Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
1–10 of 129 posts
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#2I was having trouble loading the page, so here's a cached version I used:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l3RsdPT...
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#3Glad 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!
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#4The 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.
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#5This 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?
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#6Interesting, 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.
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#7Glad 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,…
Why do you regard UBI as foolish given that real-world context?
I'm interested as opinions for and against it do tend to be from 30,000 feet.
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#8This 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?
Would be nice to only allow upvotes from those who have visited the site, but that would be a privacy problem.
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#9Glad 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,…
>As a result, my thinking has changed to ... UBI is foolish
Could you elaborate on what made you change your mind regarding UBI? It'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this.
Re: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
#10This link is in first position, was submitted 20 minutes ago and has 14 points, yet the host is unreachable. I'm interested in knowing if people actually read the article or upvoted the title?
It would book interesting if HN tracked which upvotes come from people who actually clicked the link. Maybe that would be too intrusive or brittle to implement, but the data could be interesting and might improve the ranking algorithm.