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The death of a public intellectual

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Re: The death of a public intellectual

#181

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

wincy wrote: post #154
hnreport wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? So I do this, a lot. Rogan is a good example I struggle with. I regularly go I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this , on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about. It isn’t relegated to just Rogan. Musk was another awful one when you first get into him. This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay…

I think as men we have a deep seated need to have a strong leader we respect. If we went into the woods and made a tribe I’d for sure want Joe Rogan or Elon Musk making the decisions. Joe Rogan gives even the village idiot a fair shake to make their point on his podcast. It’s like watching a wise king preside over court. There’s not some big gay mystery here, it’s hardwired “if we go hunting a mammoth, I want Joe Rog…

I keep hearing this meme repeated lately (most recently by the My Pillow guy), and I guess my brain is wired differently, but oh boy, would I hate that society.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#182

Post by d_burfoot »

The author has completely the wrong approach to absorbing wisdom from public intellectuals. Yes, of course every thinker is limited. They produce some beautiful work, some good work, and some mediocre work, some bad work. The trick is to consume the former and avoid the latter. Furthermore, we ought to evaluate writers based on their best work (use max(..) instead of average(..) as the aggregation operator). Of course Nassim Taleb, after getting famous, became cranky and overeager to engage in tawdry public insult-slinging. That does not detract from the beauty and depth of his best work. Of course George RR Martin's later books are not very good, and he will probably not finish the series. That does not reduce the magic of Tyrion Lannister's defense of King's Landing. I could produce an endless stream of examples like this.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#183

Post by kukkeliskuu »

"This guy had something interesting to say" is not a good heuristic for finding people who you can trust on multiple subjects.

A little bit better heuristic is if the person can publicly admit they have been wrong about something and change their mind.

I have been more and more disappointed by analytical analysis, in other words "wiseacring" of all kinds of intellectuals, so I have started to believe the problem is more in the analytical approach itself, and less in the person doing the analysis.

I am gravitating towards people who talk from experience, not from analysis. I expect them also to not appear to be reactive, talking from fear. An example of a person talking from fear would be a kind of junior developer who can never admit they are wrong, and who tries to cover up their mistakes.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#184

Post by hattmall »

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…

That's difference in knowledge vs intelligence though. We see repeatedly that people with expert knowledge are frequently wrong because they shape what they see to fit their knowledge. Intelligent people can give more insight on a variety of topics without having expert level knowledge just because they are smart and can put the puzzle together differently.

It's the adage of "when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail."

Intelligent people have a full toolbox to analyze things with but domain experts tend to only have increasingly large hammers.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#185

Post by ubermonkey »

Kye wrote: post #158

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit. The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with t…

I can't hit the link --- getting a 503 -- but I'd add a few.

Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things To Me, widely awarded)

Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me, MacArthur Fellow)

Ibrahim X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist, MacArthur Fellow)

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#186

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#189

Post by Kye »

ubermonkey wrote: post #185
Kye wrote: post #158

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit. The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with t…

I can't hit the link --- getting a 503 -- but I'd add a few. Rebecca Solnit ( Men Explain Things To Me , widely awarded) Ta-Nehisi Coates ( Between the World and Me , MacArthur Fellow) Ibrahim X. Kendi ( How to Be an Antiracist , MacArthur Fellow)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" was eye-opening on a topic I thought I was already well-informed on, and it barely scratched the surface. So much stuff boiled to the surface in the almost 10 years since.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#190

Post by [deleted] »

Dudelander wrote: post #50
m463 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Jordan Peterson a canadian university professor? I've only briefly heard him, but why is he so polarizing? He just seemed to say sort of "be a decent person and work hard".

He has been widely criticized by legal scholars for misrepresenting the Canadian Bill C-16, which extends the human rights act to cover transgendered people. Peterson, a clinical psychologist, claimed that it would compel speech. This is probably what the article is referring to. Before the incident Peterson was a respected academic psychologist, but was widely criticized for his amateur legal analysis of C-16. He ha…

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