor? I urge you to actually have a conversation with such a person.
And I urge you the same. Only don't ask him abstract stuff or history/etc, ask him pragmatic stuff about how the working world works, and about how most people live.
Well, you seem to subscribe to the mindset that says - as long as you're very intelligent and highly educated, you're probably right on any arbitrary topic, and your opinions trump those of less intelligent and/or less educated people regardless of the relative degrees of experience involved on that topic. Particularly if combined with a narrow range of life experiences, or a young age, or both, it's a difficult view to change.
I've worked at some of the biggest names in the tech industry. I've also literally beaten iron with a hammer in a dirty factory. I've lived in some of the most advanced democracies in the world. I've also lived under true-blue communist dictatorship. I've seen the life of some pretty fancy, posh suburbs in the Silicon Valley. I've also seen the life of the traditional Eastern Bloc peasant. I know it's hard to believe, but with a broad experience comes the understanding that intelligence and scholarly education alone don't automatically provide all answers, nor do they grant you the Always Right card. No matter how smart or polished you are, if you don't walk into the humble folks' shoes for a while, your understanding of what their lives truly are will be necessarily incomplete and warped.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. A neural network that wasn't provided with the necessary training set will not "see" the right answers no matter what. All I want to do is plant the seed of "what if". Perhaps it will grow into a broader understanding, later. But that can only come with experience.
For an argument that is espousing the benefits of empathy, your condescending tone is very off-putting. You also use a straw-man argument - there is a difference between trusting professors more than lay people and believing that scholarly education grants you "the Always Right card". I also don't believe that "as long as you're very intelligent and highly educated, you're probably right on any arbitrary topic, and your opinions trump those of less intelligent and/or less educated people regardless of the relative degrees of experience involved on that topic". That is an obvious straw man. At the same time, I don't think working at Wendy's somehow constitutes the necessary experience to understand humanity that working as a professor doesn't provide. Would a Wendy's employee be better able to cook a hamburger? Yes, but if I want economic advice on how to improve the lives of poor people I'm still going to trust an economist who studies the issues over a Wendy's employee. Would working a year as a Wendy's employee really help the economist better understand the economy?
The fundamental point of the article - that scientists don't understand society because they are somehow different and privileged - is wrong at best and dangerously anti-intellectual at worst.
i've noticed in myself how easy it is to turn any quality of mine into the thing that basically makes me better than everyone else. it's funny when i catch myself saying, "yeah, i got ingrown toenails because i cut them too low, but it's just an expression of the dogged, obsessive aspect of my personality that makes me such an amazing human specimen."
What's your point? Are you saying intelligence is not a positive personality trait? Or that all people are equal? People are different, even if it isn't politically correct to say so.
Daniel Gardner actually had a pretty good book on this topic as well [1] where he found that often times expert predictions were actually worse than those of an average person (or the flip of a coin, for that matter). On the Pundits and Policy wonks bit I think Nate Silver also had a good write-up in his book on Fox vs. Hedgehog [2] mentality, and why experts are so often wrong when they cannot incorporate as much experience from outside their own fields.
> This article is saying smart people don't understand how the world works because most of the world's people are average intelligence.
Whether or not "intellectuals" are generally of above average intelligence isn't the point. The point is that the experience of intellectuals, a numerical minority, is atypical relative to the population as a whole.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
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.
> outside the US Academia is mostly supported by governments, not gifts
Inside the US, too. Many of our academic institutions were founded on the strength of such gifts, but that's hardly where their money comes from today.
The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate.
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 isolation of the intellectual and the pundit is larger than the question of the university.
Human civilization has been based on increasing specialization and that specialization has been both an adaptation and a marker of the ruling elite - the first specialists were essentially priests, which makes it clear specialization has always a signal[1] of power even if said specialization involved some efforts find truthful representations of the world.
The scientific method, which to some extent verifies specialized knowledge and beliefs, is much younger than specialization and it's much harder to apply to knowledge about how human - both because human society is hard to do repeatable experiments on and because it can offend the existing specialized beliefs that order society - religion, political beliefs, morality, etc.
> The isolation of academia from reality is so large that you almost have to say it is deliberate.
Yes... but for context, we can compare an academy with a factory, a military, a primary school, a hospital, a ride-share, or a church. If a person spends the majority of his time on writing papers, shaping steel, marching in formation, tagging on a playground, tending to sick people, driving strangers around the city, or praising god... well, all that focused labor is going to warp his world view a bit. And that is quite deliberate. Institutions are defined by how they isolate their members, direct their members' focus, and acquire comparative-advantage.
Of course, institutions in our time are not absolute. If we turn our attention away from categorical institutions... and instead look at individuals... then the situation gets much more interesting and less dark (but still imperfect)...
"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.
I see nothing wrong with it. I am very sure I don't understand the situation of poor working people. It has nothing to do with my IQ but with the fact that I don't live there live, never have.
What makes you think you know about other people's lives if you don't live among and with and as them? Just reading a few essays now and then? You would not accept that view if a committed layperson tried to give advice to physicists (referring to yesterdays thread that pointed to https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...) but instead insist they'd have to study physics and not just read a few papers. Thinking the issues of the "working class" are different because "how difficult can it be" doesn't seem consistent or right to me.
I'm not claiming that I know anything about other people's lives. In fact I might go so far as to say that when it comes to understanding the world as a whole trying to do so by enumerating the personal experiences of all the members of the human race might not be the best way to do it. Our brains create the world for us, they tell us things and give us imperatives that even the smartest of us often don't realize. Most importantly the lie to us, all of us. Reality is not a matter of experience, when an intellectual makes a statement from his experience he is just as likely to be wrong as anyone else. What tends to set some intellectuals apart is that the occasionally apply data to a situation. I will grant you that because they do this on occasion they are far (infinitely some might argue) more likely to think that explantations that actually come from their limited (fallible) experience come from data.
Yes, you certainly could state that. I think the point is that the french fry cook is much less likely to have an outsized influence on public policy compared to the philosopher/professor/pundit.
And, in particular, there are many, many more french fry cooks than philosophers.
So the french fry cook understands the perspective of a larger proportion of people in the world than the philosopher does.
Or so the argument goes. I'd disagree -- a large part of academic education, the humanities, is about learning to understand the perspectives of others. I'd say the philosopher understands the french fry cook's perspective better than vice versa, and that the philosopher is better positioned to misunderstand /less/ across all walks of life (though misunderstanding is inevitable) than most everyone else.
For intellectuals trained exclusively in STEM/social science who sprint from the humanities as quickly as humanly possible, yes the critique is spot on.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would be much better if academia taught simple principles, variability, and how to think.
I don't think this article contradicts anything that PG says. These are just different facets of the broad reality out there. What PG says applies pretty well to the elite group who create startups and push technology forward. This article highlights the discrepancy in first-hand experience between elites and average folks.
This is, frankly, crap. It both ignores the diversity of experience that people that are not "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.
Its essentially a radical rejection of the idea of study and transmissible, shareable knowledge of the world.
The "idea of study," as you put it, is exactly what's left out of the equation. Bias is, of course, inevitable. But it makes it sound as if a sociologist studying poverty consults their "worldview" and then writes an article. That's not the way anyone does research about anything.
If someone who considers themselves a "citizen of the world" (a very old idea in Western culture, going back to the Stoics) cannot understand why anyone would hold a different opinion, they probably shouldn't be in academia. This article makes it sound like unless you're a patriot, you cannot understand patriotism; unless you're poor, you can't understand poverty; if you're educated yourself, you cannot evaluate whether education is effective. If that's the case, then academics aren't "out of touch." They're incompetent. Or else very basic ideas about epistemology are wrong.
I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times.
When I say this I think of the anecdote in the article about how "intellectuals" prescribe more education as a panacea for social reform instead of the ideas offered by the author. This as a possible case of their own biases precluding a systematic approach.
As I write this, the "frankly crap" part comes to mind again. There's not much substantive here, just a bunch of opinions.
> I don't disagree, but maybe part of what's trying to be communicated here is that systematic study of the world is not what's happening at times.
If that was the problem the piece hoped to address (and it certainly is a problem in, e.g., media punditry -- though I'd argue that's not because of any general problem with "academics" but with the process by which media pundits get selected), one would expect that it would say so, and that the solution would be some better scrutiny to assure prescriptions come from systematic study, not a solution unconnected to the problem like suggesting that "every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse."
EDIT: Additionally, if this was the issue, you'd expect that the author would actually support the argument with evidence from systematic study supporting the nature and source of the problem and the utility of the recommended solution.
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.
But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that.
By the way, if I understand correctly, this was the death blow to logical positivism. Michael Polanyi pointed out that logical positivism required objective observers, and all we had were human beings, who were never really objective.
>But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that.
Really, no, absolutely not. The bias is assumed, that's why double-blind is the gold standard too. I'd argue that at its best, intellectualism is all about building a deeper awareness of our limitations and foibles, while developing systems to compensate for them.
Yeah it felt like a superficial reflection the author wanted to concretize in words. It certainly prompts discussion but it provides only fragile arguments.
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?
It would book interesting if HN tracked which upvotes come from people who actually clicked the link. Maybe that would be too intrusive or brittle to implement, but the data could be interesting and might improve the ranking algorithm.
> This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable.
I suspect that that sentence would have been just as accurate with "and so" replacing "yet"... The various errors (I got a 500 when I first tried to read it, but got through later; others have reported DB errors) are because the infrastructure can't handle the attention.
I'm not sure what it is to which you're responding, but I do not think it's the argument Lind makes in the article theoretically under discussion here.
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.
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!