11–20 of 129 posts
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?
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,…
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?
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?
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,…
Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions that provided this: regular neighborhood hangout spots, social clubs, adult recreational leagues, and especially churches.
> unions are overall good ideas
Maybe. Depends. I frequently see union demands oriented around last decade's operational patterns instead of next decade's. Like requiring specific outdated jobs be filled (like toll booth workers) when it would be more value-added to have the same person clean or provide general customer service. A union looking out for its members would embrace that some jobs would fade away and provide (or demand) retraining for its workers so they're qualified for new jobs, even in other industries if need be.
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,…
> 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?
IIRC there already seems to be a shortage of craftsmen (carpenters, welders, plumbers etc) and a surplus of people with various higher educations.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
Having come out of this Glorious Peasantry the author idealizes, I suggest the author quit idealizing it. Chasing egalitarianism leads to Know-Nothing nincompoops being selected as presidential candidates.
edit: [1] The author did not specifically claim that. But this is the inference chain used in blue-collar land to ignore what experts say: Professor X studies field F; Professor X doesn't do the common folk things and is incompetent at handyman work W; because he is incompetent at W and out of touch, he is incompetent at F. QED, ignore professor X in his discussions about F. This leads to all sorts of problems in public policy because the experts are ignored & insulted regularly because they are "out of touch and ignorant". Frankly, these kinds of articles are pretty repellent, and the click-bait title could have been lifted from a certain notable real estate agent's Twitter.