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The death of a public intellectual

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Re: The death of a public intellectual

#101

Post by mjburgess »

I'm not seeing a very sympathetic analysis of this. This phenomenon is as old as time, with Socrate's students hanging on his every word.

In my view its an entirely reasonable thing: you encounter a person who can articulate a coherent ideology, method, system (etc.) which is entirely new to you. You use that person as a means of learning this system; and when you've learnt it all, you move on.

The key thing is you arrive at a critical point where you have seen their pov and can criticise it; and that you dont end up in a cult-like following of their ideas.

This cultishness is everywhere in academia, see, eg., all the departments that are "Kantian" or "Wittigensteinian" --- people forever trapped in the work of one author. I am very suspicious of "History of"-type disciplines for this reason.

I dont see this as having to do with social media, but if at all, maybe it accelerates it. I certainly think you need much more than 6mo with any substantive person.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#102

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

TheDong wrote: post #83
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs are…

Colleges have 4 years, and most important discoveries took a brilliant person a lifetime of work. How do you propose we give more detailed explanations and information for proving everything for yourself? Should college last a few hundred years instead of 4? Did college not teach you how to access and parse through research papers and books? If you want a more full explanation and to prove things for yourself, why di…

Come on, it's a spectrum. I don't expect everything to build up a careful chain of trust and verification. But I think we can still do better than what the current education ecosystem provides. You're taking the most extreme perspective to a pretty reasonable claim.

Figuring out how to prove everything myself is impractical because I'm not an expert in every subfield. I think experts in various fields can write shortcuts and simple experiments which prove a lot of knowledge. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#103

Post by xorcist »

andrewflnr wrote: post #46
RagnarD wrote: post #41

"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source." No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith. What counts is the connection of statements to reality and thei…

When you can personally verify all the facts about biology, physics, and distant places that you rely on to make decisions every day, then you can throw stones about arguments from authority. The rest of us use a little bit of faith.

Too much reductionism can be a dangerous thing. This is pretty much the Sophist argument and it is not enough to build a scientific foundation on.

No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts.

Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#104

Post by robertlagrant »

Barrin92 wrote: post #86
LoFiSamurai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is being American relevant? Also, Peterson is Canadian.

because rather than doing serious intellectual work they're really good at selling what people want to hear, deliberately targeting an American online audience and their anxieties (as that is very profitable). All the mentioned guys are essentially permanent guests on the US podcast circuit. Peterson and Zeihan are examples of this. Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, actin…

> Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee

I think this hyper reductive. You can watch all his lectures, at Harvard and others, online[0]. It's hard to look objectively at his life and not call it "serious intellectual work".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/JordanPetersonVideos/about

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#105

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

michpoch wrote: post #72
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs are…

> This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?

Honestly, after reflecting on it I do think that I had more courses cover how to prove things ourselves than I was initially remembering. In particular, my physics and electronics labs were the most thorough.

When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?".

Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#106

Post by hardlianotion »

Jensson wrote: post #47
nerdponx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but, one would think after spending even a couple of minutes with Jordan Peterson's corpus of output that maybe we shouldn't venerate people who happen to say one or two things that we find interesting.

Jordan Petersen talks a lot about life being a struggle and how to get through it and make the most of it. A lot of that resonates strongly in many people, it isn't something you would find faults in after watching a few minutes. And that is within his field of expertise so it makes sense that those points are pretty good. The problem is when Jordan Petersen starts to talk about other things than that, like politics,…

For a minority, downvoting is just a quick way to disagree with you.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#107

Post by Borrible »

Cult of Personality. The strong man for one, the celebrity for the next, the intellectual for the other.It presumably makes one's own lack of power,fame and significance bearable. Egoprothesis in a deficient mental model of the world.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#108

Post by TheDong »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #102
TheDong wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colleges have 4 years, and most important discoveries took a brilliant person a lifetime of work. How do you propose we give more detailed explanations and information for proving everything for yourself? Should college last a few hundred years instead of 4? Did college not teach you how to access and parse through research papers and books? If you want a more full explanation and to prove things for yourself, why di…

Come on, it's a spectrum. I don't expect everything to build up a careful chain of trust and verification. But I think we can still do better than what the current education ecosystem provides. You're taking the most extreme perspective to a pretty reasonable claim. Figuring out how to prove everything myself is impractical because I'm not an expert in every subfield. I think experts in various fields can write short…

I just can't tell what you want.

Like, colleges right now provide "shortcuts and simple experiments" to approximate knowledge that was gained with a much more rigorous path. Yet, you decry current college as not showing the full path, as taking shortcuts.

Now, you're saying that yes, we need such shortcuts, it doesn't have to be perfect, and it's a spectrum... all of which I agree with, and seems to be the opposite of what you said above.

What's the fundamental difference between what you describe and what colleges do? Or is it just a matter of execution quality?

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#109

Post by sokoloff »

michpoch wrote: post #77

> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written. I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would ha…

> why would you even watch this [person’s] videos analysing Ukraine war?

Because that was how you began life.

Your parents (and later/lesser, primary school teachers) were the source of answers on nearly everything.

There’s probably something quite natural about transferring a belief of being competent/knowledgeable in one area into some expectation of the same in another area. It's the underpinning of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy.

It certainly works in the opposite direction: someone whom you know to pontificate out their backside on one topic, that expectation holds for the next, randomly chosen topic as well.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#110

Post by simongray »

Zeihan's synthesis view of geopolitics is pretty interesting, but he does display glaring faults when he ventures beyond that niche, e.g. when he tries to summarise the economic systems of the world in his most recent book he says all of Europe is socialist, which is what I would consider a very basic American layman's take on economics, not really fitting for any kind of public intellectual in the social sciences. I try to look past it, though, since his demographics and culture-focused geopolitics analysis is still interesting to me.
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