
The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual - axiomdata316
https://longreads.com/2019/05/31/the-artificial-intelligence-of-the-public-intellectual/
======
challenger22
>Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle
of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the
dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to
maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public
intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the
inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The
public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of
the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve
anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the
richest.

>That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly
leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who
cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and
YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real
questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside
solely with the individual, but engages the community.

I do not like this article. It does not organize its criticisms well, and it
is really hard to understand exactly why the author dislikes the individual
intellectuals she calls out, and likes the others. For example, Peterson
actively engages his audience, but doesn't get credit for it. The best guess I
have for the author's position is trying to portray her left-of-center
political as authoritative by appealing to higher abstractions; I honestly
don't know. It is strange.

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sago
There is a certain degree of oxymoron in the term 'public intellectual'.

Reality is complex. Terrifyingly so. The academics I have the most respect for
walk a tightrope in a state of barely contained vertigo. It is very difficult
to make a strong point, almost impossible to make it both correct and
understandable, and (IMO) definitely impossible to make the tightrope
accessible for others to walk. To make the point, all nuance needs to be
stripped; ambiguity calcified into surety; counterpoints strawmanned for
easier demolition.

Ideally the person doing that simplification does so knowingly for the purpose
of education. But that is entirely opaque to public view.

So it is no surprise that those who gain most recognition are those most
willing to misrepresent the nuance of their field. Or to caricature the
opponents of the viewpoint they wish to espouse. How do even informed members
of the public tell? A PhD from Harvard as a shibboleth, sounds about right.

I'm not saying the public is dumb. Just that none of us have the expertise or
the dedication or the time. We rely on tribal signalling. So we are primed for
intellectual hucksterism.

~~~
0815test
> To make the point, all nuance needs to be stripped; ambiguity calcified into
> surety; counterpoints strawmanned for easier demolition.

This isn't really true, though. Rather, I think there are tradeoffs. You can
be _really, really_ sure about a quite complex and nuanced statement, or make
helpful simplifications but then have to admit to some uncertainty, if only
because your statement might be misinterpreted. More than anything, you can
provide _clear, unambiguous, broadly available_ references to enable anyone
who's actually relying on your claims to fact-check them.

Seeming more confident than you actually are is a common rhetorical trick, but
one that we should be training the general public _not_ to fall for so easily.
Because a bad actor can seem so much more confident, no matter how fringe
their claims might be - it's a loser move! One can take pride in sticking to
the minimally-necessary amounts of ambiguity and/or nuance, whatever those
might be in any given context.

~~~
sago
> This isn't really true, though. Rather, I think there are tradeoffs.

One might say I stripped all nuance (etc) to make my point.

I agree with your second paragraph. On your first: I have a long-standing beef
with references, though. The selection of references, I think, is much more
significant than the contents themselves. And it takes a lot of expertise to
intuit the degree of selection bias. It takes ground knowledge of the things
not selected. I think a part of this Dunning Kruger trap is the illusion one
can fact check and verify an argument. So the very presence of references
becomes the shibboleth.

------
AbrahamParangi
Hacking at the ideas of others (whether rightly or wrongly) without presenting
any superior alternatives seems shallow to me. A mediocre idea can still be
the best idea in the room.

"Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except
for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

~~~
heymijo
"Hacking at the ideas of others (whether rightly or wrongly) without
presenting any superior alternatives seems shallow to me."

This sounds like the idea some manager have of "don't bring me a problem
unless you have a solution", which is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad
way of managing.

~~~
valiant55
I think that style of management is just fine if it's stated as "Don't bring
me a problem unless you have a _proposed_ solution." By proposing a solution
it starts a conversation about how to resolve the stated problem. Often times
someone will just complain (rightly or wrongly) about an issue and then
everyone just kind of stares at the floor for 5 seconds and then moves on.

~~~
vonmoltke
The problem is information asymmetry. The problem is often due to information
the decision makers don't have, while the proper solution requires information
the complaintants don't have. This, it's only possible to propose a solution
together.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Can't part of the solution be the research required to come up with an
alternative?

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michjedi
This article is full of ad hominems and doesn't present any challenges to
ideas. Rather poor in my opinion

------
cafard
About 50 years ago, Time Magazine ran an article on somebody's list of the 100
leading intellectuals in America. I remember almost no names from the list,
but do remember a definition from an official at Harvard, a dean perhaps: An
intellectual is a scholar who is living beyond his scholarly means.

Honestly, public intellectual has always been an odd calling. Who would you
define it? One who writes serious, scholarly books, yet also articles in the
popular or semi-popular press? The difficulty might then be in judging whose
serious books are serious.

------
LoSboccacc
while it's important to criticize intellectuals on their positions, especially
if they show ignorance on a topic they're debating and especially if they're
tryng to position themselves as expert in the subject matter, it's a little
unfair to expect them to come into life fully formed and knowledgeable about
everything. as long as they're honest about it I think it's ok for debates to
happen between people that aren't subject expert. how are they supposed to
learn, alone in a cave?

~~~
ggg2
the problem seems to be the publisher (which some researchers double as)
framing it in a peer-consensus way when it's not.

------
ppod
This article is a bait and switch. It starts as though it has a general point
to make about the idea of the public intellectual, when in fact the real
purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political
opinions to the author.

> Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark
> web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the
> academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where
> reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming
> their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your
> Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers,
> usually men, tied in some vague way to academia

~~~
dragonwriter
> This article is a bait and switch.

No, it's not.

> It starts as though it has a general point to make about the idea of the
> public intellectual,

Which it does.

> when in fact the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who
> have different political opinions to the author.

But it's not, if by that you mean the particular “reactionary” figured
mentioned in that paragraph, the criticism of whom in that paragraph is of he
same tenor as that of public intellectuals of different political stripes in
the paragraphs preceding and following that one (the next begins, “But it’s
not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off...” Your
thesis seems to be based entirely on taking that paragraph out of context and
pretending it is the secret central point of the article, when it is clearly
not, and comes off as the kind of knee jerk defense of those figures
(particularly Peterson) common from certain corners of HN.

The actual central criticism of the article is made explicitly later,
standardly enough in the two paragraph conclusion which also includes a
resolution as well as a criticism; the main criticism being not focussed on
any one political leaning, “The individuals who have since become symbols of
thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) —
are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of
their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a
capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of
collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible
aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep
selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality.”

~~~
ppod
I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would be
aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not
"reactionary".

The article doesn't have to be perfectly balanced in criticism of different
political groups of course, but if you can read it start to finish and think
it doesn't have an obvious bias then I think you're deluding yourself. I
picked an extract that seemed to me the post obviously politically focused,
but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a
negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty
different clauses.

~~~
claudiawerner
> I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would
> be aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not
> "reactionary".

The belief in "progress" does not disqualify one from being a reactionary (and
I don't mean to make any specific comment on Peterson or Pinker since I've
only read critiques of certain aspects of their thought, so I don't feel
qualified to judge them as wholes).

------
paganel
> Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and
> philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks
> stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for
> the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The
> good professor hadn’t done his homework.”

This is a little bit harsh on Peterson because a lot of Marxists themselves
haven't read Marx. You could say that the intellectual history of marxism (at
least in the second half of the 20th century) is comprised of a large majority
of "marxists" who haven't read his works and a small minority who have done so
and who at least have a general idea of what marxism really is about (if it
matters I do believe that Žižek has indeed read Marx and he knows what he's
talking about).

~~~
ptah
nice whataboutism. fact remains peterson is clueless about marxism

~~~
challenger22
Most of Peterson's experience with Marxism is through reading about it's
effects (Gulag Archipelago, collecting soviet era propoganda), not reading
about it's philosophy. The philosophy can be understood pretty easily from
social context without having read the Manifesto.

~~~
antisemiotic
The Communist Manifesto doesn't explain the philosophy of marxism in any
meaningful way, it's about the goals of what we would today call a
socialdemocratic party, with the important difference that back then such
parties were actually intending to implement socialism after reaching said
goals.

To have a bare minimum of an idea of what was Marx talking about, I'd
recommend reading at least "Wage Labour and Capital". Judging from how many
strawmans of Marx's take on Labour Theory of Value are out there, I'm fairly
sure it can't be guessed from context.

