
Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world - jonathansizz
http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/
======
rubidium
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!

~~~
klank
> 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?

~~~
eitland
If by education GP means higher education then I can possibly add something:

IIRC there already seems to be a shortage of craftsmen (carpenters, welders,
plumbers etc) and a surplus of people with various higher educations.

~~~
endzone
a shortage that's not reflected in the wages for skilled jobs (outside of
powerful unions)

~~~
eitland
In some places it has been.

Man I sometimes wished I had a valid mechanicans or electricians certification
during the oil boom here ;-)

~~~
endzone
and now you wouldn't have a job.

in the uk, the plumbers/electricians are lucky to make £20/hr.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
BookmarkSaver
>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.

~~~
jerf
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.)

~~~
sillyarg
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.

~~~
throwanem
Take a breath.

~~~
sillyarg
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.

~~~
throwanem
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?

~~~
rbanffy
> 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".

~~~
jerf
"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.

~~~
rbanffy
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)

------
throw_away_777
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.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _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.

~~~
throw_away_777
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.

~~~
pdabbadabba
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

~~~
throwanem
"Something something anecdote something plural something data," someone
invariably said, having not yet realized that most people live anecdotal lives
in an anecdotal world.

------
juhanima
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.

------
alricb
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.

~~~
throwanem
> 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.

------
PaulHoule
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.

~~~
joe_the_user
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.

[1]Broadly, a display signifying various evolutionary or social traits.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory)

------
hyperion2010
"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.

~~~
Noseshine
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...](https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-
for-autodidact-physicists)) 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.

~~~
hyperion2010
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.

------
alistairSH
Couldn't I just as easily state "the french-fry cook doesn't know anything
about the life of a philosopher"?

Everybody's view of the world is limited by their own experiences. Does that
mean everybody therefore misunderstands the world?

~~~
usefulcat
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.

~~~
wfo
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.

------
Falkon1313
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.

[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6300/694)

------
return0
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.

------
oli5679
Here's a cached link to the text from this article if anyone is having problem
with the link above:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-
are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
endzone
witness the hysteria about brexit among academics and london based
commentators who have no idea about the reality of life in britain

------
gsmethells
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.

I think this article itself is out-of-touch.

------
anotherhacker
An easier explanation: variation.

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.

------
beat
pg's essays are a nice antidote to some of this nonsense.

One that stood out for me was the idea of cities that concentrate
intellectuals, which was studied much more deeply by pg in "Cities and
Ambition".

~~~
Florin_Andrei
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.

Both are valid.

------
dragonwriter
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.

~~~
someone7x
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
smeyer
I was having trouble loading the page, so here's a cached version I used:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPT...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPTwvKUJ:thesmartset.com/intellectuals-
are-freaks/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
Aelinsaar
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

~~~
Aelinsaar
> _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.

------
chm
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?

~~~
morninj
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.

------
oli5679
Anyone else getting this error message?

Error establishing a database connection

