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The death of a public intellectual

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Re: The death of a public intellectual

#21

Post by raincole »

m463 wrote: post #15
greendude29 wrote: post #6

> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan. These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.

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".

> "be a decent person and work hard"

It's 2023. This is a very controversial idea.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#22

Post by subroutine »

keiferski wrote: post #12

It’s unfortunate that there is not an “intellectual media network” that does all the hard public relations stuff for intellectuals and allows them to easily share their work with a public audience. Since this doesn’t exist, you end up with people that are willing to play — and are good at — the media game, which usually means making outrageous attention-grabbing claims that are far outside the person’s expertise.

It seems like this used to be what the MSM would bring in experts to comment on complex issues in economics, foreign politics, history, health, science, technology, etc. before each station developed a significant bias due to top-down pressure from ownership or bottom up pressure to push narratives that paralleled the politics of their predominant viewership. Then it was public programming like NPR and PBS. But now almost every outlet finds partisan experts. It would be great if there were a truly neutral non-political source of expert commentary. But how can such an outlet sustain neutrality being subject to those same evolutionary pressures?

HN is honestly doing a great job of this, but is a very different format than planned programming.

Perhaps the key is to watch both sides and formulate your own opinion. Maybe it's better to know the biases outright than to rely on someone else to find neutral viewpoints. Of course the problem with that is, a huge amount of the population has no interest in hearing multiple perspectives, and only wants the 'home teams' talking points.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#23

Post by pj_mukh »

This seems obvious in the new social media.

Say something boring and true and don't get attention.

Say something counter culture, evocative but ultimately wrong (or atleast not durable as an idea). Get attention.

Rinse. Repeate.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#25

Post by Jensson »

vintageplayer wrote: post #20

I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, maybe some of you want to follow: ALWAYS SUPPORT THE UNDERDOGS. They are the ones experimenting with new ideas and hopefully sharing both what worked and what didn't. Unfollow all the players with a huge following. They stop producing quality. Start by supporting underdogs, people who have a following, but small and growing. Eventually they'll become bigger in terms of follow…

Many underdogs just copies the viewpoints of bigger channels, watching those is even worse than watching the original since at least the original had some thought behind it.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#26

Post by bugglebeetle »

greendude29 wrote: post #6

> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan. These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.

Jordan Peterson unfortunately is very much a public intellectual. He just also happens to be a complete and total charlatan who is demonstrably ignorant of most the works he both cites and criticizes.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#27

Post by [deleted] »

m463 wrote: post #15
greendude29 wrote: post #6

> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan. These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.

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".

[deleted]

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#28

Post by nerdponx »

Jensson wrote: post #18
greendude29 wrote: post #6

> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan. These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.

That is the point of this article though, read a bit further down: "Without fail, each one of comes to dissapoint. They’re either a one trick pony, and every development in the world is analyzed through the same tired lens whether its applicable or not."

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#29

Post by j7ake »

keiferski wrote: post #12

It’s unfortunate that there is not an “intellectual media network” that does all the hard public relations stuff for intellectuals and allows them to easily share their work with a public audience. Since this doesn’t exist, you end up with people that are willing to play — and are good at — the media game, which usually means making outrageous attention-grabbing claims that are far outside the person’s expertise.

Are you suggesting something like scientific journals like Nature? Where there is an extreme barrier to publish in and often takes years to get anything out?

Maybe you’ve pointed out a positive for these scientific journals.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#30

Post by raincole »

vintageplayer wrote: post #20

I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, maybe some of you want to follow: ALWAYS SUPPORT THE UNDERDOGS. They are the ones experimenting with new ideas and hopefully sharing both what worked and what didn't. Unfollow all the players with a huge following. They stop producing quality. Start by supporting underdogs, people who have a following, but small and growing. Eventually they'll become bigger in terms of follow…

So you judge someone's speech's value by their popularity. Just in the opposite direction.
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