
Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? - DanielRibeiro
http://larrysanger.org/2011/06/is-there-a-new-geek-anti-intellectualism/
======
Homunculiheaded
I always find it somewhat ironic that these discussion about anti-
intellectualism always seem to lack any knowledge of how old this very
discussion is. Plato's Phaedrus spends plenty of time discussing the effects
of new technology (writing) on current intellectual practice (memory), and yet
I rarely see it even touched on when people write on the topic, so much for
those old books. More important: the real anti-intellectualism to look out for
is the 'trial of Socrates' kind, not disregarding one form of transmitting
knowledge because of your own intellectual curiosity. Certain classes of
'geeks' feeling they have found a better model of knowledge transmission, even
if they are wrong, than the academic model is not anti-intellectualism.

~~~
rfrey
Beautiful comment. There might be some parallels between the entrepreneurial
culture of the Valley (drop out of school to go conquer the universe, etc.)
and the warrior culture of Sparta and Athens. The spirited youth that Socrates
seduced were bent on fame and fortune on the battlefield, and had little time
for long-haired hippie freak philosophers.

~~~
benbscholz
I don't think Athens was known for its "warrior culture".

~~~
JanezStupar
From antique on and indeed today. Any civilization worth mentioning in history
had a warrior culture. Indeed a man that was not a trained warrior was deemed
unfit to perform any kind of public service.

Some cultures being known as more war like, in my opinion only signals their
relative cultural poverty on other areas.

------
knowtheory
I resent and disagree with the distinction that is being drawn up here.

The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that
whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum,
and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a
society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes,
change is not possible from within.

It is the opposite of conservatism (with the little "c").

Additionally in the world of the internet, where a thousand flowers bloom, and
theories and movements are spawned and die every day, i put relatively little
stock in each of the common wisdoms that spring up for their 15 minutes of
fame, and then fade into the abyss. Fads like the notion of experts being
unnecessary are ridiculous, and largely have no legs. And even to the extent
that they do reflect some deep seated feeling, i would more likely attribute
them to an antipathy to credentialism, rather than the notion that expertise
is worthless.

And if you want to put a political spin on this, posts like these are exactly
the sort of false equivalences which make moral argumentation impossible. Sure
geekdom has its share of charlatans and know-nothings pretending to be masters
of insight, but this is different from demands of faith and fanaticism, and
that if you disagree with orthodoxy, not only are you _wrong_ but that you are
_forever damned_ , and in some cases, shunned by your friends and family.

I've listened to David Barton (The "Historian", and yes, the scare quotes
should indicate to you that he's not an actual historian.) make the claim that
the Bible lays out specific prescriptions on tax policy, and that if you vote
for a party that raises taxes, you are not on the right side with God.

These are not the same caliber of argument, and i am extremely frustrated to
hear them equated.

~~~
fecklessyouth
>The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that
whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum,
and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a
society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes,
change is not possible from within.

I'm not really sure what you mean here. Tearing down what--books? Schools of
thought?

~~~
knowtheory
Sure, i mean all of these things are about the process which produces stuff.
So i mean the institution of the book. For example, that the majority of
academic publishing be measured in books (some fields definitely do this). Or
that the "great" works of literature are inaccessible to the vast majority of
the public and that there are more worthwhile things that could be done with
one's time than reading "War and Peace".

That is not to say that reading "War and Peace" is wrong, or that it has no
value, but that we should reassess whether reading "War and Peace" is somehow
a metric of serious thought. This is the same sort of bullshit that people
doing pop culture research have had to deal with for _years_. Whether it's
research into comic art (and yes there are research libraries for cartoons – i
spent 3 years working in one), contemporary art, or journalists using twitter,
their existence is not (inherently) a zero-sum game with the old order. It is
a threat to _orthodoxy_ , but it is not a threat to academic inquiry or
knowledge.

It'd be like claiming that Martin Luther was a great threat to religion and
faith, because he sparked the reformation.

~~~
Apocryphon
I don't think reading "War and Peace" is in itself a metric of serious thought
so much as it is a test of literacy and of attention span.

~~~
jwhitlark
Or sheer bloody mindedness. If you read "War and Peace" to improve your mind,
more power to you. If you read it because you think it will make you better
that someone else, you're just engaging in more social signaling.

~~~
Apocryphon
I don't think people ever do that. Not with _War and Peace_ , anyhows.

------
_delirium
An odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a pretty
good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry! Here is what
his bio on that page says:

 _I call myself an "Internet Knowledge Organizer." I started Wikipedia.org,
Citizendium.org, and WatchKnow.org, among others. Now I am lucky enough to be
able to work full-time on creating free materials for early education, which I
am using with my two little boys and sharing with you._

Now, that all sounds pretty interesting. But does it sound like traditional
academia? What are his formal credentials in Internet Knowledge Organization?
What are his formal credentials in early childhood education? What does he
publish in peer-reviewed journals in those areas? It sounds almost as if,
despite no formal training in sociology, new media, online communities,
pedagogy, etc. (all of which _do_ have established academic fields, which he
could've studied if he wished), he just brazenly went out there and started
some projects. As far as I can tell, he didn't even _read_ what had been
written about those areas. That's cool, but why is he then all negative on the
idea in general? If we wanted to apply some strict standard of expertise,
Larry Sanger should be publishing in philosophy journals (an area he has
formal training in), and staying out of online communities, education, and
other areas in which he lacks academic expertise.

In any case, I'm a computer science academic, and in _our_ field I don't see
it as a new sentiment: the idea that you can be a brilliant garage hacker with
no degree is decades old. I don't think it's overall that negative a
relationship, either. It's not necessarily idyllic, but plenty of non-
academics are interested in the work of academic research (algorithms, PLs,
operating systems, AI). Even in industry, researchy stuff, like what comes out
of Google Research and MSR, gets a lot of interest. It might help that some
respect is given in the opposite direction as well-- plenty of academics'
heroes include non-degree-holding garage hackers.

~~~
aidenn0
"An odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a
pretty good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry!"

His premise isn't that making knowledge more accessible is bad. It is that the
growing attitude that is comprised of (among other things) "If it's on
wikipedia, I don't actually need to know it"

------
nickolai
Geeks I know value skill and creativity over knowledge. Getting things done
instead of getting stuck in pointless intellectual and political
considerations. There is a growing contempt for the old academic
intelligentsia more concerned with 'clan politics' than actual knowledge
creation. The system looks like it is meritocratic, but whoever dwells there
long enough knows how far this is from meritocracy.

What seems to be the consensus is that academia has not brought in any
revolutionary innovation for decades. Whenever practical innovation came, it
came from characters as far from the 'standard intellectual stereotype' as
could possibly be. As a result there is a haughty "keep debating while we get
the job done" attitude, which may be mistaken for anti-intellectualism. In
reality it is not that geeks dislike experts and intellectuals - it is that
they've met too many would-be-experts who failed their most trivial relevancy
tests, so the term 'expert' raises a BullshitIncomingException almost
immediately in any geek's mind.

~~~
gaius
Do you know how crazy that sounds, typed in a medium invented by a theoretical
physicist? Of course I am referring to Tim Berners-Lee.

What counts as "innovation" these days is what, LOLcats?

~~~
nickolai
I think you missed my point. It is not against theoretical science. It is
against scientific politics that seem to dominate academia.

Regarding Tim Berners Lee, he is imho all but an 'average theoretical
physicist' - which further proves my point.

~~~
te_chris
Being against "politics" in anything always seems to be shorthand for being
against having one's world view challenged. This old meme gets trotted out by
corpratists all the time: "X process has become so politicised, if only it
were more efficient". It's becoming quite tiring and doesn't actually help
advance anyone's argument forward - which I guess is the point.

~~~
forensic
"Politics" seems to be an excuse for giving up these days. I think baby boomer
parenting techniques have left a generation with very little resolve in the
face of adversity.

------
jacques_chester
I think Sanger has conflated multiple streams of argument here.

The first is marxist and postmodernist critiques of the classics. "Dead White
Men" and all that jazz.

The second is the demoticism (not the democratisation) of the internet.

These are unrelated, in my view. The PoMx/PoMo criticism is more political, in
my view, than what it purports to critique. The change in demoticism is itself
not a fundamental change but a rhyming riff on what has happened in the past.

Today the classics have never been more accessible. But just as when Penguin
Classics was introduced, most people want penny dreadfuls, potboilers, comic
books and a generous helping of porn.

------
Symmetry
There are a lot of good reasons to read "The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions", but one thing I got out of it that I think is applicable to this
discussion relates to our concept of "the classics". In fields of knowledge
where they is progress the classics are often respected, but seldom read.
Nobody learning about physics reads the original Newton[1] because there are
better ways to phrase the same insights that are easier for students to
digest. So we have fields that make progress like the sciences where students
read modern textbooks, and fields that don't the original works of their
discipline.

The classics have their place as art and as sources of prestige, but if you're
looking to learn things there are usually better places to look.

Not that I disagree with everything Mr. Sanger said, but the truth is a
complicated beast.

[1] Some people studying _the history of science_ read the originals, but
thats different.

~~~
forensic
Newton is not a classical author. "Classics" basically refers to philosophy,
theology, literature and history from 600BC to 600AD. Humanities in Greece and
Rome.

~~~
Alex3917
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren include him in the canon in _How To Read
a Book_. That seems to be as authoritative a list as any.

<http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html>

~~~
jwhitlark
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren were, by the way, strong supporters of
the reader conversing, even arguing, with the author. I don't the Sanger is on
the same page with them, and I don't believe they would agree with his essay.

------
benwr
I'm reading Anna Karenina right now. It's enjoyable. I think many people would
get something out of it if they read it. But most people never did. The
majority has never been "well-read". And so, if we can make the majority well-
equipped with information (by destroying impenetrable silos and distributing
their grain), who cares if that doesn't have any other effect? The person who
is well-informed will not necessarily be the same person who has received an
excellent liberal arts education any more, but at least ze'll be well-
informed.

Edit: clarity. I never intended to say anything about the classics' _value_ ,
only their past and future _popularity_.

(in hindsight, the former could easily have been an interpretation of the
post)

~~~
lhnn
I can read a wikipedia article on Libertarianism, or I can read "Stranger in a
Strange Land". I can read about the dangers of absolute power and lack of free
will, or I can read "1984".

The lessons learned from classics are constantly quoted, and it's beneficial
for people to read and learn.

~~~
benwr
I absolutely agree that reading some classics would be valuable for anyone,
but I think it would be hard to learn anything concrete from a lot of what is
considered "art".

My argument was that we aren't destroying the silos because we hate the
information, we're destroying them because we hate the silos. And if that's
beneficial, who cares if most people, who wouldn't have otherwise read Russian
literature or listened to Mozart, still don't?

~~~
lukeschlather
Who cares if other people, who most likely wouldn't have read the manual for
their computer, still don't?

I mean, Google is obviously supplanting the manual for a lot of things, but
the point is much the same. If people read the fucking manual, they'll have a
lot fewer problems. And a lot of the classics are pretty damn good manuals for
life.

~~~
pyre
I'd venture that someone could spend a lifetime attempting to read/listen to
the 'classics' and still not fully accomplish that goal. So does this mean
that we should all dwell in the past and eschew the future? Or that we should
eschew the past and focus on the future?

~~~
yters
The future is often the past repeating itself, but most aren't aware of this.

~~~
jwhitlark
That one is trotted out a little too often. I much prefer Twain's "History
does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

It's important to know of the past, but many who use this argument are simply
afraid of the present, and are attempting to denigrate new ideas and
discoveries.

~~~
yters
I said often, not always. Also, it tends to be an amalgam of different pasts.
Like right now what the US is doing in the Middle East looks a whole lot like
Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and what we're doing financially looks
like what Japan did.

So, I do think it is an accurate phrase, but misunderstood.

~~~
pyre
You're not going to find out about 'what Japan did' by reading 'the classics'
though. The past is encompassed in more than just classic literature.

~~~
yters
Quite true, but classics focus on distilling principles. If the authors'
thinking was valid then, there isn't any reason it shouldn't be valid now, as
I've been arguing that at least parts of the past repeat.

------
mechanical_fish
I think this essay's definition of _anti-intellectualism_ is incoherent --
must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade
school, disrespect _War and Peace_ , or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in
order to be labeled an _anti-intellectual_? -- so it's hard to make a
definitive response.

But here's a partial response, focused strictly on the phenomenon of college
education:

It would be easier to embrace academia if the inflation-adjusted cost of going
to school were stable or decreasing, rather than growing at 6.8% per year
between 1987 and 2009:

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition-
expla...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition-explaining-
the-increases)

With a few exceptions -- gods bless MIT Open Courseware and the Khan Academy
-- the academy does not scale, nor does it even try very hard. The Internet
gets more inclusive every year. The academy does not. As economies grow around
the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our
public discourse, and the percentage of those people who've gone to Harvard
just gets smaller and smaller.

It would be easier to embrace academia if a young academic had more than a
snowball's chance in hell of finding an academic job. Nostalgic baby boomers
can look back at a time when new colleges were going up at a great rate and
they were all hiring staff. Not so much anymore. I know _lots and lots_ of
people who would love to do laboratory research, for example... in a world
where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career risk, incredible
devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially the sacrifice of
one's family life.

It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which is
paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all taxpayers
could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that only other
academics can access for "free" via their university libraries.

And a lot more people would be touting the virtues of college degrees if the
unemployment rate for college graduates weren't at its highest point since
1970:

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-collegegrads06_ST_N.htm)

It may not be entirely the intellectuals' fault that college education costs
more than before and can take longer than ever to pay off [1], but you can't
expect people not to complain about it.

\---

[1] AFAIK college education _does_ pay off, handsomely, even now. Although if
tuition keeps growing and wages do not, shouldn't we feel free to wonder, out
loud, how much longer this can remain true? Isn't that what a numerate
intellectual might wonder?

~~~
timtadh
> It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which
> is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all
> taxpayers could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that
> only other academics can access for "free" via their university libraries.

In principle I agree with this point, in practice it is moot. Any member of
the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access
to any book or journal article they desire. No, they can't read the articles
without leaving their office, but, yes, they can get all of the research
articles and other scholarly publications _for free_. Libraries exist for a
reason, they still provide the service they advertise. This is a false
criticism of the flawed and broken publishing system.

> I think this essay's definition of anti-intellectualism is incoherent --
> must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade
> school, disrespect War and Peace, or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in
> order to be labeled an anti-intellectual? -- so it's hard to make a
> definitive response.

As in a discussion on religion it depends entirely on how you scope the word
"intellectual." It could and does mean a variety of things. I believe the
author of the original article was leaving it open to many meanings. This is
not good writing. He should have said what he meant, instead of the feeling of
what he meant.

> in a world where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career
> risk, incredible devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially
> the sacrifice of one's family life.

Those are all fair statements on the cost of pursuing a life in academic
research. However, only the pay cut really differentiates academia from any
other competitive field. People engage in academia because they love it not
because they get rich.

> As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more
> and more people to our public discourse

Interesting factoid, the amount of academic publishing has pretty much only
gone up in last century. So even discounting the Internet public discourse
(and I do believe academic publications are public) has been growing.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives
within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a _Nature_
subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's
talk about modern information technology.

Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the
day to waste. It is _seriously_ addictive, mostly because it's a sterling
example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every
article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check
a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references _N_ generations
back, you click _N_ times. You can't _not_ follow the links on tvtropes.org,
unless you simply hate all pop culture.

It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up
academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years
or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe
click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down
some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch
of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links.
Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local
library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library
had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more
delightful CMS cruft before you found the article.

Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them
in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross-
linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot.

I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe
Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started
publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic
literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take
back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can
actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can
happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to
construct a hyperlink from _Nature_ directly to _Science_ , mostly because
they've got different and incompatible DRM.

Mind you, things are heaven compared to when _I_ was in grad school, when
following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously
collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back
to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours
I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or
care about how hard _I_ had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times
easier to research the plot of any episode of _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ than
it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two
generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link
to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's
_Nature_ can only link to a paywall.

Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture,
so why do we make it even harder?

~~~
timtadh
> Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as
> easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org.

It is. try google scholar, pub med, or academic.research.microsoft.com for
starters and Mendeley for building a personal "library" (note Mendeley isn't
perfect but it is a lot better than not using a paper manager.) Things aren't
great but they are better.

> I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to
> Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM.

I have no idea I don't read Nature or Science. The Computer Science literature
I read is all easily searchable these days.

> Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when
> following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously
> collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back
> to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time.

I still do this (but for Religious Studies research in my spare time) and
don't really mind it, although I try to avoid photocopying when possible as it
is a pain.

> All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any
> episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations
> from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular
> article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular
> article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a
> paywall.

I am usually against the idea of progress, but in this instance I do believe
this will not be the case forever. Already we are starting to see changes in
the publishing industry. Search tools are improving, archiving tool are
improving, library collection tools are improving. Yes it is slow, but the
problems they are solving a much harder than the problem of _generating_ new
content. New content can be put the days leading format (papyrus, scrolls,
codex, books, pamphlets/newspaper/magazine, websites/blogs/wikis) at zero
extra cost. Old content however costs a lot to update. Libraries and academic
journals have a lot of content that existed before the web, before the pdf,
and before the wiki. It takes sometime of the format transition but if the
past is any guide the old formats eventually become historical curiosities
rather than knowledge repositories.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Oh, I'm not surprised to find the _CS_ literature leading the way to our
hyperlinked future. CS folks are the first to know the score when it comes to
online publishing.

Unfortunately, I was never a CS guy, I was a cancer researcher. And if you
can't read the _Nature_ journals you're not going to keep up with medical or
genetic research -- everyone in the field openly lusts after _Nature_
publications; _Nature_ gets first crack at every manuscript -- and _Nature_
sits firmly behind a paywall.

Let's try your helpful suggestions on the legendary paper, _Viable offspring
derived from fetal and mammalian cells_ , a.k.a. "the Dolly-the-sheep paper",
_Nature_ 385, 810-813 (27 February 1997). Surely I can write a blog post in
which I link directly to the methods section of this famous work, which
contains the first-ever working recipe for cloning an entire mammal? I mean,
this is from 1997. We even had the web in 1997. Don't try to tell me that this
has to be painstakingly transcribed from some faded papyrus.

Pubmed has the abstract, of course -- they have abstracts for everything:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9039911>

And Microsoft provides lots of cute metadata about this paper, but no actual
contents:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/4066302/v...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/4066302/viable-
offspring-derived-from-fetal-and-adult-mammalian-cells)

...so if I want to talk about the methods section, it looks like I'll have to
tell my blog readers to click through to, e.g., the Nature Publishing Group
and pay _thirty-two dollars_ for the privilege [1]:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v385/n6619/pdf/385810a0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v385/n6619/pdf/385810a0.pdf)

Or will I? Google Scholar to the rescue:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Viable+offspring+derived...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Viable+offspring+derived+from+fetal+and+adult+mammalian+cells&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C22&as_sdtp=on)

The first link is to a reprint of most of the article, in a book. And they've
managed to include every page. Today, anyway. For me, this time. (Other pages
of the book are "not included" in the preview, so maybe others won't be so
lucky?)

Oops, except the figures and tables aren't there. Sure hope there wasn't any
data in those figures and tables.

So I'm saved, sort of, thanks to Google's big scanning budget and even bigger
legal budget, provided I want to cite the words of Wilmut _et al_ , and not
their data. Or their slightly-more-obscure references, or any of their many
citations -- for those, I will have to repeat this dance, and hope I still get
lucky.

I know I've got a bit of an _idee fixe_ here, but I cannot get over how
_utterly lame_ this is. My god, it is lame. Much of the best work of modern
civilization, the pinnacle of hundreds of years of scientific advance, work
which our society invests billions of dollars in, is hidden inside this
pitifully obsolete rent-seeking system while we use state-of-the-art infotech
to exchange pop-music lyrics and annotate famous games of _Magic: The
Gathering_.

\---

[1] No, that is _not_ thirty-two dollars per year, or even per month. That's
_one paper_. You're probably better off springing for a subscription ($199)
although that only gets you _Nature_ : all the other journals in the _Nature_
family, like _Nature Medicine_ , are extra, and of course every other journal
is also extra.

~~~
fhars
And even in CS you are mostly out of luck if it has been published by any of
the usual anti-progress rackets like the ACM or IEEE or the other usual
suspects (Springer , Elsevier and their ilk). Sometimes authors are allowed to
publish a copy on their homepages, and sometimes they even do, but you still
have to find it. Just yesterday I tried to find a description and current
assesment of an algorithm from the late 60ies (arc labeling for shortest paths
with turn penalties), and most references I found were north of $35 for twelve
pages.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I completely agree about Springer and Elsevier, but the ACM and IEEE both
offer "Digital Library" subscriptions that give you complete access to the
entire archives of all of their publications for a couple of hundred bucks a
year (including their membership fee.) That's a small price to pay for the
quantity and quality of material available, at least in my opinion-- and I'd
be ecstatic if Elsevier or Springer offered a similar option. (I've probably
paid more than that to Springer this year alone just to get a half-dozen
individual articles.)

------
mikemaccana
How does the author equate: "Recently, Sir Ken Robinson has got a lot of
attention by speaking out–inspiringly to some, outrageously to others–saying
that K-12 education needs a sea change away from “boring” academics and toward
collaborative methods that foster “creativity.” "

To: "Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known"?

I recently attended a paid training course run by the authors of some well
known toolkit. They are, without discussion, the experts on their own
software.

Nobody in the course got to 'hello world' before 2PM, the instructors
constantly bickered between each other what tools the students should be
using, and further discussion was limited to 'check our kitchen sink app for
more demo code'. Everyone on the course

This is because having knowledge of a topic, and being able to teach others,
are separate skills. Both are required, however academics - people who spend
their live in academia and are used to learning things for the purpose of
learning, whereas most others are goal oriented - tend to lack the latter
skill, despite their expertise in the former.

This is not anti intellectualism. This is about requiring teachers to have the
ability to teach.

~~~
mikemaccana
(pardon the missing fragment above)

"Everyone on the course...." later revealed they were either glad they didn't
pay for it themselves or regretted that they did.

------
Apocryphon
I think at its core this issue is all about ease and speed vs. the classical
idea of gaining knowledge through a long, pondering struggle of the mind,
equally involving pouring over ponderous texts and memorizing facts.

As far as the lightning speed of modern information technology, I must admit
to be alarmed at that- I feel that my attention span has become so
deteriorated in recent years that I find it very difficult to complete reading
books. I haven't even finished reading this article (though I shall do so
later). Certainly shortened attention spans + greater access to information ->
absorption and retention of only a shallow subset of knowledge would be a
great danger.

Frankly, I'd like to see lifehacker-type articles that propose ideas to
rebuild attention spans and teach memory techniques. Sort of blunting the
anti-intellectual effects of prolonged exposure to the internet. I'd like to
think that proper guidance, discipline, and training is the cure to anti-
intellectualism. Perhaps that is something that Confucius would have approved
of.

~~~
georgieporgie
Years ago I read about a study with college students. They had one group read
a book each night until they no longer wanted to read. The other group was
told to do the same, but then to make themselves read just one more page. The
latter group reported that they read more and more each night, and found their
attention span increased significantly.

------
etherael
What's the line between anti-intellectualism and being able to recognise an
argument from authority fallacy? Sanger does not seem to be able to draw it.

------
localhost3000
I've learned more reading Dostoevsky than I ever have writing code. One is
practical knowledge that might lead to a paycheck, the other is depth of
knowledge that (for me) leads to a fulfilling and well-rounded life. The value
is not mutually exclusive.

------
madamepsychosis
It's more that geeks oppose old institutions having a monopoly on knowledge
than that they oppose any sort of knowledge at all. Maybe there's some
resistance to the rigid, hierarchical structure of "intellectualism" as well.

~~~
juiceandjuice
The idea that institutions have a monopoly on knowledge is starting to become
preposterous. The closest thing to a monopoly is a few journals, but their
days are numbered. The monopoly doesn't exist. There is absolutely nothing
stopping anyone from buying any textbook and learning what they want to learn,
from buying all the tools they need and teaching themselves. At the end of the
day, you _can_ learn anything anyone else learned going to college. If you are
upset because you can't get a job because you don't have a degree to prove
what you know, then that's something you need to take up with the companies
that are doing the hiring.

How can there be a monopoly when there are hundreds to thousands of individual
institutions competing for each other? Of course, college isn't free or
unencumbered by some silly rules, but neither is buying an iPhone.

~~~
sliverstorm
Institutions are merely _hubs_ of knowledge, a natural enough occurrence.
Maybe information does want to be free, but free birds of a feather flock
together.

I personally feel the image that they are or are trying to cultivate a
monopoly is a misguided perception based on jealousy, resentment, etc

------
TikiTDO
While I am of mixed opinion on the article, the one part that really stands
out for me is his insistence of the necessity of long, difficult texts. I am
one of the people that seldom reads a book these days. It's not that I find it
too challenging, or too long. I certainly read fast enough, and my background
is sufficiently wide. However, I do find it far too repetitive and rife with
personal opinion that does not aid my quest for more knowledge.

Why would I read a book about a programming language when there is a set of
APIs, tutorials, and articles that can convey the information in 1/10th the
time? Why should I read a dozen chapters about the history leading to a new
mathematical concept when I can just quickly read the research paper about
that specific concept? Why do I have to read a hundred asides about what the
author does on his days off, how he loves his wife and his dog, of what sort
of stupid questions his students asked of him? I'm just here for information,
and unfortunately books are rarely the most ideal way of getting it.

Not to say that all books are bad, and should be deprecated as a medium. I
have, and will always find good books enjoyable. However, to insist that they
are an irreplaceable feature of the quest for knowledge is ignoring the
reality of how the quest for knowledge has changed. In the end it's not about
long, difficult texts; just difficult texts will often suffice.

------
ap22213
As others have generally pointed out, 'intellectualism' isn't the problem.
Instead, it's a particular brand of intellectualism that economically benefits
from maintaining its established system. These intellectuals have little
incentive to change their established position from which they profit. and
they profit a lot. Generally, the traditional intellectual world can't keep up
with the pace of the rest of the culture. We consumers and participants of
intellectualism want cheaper, faster, more variety and niche. The current
intellectual establishment benefits from the opposite.

Intellectualism is alive and well on the Internet. In fact this blog post and
reaction to it is evidence. It's just that the traditional expert model
doesn't scale into real economies. Many forces continue to work against it. As
with other capital, intellectual capital will flow, like liquid, through the
least resistant path. If one seeks influence and participation over
intellectual topics, why would they spend many years going through the motions
of attaining credibility and standing, when they can establish their presence
much quicker along other routes?

All of the objects and roles referenced in the article (e.g. books, experts,
etc.) have continued value, and they won't disappear, they will just be
augmented by technology.

------
CrLf
Recently there seems to be an increasing hate towards academia in particular,
usually ranting about how it is too theoretical and how it doesn't prepare you
for the "real world".

Funny enough, this seems to come more often from people who either never went
through college, or failed at it for whatever reason. Which can be fine, for
people who are dedicated enough to actually learn on the job, instead of just
acquiring habits and repeating them over and over.

What isn't fine is this praise for superficial knowledge. What irks me the
most is people praising their ignorance of what academic knowledge really
offers, and how it can change some of your solutions (many times unknowingly)
in the "real world".

Practice does not replace fundamental knowledge. Practice only teaches you the
solutions for the problems you encounter, not the solutions to the problems
other people have encounterer over time, and the underlying reasons for the
solutions you are using.

It this particular case there isn't so much "anti-intellectualism", but a
justification for ignorance.

------
GeneralMaximus
This article is shallow trollbait. For example, this list summing up the
beliefs of the anti-intellectual geek:

> _1\. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known.
> Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be._

Who said that, and where? "Experts" are not excluded from Wikipedia or, in
fact, any other online community. In a way, Quora, StackOverflow and friends
recognize the value of the expert. The only difference is that now you don't
have to pay thousands of dollars and travel to another country to ask these
experts questions. You don't even have to attend university! It's about
_inclusion_ , not _exclusion_. Is the OP bitter about the fact that any
teenager with a web browser can now learn how to write a radix sort whereas he
had to go to university to learn it? Or is he bitter about the fact that said
teenager has already learned a good chunk of important CompSci material even
before graduating from high school and thus feels that a formal CS degree
might be overkill? Sure, you can't learn philosophy at home, and you sure as
hell can't build a particle accelerator at home, but anything that does not
require special infrastructure that only a university can provide is up for
grabs. Think maths, compsci, even design.

> _2\. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person
> speaking from authority. In the future, information will be developed and
> propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the
> combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other
> websites._

Once again, I don't know where he's getting this from. Does he know about the
Kindle? Or iBooks? People still buy books when they need in-depth knowledge.
The only time I look at Wikipedia instead of a book is when I'm doing initial
research on a topic or when I feel I only need surface knowledge of the topic
at hand. Sometimes I will buy a book because it was cited on Wikipedia. Does
the OP know about the books people publish online? _Real World Haskell_ ,
_Dive Into Python_ , _The Architecture of Open Source Applications_ , _Clever
Algorithms_ to mention a few CS-related books. Then there are a bunch of books
on analog and digital electronics, math and statistics, all published on the
web. A book does not have to be in the form of printed pages to convey
knowledge. And remember: the people writing these books are still "experts",
they still speak from "authority", they still have an "individual voice".
Social media merely aggregates the work of individuals.

> _3\. The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because
> they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the
> distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides,
> they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally
> antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant._

What "classics" are we talking about here? Are we talking about philosophical
texts? If yes, I don't think any geek questions the value of the work of
Socrates. OTOH, the value of fiction is debatable. I personally love reading
classics because I want to learn about people from another era. Some people
prefer to read contemporary authors, and I don't think they're any worse off.
David Foster Wallace has as much to say as Tolstoy.

 _4\. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize
nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet
communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search._

This is an age-old debate. What is more important: understanding _why_ the
Roman empire fell or knowing _when_ it fell? Besides, if something is worth
memorizing, you almost always end up memorizing it involuntarily. For example,
many developers know regex syntax by heart. Same goes for human language:
after looking up the same thing 20 times, you end up remembering it. The
argument geeks are making is: why remember inconsequential data when you can
be analyzing it instead?

> _5\. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and
> for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek. You don’t have to go
> to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway._

So going to college is the paragon of success? I'm sorry, but building and
running a business is a far more difficult task than getting through college.
IMO, of course. I do not judge people by the degrees they have. My opinions
might be a bit jaded, though; college in India produces graduates who are
pretty much unemployable.

Looks like the OP met a crackpot on IRC and painted every geek with the same
broad brush.

~~~
ignifero
He did mention that his manifesto is meant to be provocative.

1) The difference is that the experts' opinions are not being amplified
anymore,as there is no reliable "authority index" on the web yet. Should we
trust wikipedia to build, say, LHC?

2) People actually read less books
[http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain)
. I guess he's referring to works of fiction and philosophy that require long
linear reading, not reference material.

3) Classics are called "classics" because they convey fundamental ideas that
shape our society. I would argue, though, that the problem is that "classics",
as in "seminal books" are not being written anymore. Btw, Socrates never wrote
anything.

4) True, i dont see what's bad about foregoing memorization of facts that are
not relevant to one's pursuit.

5) Getting through college is just the start for academics. Making a profound
discovery is the goal and it's much more difficult than making a moderately
successful business. [My theory is that the role of luck is much bigger in
entrepreneurship than in academia]

~~~
klbarry
I question number 5. Don't most PhD students succeed in making a peer reviewed
thesis? The same cannot be said for businesses.

~~~
ignifero
A PhD thesis with little other impact would be the equivalent of a business
that barely breaks even. My point is that the luck/work ratio of , say, the 10
greatest websites is much higher than the equivalent of , say, the laws of
quantum mechanics.

------
goombastic
The problem seems to be with the explosion of knowledge around us. Very often,
beyond basic principles, what we are being taught in school is failing us in
real life by being too general, too generic, and too broad to solve the
problems we face. Given this, and given the lengths to which one must dig by
oneself to solve a problem, a self reflecting geek tends to look back and see
that his education has not been of much help. This is more so among
information technology professionals and maybe among some in fundamental
research.

This doesn't make education unnecessary, just that there needs to be a way of
making it more relevant to people, problems and choices.

------
InclinedPlane
I don't think this article has much, or at least enough, to offer to stimulate
a high quality debate on the subject. It conflates anti-intellectualism with
skepticism about academia and authority, these are very different things
though.

------
blahblahblah
The ongoing attacks on academia have little to do with geek culture in
particular. Academia is under attack primarily for cynical political purposes.
Specifically, because the political right wing sees institutions of higher
learning as bastions of left wing political ideology and because the employees
of these institutions are largely unionized. What is happening is
fundamentally a political battle dressed up in the guise of "concern" about
tuition costs and the value of a college education.

------
johnm
New? No. Just the latest fad of rationalizations.

------
wisty
_So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope
more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously
dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including
classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind
thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload
what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools
to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going
to college._

I think this is the core of the article.

Firstly, geeks are not opposed to knowledge, as such. There's knowledge, and
the ability to apply it, and geeks value both. We don't all value both
equally, there's a bit of diversity here, but "put up or shut up" is seen as a
valid call. You can't just claim to know better.

 _You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it_

We dismis experts who flash their "expert card". We are deeply suspicious of
experts of the esoteric, unless they can show they are also proficient in the
familiar.

 _you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the
most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far_

Here is where we start deeply mistrusting experts of the esoteric. Notice how
the author refuses to actually specify _which_ old books are important?
Criticize Plato and he will say he is talking about Gothe. Or Victor Hugo. Or
Sun Zi. Or Spinoza.

 _you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you
have memorized to the net as soon as possible_

I advocate memorizing as much as possible. Cognitive psychology has a lot of
evidence that low level knowledge is the foundation of higher order skills. A
lot of modern educationalists dismiss this, but they don't have any evidence;
just credentials of esoteric expertise.

 _you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible;
you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage
most people from going to college_

Accessible knowledge is a good thing - would the author have opposed the
Gutenberg press? Probably.

As I've stated, I do want students to memorize as much as possible. If there
are any geeks who think differently, they should read "Why Students Don't like
School" - which presents a fair amount of cognitive psychology in a very easy
format.

Finally, we get to the real point. Because of our virolent anti-
intellectualism, we discourage students from attending university. Bullshit.
We discourage some students for going to university for three reasons:
Firstly, we don't think it's necessarily the best way to educate themselves,
mostly because class sizes are so big you might as well just watch a better
lecturer on youtube. Second, it's not necessarily worth it, from an economic
point of view. Finally, universities need a bit of competition.

------
stretchwithme
Is there a new jock anti-athleticism?

~~~
reemrevnivek
I understand that you're trying to say that jocks are to athleticism as geeks
are to intellectualism. Your tone indicates that you believe that jocks cannot
be anti-athletics. By your initial analogy, geeks cannot be anti-intellectual.

However, I disagree with at least the analogy. The word "geek", in this
context, refers to a computer programmer, not an intellectual.

------
tomkarlo
These kinds of discussions remind me of the people who said 20 years ago that
calculators were going to make everyone math-illiterate.

~~~
colomon
I just flashed back to one of many times in the last few years that the person
behind the cash register couldn't handle basic making change without the
machine telling him how to count.

But then, if we're seriously talking about "the classics", then "everyone" is
already classic-illiterate, aren't they? I mean, I took two semesters of Great
Books and done a good bit of further reading on my own. I'd be willing to bet
that puts me in the top 1% of the population. But I'm still fairly classic-
illiterate by the standards of 100 years ago...

~~~
hammerdr
Huh? I'm trying to get my head around today being less 'classically literate'
than in the early 1900s. For example, in the United States, 10% of the
populate was flat-out illiterate. Only 50% of people were enrolled in primary
education (reaching a middle-school level education). [1] Secondary schools
(High School) just started around the 1890s. Enrollment in schools that are
now mandatory was 10%. [3]

Since 1942, inflation-adjusted cost per pupil increased by 700%. [2] Some of
that is surely inefficiency but most is because we spend more on education.
This means better teachers and better materials.

And this is in a country with one of the largest GDP in 1900. You can pretty
safely assume we've had far less drastic changes in our own education system
compared to the rest of the world.

I'm sure Thomas Jefferson could destroy you in Classics knowledge. However, he
was one of ten his age that had the means and passion enough to spend much of
his life reading them.

But, this all adds up. This leads to people reading War and Peace, Jane Eyre
and Great Gatsby before they leave mandatory secondary school. And while not
every country is at this level, technology and humanism has given people a
much better chance in life to explore these types of works all over the world.

[1] <http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp> [2]
<http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html> [3]
<http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-20.pdf>

------
michaelochurch
I think the internet is, for those who can take it in, very humbling. The
anti-intellectuals are the people who react badly to this overwhelming sense
of one's own smallness.

In 1900, colleges decided what it was important for an upper-middle-class
person to know. One set of writers and texts was in the canon; the rest were
not. Sometimes the selection was based on quality but it was often political
as well. It wasn't actually possible to have "all knowledge" but one could get
all the "important" knowledge in a few years of study. Any thinking person in
2011 realizes that this is no longer true (if it ever was). There's a million
times more genuinely valuable knowledge out there than anyone can take in in a
human life. Also, the authorities once trusted to decide what was important
have been disrobed by technology; the increased power of technology has
allowed us to discern that they aren't much smarter than the rest of us.

Anyway, the result is that a lot of people get really insecure and overwhelmed
when they realize how much they know nothing about, and there's a tendency
among some people, as a defense mechanism, simply to declare large sectors of
knowledge useless, unimportant, or outmoded.

It's not just the less intelligent who have this attitude either. I've heard
an esteemed computer scientist (someone with a name, but I'll withhold it
here) argue that the only useful literature is science fiction because
everything else is "just the seven deadly sins, over and over again".

~~~
jwhitlark
It isn't that the elites are about as smart as the rest of us, it's that they
were usually found to have their own agenda, regardless of the ideals they
espoused. Just another case of someone telling you "it's for your own good",
when really it was for theirs. "Intellectuals" are the ones who are reacting
badly, when their "authority" is challenged.

It's not anti-intellectual to require someone back up their statements from
authority, it's science.

~~~
michaelochurch
That's not anti-intellectual. That's just being discerning about what
information you take in. Everyone needs to do that, especially with regard to,
e.g., news media.

Anti-intellectualism is when people start making ridiculous statements like
"classical literature is boring and irrelevant" and "college is a waste of
time" (rather than merely overpriced).

------
DannoHung
Should people read a classic book because it is important or because it is a
good book?

I firmly reject the notion that a book should be read _because_ it is
"classic". But any book that's good should be read for it's intrinsic quality
as exemplary writing.

To that end, Ethan Frome can get fucked, Moby Dick is gonna (minus the
incredibly inaccurate whale biology chapters) will be around forever.

~~~
william42
«A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to
read.»

Guess which «geek anti-intellectual» said that. Mark Twain.

------
ignifero
Taking the author's point of view, one can spot 2 underlying assumptions about
the world in today's digerati:

1) The more information we consume, the more likely we are to come up with a
useful theory, tool etc. Our brain is designed to process and recombine
stimuli and come up with innovative things, so the more combinations we do,
the more likely we are to succeed. This is sort of like a darwinian theory of
science and technology. There also an anti-specialization trend among geeks.

2) People have an equal opportunity to create new and significant knowledge.

While (1) is debatable, (2) seems to be outright wrong. Some of our greatest
scientists, from Newton to Einstein were "lucky" in coming up with great Ideas
more than once in their lives. They also had a narrow field of focus, and it's
doubtful they could keep up with Twitter today.

------
tdignan
I think the best examples of geek anti intellectualism are the groupthink
cultures of reddit and 4chan.

------
KeyBoardG
They're called Derp-sters.

------
spartyfan10
All this article does is bash other peoples' opinions without providing and
basis of its own. Why are the classics still worth reading? Why is practical
knowledge not good enough? If I was supposed to be convinced by this, I
wasn't. I still feel that reading "The Classics" is outdated. I see no real
problem with them being considered "tl;dr". It doesn't seem unreasonable to me
either to say that memorization is antiquated, I think that's true, though it
certainly isn't done for all together and I do think you need to memorize
things at first to learn them on some topics. I also am currently in
university and feel like a lot of theory I've learned has been helpful and a
lot of it has not. Frankly, the jury is still out for me on this topic and
this article sure didn't put me on this guy's side of the fence.

------
aba_sababa
In response to his accusations, I DO think that most classics probably ought
not to be read. But that DOESN'T mean I'm anti-intellectual - rather, it means
I believe that iteration is everything and we just need to upgrade our old
firmware. Classics are, by and large, inefficient mediums of information. The
fact that they are still around today is really just a function of the fact
that they were still around yesterday. And what if every nugget of knowledge
and insight that is contained in a classic could be transmitted in a much
smaller package? We'd have trouble remembering and applying it all, sure, but
not if they were a part of our collective consciousness - as many ideals found
in the classics already are. Believe it or not, you already know most of what
Kant, or Twain, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare has to tell you. They were all
human, just like us, and we are more than capable of thinking what they
thought without reviewing what they said first.

~~~
tomjen3
I properly know all that Shakespeare has to say to me, but the importance of
him is how he says it, how he makes English come alive and sing.

I have never read anybody who has mastered the English language so completely
has he has.

