Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? 949
Larry Sanger writes "Geeks are supposed to be, if anything, intellectual. But it recently occurred to me that a lot of Internet geeks and digerati have sounded many puzzlingly anti-intellectual notes over the past decade, and especially lately. The Peter Thiel-inspired claim that college is a waste of time is just the latest example. I have encountered (and argued against) five common opinions, widely held by geeks, that seem headed down a slippery slope. J'accuse: 'At the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs, in books, in experts, in institutions, even in your own mind.' So, am I right? Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?"
False Premmise (Score:5, Insightful)
Geeks are supposed to be, if anything, intellectual
I disagree, geeks should be doers. They should make things, be it overly detailed costumes, or new pieces of electronics. I don't think the hacker ethic is about intellectualism, it's about doing. The intellectual part is a side-effect, and a helper, but it is not a requirement. Maybe I'm wrong to refer to hot-rodders as car geeks though.
college != intellectual (Score:3, Insightful)
I went to big state school, and it didn't make me more intellectual. Most of my classmates were just ordinary people trying to get degrees so they could get good jobs. If any of them were intellectuals, they were that way before they went to school.
Not anti-intellectualism (Score:3, Insightful)
The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.
Tagging article "troll."
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
I ask because I don't see a case of 'cool to be stupid', instead I see an evolution of how we function in a society where we've stored our knowledge in a manner that is dirt-simple to get at.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for the statement "college is a waste of time" to be anti-intellectual, one has to presume there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.
I find a vast majority of students (these days or perhaps any other) treat college more as an extension of high school and a social/networking opportunity more than raw pursuit of exposure to academics.
I do not like the way the question is posed. It seems to make assumptions that are not necessarily true in order to posit that "geeks are becoming anti-intellectual".
None of them are geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the people in that article are geeks. All liberal-arts majors, book authors, marketing personnel, PR, spokemodels, management, etc. If I remember my HHGttG correctly, they're all from the "B Ark". As a group, they've always been anti-intellectual, its just they've recently had a thin veneer of geekiness smoothed over them.
It may be that I'm out of touch and being a geek now means you're a "tech journalist / blogger".
Bull... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that "college is a waste of time" is an economic, not an anti-learning argument. Economically college can be a waste of time. How many English majors are out there making huge bucks vs how many of them are working at Home Depot? How many people got a degree in "web design" or some such fluffery in the 90's only to discover that, gee, there's not a huge market out there for such services.
If I'm going to end up working at McDonalds after I get my 4-year degree, then I might as well skip the degree and work at McDonalds 4 years early.
As for learning, dunno about the rest of you guys but my college education was largely an exercise in bullshit. Repeat what the professor said if you want an A. Disagree with his premises if you want an F. That's not learning. It's regurgitation. Parrots can do that too, and they don't attend college to do it.
And of course there's the student attitude side of "education" as well. A good number of my "getting educated" classmates liked to say stupid crap like "well I paid for the class and so the professor owes me an A." Those guys aren't there to learn. They're there to get a piece of paper that says they went to college. That piece of paper is worthless in and of itself. The value comes from either having learned something (and these guys pretty much limited their learning to the fluid dynamics of beer bongs) or from getting a job that you could not otherwise have gotten.
Well, you probably can't get that job in this economy anyway, and meanwhile manufacturing jobs are starting to open up, and remain open because companies can't find qualified welders etc. Economically speaking, currently anyway, it makes more sense for a lot of people to go to a trade school and learn how to weld than it does to go to a college and learn how to do something that they won't be able to do once they graduate.
That's not anti-intellectualism. It's anti-impracticality.
Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:5, Insightful)
Quotes (Score:4, Insightful)
A few quotes by a few people doesn't make for a culture of Anti-Intellectualism. The change in how knowledge is acquired over the last 20 years has been beyond drastic. 20 years ago when I wanted to do a paper on super novas and pulsars I spent days in the library sorting through books. Today all that information, and more, is available to me in seconds.
It's completely valid that this sort of change will shake up how humans deal with education and the transfer of knowledge. It's also good to be questioning the impact such systems have on us as a whole(such as how the super organic impacts knowledge when it's completely free flowing and popular opinions percolate to the top). Questioning old guard institutions and methods isn't Anti-Intellectualism, it's quite the opposite.
Re:False Premmise (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeri Ellsworth: highschool dropout, race car builder, race car driver, FPGA designer, builder of transistors from scratch.
School does not promote intellectualism, school is rote training. Anyone who loves learning does it in spite of school.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:2, Insightful)
The pleasure of learning is the return on investment. Knowledge is its own reward, not just a tool for prosperity.
for a lot of people college IS a waste of time... (Score:2, Insightful)
... and money
higher ed has been pushed on a whole generation whether they were prepared for it or not. Some of the most successful business people did not go to college, and they were successful because they were able to do things their way and not "conform" to the proper way to do something because they were never exposed to it.
Just look at how many people are so far in debt because of student loans, colleges aren't just there to educate, they are there to make money.
Re:False Premmise (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Frist Psot (Score:3, Insightful)
Intellectual?
It's rare that the garden-variety "Geek" ever had much time for what could be called "intellectual" pursuits.
There's not a high degree of literacy in geekdom, outside of their specialised technologies.
Plato? Proust? Swift? Wittgenstein? Wilde? Eco? Baudrillard? Pound? Spinoza? Aquinas? Borges?
Nope. Not common. Never was.
Re:False Premmise (Score:5, Insightful)
Isaac Newton, Cambridge graduate, member of the Royal Society (and later Prpresident thereof), mathematician, physicist, astronomer, philosopher, theologist.
OK, he was also an alchemist. But he was probably a better statistician than you. I know I am.
Re:college != intellectual (Score:5, Insightful)
I went to big state school, and it didn't make me more intellectual.
Nothing will make an intellectually non-curious person into an intellectual. In a perfect world, intellectuals would go to college, and everyone else would just go to trade school, or learn on their own (or just be garbage men, which is fine).
Instead, college is a business, and to maximize profits they need to attract everyone they can. Unfortunately, this means a lot of people who have no business going to college -- who will neither gain anything from their time there, nor contribute to the intellectual pool of the community (or the world in general) -- wind up drinking their way through an extra 4 years of high school.
Rather than pushing everyone to go to college -- which leads us to the broken system we have -- I'd rather we encourage more people NOT to go to college. Leave that for the thinkers and those who want to better themselves. As someone who's worked at a public university for 10 years, I estimate that these people make up less than 20% of the student body.
Re:False Premmise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to feel such pleasure when you don't have enough money to eat.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:4, Insightful)
Your position is deeply anti-intellectual, apart of being factually wrong. The "become a better rounded argument" wasn't being made. An intellectual derives from his knowledge and thoughts, from his creations and his intellectual environment much more pleasure and fullfillment than most people get out of owning a sports car.
That was the anti-intellectualism in your post. The factually wrong part comes from many lower and middle-class people going to college for the pleasure of learning. They really do. It's called having a life. It might not be the best in terms of money, but it is not that bad either.
You see, not doing the things you want to do in life for purely economic reasons is also irrational behaviour.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
Why can't the pleasure of learning be the significant return?
Re:False Premmise (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the larger point is that spending 4 years in college doesn't make someone a geek, there is no degree that transforms a non-geek in to a geek. Likewise, not going to college doesn't disqualify one from being a geek. Being a geek is who you are, not how you were educated.
Likely the geeks you knew in college were geeks long before they got to college, and the non-geeks likely didn't magically become geeks by going through the process.
Re:Not anti-intellectualism (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.
I cannot speak for others, but I can certainly speak for myself. I almost did a PhD in Quantum Computing and opted out. I did not realize it then (but I realize now) that the reason I decided not to pursue the program is because I was less interested in the physics aspect of it and more interested in the math aspect of it.
So, I quit to do my startup, ended up in consulting, and now I'm trying my hand at another startup, thinking that I could find a substitute for my obsession. But I could not. And somewhere amidst all this, after much soul searching, I decided that what I really wanted to do was pursue math (and not really PhD).
I figured, I'd study something different and and use my free time to do math, because, hey, you can always learn and do stuff on your own. Even in a field like math, where the community is pretty small and you can pretty much email anyone (except, of course, Grisha Perelman) and expect a response, it is impossible to do anything worthwhile outside of a university environment.
Part of what school offers is a support system, and one where when you have questions, you've peers and experts to answer them. Where you don't have long periods of waiting between periods when encountering obstacles. In grad school, if I had a question, I'd ask my advisor and he'd put me in touch with the right people, and they'd respond quickly. Outside of it, you're pretty much on your own. Nobody will be willing to explain a paper (and trust me, math papers, especially the good ones, are pretty fucking obscure).
The other part is the contacts and networking aspect, which you readily dismiss without a second thought. The ones who've done good work outside of academia have only been able to do so because they've had the necessary background, training, and *contacts* within the academia to help them out.
By supporting the premise that college is a waste of time because *some* students are not taking advantage of it is speaking for all students. Even so, the things that I learned in completely unrelated classes are useful outside of it.
I learned Fourier Analysis in high-school, which had no meaning outside or applicability (ironically, it was considered "pure math" back in the day). Come college, and I started using Fourier Analysis in DSP. And having studied Fourier Analysis in high-school made it easy for me to do very well because I had the basics licked, even when I thought it was quite pointless. My latest startup uses yield management, and I am fortunate that I paid attention to my economics classes to speak halfway intelligently to investors. That's the value of education, even when you don't realize it.
So, yes. If you're planning on doing something worthwhile and making genuine contributions to the human society and civilization, it's mighty fucking hard to do it outside a college environment/lacking a college background. And a handful of examples and exceptions don't make the rule. This is especially important when you consider the fact that the vast majority in fact need school, and the minority would have done well independent of a collegiate education.
And for the record, I believe the OP is referring to exactly the kind of anti-intellectual sentiment that you're spewing forth.
Begging the question (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that both of these terms are undefined and contentious, it should be no surprise to see a diverse, noisy spectrum of responses to the question. After all, who gets to say what sort of person qualifies as an "Internet geek"? At that rate, I suppose we might as well all have a crack at the definition. Is it anyone with a Facebook account? Or do you have to be a protocol designer? If the former, then we're really talking about a massive sampling of the whole human population, and there's no particular discussion to be had. If the latter, then I'd argue, as someone working in the profession, that it's the same highly-skilled elite as always, and that - of necessity - nothing has changed.
Something has changed. It's more crowded now. When I got started in this profession, computer science was a new term for the sorts of inquiries being made by mathematicians and electrical engineers. To be a computer scientist was much like being a rocket scientist. Everything was exotic. A lot of the work was, perforce, purely an exercise of intellect. Anyone who had free access to computer time lived in a rare state of privilege. Today networked computing is absolutely prosaic, and comparisons with the old profession are essentially meaningless under any but, as noted above, a fairly elite definition of "Internet geek".
That's what has changed. The once-exclusive hot tub has become infinitely more crowded. Well, but what does this tell us about a "new anti-intellectualism"? It tells us absolutely nothing that we didn't know before. In the limit, the average IQ of a population still converges, by definition, to 100. Such a population places no particular emphasis on intellect, since intellect is not its particular asset. That population of Internet practitioners is our reward for all the hard work of building the Internet. Most people don't appreciate what it means simply because they can't. It's not a question of hostility to intellectualism, it's just that it's no longer necessary for everyone to be an expert.
Does this threaten the intellectual elite which brought the Internet into being? I can't see how. Of course, it can be frustrating at times to deal with ignorance disguised as superiority, but that's nothing new [dilbert.com]. We can go back further, to Aristotle and beyond, and find the very same thing.
Re:Frist Psot (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree, because I think there's more point to learning than increasing intelligence, and there's more to being human than being able to apply intelligence to business or technology. Education is also about producing well-rounded people. For example, people who know the difference between a social norm (closing the bathroom door), intelligence, and cultural knowledge (Plato, Proust, Swift, etc). We haven't "moved on" from the human condition. Reading Wilde makes you a better person, not a better programmer, trader, or businessman. Seeing college purely as exchanging money for employability in a particular field, of course it is a bad deal. But that's the difference between a degree and a trade certification. Or it was.
Re:Frist Psot (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Frist Psot (Score:4, Insightful)
If we consider your average Slashdot poster as what a "Geek" is, I think it's fair to say that most would consider themselves intellectual -- just not focused on historic literature and philosophy. And I think the author was spot-on in their observations -- "geeks" are so interested in intellectual pursuits that they overstate their abilities in a given field to themselves (believng anything can be readily learned, even complex fields of study) and wanting to be on the side of those who tear-down paradigms. So whenever they hear anyone with credentials decry a majority position, they tend to side with said person, no matter how outspoken said person is in their field -- and said geeks generally are educated enough to understand said minority person's positions in detail but are not versed with the bountiful amount of contrary literature that shows why their stance is implausible.
Oh, and FYI: Global warming is a myth, hydrogen doesn't burn, Polywell or Focus Fusion is the future of fusion, the Big Bang didn't occur, and John Doe from Podunk, Illinois has just discovered something in his garage which overturns Dominant Paradigm X.
Re:Frist Psot (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes. Intellectuality is useless unless provides some form of sucking at a corporate-industrial cash-teat.
Thanks for validating my thesis.
Re:Frist Psot (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with both you and the writer of the article to equal extent. Conversely, I disagree with both you to a similar extent.
Calling Plato, Proust, etc fucktards really doesn't serve any kind of purpose at all. Do you think you have nothing you can learn from those people? If so, I think it's fair to call you an anti-intellectual. I agree you don't have to go to university to get a broad education and exhibit some intellectual curiosity in the human experience, but showing contempt for that curiosity is pretty contemptible.
While we agree that it's important to think, your post gives the impression that you consider only a narrow band of subjects worth thinking about -- to wit: things that will help you in a business or IT environment.
I could argue that a certain general knowledge of western culture would help you in a business environment. The Borgias and Machiavellie would almost certainly help in a strategic sense, while being well read and erudite is generally helpful unless your aim is to be chief of the cellar dwelling server maintenance tribe. That would however be missing the real point, which is this: your intellect is useful beyond IT and business. It's worth applying your intellect to issues of culture, society, economics, ethics, and humanity. It's worth reading what other people have had to say on the topics, and it's worth reading the intellectual works that have formed the basis of our society. It is especially worthwhile to read these things with a critical, analytical, intellectual mind, to see what you agree with, what strikes you as wonky, and what can be tested and disproven. It is fascinating to see how our minds work, how our societies function, and how they are developed. The more you know about these subjects, the more you can contribute to our society as a whole. In short, it makes you a better human being and a better citizen. It's also fun.
I'm reminded of a guy in my English Lit class at Georgia Tech, who complained loudly that we had to read "The Odyssey". He wanted to know why we had to read what a bunch of dumb Greek guys wrote about gods, when now we have science and understand how the world works. To this day I think on him and have to shake my head at his fat headed willful ignorence. You don't read The Odyssey to understand how the physical world works. You read it to understand how the human mind works, how western culture developed, to understand the origins of what are, even today, common elements of our culture. To understand the power of metaphor. To understand the human tendency to find patterns (even ones that don't exist) and to anthropomorphise patently non-anthropomorphic behavior. To understand how ideas of ethical behavior, culture, civilization and a good life have changed over the years, and the origins of our modern beliefs. To understand how wars start, and how they are justified... It's also very useful to see the mistakes people have made in the past, to understand how and why we make similar mistakes to this day.
In case you are interested, here's my reply the post's author: