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Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?
Larry Sanger writes "Geeks are supposed to be, if anything, intellectual. But it recently occurred to me that a lot of Internet geeks and digerati have sounded many puzzlingly anti-intellectual notes over the past decade, and especially lately. The Peter Thiel-inspired claim that college is a waste of time is just the latest example. I have encountered (and argued against) five common opinions, widely held by geeks, that seem headed down a slippery slope. J'accuse: 'At the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs, in books, in experts, in institutions, even in your own mind.' So, am I right? Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?"
but it ain't new...
Geeks are supposed to be, if anything, intellectual
I disagree, geeks should be doers. They should make things, be it overly detailed costumes, or new pieces of electronics. I don't think the hacker ethic is about intellectualism, it's about doing. The intellectual part is a side-effect, and a helper, but it is not a requirement. Maybe I'm wrong to refer to hot-rodders as car geeks though.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I went to big state school, and it didn't make me more intellectual. Most of my classmates were just ordinary people trying to get degrees so they could get good jobs. If any of them were intellectuals, they were that way before they went to school.
It isn't new, you just started paying attention.
The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.
Tagging article "troll."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Saying "college is a waste of time" is not anti-intellectual, any more than saying "religion is a waste of time" is anti-moral.
Institutionalized education is NOT the same thing as education.
"Education is a system of imposed ignorance"
-- Noam Chomsky
I guess this makes sense, but I'm not sure it's an intentional thing. Words tend to change meaning over time, and the word 'geek' is starting to be associated with 'cool' kids who dress a certain way.
I'm okay with this, as long as a new word eventually surfaces that lets me distinguish myself from the new 'geeks'.
Anyone who is anti-intellectualism is not a geek.
Libertarianism seems to be married to a distrust of authority, including academic or otherwise intellectual authority whose power isn't based on some sort of commercially-viable aesthetic appeal (for example, libertarians will acknowledge the authority of bestsellers widely read in their circles, or directors, video game designers, programmers, or musicians).
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
I ask because I don't see a case of 'cool to be stupid', instead I see an evolution of how we function in a society where we've stored our knowledge in a manner that is dirt-simple to get at.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That was quick!
Moar apple slashvertisments!
None of the people in that article are geeks. All liberal-arts majors, book authors, marketing personnel, PR, spokemodels, management, etc. If I remember my HHGttG correctly, they're all from the "B Ark". As a group, they've always been anti-intellectual, its just they've recently had a thin veneer of geekiness smoothed over them.
It may be that I'm out of touch and being a geek now means you're a "tech journalist / blogger".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I saw the headline and assumed that this was going to be an article about Apple.
Seems to me that "college is a waste of time" is an economic, not an anti-learning argument. Economically college can be a waste of time. How many English majors are out there making huge bucks vs how many of them are working at Home Depot? How many people got a degree in "web design" or some such fluffery in the 90's only to discover that, gee, there's not a huge market out there for such services.
If I'm going to end up working at McDonalds after I get my 4-year degree, then I might as well skip the degree and work at McDonalds 4 years early.
As for learning, dunno about the rest of you guys but my college education was largely an exercise in bullshit. Repeat what the professor said if you want an A. Disagree with his premises if you want an F. That's not learning. It's regurgitation. Parrots can do that too, and they don't attend college to do it.
And of course there's the student attitude side of "education" as well. A good number of my "getting educated" classmates liked to say stupid crap like "well I paid for the class and so the professor owes me an A." Those guys aren't there to learn. They're there to get a piece of paper that says they went to college. That piece of paper is worthless in and of itself. The value comes from either having learned something (and these guys pretty much limited their learning to the fluid dynamics of beer bongs) or from getting a job that you could not otherwise have gotten.
Well, you probably can't get that job in this economy anyway, and meanwhile manufacturing jobs are starting to open up, and remain open because companies can't find qualified welders etc. Economically speaking, currently anyway, it makes more sense for a lot of people to go to a trade school and learn how to weld than it does to go to a college and learn how to do something that they won't be able to do once they graduate.
That's not anti-intellectualism. It's anti-impracticality.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
The reason geeks look down on college is because the vast majority of colleges/universities set their bar too low. College professors and students are insulated from market forces and over time this has eroded the system.
BTW, I worked 40 hours a week as a video game developer in college, and still pulled out an A- average at my crappy school (USF) for a Biology degree, even though I skipped most of the classes to go to work.
I think I learned about 10x from my job, where we had to deliver a marketable product on a tight deadline, than I ever learned at my college. Wish I would have skipped that colossal waste of time.
Is a person a geek because he/she is antisocial, is an expert in something obscure, or for some other reason?
"God does not play Minecraft with the world." - Albert Einstein
.. I didn't go and I didn't get a degree. Now I make a very comfortable living working three days a week instructing those that DID go to college, how exactly they should be doing their jobs. Ironically enough, one of the markets I specialize in is - wait for it - education.
College is a waste of time for anyone looking to go into the IT field. Programming? Its iffy honestly. Most places would hire someone with 5 years XP over some college kid with 1 year. So my choices are I could either just work in IT.. spend maybe 100k over my entire life on certs and renewals and make the same as a college kid... or I could go to college, leave with 200k in debt, still need the 100k for certs and renewals, and start 4-7 years after my competition... so.. uh... ya. College? Waste of money sometimes.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
TFA is a load of strawmanning - he discusses an interesting point, which I won't go into because I haven't thought/read enough about it, but his discussion is oh-so-exaggerated. To quote:
"The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant."
It would be rather hard to find any person, geek or no, who would say something like that. I think that definitely, there are some geeks who are decidedly anti-intellectual. (Just like there are some geeks who are decidedly intellectual.) And if Larry Sanger wants to copy a couple of their statements and distill them down to a J'accuse - well, congratulations. He's done what every political pundit does every day.
Note to self: Make a funny sig.
Saying college is a waste of time isnt anti-intelectual. most intelectuals do not have college to thank for thier minds.
Similar to the current hipster movement, it's not cool enough, almost too "mainstream" to be an intellectual right now. Some geeks try to hide their intellectual side- not necessarily abandoning it, for the sake of being different and special. This is amplified by the sheep who follow those other geeks, thinking that the underlying motivations for their kinds' exodus was something other than self definition/separation/what have you. Reddit is a good example. They're obviously still geeks, but they try to hide it by putting stress on life and (usually) lies about their social life, something unheard of and in fact rather unnecessary on the internet when you're not in a setting with people you know in real life usually, however the behavior persists for the aforementioned reason. Whenever the balances of the great hipster scales are tipped, you'll see the converse of this. Also I can't have linebreaks? I am not happy.
The rest of us are still expanding our skills, finding jobs, studying in school, and generally doing our thing. It's just really easy for it to look like the loudest represent us all. (This applies to more than just geekdom.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Seems a bit trollish. If anything geeks are more likely to flame you for not knowing some obscure bit of information. Perhaps the "hipness" of being a geek has drawn in a few mindless idiots though. In my opinion geeks fall in to one of two categories. The "hip" crowd that is also usually very liberal, also because it is hip. These people are usually borderline retarded. At the other end of the spectrum are the real geeks who can't help but be a geek. These people typically don't buy in to any political propaganda and lean towards general distrust and dislike of the government regardless of party,
It's not all geeks, it's just computer geeks. 200 years ago they would have been clerks scratching entries in ledgers in the basements of banks, feeling superior to people with outdoor jobs. They have no taste for learning anything they can't immediately use.
Cause I didn't go to college and so got here 4 years before everyone else.
Well, maybe if you had been to college you would have learned how to really get first post. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It is a very poor example to use college. For many people, it is a waste of time. For many others, even if you do receive a good education, you get a ton of debt.
What the parent post seems to be saying is that if you disagree with a position that you hold or that a majority of educated folk hold, that is anti-intellectual. That isn't anti-intellectual. That is a minority viewpoint. There is a difference.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
There has also been a trend to dumb down programming languages.
If you mention any vaguely advanced language concepts (independent of any actual language), many "geeks" and IT people just stare blankly. This leads to the creation of languages that, in the process of holding your hand, force you to create inferior code that is larger and harder to maintain.
I see some of what you are saying. Yes it was stated that college is a waste of time. This can be true. Depends on the field. Undergrad level of school is more about if you can do homework and take a test then actual knowledge gaining it seems. I disagree that geeks abandon knowledge because they abandon traditional concepts. Geeks are the forefront of change. The geek is the one who is smart and is likely to be successful or so we were taught in high school. When I worked in IT i skipped college and part of high school. Knowledge and my ability to research beyond traditional means moved me well into the 6 figure salary range. Do to numerous circumstances I find myself reexamining my life and needing a change from the stress of IT work. I've reentered college but I don't feel its a waste as my knowledge of my new field, psychology is limited from a professional standpoint. I have no doubt I could have another job in IT without those degrees but in person growth I am forced this time to get a degree. Is it a waste? No, its about if you learn from it. Sitting through a class in say "Unix shell scripting" would be pointless for me but If I wanted that IT degree odds are I would need it. It doesn't mean I can't do the job. College is about training people so they can do a job. If you can do a job without it then there is no reason why you need that degree, but if you can't its time for training. Its pretty simple. As to rejecting paper media if its on the screen are you going to learn any less from it? Geeks want innovation and paper books are an antiquated relic of times past. Technology is an enabler and it should be used as such. As to opposing knowledge that seems absurd. If someone truly opposes knowledge its probably time to remove them from the gene pool.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
are the comments here equating financial and career success with intellectualism.
I'm not sure that's exactly the phrasing I would use for it. I think I'd call it unhealthy skepticism, where we've become so cynical to what we've been told that we automatically discount it and fall back on how we tend to see things. I suppose they're pretty similar but I don't think that's really how those types of people see themselves, and they probably deserve the benefit of the doubt. I notice it most when anything political or economic comes up and we hear about how we're going to turn into Zimbabwe because PRINTING MONEY, but I think it has more to do with the difficulty to find and digest real information when 90% of claims made are on their face bullshit, and another 7% seem legit but are actually bullshit.
So I guess, sure, some are anti-intellectual, but I think most of us just have a hard time sifting through the noise.
There is a new level of geek culture that seems to be less like the island of calm spirit that I used to love in my childhood and more a loudmouth beer swilling defensive stance that will argue and ram opinions down any and everybodies throat that disagrees. You see much of this online winging on about how youd be 'fun at parties' and other comments that quite frankly aren't what made the culture strong. bb
Ignorance is bliss, they say...
.: Max Romantschuk
Among the ignorant, of course there is anti-intellectualism: this is by nature. I think among the intelligent, however, there is a sentiment of antiestablishmentarianism.
The two sentiments maybe coincide and so have a combined effect to erode the public faith in institutional education, but amoung geeks, the intelligent and the educated it's not anti-intellectualism.
I am not unintelligent. Throughout school, however, I did terribly. This is not a new story.
There is perhaps a growing feeling or perception that current education is mostly about memorization at the great expense of imagination. Imagination is creation. Memorization is indoctrination.
No, you're wrong.
STFU and go away.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Don't confuse anti-academicism with anti-intellectualism. People are just as interested in learning as they ever were, but the monopoly on higher education held by the university system for the last couple centuries is crumbling in the face of the freer exchange of ideas offered by the internet.
Universities are in the content delivery and certification business. They're suffering the same internet-related issues as other content delivery systems as other options become viable. (Khan Academy, anyone?) But worse for them, they've allowed their certification standards to steadily be weakened, while at the same time raising their prices far faster than inflation. Faced with paying ridiculous prices for weak degrees when free options abound, it's hardy surprising that many choose to opt out.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
The Peter Thiel-inspired claim that college is a waste of time is just the latest example.
I think you should be concerning yourself about whether college may be showing signs of anti-intellectualism. I think you could make some strong arguments that it is, and that its importance and utility has diminished.
There's a difference between anti-intellectualism and anti-institutionalism.
colleges, universities come from scholastic roots from their roots in 13th century church universities. even the word scholar, scholastic has church roots. over the centuries, universities have served good use by liberating themselves from their religious aspect and adopting positive sciences, but, they have more or less maintained the general hierarchical and monolithic structure of the scholastic roots. curriculums et al remain almost same for centuries in system and mechanics. this worked well for centuries. but ....
times have changed. we have the information revolution now, the internet, intellectual and processing power of the crowds, new methods, new approaches, new techniques. it moves fast now. colleges and universities cant keep up with internet. you can see it at the minimum in the difficulty of i.t. related departments of colleges for keeping up with the fast tech.
we need something new in our times. and i guess it will be something having to do with internet.
Read radical news here
You've mistaken a geek's innate distrust of unquestioned thought with... some kind of required conformity, I suppose. Geeks will often respect a cool idea, but never some nameless institution. Certainly not some authority that claims to offer something unprovable like, I don't know, intellectualism.
PhD = Piled higher and Deeper. This probably even predates Heinlein. No, geeks seem to still be on the same path. Not to say there aren't geek posers that will muddy the purity of the aesthetic.
A few quotes by a few people doesn't make for a culture of Anti-Intellectualism. The change in how knowledge is acquired over the last 20 years has been beyond drastic. 20 years ago when I wanted to do a paper on super novas and pulsars I spent days in the library sorting through books. Today all that information, and more, is available to me in seconds.
It's completely valid that this sort of change will shake up how humans deal with education and the transfer of knowledge. It's also good to be questioning the impact such systems have on us as a whole(such as how the super organic impacts knowledge when it's completely free flowing and popular opinions percolate to the top). Questioning old guard institutions and methods isn't Anti-Intellectualism, it's quite the opposite.
A coder is not a computer scientist or even really a programer. They have the same relationship to a programer as draftsperson has to an engineer or architect. Some coders can become programmers but they are the ones that read Knuth and take classes and so on. It is going down hill fast folks, I deal with support techs that don't understand what an ascii file is. They have no idea what Unicode is. And they really don't even know what binary is. Most don't even know that it takes 1024 bytes to make a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes to make a megabyte much less why.
Sure they can tell me which GPU is the fastest but they will also things like AMD video cards suck because their drivers are crap. Or better yet that Macs suck! They have never used one or a Linux box but they know that it sucks....
Sigh...
I gave them a link to some free computer science texts I have found including one my Wirth. Not one of them bothered to read them.
I fear that as more people adopt the label "geeks" the more the rift raft creeps in. Hell they are showing wrestling on the Science Fiction channel!
That is how bad we have fallen!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The economics of university are certainly the driving force, but "geeks" are naturally skeptical of ossified, centralized institutions that exist for the sake of existing more than anything else.
I think most of us agree that from the time of the ancient Greeks to now, the western university has had a great run, and that there's a great deal of it worth preserving. There really is a lot to learn from what should rank as one of humanity's greatest achievements.
But it's offensive to our sense of liberty to make people suffer through years of poverty to prop up a collapsing institution out of a sense of nostalgia.
But I did read the entire article to find that out, so I guess I'm guilty of feeding him.
With geek sheik being the new zer cool many nongeeks have taken to claiming to be geeks. This does not mean they are any more than the male figure skater in high school claiming to be a jock.
As for college being a waste of time.. Yep, for a lot of degrees it is a waste of time and money. A "do you want fries with that?" degree like philosophy or art appreciation is just a way to rack up a pile of debt and waste 5 income earning years (3 you you voteched to an IT job in 2 years). Saying it is a waste of time is not anti-intellectual, it is sitting down and actually figuring out if degrees are worth as much as colleges say they are.
...but more like a focus away from what I can only call "traditional intellectualism". It's the "I'm smart enough to drop out of school at 16 and get my GED so that I can start on real life rather than high school bullshit" mentality. I know a guy who did that. Started working at a mom & pop ISP back in the 90s, and then went on to be a successful network engineer. Also, college IS overrated. Sure, the piece of paper looks nice, might get you another $AMOUNT of money on your paycheck, but at the end of the day, it's still sophistry to the highest degree, and you spend that additional $AMOUNT of money paying it back for years to come. For anyone actually genuinely interested in learning, and not just looking for a job, we have Internet resources like Khan academy, tutorial sites, and Wikipedia (love it or hate it, it is informative enough to be a starting point). Honestly, I trust Wikipedia more than I trust most of the "professors" I had in college, but perhaps I'm just bitter, and/or perhaps I just picked a shit school.
On the other side of the coin, I could also see Mr. Sanger having a legitimate point. I refuse to accept any research on 'controversial' issues with large amounts of political or corporate interest behind them. I refuse to believe in or against global warming, for example. For some reason, people are too polarized on the topic, and I can't find any information I trust on the subject, so I willfully ignore anything I encounter concerning the topic, and do not take a stand as I do not feel well informed enough to feel justified. Most 'studies' I read that aren't paywalled in a journal somewhere always have that 'corporate slime' feel to them, and so I hear about the new medical breakthrough or recent scientific finding, and I can't help but think to myself, "Is that real? How are they going to market that?"
Is it right, wrong, good, bad, or otherwise? I wish I knew. I'm not informed enough to be able to make a decision.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Not knowing that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 is not anti-intellectual. Knowing trivial facts about that event does not necessarily mean you understand the significance of that event.
.sig
TFA has been melted into slag by slashdotting, so maybe the author covered this, but I wonder what, exactly, is meant by "intellectual"? A lot of what passes for it has less to do with rational works of the intellect than with currently trendy fashions among those who pat themselves on the back for being "intellectuals."
Geeks tend to not go along with that sort of crowd. (They have their own sorts of crowds.)
He's drawing a very false dichotomy between the notion that some geeks are expressly anti-intellectual, and the more legitimate idea that perhaps we should redefine what is intellectual. I am tempted to say that knowledge as the memorization as facts/dates is somewhat outdated in a world of Google, whereas knowledge as the synthesis of opinions/theories is now considerably more valuable as a search engine can't provide that (yet). Hence the modern emphasis on crowdsourcing. But he's just linking that shift in focus with a complete denial of knowledge, and defending it with empty strawmen. Which is just lame.
Anti-Intellectual? No
.. or do they want to build upon the existing knowledge base - this is where the institution comes in. Unfortunately a lot of institutions have been slow on the uptake for IT.
Anti-Institution? Probably Yes.
A large portion of geeks today are self taught and have confidence in their own ability to figure things out. The institution is worthless to them. I just watched Jaws recently and I relate the owner of the boat an old Sea Hand who kept making fun of the college researcher. Near the end of the movie he runs out of ideas and finally starts listening to the college kid. (Maybe I'm just buying into Hollywood stereotypes).
As they pass on do they want their knowledge to be lost so other geeks can re-invent the wheel and get to the same point they did
I'll take my Karma hit now.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Seriously? You think an intellectual is somebody who plays video war games but doesn't know the first thing about history is an intellectual? You think somebody who can write Java code but doesn't fundamentally understand the inner workings of a computer is an intellectual? When I started my career the people I worked with had degrees in maths, philosophy, greek history, biology, and so on. Many played musical instruments and you could engage in deep lunch time discussion about anything from the rise of socialism to the defeat of German militarism to Chmosky's 'Manufacturing Consent'. Those are intellectuals.
Pissant clowns who know how to make the latest gadget work are not intellectuals. And they won't have much luck getting a job 10 years from now when their superficial knowledge is obsolete. Remember this phrase: "Welcome to Wal-mart"
It's all Geek Squad's fault. The very definition of geek was tainted the moment they started bundling their services at Best Buy.
As an intellectual, I'm anti-intellectual, in the sense that I take nobody's word for granted, even if they are supposed to be a "recognized expert". Either explain your reasoning or go away.
Nullius in verba.
For me, college coursework -- especially computer science coursework -- was mostly a breeze, an overview and introduction to the material. What made it worthwhile was the time spent digging deeper than the classes -- independent study in the truest sense of the word. College creates the environment where that kind of self-directed, self-motivated learning is possible. The Internet facilitates the flowering of a new Invisible College beyond the conventional campus.
Anti-intellectual sentiment is so prevalent in the zeitgeist of much of America, the Middle East and central Asia, it's no surprise some geeks are picking it up. Anti-college sentiment specifically, on the other hand, likely arises from the large number of graduates -- even those with master-level degrees -- that are unable to "hit the ground running" in a work environment, or even require refresher courses on basic algorithms and data structures such as breadth-first search with associated queues.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Geeks have always had a tradition of valuing independent thinking and doing things, including thinking, for themselves. It's a bit like being religious without belonging to an organized religion. That's part of why geeks, even when going to college, may not graduate in a standard amount of time, or may not graduate at all. During my undergrad years many decades ago at MIT (and yes I graduated in a standard amount of time) it was not that uncommon to see perennial quasi-students who contributed to the life and culture of the institution without any semblance of traditional participation. Opting out of college altogether and going into business directly these days may not be all that different, depending how it occurs.
This is the opinion using the extreme outliers but...
But in it's defense, I got an IT degree (actually I got 3 degrees, but that is a different story) and I can honestly say the only thing I learned that is real-world relevant is the jargon/naming conventions for stuff I already knew.
So basically I learned how to properly name and refer to things in a way that management would NOT understand.
I am all open to knowledge, however the academic systems are unable to keep up with their current models.
A 12 year old reading up on the internet and letting their natural curiosity set them on their journey for knowledge while having someone to chat with who is more progressed in their journey will learn more and actually understand it, instead of being a memorization or boxed in college student.
All a degree is a piece of paper that say you have some background in this field and you are capable of learning to meet the minimal expectations of your professors.
Please note, I was not a slacker in college, I got 3 degrees in 5 years time and had an overall GPA of 3.8.
Geeks have never been "intellectual." They have been smart and focused on their own subject (read "obsessive'). The internet has now made it possible to for these DIYers to bypass the traditional form of education. Intellectualism equates to being well rounded - that only happens later in life, when the geek has saturated his knowledge on his own subject and decides to branch out.
ceci n'est pas un sig
... and money
higher ed has been pushed on a whole generation whether they were prepared for it or not. Some of the most successful business people did not go to college, and they were successful because they were able to do things their way and not "conform" to the proper way to do something because they were never exposed to it.
Just look at how many people are so far in debt because of student loans, colleges aren't just there to educate, they are there to make money.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I believe that collage and the organised education system today with it cramming all of the liberal beliefs in to us and adding so many courses just to make people "Well Rounded" With out any real world tools.
It is better to learn some thing for your self than to be forced in to a class at a collage or university.
I think the meaning of "geek" is in flux.
You could argue that at one point "geek" was just a term for "non-academic intellectual." Now it seems that "geek" is a much looser term, requiring only a fondness for technology.
As an geek in the high old fashion, it's a bit sad to see the word lose its meaning, but "real" geeks are still out there.
Personally, I think it's antil-intellectual to criticize the way others are learning to think and operate in a new, more complex world. I think it's anti-intellectual to proclaim that Wikipedia is useless. I think it's anti-intellectual to boldly assert that Google is making us stupid without solid research showing diminished capacity to solve real-world problems.
I think there's a real case to be made that some "democratization" of knowledge is a good thing. It's not that we can vote on the truth (and it's essentially dishonest for Sanger to continue to insist that Wikipedia operates democratically). I don't believe that it's very useful to absorb "knowledge" from the uninformed but I also don't believe that this is really what people are doing. Rather, I think the new information technologies make it possible to absorb knowledge from a wider, more diverse array of knowledgeable people.
I don't think anyone believes that you can understand a complex topic without careful study. However, I think it makes sense to expect the nature of this careful study to shift over time. There is some sense that "facts" are less important and understanding more so, and I think that in the past there has been in fact too much emphasis placed on memorized facts as a substitute for understanding.
We can debate the benefits of different methods of learning, but I fear that Larry Sanger in particular is not contributing to this discussion. Rather I feel he has a tendency to mis-state the arguments of those who disagree with him (Wikipedia as a democracy, etc). I wish he would spend more time understanding why Wikipedia is a better, more useful model than something like Citizendium.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I think there is a difference between geeks and nerds. They both like Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons... but geeks hate school and nerds love it.
After reading this article, I have to wonder, how did A + B = C? No one has seriously argued that classics no longer need to be read, no one is saying education is important and no one claims that knowing the exact date of the Hundred Year War is a necessary part of every single person's life! There is a huge difference between necessary information and tertiary information, aka trivia. This editorial fails not only to differentiate the two but also to clearly understand the points other articles, cited within this one, attempt to elucidate.
The often cited, rarely understood article referring to a programmer's need (or lack there of) for a formal education is a great example of ways this article fails to understand the very material it references. No one has ever argued that programmers require no education. No one truly believes that coder's are born with silver keyboards in there mouth. The article simply states that a formal education is not strictly necessary. This of course leads back to the overarching flaw in this article, the juxtaposing of formal and informal education into one swiftly discarded container. Obviously for the sake of this argument, informal education is anti-intellectualism. No matter how self-educated One is.
As any reasonable amount of observation will tell you, there is a constant public outcry to remove all difficult readings from public schools, or to cut up Romeo and Juliet into smaller, twitter-sized bites. Similar to Dan Brown's rather pathetic style of writing. While it is hard to argue that there has not been an attempt to dumb down, censor, rewrite and remove the flavor of classics, see for instance, the attempts to change Huckleberry Finn's "nigger" to "slave", completely ignoring the "free niggers" who would become "free slaves, and of course in some ways this does lead to an anti-intellectual slope, the vast majority of the population still strongly believes in education! Yes, many want the world to be black and white, and to eliminate all shades of grey, but thankfully for the geeks, for the nerds, for the erudite and the elitist, one can become as educated as one chooses to be as long as one has access to the internet. Look at Project Gutenberg, with the thousands of public domain books available, listen to Jon Stewart and pay close attention to the allusions he makes to literary figures, that require a great deal of knowledge! Read XKCD and discover that you barely understand the jokes! Check out a Physics forum and boggle at the complexity of the discussions currently going on in this anti-intellectual society!
The corner of a round room
n/c
This leaves me thinking about how I should talk to my kids. Do I want them to value college? And if so, for what purpose? I agree that the cost/benefit of college is terrible, and the truest lessons are learned almost despite college. Yet I still feel compelled to send them there. Why is that?
I want them to learn how to think for themselves, how to take information and turn it into knowledge no matter the subject, how to be introspective and apply critical thinking to their own processes and behaviors. I want them to be eloquent speakers and to be culturally fluent. I also want them to be happy. How do I get there from here?
--Jaborandy
The author seems to think that Pragmatic thought is Anti-Intellectual thought, and to be fair progressing too far into the utilitarian world does result in a degree of anti-intellectualness, but it seems to me that it's those imitating geek culture with out being geeks themselves that are the anti-intellectuals. Amongst all of my geek friends the amount of knowledge and analytical power available is incredible, even for things we have very little interest in, as it's faster to recall something than to google it, especially when you're doing specific analysis that relies on some random things.
I'm sorry, .NET is a trade not Computer Science. In my book, you're not a real computer graduate unless you believe that Computer Science is language agnostic.
I agree that a university needs to teach theory. But it also needs to teach each student enough of a trade that the student can start paying for tuition.
is it anti-intellectualism, when schools don't teach you to think for yourself, but how to be a good sheople instead? Teaching to the lowest common denominator?
I live in Williamsburg, NY where "geek" has become a hipster trend. These faux-geeks are all surface: if you query them long enough about their "interests," you'll find they usually try to change the subject, stone-skipping to the next topic rather than delving into anything useful.
And also it is hard to judge who is a geek when all the geeky things of the past have been taken over by the mainstream market.
And "college is a waste of time" != "don't learn new things and test/improve your intelligence"
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Maybe the problem is all the idiots that go to college just to get a high paying job that even with all the college they still have no clue about, makes everyone who has a clue feel like the whole process of college is waste even when there are some things you could learn from the experience. Stop making college an extension of high school to get a job and maybe the people who realize that education and knowledge is more than just a piece of paper will come back.
The biggest problem is that the definition of "geek" has been widely expanded. What people consider as a geek is not what it used to be. There are many internet/it/technology pundits calling themselves geeks out there that might otherwise be written off as kooks with a soapbox if it weren't for the internet or TV.
As for the anti-college kick, I think some people are missing the point. Its not so much that college is useless, its that the ROI for some folks isn't worth while to attend. On one end of the spectrum, you might be better off going to a technical/trade school instead of spending a ton of money on a degree that may not land you a job paying all that much better. On the other end of the spectrum, you might be better off skipping an expensive education because you've already gained skills enough to learn and grow on your own. The folks in the middle are still probably better off going to college because of lack of skills or because specific jobs require large amounts of training (ie, a doctor).
People who end up in the innovation industry (computer or otherwise) usually learned what they did by dyi trial and error or early on the job experience. Just taking a look around my own office, the people I look up to and respect are also the ones that either didn't go to college, or didn't go to college for what they are doing now. The people who don't can't be left alone and expected to get stuff done without a script are usually the ones who went to school for the specialty they work in now.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Intellectual?
It's rare that the garden-variety "Geek" ever had much time for what could be called "intellectual" pursuits.
There's not a high degree of literacy in geekdom, outside of their specialised technologies.
Plato? Proust? Swift? Wittgenstein? Wilde? Eco? Baudrillard? Pound? Spinoza? Aquinas? Borges?
Nope. Not common. Never was.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One practical problem with going to Invisible College is that without an accredited school affiliation, one doesn't qualify for student discounts on learning materials such as industry-standard software. Another is that Invisible College doesn't grant the sort of brand-name degree that an employer is looking for. But I'll grant that those could be rephrased as statements against industry, namely that industry has standardized on proprietary software and that employers don't understand Invisible College.
There's got to be an entertaining story behind your business. Or am I being awesomely dense today by not being able to name it?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What were the five common opinions, widely held by geeks? Without that information, it could actually be YOU that was wrong in the argument, and not the other geek. :)
According to TFA:
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
College may be a waste of time, because for lots of people all it gets them is a diploma saying they were at that college. Forget the amount of money spent, is the paper important or how much you learned? Yet there are so many avenues for learning now.
There is not a rise against intellectuals, but instead those people who wave credentials as proof they know better than the rest of us. That is in response to waves of credentialed people screwing lots of people over by pretended they knew better than everyone what do do, and then failing spectacularily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think this is just a facet of the also typical arrogance of geeks. Look at Steve Jobs and Apple, making really wonderful devices that work well, but force you to play by their rules. He knows better. Bill Gates and his foundation, where he feels he can take his success in business, which was rather amazing but ruthless, and apply it to social causes, by jumping in with lots of money. The Gates foundation does lots of good, but its hardly a democratic exercise. Gates knows better about how to save the world than its citizens. Mike Bloomberg is a technocrat who gets to run a whole city.
So its not so much anti-intellectualism but it is the arrogance of personal intellectual experience and achievements over any collective or institutional approach to the same. For example, "I succeeded without college, so no one needs college to be meet my criteria for success". If what has caused me wild success works for me, then it can work for anyone. Simply forge ahead with the courage of your convictions and all else be damned.
Colleges are by their very nature collegiate, a collaborative and community experience in learning, that involves not just getting information, but integrating it into yourself. The phrase "fake it till you make" it is the ultimate rejection of that approach. There is something missed when you only focus is getting ahead at the task at hand, by any means you can.
This Technorati individualist approach has produced great things, and good things. It is certainly appropriate for certain individuals who have the wherewithal to handle it and come through. Many more people fail taking the same approach. There is also the issue that success is not defined the same way for everyone. It is certainly I think it is no way to run government, or certainly every business or every career. Our successes are build on the successes of others, on the history of their work, their contributions, and their knowledge. To say you know better so you won't pay attention is a dangerous thing.
The goal of education and intellectual pursuits are to make you a better and more whole person. The goal is not to be just be a good worker, to make the most money, to have the most power. It is to improve thought and understanding. The specific nature of knowledge and learning is changing due to technology, that is inevitable, but those are just details. The purpose remains the same, and our intellectual institutions that are truly the best (not just in name) strive to advance that purpose. By abandoning that history and being arrogant towards it, we loose its benefits.
So I am sure some people will yell at me over one part or an other of this post without considering the whole thing. That always happens online. My point is, no persona can say they know better, that they can ignore some existing knowledge, experience, or opinion, because they have such certainty, even if that certainty is backed up by success or accomplishing what may be considered good. There is a bigger world than yourself, and it needs to be let in in order to obtain true and lasting success and meaning as a person on this Earth. Humble geeks can do amazing things.
If it helps someone learn what they need, then that is good. However, far too many employers seem to instantly decide not to hire someone merely because they didn't go to a college (apparently, anyway). Having gone to a college does not necessarily mean that you know what you're doing, and as such, I think it is a good idea to make applicants demonstrate their knowledge anyway. Especially for smaller businesses that don't have hundreds of job applications at once. It may still be possible even then, but I'm not sure how.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Slashdotted already. What intellectualism was that, again?
"Cause I didn't go to college and so got here 4 years before everyone else."
And you'll still be here four years after everyone else has left.
What is Anti-Intellectualism and who does Larry Sanger think he is that he paint all geeks everywhere with this brush of his. I bet he has never even been outside the walls of his Ivory Tower!
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I got a BS in CS.
It was a lot of work, and I learned a lot of arcane stuff. I also did a lot of busy work.
The only real programming related skills I picked up were almost exclusively from the work I did to support myself in college. Now I'm a professional programmer for a major defense contract.
I've got a ton of school debt that I'm paying off, and I "wasted" four years at a university. Now it's certainly true, that my piece of paper potentially helped me get jobs though I could have made the degree up for all my employers actually checked. It's also possible that the four years I spent in college, I could have spent working for minimum wage gaining programming skills and experience, and I would have gotten just as far as I am now. What's a piece of paper when I can show that I am a proficient programmer and I have references and experience? I at least wouldn't have come out the door with 40 grand in debt.
Claiming that college is a "must" anymore is just silly. It depends on what you want to do, and if you have the chops to start working for less, and demonstrate proficiency in an interview.
I don't particularly regret getting a degree, and it certainly was satisfying to say that I got a degree and graduated magna cum laude, but I am not so arrogant as to believe that my degree somehow makes me superior to someone who didn't go to college.
Valid point, but it's complicated by the fact that many accusations of "pretentiousness" are merely code for "I can't refute this properly so here's an ad hominem"
Then you need to get well up in a big organisation.
Do you know what you need to get past an HR department and managers that do not have a clue about what you do?
That's right - you need a degree...
Now I know that many people think that the only way to work is either self employed, a small company where everyone knows everyone else or a startup.
This is just statistically unlikely. Because big companies hire more people, they have a bigger part of the workforce - that is just arithmetic.
If you end up working for anything that has hundreds of employees without that bit of paper, you will probably carry on doing your job. You will not be in charge and you will not get paid as much as the idiot with a BA in greek literature who is your boss.
If you are working, that is what evening classes are for. You might need to move after you get that qualification, but you will have better options.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
"I don't think it's fair to require that geeks be 50+ years old."
Who said life was fair, young'un?
I know a few geeks, not many of which could hold up their end of an intellectual conversation. I tire of them fairly quickly.
I also know a lot of engineers. There are a few nerds among them, but not many geeks. The engineers I know can talk all four legs off an Arcturian Megadonkey and then convince it to go for a walk afterwards.
Yes, I've wrapped a lot of subtle distinctions in all that. But that's really the point of the exercise. We all could stand to examine our definitions of a lot of things. I would start by examining one's definition of success.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
As for learning, dunno about the rest of you guys but my college education was largely an exercise in bullshit. Repeat what the professor said if you want an A. Disagree with his premises if you want an F. That's not learning. It's regurgitation. Parrots can do that too, and they don't attend college to do it.
That is a sad commentary. Certainly not similar to my experience. Of course, I was in a non-"geek" field, taught by non-"geeks". Maybe that's the difference. I graduated with a BA in a foreign language and within 2 years embarked on a 10+ year career in programming based on skills that I taught myself.
School is where you learn how to learn. Or it should be. Increasingly, it seems to be seen as a place where they tell you what employers want you to know.
to manage to /. your own blog.
We're rapidly becoming a world of children who ask our parent/guardian/device a question and trusting its answers (usually from Google).
The smarter our devices get, the dumber we get, and the less we try to actually learn and remember.
College is absolutely a complete waste of time, unless you are one of the 99.995% of programmers who don't become the next Bill Gates or Larry Page.
Sadly, I'm one of those, and I graduated from an Ivy League school (by which I imply top-tier of cost) with a CRUSHING $20,000 in student loan debt, which for several years had a lower interest rate than my simple savings account, and in any case amounted to an UNTENABLE six months or so of marginal wages. Alas! Pity me, the fool who went to college!
It has always been true that if you are the one-in-a-million super-genius ridiculously motivated overachiever, that you don't need anybody's help to get where you are going. Saving, planning, and getting an education are merely for all the rest of us.
I remember when there were like 5 kids in the whole school who played computer games and everyone thought they were, well, geeky. Arguments happened all the time over designing electrical circuits, if Microsoft Macro Assembler was better than Turbo Assemlber, if Stacker was worth the price, or whether it made sense to upgrade to a 14400 modem (the phone company would not guarantee speeds over 9600 baud).
I think we are just inundated with people ("geeks") who have gleaned a lot of 1/4" deep knowledge from google. They know enough to argue about what they read, but haven't enough understanding to hypothesize.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quite personally I find myself expressing some of the view points from the article but see it from a different angle.
I'll fully admit my university was under-par. I came out near the top of my class and was one of the 25% of the graduating class that landed a job immediately (I actually had multiple offers). What I felt coming out was that all the work that *I* put into university was what caused my "successful" outcome. I try to stay humble and credit those who were there along the way (profs/peers) but I still often feel that it was a direct result of my efforts as to why I ended up where I am.
Having said that if you take that view point and twist it, it can sound as if I think I am here solely as a result of my own actions which is not true. I see many people in my field who share this view and as a result make the leap forward and say that their university had nothing to do with their success and their own drive would have landed them in the same position they are in now. Keep extending the argument and you come full circle to the idea that "college was a waste of time" which is more often then not very untrue.
Now the only real argument that I have against this view when people take it that far is to ask them what they've accomplished since graduation besides a job. Can they tell me they've continued to learn multiple programming languages or other related items at the same rate? What about practical applications of knowledge? What have they to show for their months/years post-degree? The obvious factor that I see people missing is the motivation that peers and others around you provide in the university or education environment...
/rant
At the crux of it all is what is intellect?
I went through the system and I got my degree. My own view is that the college/university system has little to do with intellect.
It is a mass education system that has more to do with job creation and ideology than any serious attempt at academic study.
Not to pick on the current president. But has anyone read for example Michelle Obama's Master's thesis? http://www.politico.com/pdf/080222_MOPrincetonThesis_1-251.pdf
There is no intellectual merit to it at all. It reads like an opinion piece.
About the last refuge for real academic work is in the hard sciences. Yet even there you see the problems. Professors have to constantly make up studies and work to show value to administrators and grants...
And so are geeks anti-intellectual?
I'd prefer to ask:
Have Colleges and university become anti-intellectual.
I have this underlying theory that all institutions are inherently corrupted over time. As Locke would say, power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
Just as the church was one associated with God...
universities used to be associated with intellect.
We can all see in plain sight how ridiculous it was to associate belief with the church.
In time, we will see that associated intellect with educational institutions was also ridiculous.
And no... peer review does not solve anything. When the institutions in question get to pick their peers... when there is a lot of self interest and ideology involved...
I had the feeling that geek anti-intellectualism usually reflects the personal experiences of people who did not fit in towards certain parts of the academic world.
I am a geek and still hold a phd, but i recommend that anybody who cant stand to sit in lectures and listen to the one to many textbook reading of the professor due to any reason to leave the room and take a book (for example i have a problem focusing on oral presentations). And i recommend to people for whom university does not work to leave it. We need different kinds of talent doing different things, everybody what and how he does best.
just because information comes from self (or other) proclaimed 'experts,' or 'institutions' doesn't mean it's correct. There are a lot of worrying trends regarding such people and organizations that should give any intelligent person pause.
Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS.
The point of the "don't go to college" meme is that by not going to college, you avoid the soul crushing debt that most students now graduate with. I've been out of school for almost six years, and I STILL don't make enough to pay all my loans, even though I have what most would consider to be a "good" job, in my field, ie I manage a multimillion dollar materials research lab.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken my college fund that was only enough for about a year of school and started a business. College is now a suckers game, and has been for a decade.
You were designing bio-methane plants?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Where are these places that value XP over college? Every engineering shop insists on me having a degree! I tell em I don't need it, I've been working with Legos, even Lincoln Logs ever since I was 10! But they won't have it.
Since when is the founder of paypal a geek? Just because it involves computers no longer makes it geeky. In the 80s and 90s yes... but now computers are a profit vehicle and attract more non-geeks than geeks. Geeks want to do things because they haven't been done before. They want to know how stuff works, and will work very hard to figure it out even if the result is useless. Would Peter Theil have founded paypal if it wasn't going to be profitable? No... not a geek.
That being said... Formal education has nothing to do with being a geek either. It can be a tool to be used to further their goals though... and often you'll find the people getting the worthless degrees that never make you any money are the geeks.
I wasn't a geek. Geeks were the kids who were not intellectual, and were generally considered good for nothing by their peers, including the intellectual ones (nerds). Geeks were what might now be considered mindless fanboys of something or other (not something requiring an intellect to understand, although sci-fi would count). They were the ones who lacked grooming and social skills, and also did not apply themselves in school, not because of lack of interest but because of lack of capacity. It was a true insult to call someone a geek.
So if this trend is true, then it looks like one of the old usages is coming back into trend. It's simply not possible for a term that supposedly describes highly intellectual and motivated people to come to encompass so many people as the word 'geek' has consumed. It can't be a catch-all for anti-mainstream becoming mainstream and cool, because such a thing cannot exist in humans, at least not in the bulk of humanity as I know it. Particularly since the bulk of humanity can't simultaneously be anti-mainstream, and cool, representing a pinnacle, can't also be a near-universal trait. The 'geek' as it has been recently symbolized was always a myth, and impossible by definition.
It is just that stupid people get to post as much as anyone else.
It is just the net has been Walmarted.
The GUI lowered the bar so far.
I hardly even bother to read comments any more.
I worked there for four years as a software engineer. I have no degree. I left university 3 months early to take a job out of state. My major was geology and not computer science or engineering, in any case.
-B
1. Knowledge is most decidedly NOT democratic, in that the truth is not determined by whichever idea is most popular at the time. The Truth is the Truth, dammit.
I keep seeing this sneaking into science and engineering all the time. Yes, your mother told you that your were a rare and special guy, and that means it is hard for you to hear that your opinion is actually no-foolin' *wrong* - but the Earth goes around the Sun, and no amount of "democracy" will ever change that.
Granted, more applicable to hard sciences than to literary criticism.
2. Books represent a point in history, written by someone who took the time and effort to contribute his understanding to paper. As such, they may contain errors. But I also find that a person willing to take the time and effort to write a book usually knows a fair amount about the subject matter - it is rare that an idiot writes a treatise on Calculus.
3. He who does not read the Classics misses out on enormous amounts of cultural reference. So many works refer to or allude to classical literature, that to willfully NOT read them is to miss most of the information in more modern works. It'd be like trying to watch Family Guy without having watched any TV, seen any movies, or listened to any music made in the last 30 years - you's miss most of the real material.
4. Awesome idea - until circumstances remove that electronic crutch. What do you do in a power failure, or a natural disaster, or in Afghanistan?
5. What a narrow and short-sighted view of "success"! I'd say "success" is a real-realized life.
Granted, a university degree need not be part of that - I taught myself mechanical engineering (and was employed as an engineer) without taking any University engineering courses. Did it the hard way, through hard-won experience and a whoooooole lot of reading (thank Lob for books!)
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
It isn't really anti-intellectualism, but pseudo-intellectual elitism. What has gone out the window is critical thinking and really caring about getting to the truth. What remains is the belief that one is intellectual when one is really just following a pseudo-intellectual herd.
A lot of IT and programming is not about something you learned in math class. Yes there are times when having a good understanding of math, etc can help, but I don't think there is much math in understanding the HTTP protocol, or TCP for that matter. Most languages are high enough level where you don't deal with the low level stuff all that often.
I've seen kids come out that are super smart, but couldn't get a project from start to finish to save their souls. Each team will need one or more of those super nerd types to help when we need a complex algorithm etc. Although I often want more and better open source libraries where you can just get this stuff..most of the time you do a google search and find some dudes work.
Does installing anything from a mysql server to an Exchange server really require anything that college would require.
For my money we need to start turning our world into more like a construction union. Certainly we still need engineers and other computer scientists, but we also need the project managers, carpenters, plumbers, etc.
I don't want unions and all their baggage, but it would feel cool to have various guilds like a HTML/JS/CSS guild, a DBA guild, a server admin guild, etc.
And why isn't high school enough anymore? Maybe we should stop teaching stupid history and English course and help kids understand computers earlier. Maybe the problem lies earlier than college.
Finally this sounds like some very arrogant crap. Like academia, scientists, economists, etc are never wrong about anything? College professors are always right right?
Thiel is not paying students to drop out of college. He is giving exceptional students two years of freedom to take a chance where in the past in would likely not be feasible. If one has wealthy parents, for example, taking a couple years off to try something new is possible because there is little risk of economic loss. After two years time, the student/entrepreneur may resume studies or continue in the workplace. If the venture pays off, they may still return to school taking up a new direction or continuing on their original path.
Take a look at the 20under20 site and tell me which ones are the anti-intellectuals in the group: http://thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=19
Perhaps it would be better to park this drive in a classroom for few years
However, nerds are not. Geeks are people that build things, have an insane connection to something. Band geeks, anime geeks, computer geeks, video game geeks, comic book geeks, and so on. They will have very strong opinions based on their admiration of something, and therefore be practically dogmatic in their approach. Geeks will also be very insecure about their lack of credentials, making someone seem better then they did because they actually put the work in. A geek is generally lazy about what they don't care about.
However, a nerd should be a fricking nerd, and go to school, and do well, either because they don't have to try because they're so nerdy or they work their ass off because they're so nerdy. Geeks and dorks don't have to do it, and a geek can be self-promoting that they made a lot of money without college, a dork dropped out of college or became an English major, and nerds will inherit the earth.
Speaking for myself as a geek, I don't consider myself anti-intellectual. It's just that over the years I've come to discover that a lot of conventional "wisdom" is BS. Pert of being a geek is doing things a different way, experimenting, and seeing what happens. Well guess what? Some of those experiments actually pay off and you discover how ass-backward the rest of the world is doing things. Over time, these life experiences accumulate to form a general skepticism of all authority in general.
Our jobs are secure. We are useful in the down economy. If our company goes under, we have many options. Now the unlearned labor (skilled labor - tradesmen, and unskilled labor - secretaries) are finding their jobs depend to a higher degree, on the economy.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
How's that for anti-intellectualism?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Extraordinary people will be extraordinary regardless of college. For the rest of us there's a framed piece of paper to get our foot in the door and have a few beers while we're at it.
Yep.
You go to college to eat and pay rent. It's a calculated gamble of which major has the best ROI.
You study the fun topics on your own time.
Also, I'm a bit disturbed by the comments all the way down to here. Cue the 10 exceptions to the rule, silent are the thousands who could have gotten midline jobs with midline degrees.
Not counting the games that colleges play, you go to college as a scheduled flow of the information, and hopefully to claw our way out of trouble if you start to slip. Let's assume good profs and office hours, etc.
Also, college is just about raw processing time to learn a couple of fields. Coming out of high school it's easy to fall into the Pink Floyd "we don't need no education" bit that seems to drive this article. Go to college even for a little and see all the weird fields you never even know existed. (Weather variance hedge securities!? Black Swan Silent Evidence Information Modeling!? Psychological History!? Forensic Anthropology? Long Tail and Freemium Economic Theory!?)
Elsewhere there was that article about the guy who thought he proved the hailstone theory, except he didn't take advantage of college resources to vet it, and he's now skunked on the net for a flawed paper. College is supposed to partially prevent you from turning into Timecube Guy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Geek community is pro some subjects and against others. Actual intellectualism should be atheistic about all subjects and embrace pure knowledge. Declaring unpopular stances as being "troll" is a way of suppressing subjects and positions that don't match the geek model. Say you are against file sharing copywritten material that's a troll. Say you are against nuclear power but for solar and wind, troll. Say you are a Mac computer fan, troll. Say you are pro Linux you are greeted with cheers. I would say it's not so much an intellectual issue as a lack of openmindedness in the geek community. Open source good, open minds bad. Geeks used to be just tech heads but these days it's a very specific group of stances and beliefs like saying you are a conservative right wing republican. There's a check list. If you say you are a geek odds are you are pro nuke, anti Mac, leaning towards PC but pro Linux. Pro open source, anti copyright and patents, anti DRM and pro file sharing. Not everyone agrees on every subject but if you don't agree with 90% of the party line these days you probably can't be considered a geek. Look at how many people would boast of never ever considering an iPad or iPhone but would then boast of their Android. One is acceptable in the geek world and the other is shunned even though many geeks quietly use iPhones and iPads they just don't say it too loud.
"Noam Chomsky is well respected as an expert on linguistics. That doesn't mean I'd blindly trust his opinions on politics, economics, or the right way to make saag aloo. Or anything else, for that matter.
I certainly wouldn't trust the commie fucker to wire a plug"
-- Me
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...It's called 4chan.
And your business would likely have failed during the time you would have otherwise been in college, based on even the most generous statistics which seem to indicate a 50-60% small business failure rate in their first five years. Then you would have found yourself in soul crushing debt, AND with no college degree.
And this seems the better alternative to you?
For me college was a waste of time and money. I wasted 3 years going back to school attempting to finish a BS in IT. I already had a good job in IT when I started. Over 3 years tuition increased from $26k to $42k. As tough as that was I could swing that. It didn't help that for 3 quarters they cancelled classes I had registered for, putting me at part time enrollment, yet still billed me for full time. The final straw that made me drop out with only two quarters worth of classes left was that they charged me two quarters of tuition ($18k at the time) to go to work every day, as I did before and while going back to school and they did not allow me to take any classes during this time. They called this a "cooperative internship experience", though I had no contact with the school during this time. Unfortunately they automatically billed this against my loan and I had no recourse. I was told upon entry to the school (Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA), that the "cooperative internship experience" was mandatory, but you could either pay two quarters tuition during the internship and take classes like normal, or opt to not pay and not take classes, saving money to help pay the tuition bill. This was an outright lie.
Then they wanted to charge me a full years tuition ($42k) for the next two quarters for 7 classes to finish a degree. I was tapped out and didn't have any more money and couldn't take on any more loans as I already had around $100k in loans. I asked if I could take a year or two off to save the $42, or more realistically $50k+, that tuition would be. They said I could, but they would expire the credits I transferred when coming in. Those were credits from a 2 year college I took immediately after graduating high school a year early. So if I waited a year or two to finish, the cost would be over $100k for two years of tuition. I was already tapped out and taking another $100k of loans is not an option.
So here I am, working the same job. A good job, but a dead end from a pay or promotion standpoint without a degree. My boss dangles promotions over my head if I get a degree but the money simply isn't there to do it. So now I'm financially crippled as a result. I should have bought an investment property, or heck, even blowing all my money at the casinos would have been wiser than trying the college route. At least at the casinos I would have had some fun and couldn't lose more than I have.
The greater shame in all this was I didn't learn much, and the little that I did learn was mostly unrelated to IT or generally trivia type knowledge, not useful or practical knowledge. The classes were always brought down to the dumbest common denominator. I was on the dean's list with a 3.9 GPA, but not eligible for any scholarships or grants that I was able to find as I either made too much money, was not a minority, or not a woman. I quickly stopped caring about a good GPA and coasted along with a 3.4, as it gave more time to focus on work and bettering myself through learning on my own. Tests and projects were all a joke. Extremely basic level stuff for the little bit that was relevant. After seeing what goes on in a "reputable" university with "highly regarded" IT/IS/CompSci programs I would never hire anyone straight out of college with no experience.
I feel bad for many of my friends back at school graduating now who have a lot more debt than me, learned very little, and didn't work through school as I did. All through school I was working 40-50 hours a week at my job, and doing side work on the weekends. These kids had no motivation to learn a skill and get a job while in school. Now that they've graduated they all complain about scraping by with loan payments and such while working retail sales jobs. Meanwhile I get job offers of comparable or better jobs than where I'm at now with some regularity, but none are local so far and thanks to that student loan debt I can't afford to relocate. School has kept me trapped and stuck in a rut.
A college degree [in IT/IS/CS] truly is meaningless and is a waste of time and money. Those years can be spent working, and learning in your own time and growing in your career. All this can happen without racking up tens or hundreds of thousands in debt.
It's a false assumption that if you don't go to college or university that you cannot be intellectual. It's also a false assumption that college or university will make you an intellectual. I have met plenty of people in my time that have bachelors or masters degrees and yet they are unmotivated morons that are disconnected from any sort of reality we would call useful. As another poster mention, while being a geek is considered intellectual there is also another component: motivation. People who go to university are essentially saying, "I'm too lazy to educate myself and need someone to spoon feed me". Geeks on the other hand are always curious about the world around them and have a burning desire to learn more, doing this in any number of ways. Having attended university and find it to be a complete waste of time, the one thing I realized is that if you just read the same books and gain experience in what you've read, then you have the same knowledge as someone from university. The only difference is you don't have a certificate, you didn't waste tens of thousands of dollars, and you didn't have multiple hookups along the way. . . Okay, that last part may be a downside to not going to university.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
In my 25+ years in the software biz (with barely an AS degree) I've needed to help out on projects designed and built by CS PhDs. The designers often had little comprehension of the "real world" -- at least how it would interact with and affect their software and/or how users would do the same. My boss brought me to design meetings to take notes and afterwards, he'd clean up my questions and send them to the PhDs, often resulting in significant redesign.
It wasn't that those folks weren't smart and didn't know how to make the computers jump through hoops. It was more like they had blinders on to some of the real world issues (even simple things like dealing with power failure and recovery) and those blinders seemed, in many ways, to be a result of their advanced training. In a sense, they'd gotten so far into the theoretical, that they'd forgotten (or lost contact with) the practical.
IMHO, it isn't that college is a waste of time and money, it is just that a well rounded team often needs someone not encumbered with too much knowledge but who can still ask pertinent questions to keep a design grounded. (smiling) Basically, every big project needs someone like me!
Geeks live in their own world.
For me, taking a wide variety of classes in college definitely challenged my own perceptions of the world and made me a more well rounded person. College suppose to teach you how to analyze information better, not just memorize facts. Memorizing the date of a war is really useless, but analyzing the causes and consequences of a war is a skill that can be applied to other aspects in life.
Instead of just reading stuff that conforms to your worldview, college has taught me how to better analyze different points of view, the evidence behind it and draw my more accurate interpretations, while understanding the limits of my own knowledge.
Let me guess before I've read the article:
Larry Sanger, whose only claim to fame is a brief association with something that became impressive well after he left, is upset that people aren't deferring to him just because he has an official stamp of expertise in something other than the topic he is currently opining on.
The dominant epistemology -how we answer the question of what it means to know a thing- is indeed changing. I'm not sure that it's changing for the better, either. But to call it anti-intellectualism is more than a bit of a stretch.
The dominant epistemology isn't perfect (only zealots think the perfect epistemology has yet been devised). And so, like every epistemology that has ever held sway, this new one seeks to address the flaws of what has came before it. It has its own weaknesses too; like I said, I'm not sure this particular change is for the better. But this article doesn't make its points toward that change being a fundamentally anti-intellectual one very well.
and let me think about that...
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
PhDs in what, and from where?
Someone doing comparative literary analysis of Westerns or someone with a PhD in Electrical Engineering? Someone with a "PhD" in Psychology of Education from a no-name school in North Dakota or someone with a PhD in Physics from MIT?
These things matter. I would argue that unless you're doing your PhD in a worthwhile subject under the auspices of a good school, you were probably going to flip burgers anyway.
Unless you're doing it for fun, and in which case, well you had fun, and now it's time to pay the piper.
"You were designing bio-methane plants?"
A hundred grand for a lot of stinky hot gas?
Not a bad deal, though it sounds a little like politics which also concerns stinky hot gas.
Yes.
School does not equal education.
From wikipedia:
Remember the TV show 'Paper Chase'? The opening sequence with the crusty professor finishing with the line 'you'll leave thinking like lawyers'?
For many fields, college is more about teaching you how to think than it is teaching you what things are. Actually, it used to be that, but now it's very at least as much 'what to think' as it is 'how to think'. And those goals are somewhat exclusive of one another.
College should, I think, focus on the how to think, how to learn, and in the process also deposit significant fundamental knowledge. Especially in a field like IT, where new things come up more often than every four years, to expect a lifelong grounding in all that is on a particular topic is unrealistic, and short-lived. If you learned Fortan in college, you are not that far from learning Java. More importantly, did you learn how to program? That serves you no matter the particular language you use.
I'm going through a series of college lectures on Java programming, and in the second lecture, the presenter drops this toss-off line:
"...turns left, like a good Democrat..."
If you've taken the course, or heard the lectures, you know now... But the remark was just plain out of place. Political science is a few buildings away.
It's this sort of thing that makes me wonder if college is enough about 'how to think', or too much about 'what to think'. Aside from that remark, and one other, this lecturer is focused on the 'how to think' goal, spiced with basic Java stuff. This has value for me. I'll add Java to my resume when I can demonstrate some proficiency. That will mean some projects for friends and willing guinea pigs, and some things on my own web page. That is the geek version of a diploma. This I want and need.
Intellectual?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The technical world is simply no longer the sole domain of true geeks. There has always been populist anti-intellectualism in America. True geeks have always been derided for their intellectualism. Geek wanna-be's are responsible for this, not true geeks. The wanna-be's have simply been encroaching upon the technological domain for the past decade.
...it's not anti-intellectualism. It's laziness. What's being rejected isn't "intellect"; it's the idea that you have to work for reward. "I'm smarter than everyone else, I shouldn't HAVE to work to get the best pay! My mere presence and occasional acerbic comments on the inadequacy of others should be enough to warrant a six-figure salary and accelerated vesting!"
Not all geeks, of course. I would even challenge that such a person isn't a geek, because they don't DO anything. Having good tools (in this case, raw intellect) doesn't make you a craftsman, but we all know people who think that ownership of specific bits of tech tools (Android this, iOS that, Linux the other-thing, scripts downloaded from rootkit.org) makes you a tech god. Tell me, when was the last time you saw an Apple-hater accomplish anything important? Or the last time you saw a Windows-hater have anything to contribute to a discussion other than vitriol? The loud aggression masks a lack of ability. It's a form of counterpunching, to deflect the "oh yeah, what have YOU done that has geek cred?" before it can be said.
In fact, let's just agree that people like that... the self-labeled "geeks" who exhibit what can be taken as anti-intellectualism... aren't geeks at all. They are the coat-tail riders coasting on the efforts of others.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
On the other hand when it comes to knowledge the foundations you gain from college/university are useful. I know a guy at work who didn't do an under-grad degree. We're both developers. He didn't understand the concept of transitive closure (something we studied in CS), or how you could create a tree structure in a relational database.
Uneducated geeks tend to mislabel their bizarre/eccentric fixations as "intellectualism", but unless they are able to detach themselves, and critically (not to be confused with prejudicially) explore ideas and thought for their own sake, rather than only those that they deem to be worthy, they don't make the cut.
This sparks rage in me, and be prepared for a passionate, not flaming response.
Intellectual?
Plato? Proust? Swift? Wittgenstein? Wilde? Eco? Baudrillard? Pound? Spinoza? Aquinas? Borges?
What enrages me nearly beyond comprehension is the expectation that we must be versed in the F*Tards listed above in order to be considered "Intellectual". F* you and your tired demarcation of what constitutes mental prowess. The fact is that we have *moved on* and live in the now of our own immediacy. Knowledge of these people will rarely help you in any business or IT environment.
Granted, It's important to know how to *think* and having read of these people will *NOT* increase your ability in that capacity. If it did, we wouldn't be awash in college graduates that have to be taught to close the damn bathroom door to take a piss. ( Yes, there has been this talk. )
College may have been fine and dandy when the knowledge pool took generations to change. These days you will spend more time in college than most IT jobs last. College has outlived it's paradigm.
So please, get off your intellectual high horse and stop trying to justify the excessive tuition you may still be making payments on. The need and applicability have been analyzed and it's waste of time and money.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I like the cut of your jib sir.
+1 Intellectual
... have stopped having worthy intellectuals. One can look at the rise of neoconservatism in the US and the right wing think tanks everywhere spewing their anti-global warming garbage and many people with degree's or PHD's after their name from corporately funded schools. Corporations have highjacked the educational systems in order to spin ideology and misinformation into the curriculum and it's spreading. There is tonnes of misinformation all over the net with think tanks and special websites funded by billionaires.
I think the discussion of whether or not college is a waste of money misses the main thrust of the initial question. Another way to look at the question is to consider the degree to which learning about the past (and familiarizing yourself with the canon) is valued in 'Geek Culture.' In many ways there does seem to be movement away from the 'you have to know the rules in order to break them' concept. I find this shift disappointing because it devalues formalized learning, and rewards revolution over improvement.
Oh yes, the "Internet geek" community. Is there a "new anti-intellectualism" amongst them?
Considering that both of these terms are undefined and contentious, it should be no surprise to see a diverse, noisy spectrum of responses to the question. After all, who gets to say what sort of person qualifies as an "Internet geek"? At that rate, I suppose we might as well all have a crack at the definition. Is it anyone with a Facebook account? Or do you have to be a protocol designer? If the former, then we're really talking about a massive sampling of the whole human population, and there's no particular discussion to be had. If the latter, then I'd argue, as someone working in the profession, that it's the same highly-skilled elite as always, and that - of necessity - nothing has changed.
Something has changed. It's more crowded now. When I got started in this profession, computer science was a new term for the sorts of inquiries being made by mathematicians and electrical engineers. To be a computer scientist was much like being a rocket scientist. Everything was exotic. A lot of the work was, perforce, purely an exercise of intellect. Anyone who had free access to computer time lived in a rare state of privilege. Today networked computing is absolutely prosaic, and comparisons with the old profession are essentially meaningless under any but, as noted above, a fairly elite definition of "Internet geek".
That's what has changed. The once-exclusive hot tub has become infinitely more crowded. Well, but what does this tell us about a "new anti-intellectualism"? It tells us absolutely nothing that we didn't know before. In the limit, the average IQ of a population still converges, by definition, to 100. Such a population places no particular emphasis on intellect, since intellect is not its particular asset. That population of Internet practitioners is our reward for all the hard work of building the Internet. Most people don't appreciate what it means simply because they can't. It's not a question of hostility to intellectualism, it's just that it's no longer necessary for everyone to be an expert.
Does this threaten the intellectual elite which brought the Internet into being? I can't see how. Of course, it can be frustrating at times to deal with ignorance disguised as superiority, but that's nothing new. We can go back further, to Aristotle and beyond, and find the very same thing.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Sounds like this is more of a larger issue of information versus knowledge. The internet is pushing for information to be everywhere and open to be modified by other individuals. Right now I have a crazy amount of information at my fingertips - stuff I would never have access to if it was fifteen years ago. Sure - the databases can act like a "collective memory", but the problem comes to applying deep concepts. I might have a breadth of knowledge available but if my depth is only an inch deep how does that better you?
At once point there was a good balance of depth and breadth; an understanding that it is important for you, the individual, to still consume the information to formulate an opinion, thought, or just to *create* from it. Relying on copies of copies of quick cliff notes degraded this.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross, deals with this in part. The main character had his "external memory" pouch swiped and he complains of feeling lost and incomplete. Basically the sum of his being was book marks and meta tags... take away that and effectively cripple the person.
I got my BA, MA, and Unix admin skills. And now, I'm doing a job that can easily be done by a high-school drop-out. Why? Because the world is run by non-geeks with "people skills" who s____ on knowledge (PHBs is the term). Actually, this is why I became convinced that God and Satan are real, because so many times when something good comes along, it's completely transparent that there's a force of evil which will work to stifle it.
As regards college, if I had to do it over again, I'd spend MUCH more time trying to find a wife. Behind every good man is a good woman. Single, nerds, they don't go far in this pop culture dominated society.
That's what all of my learning has taught me: Fat, dumb, happy is better than slim, smart, & sad.
What enrages me nearly beyond comprehension is the expectation that we must be versed in the F*Tards listed above in order to be considered "Intellectual". F* you and your tired demarcation of what constitutes mental prowess. The fact is that we have *moved on* and live in the now of our own immediacy. Knowledge of these people will rarely help you in any business or IT environment.
QED.
And, today's OOP type languages? Pretty much ALL THE SAME, in the Object.Property Method approach. Once you knew a few languages? You start to see they are ALL doing pretty much the same stuff!
That's in regards to your closing statement I'll requote, here:
"In my book, you're not a real computer graduate unless you believe that Computer Science is language agnostic." - by Marillion (33728) on Tuesday June 07, @03:56PM (#36366664)
So true (per my subject line above), & you learn to say to yourself, for example:
"Well, I know I have to open/read/write/close a file - I know how it's done in C/C++/Object Pascal/VB, so... now that I know what to do, it's just a matter of finding the syntax for it in this new language for me!"
That's the MOST important part (well, one of them) that I've learned, after picking up on roughly, whew, I'd say 10-12 languages & variants thereof over time since 1982 here...
I also don't think college is a waste either, UNLESS YOU WASTE YOUR TIME & MONEY THERE! You'll get out of it most times, what you put into it & learned there usually I'd say! But, you DO have to "live it"/breathe-it while there too... shaping yourself, for lack of a better expression!
Now, I say that, because I learned via collegiate academia in a couple degrees (before OOP, "top-down design, & later, procedural programming"in the mid to late 80's, & later thru the 90's in the OOP paradigm) & later for decades moreso on the job... Whew, I remember "the terror" when going from character mode/console mode apps (most of what I learned in academia" then to GUI... holy heck! LMAO, memories!
Both have merits, in their own place & usage imo, procedural coding vs. OOP, for example.
The thing is though, like your noting .NET: That's just a toolset by MS, but NOT "comp. sci." (as it's limited in scope).
Plus - Things you learn in collegiate academia, even @ the State College level (as good as any imo, because you get what YOU put into it really), you most likely won't learn "on the job", right away (& being exposed to principals like you see in DataStructures (one of my favs of "all time" outta academia)? Help you avoid HUGE mistakes, & show you "tips/tricks/techniques" that help a lot in avoiding said mistakes, reinventing the wheel (very possibly POORLY) etc./et al)).
So, hey - I'll never "knock" academia, but in the long haul? I do think you learn more "on the job", or, @ least what's more "practically applicable" vs. theory alone.
(I imagine this is what the diff. is between say, theoretical physics & applied physics).
However, I really DO think that they ought to bring back "apprenticeships" too!
I say THAT, because honestly, @ least from my experience around this art & science of computing since 1982?
Well...You don't need things you learn in many collegiate CSC courses in IT work, for example!
(That's more where the 'newer' CIS degrees come in if you ask me - you learn more "rubber-meets-the-road" type skills that you WILL see on the job).
I have also found, that once you've learned a few languages? Well, again: You pretty much can "fall into" a new one, very fast, especially with today's OOP methods!
(Probably same w/ the new "functional programming" stuff too, but that? That I have NOT "put my hands on & tried"... stuff like, iirc, HASKELL).
Newest/latest-greatest I have tried has been PyThon, & for doing text processing or file manipulation work? It does the job, & fast - I was able to do useful work in it, in about 2 wks. time, because of prior exposure for decades in programming!
(I was actually impressed, no, it's not C/C++ or Asm speed, but good enough & easy to learn (VB level type difficulty, maybe not even that)).
Anyhow - that's my take on this "college isn't needed" stuff - sure, you can "get by" without it, for IT type work?
Absolutely!
(However, again,
I disagree, because I think there's more point to learning than increasing intelligence, and there's more to being human than being able to apply intelligence to business or technology. Education is also about producing well-rounded people. For example, people who know the difference between a social norm (closing the bathroom door), intelligence, and cultural knowledge (Plato, Proust, Swift, etc). We haven't "moved on" from the human condition. Reading Wilde makes you a better person, not a better programmer, trader, or businessman. Seeing college purely as exchanging money for employability in a particular field, of course it is a bad deal. But that's the difference between a degree and a trade certification. Or it was.
No. (Elaboration is left as an exercise for the reader)
It was never just the right or the religious.
I'd include the left during the 60/ early 70s as a hotbed of the sort of thing you mention. The revolt against any sort of intellectual authority was taken up wholesale by the "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation.
Examples:
Mentioning a gifted program at that time was an anathema to educational theorists who held that nearly all ability was aquired and that all could be brought up to one level with enough effort.
Sadly, this often resulted in the "gifted" program at smaller schools at that time being the special ed room.
My father had to deal with that for much of that period, being a biology teacher. He got it from the religious fundamentalists on evolution, and the left on genetics when it was even obliquely applied to humans.
In literature and philosophy, there was a whole litany against the DWMs (dead white males) and the substitution of nearly anything else for well established classic texts. Some of this was good, as it introduced different viewpoints. But there was much baby that was tossed with bathwater.
Any intellectual pursuit that treaded on the wrong toes was suspect. To research genetic contributions to behavior (real research, not Shockley's nonsense) was suspect. It was a good question in the 70s whether fetters would be put on genetics research aimed at modifying organisms, and most of that didn't come from the right. The right's move against stem cells was a considerably later development.
This was taken to an extreme in the literary criticism movement that went almost to (and in some cases directly to) the belief that all ideas are equal, and no intellectual framework has any more sway than another. Presumably even if it's based on the psychic friends network.
My point is that unlike the view referenced in your article saying that anti-intellectualism was considered by many a hallmark of only conservative protestantism, it was and still is enthusiastically embraced by many different groups. The only criteria was that it be a form of study or knowledge that conflicted with the entrenched views of $(group).
Reading any book does not make you a better person any more than violent video games make people violent. The ability to read at all certainly makes you a more useful person. There are a number of very intellegent yet very horrible people in the world.
I see a resurgence of anti-establishment sentiment, but not anti-intellectualism. We are at the dawn of an amazing new age where education is about to undergo seismic change due to technology. Establishments like the university no longer own recondite information that we can't learn ourselves for free (minus bandwidth and connectivity charges, of course). Another side effect of technology on education in the near future will be the end of the memorization of trivia that can be parsed and synthesized into answers to complex questions by Watson's progeny. Many jobs that hinged on encyclopedic knowledge of some area of law, for instance, will simply evaporate, as will degrees emphasizing filling one's head with facts. The human race can increasingly focus on broad understanding, developing better critical thinking, and asking more interesting questions.
Ask me about my sig!
Mistaking popular culture for geeks because they use websites is like mistaking a walkman for a contemporary cell phone becase they both play music.
I agree with a lot of what you said. My experience is similar; I learned enough Python in a few weeks after starting my first real job. But it took me years after graduation to find this first job, and I'd bet that had a lot to do with keyword-scanning HR departments that wouldn't even give me an interview without the magic buzzwords on my resume. And some of those businesses where I did get an interview were probably put off by my medical condition, which appears to be common among geeks.
If we consider your average Slashdot poster as what a "Geek" is, I think it's fair to say that most would consider themselves intellectual -- just not focused on historic literature and philosophy. And I think the author was spot-on in their observations -- "geeks" are so interested in intellectual pursuits that they overstate their abilities in a given field to themselves (believng anything can be readily learned, even complex fields of study) and wanting to be on the side of those who tear-down paradigms. So whenever they hear anyone with credentials decry a majority position, they tend to side with said person, no matter how outspoken said person is in their field -- and said geeks generally are educated enough to understand said minority person's positions in detail but are not versed with the bountiful amount of contrary literature that shows why their stance is implausible.
Oh, and FYI: Global warming is a myth, hydrogen doesn't burn, Polywell or Focus Fusion is the future of fusion, the Big Bang didn't occur, and John Doe from Podunk, Illinois has just discovered something in his garage which overturns Dominant Paradigm X.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
It's actually anti-institutionalism.
A lot of people agree that the institutionalization of knowledge is wrong, and that information, education and let's throw in intellectuality, should be freely accessible and decentralized.
Anti-expert, anti-university and anti-intelectualism are merely missinterpritations of the thoughts that information, and knowledge should be a free pursuit.
Your generalization is stupid.
.. there's a lot of "intellectual" in there.
I spent as much timing discussing nihilism or nietzsche with friends as I spent discussing the big Oh, Knuth's musical enterprises or xkcd comics.
Heck, just read xkcd
(literacy != intelluctuality)
btw.. intellectuality sounds better..
How did I get this soul crushing debt when I used the money I had saved?
If my business had failed, I would have gone and done something else. Hell, I could have driven a truck for 4 years and saved up $80,000 (by not having a home of my own, or any bills outside of a cell phone). That would be enough to do any number of things. Hell, a few more years of that, and you could retire.
I grew up with the understanding that Geeks are people who simply love knowledge. That knowledge can come in the form of literature, arts, computers, tech, anime, movies, physics, math, biology, etc. A geek is someone who fully immerses him/herself in the information of a topic.
When you see someone on the internet suggesting that college is a waste of time, there should be no assumption that the person is a geek at all-- just a person with computer literacy sufficient to post a comment.
I know Physics PhDs from state universities that are making only $30,000/year in a testing laboratory.
And the competition for THOSE crappy jobs was FIERCE!
College has outlived it is paradigm.
What does that mean?
"Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS."
And what's new about PhD's flipping burgers? Early 80s? Check. In the early 70s we used to kid my brother that when he finished his doctorate in anthropology he'd wash buses for a living. It was only partly a joke.
And it's not just the liberal arts. I work fixing lab equipment, and I've got a physics degree. Before that I was a sysadmin.
No jobs that require college degrees? Really? Sounds like the one your doing requires it to be considered.
Whether it should is a different story.
BTW, I did start and run a business for 2 years. It crashed with the housing downturn. So did a lot of other HVAC/Refrigeration companies.
(You're reading more into my comment than was there. It was twitting an AC saying that he'd gotten to slashdot 4 years early and falsely claiming a first post. Getting to slashdot first, or getting first post may be a little like winning the special olympics. ;)
I see... so while your business is failing over the course of 4 years, you would have magically acquired income from... what, exactly? Or did you start your business with no seed capital, and spend your $20k or so of savings on living expenses? But you lived like a king for those 4 years.
There is no world in which a (failing business + living expenses) * 4 years = $20,000 dollars + no debt from living & business expenses.
You're either being willfully ignorant about the cost of living, or you literally have no clue how much money rent food and basic utilities actually cost.
On the other hand, those that claim to be a computer expert because they can run a mail merge from Word, or copy an Excel macro from a website, or talk l33t, these people might abase intellectual effort because they make none. Posers, in a word.
This would not be the first time a few flashy shallow loudmouths are embraced by the news media as a trend. After all, no news sells no newspapers (or web site adverts).
Geeks are not and never were supposed to be intellectuals, they were supposed to be smart and capable. Often being an intellectual correlated with being smart and capable. Its less so today because being an "intellectual" no longer implies being a critical thinker, being open to the facts, questioning ones own assumptions and presumptions; rather it has come to mean in most parts of academia accepting a particular political view point.
It used to be that attending university was a the best route to learning a great deal about a topic you found interesting and wanted to work at applying while at the same time picking up all kinds of useful background information. In many many cases its not anymore. The business people at many schools figured out people don't like paying tens of thousands of dollars and possibly not getting a diploma to show for it. So they watered the curriculum down to the point the sort of person who is a true geek (smart) would have to almost apply themselves to failing in order to do so. Consequently university is depending on your financial resources and interests not the best place to obtain useful education or at least not the most efficient route; for many geeks it is therefore a waste of time.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Wish I was kidding :)
In a world where we are encouraged only to follow our own self-interest, where the state and anything associated with the Public Interest is under attack, it is no surprise that the Truth becomes a casualty. Our habit of looking inwards seems to be carried over to our intellectual lives. In this world where we are all individual islands, it often seems that everyone is right and no one is wrong. We seem to denigrate the idea of Truth, and with it we denigrate the institutions whose purpose is to explore for Truth. Academics, intellectuals, and people who rigorously use logic and reason to seek the Truth are put at the same level as charlatans and those who do not care about logic but have other agendas. Surely the idea that "nerds" are becoming "anti-intellectuals" can be tied to this broader trend.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It's rare that the garden-variety "Geek" ever had much time for what could be called "intellectual" pursuits.There's not a high degree of literacy in geekdom, outside of their specialised technologies. Plato? Proust? Swift? Wittgenstein? Wilde? Eco? Baudrillard? Pound? Spinoza? Aquinas? Borges?
Wiki says an intellectual is "An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence (thought and reason) and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity."
You're right that they've never been the most literary or philosophical group, but there are multiple types of "intellectuals" A scientist definitely qualifies as "intellectual" in my book. At least 40% of scientists are geeks in my estimation, and most geeks seem to like science.
Maybe there are some geeks who are anti-academic, disliking the higher education system, and maybe they do have more of a voice than they used to. As an academic scientist, I dislike the notion that we spend too much time learning, but maybe we do pay too much for it. They have a point. But that's not "anti-intellectual" in my opinion.
And I'm not even talking about the classical definitions being in play either.
Most geeks I know struggle with A+ and Hello World. They know more about comic books than science. Video games are as close as they ever get to a physics model.... It's a sad state of affairs.
College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car
In the US, maybe. This is the model of society you have chosen as a people, that education should cost a lot of money and exclude those who aren't rich or aren't given credit to go into debt.
In some other countries, education is seen as something society should subsidise and doesn't cost as much, and is accessible to all and not just the rich. It depends on your preferred model of society.
Real geeks are not getting anti-intellectual. It's just that for a few years, being geek became trendy, and the word lost its meaning. Today, "be a geek" means "be a brainless idiot that spend its days on /b/ photoshoping pictures of cats".
I don't see how we can say we're devolving into anti-intellectualism simply because we can look things up on the internet. First off the idea that geeks are intellectuals of any sort is laughable. There are and always will be people of high intellect that will contemplate things of great importance. Your average web programmer isn't one of them. Sorry to all you software engineers out there who think you're special. But in order to be one of those lucky few people you have to first be independently wealthy to devote all of your time to reading and study and you also have to be mentally gifted. It is a luxury afforded to only a few people.
For the rest of us normal intelligent working stiffs, having information quickly accessible on the internet allows us the ability to do things without the years of study usually required. As much as I would like to think I have a brain like a computer, I don't and having information easily and quickly accessible enables my brain to be "smarter" than it would normally be. For me it is not a devolution of intellectualism, but an enhancement that relieves me of the burden of useless memorization. For those of you geeky armchair intellects out there that feel we're getting dumb please feel free to shut your computers off.
A true geek would have pointed out before you could truly have this discussion, one must define what the definition of a geek is. It seems in society and here on slashdot, we have many who exhibit "geeky" behavior, but that in and of itself does not make one a geek.
I have heard different versions but here goes.
By the time the college figures out where rapid tech is heading, tech
has already moved onto the new latest thing and or changes
are happening in real time and college 'somewhat' has not
adapted to this rapid real time in how its done.
Ppl show up in the working world and what they were taught in school
has been changed majorly or retired.
For ppl in the real world to keep up they are self learning via books,
the net, and other tools before the professors teach it in their
classrooms or student have to parallel learn the classroom material
that is may be obsolete with what is really being used.
One intellectual inferred this would be part of the Technological Singularity,
in other words tech would speed up learning, publications, and the old ways
of doing things would have to adapt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
The other aspect of the singularity are argued, but I'd say this one is
coming true in certain areas to certain extent, YMMV.
My use of this example is due to how fast we are advancing due to the net,
rapid on demand publishing, etc etc.
The whole tech sphere is accelerating itself in some areas, in others
it seems to be complicating things...but that is another story.
The best thing to learn IMHO is how to learn on your own via
the online resources, books, journals, and be adaptive to a fluid world
that is moving faster than it has in the past.
I think we can all agree that a lot of areas are accelerating.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Ah yes. Intellectuality is useless unless provides some form of sucking at a corporate-industrial cash-teat.
Thanks for validating my thesis.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I have befriended a number of people based on a common geek interest in my town. Within a year or so, I came to realize they're all fucking morons. They like this geeky thing, but have no logical reasoning capabilities, have almost no post-secondary education, and have menial jobs.
But I wouldn't really call it a rising trend so much as "geeky" things becoming mainstream: video games (Halo did this more than any other game, I think), sci-fi/fantasy (came about because of LotR), computers...
Everything that used to require you to be a nerd, too,* now only requires you be a geek.
* Full disclosure: I consider a nerd to be someone with depth and breadth of knowledge (which sort of implies a high degree of intelliigence), while I think a geek merely has depth. So you can "geek out" over one topic like video games, but unless you're actually an intelligent person, you aren't a nerd.
And yeah! this all sounds elitist, but I don't care. I used to befriend computer people and then happen to have conversations with them about number theory, geopolitics, whatever. Now there is no guarantee a "computer person" I befriend even knows what a kernel is.
I've posted quite a few times here on Slashdot, and I have to say, this is the most civilized discussion I have seen, well, ever in this forum. I have to think that I've hit a nerve, and people are actually not just doing their usual posturing, but actually caring about the question and trying to come to grips with it. There may be hope for geeks yet.
Right now a PC with a hypnosis program and the material that is needed to
learn combined in the right manner would make things go even faster.
Try self hypnosis and reading some time, its amazing, thou
if not used and reinforced it tends to fade faster than usual in most ppl.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
A lot of college is a waste of time... If you go to college directly out of High School you will be repeating most of the core subjects which is just a waste of money. Not to mention the classes that "teach you to study" but require you to study to learn to study, as well as college requiring P.E. classes. College is only useful once you start learning what you actually need to know.
Geekdom is about applied intellect, not intellectualism. In fact, I'd argue that it is precisely the opposite of intelectualism. ... or its eastern variant, Zen Buddhism. Maybe with a tad more materialism, but basically that's it.
Intellectualism is basically a bourgeoise exercise in brain farting, with no real effect on the world in general and no direct practical value to personal life. Geekish applied intellect on the other hand is the - more or less - systematic acquisition of skill and/or insight into the workings of the world around you. For the sake of, in the end, improving the world for oneself and others. In essence, it's the modern pinnacle of Stoicism
That in times like these, where knowledge is free and widely available and top-grade expertise is just a download away, I see no contradiction to geek intellect when the value of a college career is questioned every now and then.
And I see geek intellect only pro-actively up against intellectualism where the latter gets out of hand and places itself to far above the sort of intellect that actually 'gets the job done' contrary to just musing and bullshitting about things.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm certainly not anti-intellectual, I learn all the time, probably more so than most college grads do. I'm not anti-academic, either; I respect people's choice to go to college, and I even went for a couple of years myself before deciding that just getting a job coding software was a better path for me.
What I am is against having college forced down someone's throat as the only option, especially when the universities (at least the private schools) are heavily profiting from this attitude. I'm against the idea that you have to be tens or even more than a hundred thousand dollars in personal debt at age 25 to succeed in life. And I'm against a self-perpetuating system of college graduates who think only college graduates could possibly be as skilled as they are and thus artificially inflate the value of the degree.
You absolutely can succeed without college, if you're smart and determined. And if you're an entrepreneur, then getting the hell out on the market is much more valuable than biding your time while learning things that have nothing to do with your dream. Never mind the tuition costs, the opportunity costs to an entrepreneur for waiting are crippling.
And then, if you really want to go to school, go. But only if you really want to do so.
I think you're a huge troll.
Judging by the lack of depth to most of the comments here, and on slashdot in general. I would have to say there are no geeks left on planet earth. Not a single one under 50 years of age anyway. Geeks , a true Geek follows his own path defined by his own concept of intellectualism what ever it may be
Too often here the idea of being a Geek seems to be cry about something. Not fix it or investigate why it is as it is. Just poor scorn on it and maybe it will earn you fame and fortune.. Has absolutely nothing to do with where you are or where you went. Does not depend on what school your parents sent you to..
Here on slashdot it seems to be about getting a rating,its all in the points and some ones warped idea of charisma and karma.
Truth is a geek would not bother to waste a lot of time here. Slasdot just doesn't matter . Get over it and move on kids !
Oh, and FYI: Global warming is a myth, hydrogen doesn't burn, Polywell or Focus Fusion is the future of fusion, the Big Bang didn't occur, and John Doe from Podunk, Illinois has just discovered something in his garage which overturns Dominant Paradigm X.
Reminds me of a John Doe who went head to head with Stephen Hawking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susskind-Hawking_battle
I'm afraid maybe you went to college for the wrong thing. I'm a self-taught IT guy and computer programmer, and I never saw any point in going to college for those things because I could do them well enough already, and I'm confident I could teach myself anything else I care to know in those fields. However, after dropping out of a liberal arts program that I was doing just to get my degree, I worked some shit jobs and then decided that if I went back it was going to be for something worthwhile. I chose physics, and I can tell you that I've learned no end of useful, applicable stuff, and opened doors that never would've existed before. There are jobs paying 60k a year that I could have right out of college if I wanted them. I've gotten research experience and contacts that will make me a shoe-in at most grad schools I'm interested in. I've been able to work with fun stuff - particle detectors, liquid nitrogen, robotics, radioactive substances, aerospace projects - And, I've gotten my education certification, without which it is illegal to work as a teacher.
So, college has done a whole lot for me. There's not a class I've taken in physics that hasn't taught me something cool and useful. And, it is useful in both a "people would pay me for this shit" kind of way and in a "I've always wanted to be able to do this" kind of way. And, believe it or not, the education program has given me a lot of real-world experience and practical knowledge that will make my job as a teacher much easier.
If you go to college just for the earning potential, it is probably a waste of time. If you go to college to pursue a passion or, I don't know, learn something, you might find it a more valuable experience.
In terms of anti-intellectual geeks - Intellectualism doesn't mean that you can do something complicated or that you've built something, or that you can outprogram your peers in your chosen language. In my mind, intellectualism means a love for knowledge and truth and an endless curiosity. A lot of geeks have blinders to everything that isn't computers, gaming, or otherwise overtly nerdy.
Somehow the ideal of the Renaissance man has disappeared, but for quite some time I think that was the meaning taken by "Intellectual". To qualify, I think you need to value knowledge itself. As soon as you call some field of knowledge worthless, you've undermined the entire body of intellectualism. Sure Art History doesn't require calculus and doesn't have the same earning potential. So what? You've made it ok to say "knowledge is worthless" in one instance, so you undermine whatever piece of knowledge you claim to value.
I am a high school dropout with 160+ semester hours (Math, Art, Anthropology, Law, Business, Telecommunications...).
In 1969@17yo I was in the USMC. I make a decent living. I am respected by my peers and work colleagues. I am respected by scientist and engineers in labs and field. I am respected by lawyers for my understanding of technology application. IOW: I do very well without the academic crutch with (like myself) most professionals.
Regrettably, I seldom get any respect from business/career-management idiots, because I am degree-free. Senior, staff, and the wannabes of marketing and business management are frequently disappointing. They have no leadership skills, and excel at micro-management their next career move. I have never met any senior clerical leaders, staff/managers that I do not consider scoundrels and frequently just flat-out evil.
About 1 in three C*Os, project/program managers... and politicians are fair to exceptional and typically a mutual respect between the good/exceptional is probable.
Some folks; I work with say, I have a pragmatics science degree. I just know I am a good troubleshooter/guesser.
WHY DO I NEED/WANT A DEGREE? George Bush has one, I suspect Sara Palin, Don Trump, the Vatican Pope all have degrees. I bet most of politicians, C*Os, and economist have degrees. I knew there were no WMDs in Iraq, I knew the tech (got out six month early) and housing (I sold two thirds of my position) bubble would burst....
Anyway, degree or no degree does not make you an intellectual or moron, but an official degree does allow many folks to be elitist, walk on bullshit, and make money, then grin at the poor trusting folks that lose their homes, money, retirement, medical insurance ... and say "I want my life back."
"Intellectual" I know more about fine arts and applied or theoretical science/math than any Biz-buzzard I have ever met. I earn respect; So, let the dude-degree folks earn respect. I suspect, most cannot earn respect except from another Biz-buzzard.
Autodidacts with a degree in pragmatics, that always are learning, are the wave of the apt, agile, and flexible wave to the future. Stanford, MIT, Harvard ... are already moving to a new academic business model.
What it will finally be, I am not sure, but I suspect the Bush/Palin... of the future world are in for less money, housing, food, medical care, education....
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
What does it mean to be 'educated', 'intellectual'?
If you consider the total amount of known, once known but lost, and unknown information in the world, none of us begin to differ in our ignorance for about 20 decimal points to the right of zero.
Given endemic ignorance and a limited human mind, I have to make decisions. Wish I were smart enough to understand and remember all of the things I need to use in my daily work, but I am not. For my spare time, Proust isn't even on the horizon, there is history, science, psychology, neuroscience, biology, biochemistry, medicine, finance and current events that provide more context and insight on the world I live in, need to understand to make good judgments about my future and my kid's education, ...
So, I am on the side of us 'anti-intellectual geeks' : I don't need someone telling me what it is to be educated, their definition isn't much relevant to my life, my goals, ... And don't get me started about the weak minds of the average college graduate : most can't reason their way out of a paper bag even in subjects they are supposed to know well.
This stance has results : I have read more books than anybody I know. My 15-year-old kid has already read more books than most high schoolers, precisely because he is is home-schooled and I want him to be a broadly-educated person. But he can achieve that without anyone else's reading list, and I guarantee that he will be a really critical thinker because he and I have those conversations.
I think a college degree is useful for reasons of social prestige and proving that you an jump through hoops, but I observe it has zip to do with education, professional competence or level of intellectual knowledge and power.
As for CS, I have taught graduate-level courses in universities, never had a course. So of course I assume that any intelligent, competent person can learn anything necessary to do a job. That was assumed until recently in the world of technology : I learned all of the languages I use on the job. I read the text books for compilers, worked on compilers. Ditto OSs, drivers, ... I have worked on internals of Unix, Windows, Linux, never had a course in any of them, never passed any certifications. Ditto networking, ...
This is common among my friends and people I pulled into various jobs over the years. I have hired Ph.D.s in English who went on to become great programmers, without taking courses.
Instead of college, friends of my kid are getting technical degrees before they finish high school, are earning a living right out of high school. They will finish a college degree, maybe, someday. Meanwhile, experience counts, they don't have debts and they have a lot of time to read, something college kids seem to do too little of.
Are you serious?
Has it ever occurred to you that the position might be (at best) cynical or (at worst) simply mistaken (due to college being widely viewed as a party atmosphere rather than an intellectual atmosphere)?
The cynical viewpoint has a lot of merit, IHMO. Just the textbook racket alone makes me think a person can learn the same stuff a hell of a lot cheaper, and that at least a significant part of the institution's real purpose is to shake money out of people. Think about it: we're in the information age, and instead of tuitions and other costs plummeting like you should expect, they're going up. That alone tells you that college, even if you charitably maintain it is still intellectual, is nevertheless horribly broken.
Then there's the proliferation of technical colleges: it amazes the fuck out of me to talk to a person who is taking Java or .Net courses yet still isn't learning a goddamn thing about either CS or sometimes even programming. And vocational colleges simply aren't intellectual, but half the people I know have been going to those. That doesn't mean they are useless; if someone learns auto mechanics like that, I think it's cool, but let's not confuse useful with cerebral.
I'm not saying there aren't good colleges out there, but the average case is going to have to get a shitload better and cleaned up, before the general institution of college can be credibly said to be on the "intellectual" side rather than neutral or anti-intellectual side. If you think college is intellectual, you need to talk to a wider sample of college graduates, both about what they've learned and what their experiences were. Get out of your bubble and smell the bullshit.
Power instincts flaring up everywhere here.
The reason to read the works of (or paraphrases of the works of) ancient or historical thinkers is because they introduced new concepts and new patterns of thought. You can study these concepts and their relationships, and rehearse these patterns of thought, and increase your intellectual ammunition and versatility.
To think you don't need to get deep into some of these areas, and don't need to take time to wander around in each area of knowledge with expert guides, because "there is a wikipedia page for that", is the height of pseudo-intellectual arrogance. You will know the stuff in the same way a parrot knows it. And it will be as much use to you as it is to the parrot.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
because college is SOO intellectual. academia
I think you've failed to separate intellectualism and college education. These are two discrete concepts. The college "educated" would love to think that their piece of paper makes them an intellectual, but it just doesn't. Some people are smart. Some people aren't. Very rarely can you take someone who isn't smart, force facts at them, and wind up with an intelligent thinker. More often you have a dumb person who knows what year the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
Hm, each one of those majority positions has a chance of being wrong. I wouldn't be too sure not one of them turns out to be.
None of which has anything to do with college. Understanding computer science generically requires... studying computer science. Holy shit. What a fucking concept.
If you treat your profession as a trade, you'll learn trade skills. If you treat it as an art or a science you'll learn more. If you are intellectually curious you'll study outside of your bubble.
College can certainly help with those things, but it's not the one and only true path.
The reason to read the works of (or paraphrases of the works of) ancient or historical thinkers is because they introduced new concepts and new patterns of thought. You can study these concepts and their relationships, and rehearse these patterns of thought, and increase your intellectual ammunition and versatility.
So I can parrot these guys? Become an unoriginal automaton?
To think you don't need to get deep into some of these areas, and don't need to take time to wander around in each area of knowledge with expert guides, because "there is a wikipedia page for that", is the height of pseudo-intellectual arrogance. You will know the stuff in the same way a parrot knows it. And it will be as much use to you as it is to the parrot.
Damn right there is a wikipedia page for that, information isn't hard to come by these days. It's the ability to work with that information that's not being taught in hardly many schools
And to quote someone above:
Seeing college purely as exchanging money for employability in a particular field, of course it is a bad deal.
Welcome to the HR mandated curriculum. I wonder how many companies would soar to profitability by just laying off the whole damn HR money sink?
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Enlightened individuals can rise above it and do well despite it, but they wouldn't live long enough if the ignorant masses didn't have a system to keep the later from killing the former.
Journalism 101 template: "Is dead?"
Journalism 201 template: retitle Journalism 101 material: "Is there a new trend against ?"
Congratulations on graduating to your second semester of Journalism school.
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
The Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University is a "John Doe from Podunk"? Were his colleages in that debate also the same? Is Hawking the sum of theoretical physics?
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
This sums it up. Everyone else can stop now.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain
A Geek can like Sci-Fi, Computers, Gadgets, Board/Card Games, Code and Hack.
A Nerd can be all of those things, plus is an intellectual, usually formally educated.
A Dork can like Geeky or Nerdy things, without any of the capabilities of either.
Say what you want about religion, but Catholicism has helped shape young minds to be fit for the workplace far better than the exceptional, honest scientist. The fact is that deep in the scientific subtext is a dangerous idea -- that if you remove any assumptions about social order, and begin applying science to your own life, your own personality and your own standards, that you can blindside the least desirable bits of the established order with your own ideas.
That leaves us with how to keep the wheels greased. The key notion is that American culture is not worth rescuing. Why would a child eat or want to be a STEM or any other kind of vegetable when he or she can feast on sugar? Foreign students are doing the work of getting the proper education just fine on their own -- the only metric is that there are enough of these professionals to wind up as the necessary cogs of industry. Indoctrinated, of course, with necessary subtext -- limit your interests to your own field, and never consider the implications in a broader context. Also, contracts are binding and non-negotiable; of course your mindshare is of the company's benefit solely.
To think of the average American child, therefore, we need only appeal to economics. I will take for given the idea that public schools are inefficient. That granted, the Catholic Church has considerable infrastructure already in place to take over a large breadth of education. Coursework would be greatly simplified into the substance necessary: respect for authority. The price of a penis entering an anus a normative corrective context could not possibly be lower, and this would be a critical part of education. Instead of a standardized test, we would get back to the individual teacher having discretion on which students pass; the metric would be solely if the child exhibits the necessary rate of submission.
In conclusion, we must affirm our societal values by applying them economically; these are corporate values at their best. Time-honored and conservative; easy to relate to and understand. Christian in every way.
Find your love in school while you are still in it. If you wait until working outside to find your other half, all you get is gold diggers.
Of course there are people who still want to go this route because it saves you money during college, but then make sure you get a pre-nuptial to protect your assets.
New Economic Perspectives
I think you might need to define what you mean a bit better. Also what you mean by geek.
I think a geek is a person who not only has a passion but an avid interest in continuing to better their knowledge on a specific subject. This may upset a lot of people, but the person who went to college for chemistry, goes to work and does his job in chemistry but doesn't care at all about increasing his knowledge in chemistry outside some forced job training is NOT a chemistry geek.
It doesn't mean he's not a geek, it simply means he doesn't have an interest in being a chemistry geek. This does mean in my opinion that you can have specialist geeks, who have a passion and avid interest in something but don't care about the other bits going on around them.
A doer also doesn't define a geek, as the comic book geek who doesn't do anything other than increase his knowledge of comics doesn't make him not a geek.
And college is a tool, you get as much out of it as you want to. So the person who uses it as a tool to get job is neat, it doesn't make it the only tool. But a lot of people have trouble self teaching and learning so it's a tool a lot of people like, and perhaps need. To mock or put down college is silly, it's just a tool.
The geeks you seem to be referring to I would call renaissance geeks. They are probably people who have multiple interests and pursue them with a passion. I think the thing that sets them apart from others is that they like to pursue multiple interests. But to do this successfully they have to interact with other people outside of the normal geek only avenues. This means they have to develop better socials interactions and interests in other things so they can interact with the people who are not geeks or various types of geeks.
In my long winded rant I did forget to mention that people are people, there have been multiple articles on slashdot about how people seem to dislike facts that prove them wrong. This also applies to geeks as well.
But this is just my humble opinion.
there is a growing realization that higher education, outside of a select few degrees (which have limited openings annually) is a SCAM.
The industry is striking back. The Higher Education Cartel Strikes Back! with a propaganda offensive. This is multi-billion dollar industry, one that preys on naive youngsters.
Filth.
Cut their balls off and hang them on poles to rot!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde
What's somewhat amusing is that many of the great thinkers we study in education had few good things to say about education.
Many forms of intellectual inquiry better yield themselves methods of discovery other than the Socratic method. This is simply the case because of the cheapness of presentation medium in the modern age. Few would argue that Sesame Street, for example, inhibits intellectual development of children. Well, with the cost of interactive medium coming to the low levels it has come to, many forms of inquiry (which were previously only available through the rigorous structure of the Socratic method) are now available to be purveyed through more individualized means. Those adroit at exploiting such venues of discovery are not anti-intellectual, but they often are geeks. They may appear to be anti-intellectual since they sidestep the orthodox methods of inquiry (which are traditionally associated with intellectual endeavor). But those who give too much credit to such appearances are guilty of elevating form over function.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The core belief of a geek is seeking knowledge in all its forms. It doesn't matter if you do it in school or self taught, whether you build or study, the seeking is the thing itself.
Hm, each one of those majority positions has a chance of being wrong. I wouldn't be too sure not one of them turns out to be.
Established theories are well tested models of how certain bits of the universe work and by definition models are imperfect. However, established theories (eg:Evolution, AGW, Heliocentricity, Germ Theory, Politically sensitive theory X) are very unlikely to be flat out wrong
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The times I have heard Peter Thiel speak in person, I have been decidedly unimpressed. He's one of the guys that got lucky, he's not where he is because of genius. So of course he's going to reject college education, he didn't need one to get where he is.
College isn't the only place where you can find books. In fact, it's often the last place that you'll find them. You don't have to go to a college textbook store anymore in order to get screwed when buying college level texts. In theory, you don't even need to attend classes that require you buy said book but never assigns any reading from it. Not all learning is from books, and some professors make their lectures on video while a mixed bag of lousy/fantastic ones don't. Want to learn about circuits in an electronics lab? Program with cutting edge Unix "workstations"? Buy a breadboard and some other bits from a Digikey catalog and any old laptop.....
See this is where both you and the parent are right and wrong. Many of the geeks I know agree that college is a waste of time, but they also have read the classics and then some. Some of these "anti-intellectuals" are far more learned and social aware than many of these college educated nerds. Education doesn't need to come from schools, and from what I've seen a degree doesn't tell me more about a person than that they spent money on college.
Principles... NOT "PRINCIPALS" (as my init. reply stated) - one nice thing to see here though, @ least in this forums section of /.: NO DAMN SPELL-CHECKER NAZIS!
(Still - I just HAD to "catch it", before nitpickers could!)
APK
P.S.=> So lol @ myself, & That's what I get for posting after doing the lawn today, & it was the day of the HUGE 'sunspot explosion' -> http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/07/2224225/Massive-Explosion-On-the-Sun (perhaps it was radiation? "Inquiring minds, want to know!" lol (so excuse the misspell guys)... apk
True.
For that, you must start with silence.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No, Geeks just think they know better. Very competitive and egotistical.
On a sliding scale of intellectual, a geek is well above the average in a given social group but below a true academic. A select group of them tend to become academics. Once and awhile one becomes a poisoned dragon and becomes Malcolm Gladwell, the anti-thiesit of a true intellectual
64,000 is among the highest starting salaries I've ever heard quoted for a bachelor's degree holder. I can't expect to earn that much starting out, even as an engineering major (and one of the higher-paying engineering degrees, at that).
Nobody ever said going to college was a total wash. My degree makes good economic sense, but I'm an engineer. You can't cherry-pick the highest earning 5 or 10 % of bachelor's holders and infer that college makes good economic sense. Run the numbers on people who have degrees in kinesiology or journalism or even business administration. Keep in mind that many bachelor's degrees, such as mathematics, biology, physics, history, and English, don't have good potential for advancement/promotion unless followed by more, and more expensive, education. Furthermore, don't forget to factor in the 3+ years of real life experience that one might have in a job if one had gone looking straight out of high school.
The fact underlying "college is a waste of time" is not that all of academia is redundant and only grabbing for your money. Rather, it encourages each student to critically evaluate whether the degree he intends to get makes good economic sense. Not everybody is cut out for engineering.
@Larry Sanger. I agree and here are my opinions/comments. I expect geeks to be intellectual and have never tied formal or informal education with intellectualism. I have often felt disappointed at the spelling, grammar, mathematics and other minor errors shown by some of the geeks. But I have seen similar errors shown by other professionals also and was equally dismayed, not that I wanted to, but had no choice in accepting what was true. One word, Geek and Intellectualism are obviously not synonyms, and as all engineers, physicians and other professional are not at the same level in terms of expertise; so are various schools, Ivy league or other, this then will not be proper to expect and attach a significance to one working professional with all the intellectual capacities, because of the anticipated connotations involved with the word "Geek". My guess is, it would be more appropriate to judge or evaluate on a case by case basis rather than roll all under one carpet or put on a high pedestal.
College was a waste of time. I didn't learn anything from any teacher/professor/educator in college. It was just an extremely expensive day-care where I taught myself everything I learned.
Going to college has intangible benefits, and that means you are less likely to do stupid stuff like crack cocaine, unplanned parenthood, etc. After going to college, you have a better clue of how the world works and that may, or may not, help you survive and succeed in it.
You can go to college and still do stupid stuff, so this argument of "self improvement" isn't always good.
The tangible benefit of going to college is that you are better in a certain trade. If you went to a good college, you are not simply trained, you have an actual deeper understanding of the trade.
To cite an example that I'm familiar with, anyone that works with compressed gases knows that when a compressed gas discharges to the atmosphere, it gets colder. If you studied fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, you know why that happens and you can even predict how much colder it will get. The guy that worked with compressed CO2 for 5 years will have just a "feeling" for it, and that kind of "feeling" won't get us to the stars.
Now, if that deeper understanding of the trade will translate to economic benefit, that depends on the society you are in. Sadly for my american friends, your society doesn't value that sort of knowledge as it used to. Maybe you need another USSR and terrorism isn't cutting to it, maybe the american dream succumbed to greed, idk. Here in Brazil, the trend for economic value of knowledge is certainly up.
PS.: there are 3 ways to explain why gases get colder when decompressed to an open environment: thermal energy is transformed into kinetic energy; or the gas suffers an adiabatic decompression, and it cools because it exerts work on the surrounding air; or if you consider temperature as random movement of the atoms, when you align that movement to a certain direction, the random movement of the particles must decrease to keep the energy of each particle constant. Number 3 is just a fancy way of saying number 1, though.
Every year I was an undergrad, my score in the Putnum math competition dropped (in my first year I got the highest score in my school, second year I tied for highest, third year I was middle of the pack and fourth year I was so stressed about other work that I overslept on the day and missed it entirely).
That's the only emperical evidence I have, but it suggests that higher education was worse than useless for me :)
I've never seen a worse case of 'correlation does not imply causation'. A generation ago, corporations had plenty of good-paying office jobs for which college grads (of any major) were a reasonable fit. This is the source of the idea that 'if you go to college, you'll get a good-paying job'.
Corporations don't have those jobs anymore, and they will never have them again because business information is online now (no paper to shuffle means no paper shufflers). There never was a causal link between being a college graduate and getting a good-paying job; that could only happen if we had a perfectly managed economy that would only allow n people to go to college if n jobs were going to be available in four years.
Really?
They actually introduced new ways of thinking?
I'm sorry but I find that somewhat hard to believe. They may well have performed thorough intellectual investigation of thought patterns, of what it means to be human, to be alive etc etc, but I think you credit them with being more influential on the rest of humanity than you can possibly support.
Yes. ..." I would get a reply along the lines of "Nuclear waste does not exist, it's just an opportunity for future fuel - and what about coal?". Mindless fanboys cheering for their team and regurgitating the lines from PR campaigns. They are extremely hostile if there is any mention of the underlying science. That's anti-intellectualism.
A major characteristic of a self defined geek is a love of technology. Among a disturbing number of those is an inpatience, disgust or even absolute hatred of the underlying science or whatever field of study lies behind the technolgy they love.
It's cargo cult anti-intellectualism.
You can see many examples of this on the comments to articles here, many along the lines of "who cares, don't tell me about this advance until I can buy it at Walmart". Other examples lie with anything involving biology or climate where the scientists are derided and arguments by barely educated lay preachers and mathematically illiterate economists are put forward instead. Something like that cannot be mistaken as anything other than anti-intellectual by anyone other than partisans cheering mindlessly for their team.
Discussions on civilian nuclear technology here really draw out the mindless cargo cult behaviour. For example if I was to put something like "Synroc stablises high grade nuclear waste by incorportating
It's not just the nuclear power cargo cult with their 1970s PR fuelled dreams, there was a frequent advocate of solar energy by photovoltaic cells here that described the simplest behaviour of materials under stress as "magical thinking" and was full of insults for anyone that dared to discuss simple high school physics. There's a beanstalk cargo cult that do not understand why there is the concept of a space elevator in the first place - they just know that it is GOOD and anyone who wants to bring very simple physics in to explain why things won't just rise off the ground on the beanstalk without putting in some energy gets hit with mindless rage and insults - how dare you sully the lovely dream of technology with talk of science! They do not begin to understand that the technolgy does not just magically drop from the sky.
You've misunderstood what anti-intellectualism is.
You have a point that intellectualism is not intrinsically intertwined with geekdom (although more often then not it is) but that does not make it anti-intellectual.
To clarify, Anti-Intellectualism is the rejection and ridicule of intellectual pursuits. Being a geek is contrary to this, even if you're a traditional hacker and never pursued structured study you are still driven by a desire to learn. People who are geeks tend to be good learners and rational and/or abstract thinkers. They put their brains to work a lot and demonstrate aptitude in problem solving. Geeks are often intellectual, even without appearing to be.
Anti-intellectuals on the other hand constantly deride learning and problem solving, They tend to be followers who discourage individual thinking, often irrational and erratic using loaded arguments and emotional language to instil hate, fear or loathing in those who they dispose. Luddites fit the mould of anti-intellectuals as do most fanboys. The "jock" is the classic example.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
And yet here I am with a six figure salary, programming in C, a language that's been around since the 70s.
A good foundation in computer science doesn't become irrelevant. The language of the moment may, which is why it's not always the best idea to heavily teach the current fad.
The capacity to learn on your own and with your peers is what defines a geek. You go where curriculum dare not tread and actually hit the books instead of skimming power points and skimping on others notes. Money, brawn, good will and a quirky attitude don't yield brains no matter how much you have. The only way to usable knowledge is through your head not the doors to any building or some magical being in your locker.
so what you are saying is in order to consider my logic and thought to be sufficient, I first have to read these books? that is like saying you must read On the Origin of Species to understand evolution. Both are equally idiotic and if you think so, your ability in both fields is probably lacking. Darwin, while having a great idea, did not understand the process or or the science as it is understood today and frankly, modern evolutionary theory can be taught without knowing anything about some random islands he went to. Being able to quote Darwin is for people who want to seem or act like they are educated.
For the rest of us trying to expand our boundaries, we'll happily forgo wasting time on methods and ideas that have either been completely replaced or expounded upon in ways that clarify the ideas. It'll save us time so we can try and push forward.
To clarify, Anti-Intellectualism is the rejection and ridicule of intellectual pursuits.
If you define "college" to be a subset of "intellectual pursuits" then geekdom is anti-intellectual (for at least some of the subset of intellectual pursuits).
Anti-intellectuals on the other hand constantly deride learning and problem solving,
Geekdom doesn't get a free pass because they deride learning at college and support learning if it's from self-study. They deride learning. Thus they are anti-intellectuals. That they then praise some "approved" subset of learning doesn't change the fact that they already earned the anti-intellectual label by deriding learning.
Note, the above is a little more "devil's advocate" than I like to be, but it's showing that when you look at specific traits and specific geekdom beliefs, they can be seen to be anti-intellectual.
Learn to love Alaska
The problem with this article is the author's incorrect implicit definition of intellectualism. Intellectualism is not about memorizing facts or reading books, but is a personality trait defined by a love of learning.
I would argue that "geeks" are not anti-intellectual as you position, but are increasingly against traditional (and often sorely outdated) methods of gaining knowledge.
I myself am against traditional education, and yet I am a very intelligent, knowledgeable person. I have gained that knowledge by learning on my own, and through others. In today's society you just don't have to go to a special building and pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn a lot of things.
Anyway, I'm not going to stay on my soapbox... suffice to say that traditional education is, to me, mostly obsolete or in need of a serious overhaul.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
You've defined it as that, I said
Being a geek is contrary to this, even if you're a traditional hacker and never pursued structured study you are still driven by a desire to learn.
You're trying to paint the issue into a black and white corner here. Being geeky does not preclude having an education from an institution or choosing other methods of learning.
Geekdom doesn't get a free pass because they deride learning at college
I know few geeks who'd actually do this.
Those geeks who did not get a formal education are normally smart enough not to deride it as they understand that learning can happen in may forms.
I'm uni educated, I do not deride anyone who is not for the simple reason that I understand that they can be just as smart as I am, perhaps more so. Trying to limit the definition of "education" to gained certifications is pointless as it's easy to change the definition. E.G.
I'll bet that you are not a certified boilermaker therefore you are uneducated.
This is a strawman because it ignores A) you may have the skill set but not the certification B) boilermaking is not the only skill in the world.
Uni/Collage is not the only way to learn, although in my experience it's a very good way (TAFE, the rough collage equivalent in Australia is focused on delivering practical skills and does quite a good job at it) but it is not the only way. Anti-intellectualism is rejection of learning, not disagreeing over the best method.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If you define "college" to be a subset of "intellectual pursuits" then geekdom is anti-intellectual (for at least some of the subset of intellectual pursuits).
Er? That doesn't seem to be a valid logical proposition at all. Are you sure you went to college?
LET COLLEGE = SUBSET (INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS)
LET GEEK = NOT COLLEGE
GEEK = NOT INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS
therefore ALL(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS) = SUBSET(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS)
Error: attempt to equate subset with totality of superset. Assertion failed.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Do not accept the axiom of a point and everything based on it. Do not accept bivalent logic or classification. Do not accept naive set theory. Instead, study category theory and fuzzy systems.
PS: I'm not here trying to say that academia does more damage than media, mind you -- but it does make the damage a bit more difficult to cure since it has the veneer useful knowledge.
Seastead this.
Pulling numbers and averages out of the air is a wonderful generalization: I'm glad it helps you sleep nights, but your numbers don't mean anything without context and I can think of plenty of cases where these don't apply.
Which bachelor's degrees/sectors/sources are you referring to?
I know many of us just associate with other geeks, but this phenomenon isn't at all confined to the geek world. Don't overthink this one. Conservatism has had a nice little rebound in the last year or so, not to mention a trend in the US that really started in 2001 with the election of the quintessential anti-intellectual, George W. Bush. Modern conservatism is, at its core, anti-intellectual. It doesn't care about facts, degrees, experts, or reason. It's all about giving in to your fear, and what your gut tells you. The masses are most easily lured by this kind of philosophy, but geeks aren't immune to it, either. Geeks are humans, too.
Re: "college is a waste of time"
It may be for certain people. If you have a good business sense and are industrious, you can do quite well without college (at least financially). In my opinion, having a degree is a good hedge against the uncertainty of the future, but balancing such risk is up to the individual. It's not about logic, it's about personal choices about future career tradeoffs.
Table-ized A.I.
"you must start with silence"
Which you obviously don't do.
Your initial post was a reply where you simply posted what you wanted to say. No posting your own thread for you, oh no. What you have to say is way more important. It needs to be posted at the top so everyone can see just how special you are.
That is an obvious attempt to force your own opinions into the discussion rather than starting your own thread.
We would prefer your silence.
and as every idiot who know where to get a cracked Windows 7 from claims to be a geek now, anti-intellectualism is just the logic consequence of no intellectualism at all. We gor assimilated. Resistance would have been futile, anyway. Also social misbehavious is out of seasons for geeks now, you really do not want to join a bunch of grown ups who behave like 13year old highschool dropouts to pretend procramming skills they don't have.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
You are right. When you purposefully screw up what I say in order to prove your point, you can prove any point you like.
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, there *are* many people who went to university who know nothing; and yes, there *are* many people with no formal education who know something. Neither of those facts prove anything.
The real question is: If *I* had not gone to university, would *I* have been better or worse off?
(In my opinion, based on personal experience, the answer is that I would've been worse off without university.)
At least you know the difference -- the author of this blog seems to confuse the two. But I can't agree with this:
there's more point to learning than increasing intelligence,
Intelligence and willingness to learn are far more important, in my opinion, than knowledge itself. Given any problem, it's a lot easier to learn stuff about that problem domain so that I can help solve it than it is to increase my intelligence, or to learn whole new ways of thinking. On the other hand, if I lack the basic intelligence to tackle a problem, there's no amount of learning other than knowing the solution by rote that will help me.
Both make more sense. Learning is important. Learning stuff that may never be relevant is also teaching you different ways of thinking, and this is true even in pure geekdom -- learning truly different programming languages (Lisp, Haskell, Erlang), hardware design, machine code, and actually implementing the basic data structures (like in any CS2 course) all change the way you think about programming, even if you will never do those things again. And I absolutely agree about a well-rounded person.
Kind of like Naruto. Sasuke is a genius. Lee wants to match Sasuke through hard work. Naruto passes both of them by being a hard-working genius.
Still, high intelligence without broad learning gives you the kind of teenage geniuses who contribute so much to open source. Low intelligence with a degree gives you an MBA. I don't know about you, but I think the world needs a lot more open source hackers and a lot fewer MBAs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The exact opposite, actually: so you can analyze them for their strengths and weaknesses, and adapt their strengths to make your own new discoveries and realizations.
And yet, as your comment's parent points out, you will have zero understanding of the concepts involved: you can memorize and regurgitate facts, but that's it. And without guidance by a credentialed expert in the field, you will have no understanding of the scholarly context to put them in their proper place.
Damn right there is a wikipedia page for that, information isn't hard to come by these days. It's the ability to work with that information that's not being taught in hardly many schools.
Are you talking about schools not teaching the general population properly? Because I was under the impression that the topic was geeks.
A wikipedia page is a nice starting point as always, but self-teaching can lead to narrow knowledge, since there's no teacher to kick your butt and point out all the stuff you completely overlooked.
So I can parrot these guys? Become an unoriginal automaton?
You're an unoriginal automaton right now. It seems you're the person who should be reading some of the books mentioned. Or rather, any book from outside your current world view (the mentioned authors are by no means a requirement). "Expanding one's horizon" is something one rarely understands before actually having done it numerous times. I'm not saying you're narrow-minded, but simply latitudinally challenged on this particular topic.
This isn't about pontificating with a book and wine glass in hand, it's about experiencing ideas you never realized could exist.
Knowledge of these people will rarely help you in any business or IT environment.
Right, so you appear to be concerned with business requirements, career, problem solving, possibly money. If this is the full extent of your interests, have fun!
Technology is moving fast. Ideas are not.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
A jock is someone who likes to use his brawn.
A geek is someone who likes to use his brain.
A nerd is a geek who has a strong topical focus.
You're a geek if... - you study some field of knowledge (real or fantasy) because you enjoy improving your knowledge/understanding.
- you build things that require thought (whether electronics, computer software, or even advanced and complex Lego structures).
- you like to have cerebreal adventures (ex. roleplaying, sci-fi/fantasy fiction)
- you like to think up better ways for society to work.
- etc.
You're a jock if...
- you do physical activies because you enjoy improving your physique/looks.
- you build things that are strong (whether powerful engines, noisy engines, or even building strong brick walls).
- you like to have physical adventures (ex. jumping off high places, chasing a ball)
- you like drink up and socialise
- etc.
Most of us are a combination of both. The question is how much geek vs. jock you are.
Does your geek side overwhelm your jock side, or does your jock side overwhelm your geek side?
On the topic of further education: If you went to college/uni because...
- you liked to learn and understand, then you're a geek.
- you just wanted the degree, then you're not a geek.
Even if you didn't have higher education, if you like to learn, then you're still a geek.
So, if you like to think, but can't be bothered studying, then you're only part geek,
and if you're "opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs" then you're not a geek at all.
GEEK = NOT INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS
Fantastic work there, try again...
A nerd is generally a highly intellectual person with a strong, if nothing else academic skill set (whether through the universities or self-taught). A geek on the other hand (and mind you the original definition of geek is "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake") is a person who lives a certain lifestyle where their method of gaining attention and possibly public acceptance is to behave in a manor which is entirely different than is considered the "public normal" for lack of an alternative wording. In many ways, being a geek is simply a way of conforming to a non-conformist group similar to the modern "goth movement" or the "Smiths' style Meat is Murder" styles of the 80's.
Geeks on the other hand are different from the other non-conformists as they are often more or less intentionally conforming to the "geek style" in order to allow themselves to "fit in" among others. In many ways, geek is a safety mechanism. If you're not particularly good at sports, self-articulation, personal presentation (grooming not excluded), style, fashion etc... upon reaching a secondary school level, in order to avoid simply being an outcast, a geek will emerge from their childhood cocoon of simply being an awkward child. It allows them to embed themselves within a larger community where they can solve the issue of finding social peers as well as being less of a target for people such as "jocks" who infamously have caused the geek community grief to attempt to make themselves seem more important before moving onto a highly lucrative career of wearing ties and misusing buzzwords (if they're lucky enough to avoid working at a gas station or McDonalds).
Nerds on the other hand are a group of people who may or may not also be geeks. A nerd is often a person whose interests and areas of specialty is academically focussed. While there are other types of nerds, generally a "real nerd" is very mathematically and/or scientifically focussed. Nerds can be found in any social group ranging from geeks to hippies to fashionistas even jocks.
A person does not actually need to be a geek to be a nerd and conversely, it is not necessarily that a geek is in fact intelligent.
Geekdom is more often labelled as opposed to seeked out. Many geeks simply were outcasts and eventually just found themselves grouped in with other geeks. Most other social groups have a special dress code that must be met and maintained as a minimum entry requirement. In most cases, geeks are simply people who don't bother with this. After a certain point, even geekdom requires a dress code be met, though it's generally much simpler as it doesn't require color coordination or fashion sense. Sometimes, it's as simple as choosing to buy the same type of clothing you'd get if your mother was doing the shopping for you.
As an adult, leaving geekdom behind can be as simple as buying a new set of clothing and frequenting a different social environment. Dressing in a suit and going to a bar where people judge how important other people by what suit their wearing is an example. Of course, in that environment, a proper haircut helps as well, often a change in eye wear as well. This group often sees glasses as an imperfection and many members of this group will choose to walk around half blind to avoid being seen in glasses. Buying some blue jeans and a few concert T-shirts will allow a person to easily integrate into a rock bar crowd. Leather, chains etc... gets you into the goth crowd. Researching fashion from magazines and dressing those styles will get you into the pop-culture crowd, this one however requires that a person can exhume a sense of confidence even if it is false.
Nerds are often geeks. In other social cultures, a person's worth is often measured by what they wear or who they know. Sometimes simply by how well they smile, laugh or tell a joke. In nerd culture (which is not geek culture), people are accepted based on either what they know or what they are able to
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You rather lost me when you started spouting your weeboo references.
However when the concepts are in your head, combining them works more efficiently than if you first have to Google them.
Speak for yourself.
To me, true geekdom always was wizard buisenes.
I went to university to become a wizard because I was sick of always beeing just a mere sorcerer.
Also, while often useful, one has to specialise to experience deephack-mode. A jack of all trades will never reach that level of enlightenment.
And while we'r at it, that demockrackzy sucks aswell. The least common denominator is never the best descision.
Does that all sound unpopular? Well it always did. It just happened that computers got cool and geeks got somehow into the focus of beeing cool and all those who could never live up to true geekdom (due to other interests etc.) redefined it to match their low level.
TFA is only wrong at thinking those guys were real geeks.
I think the problem is actually the fact that people graduate from these Universities, and cant write a line of batch script to save their lives.
Geeks are geeks from birth; not later on in college.
jamest
Yes you read that right :D
Seriously, to the author- shut up. College is a good idea for some people, and a bad idea for others. When you hear someone say "College is always good" or "College is never good", you know they are not to be trusted. Which is why I didn't bother reading any further.
I agree with both you and the writer of the article to equal extent. Conversely, I disagree with both you to a similar extent.
Calling Plato, Proust, etc fucktards really doesn't serve any kind of purpose at all. Do you think you have nothing you can learn from those people? If so, I think it's fair to call you an anti-intellectual. I agree you don't have to go to university to get a broad education and exhibit some intellectual curiosity in the human experience, but showing contempt for that curiosity is pretty contemptible.
While we agree that it's important to think, your post gives the impression that you consider only a narrow band of subjects worth thinking about -- to wit: things that will help you in a business or IT environment.
I could argue that a certain general knowledge of western culture would help you in a business environment. The Borgias and Machiavellie would almost certainly help in a strategic sense, while being well read and erudite is generally helpful unless your aim is to be chief of the cellar dwelling server maintenance tribe. That would however be missing the real point, which is this: your intellect is useful beyond IT and business. It's worth applying your intellect to issues of culture, society, economics, ethics, and humanity. It's worth reading what other people have had to say on the topics, and it's worth reading the intellectual works that have formed the basis of our society. It is especially worthwhile to read these things with a critical, analytical, intellectual mind, to see what you agree with, what strikes you as wonky, and what can be tested and disproven. It is fascinating to see how our minds work, how our societies function, and how they are developed. The more you know about these subjects, the more you can contribute to our society as a whole. In short, it makes you a better human being and a better citizen. It's also fun.
I'm reminded of a guy in my English Lit class at Georgia Tech, who complained loudly that we had to read "The Odyssey". He wanted to know why we had to read what a bunch of dumb Greek guys wrote about gods, when now we have science and understand how the world works. To this day I think on him and have to shake my head at his fat headed willful ignorence. You don't read The Odyssey to understand how the physical world works. You read it to understand how the human mind works, how western culture developed, to understand the origins of what are, even today, common elements of our culture. To understand the power of metaphor. To understand the human tendency to find patterns (even ones that don't exist) and to anthropomorphise patently non-anthropomorphic behavior. To understand how ideas of ethical behavior, culture, civilization and a good life have changed over the years, and the origins of our modern beliefs. To understand how wars start, and how they are justified... It's also very useful to see the mistakes people have made in the past, to understand how and why we make similar mistakes to this day.
In case you are interested, here's my reply the post's author:
I agreed with you right up until you spouted this bit of nonsense. Credentials, and social recognition of being an expert in the field are neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee the ability to confer understanding of a subject. They are social tools with that purpose in mind, and they are relatively good indicators, but that doesn't mean there aren't better alternatives. In point of fact, my experience has been that the best people in a particular field are rarely the best at teaching a particular field (be that humanities or physics).
:-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The simple act of reading any book doesn't make you a better person. However the subsequent incorporation of the ideas held in the book to your own life may well have an effect (just ask any Christian about the bible, a devout muslim about the Koran, any 16 year old who has just read Atlas Shrugged, Myra Hindley about the Marquis de Sade). Whether the changes result in a human who is better or not may end up being a subjective judgement, but you can definitely say the human is acting differently as a result of those ideas. They may act differently such that you appraise them as a 'better person' or a 'worse person'. Without the means of transferring ideas and knowledge to the next generation through books, I think it's fair to say that the human race would have advanced much slower. In fact picking up the right book can inform us about the effect the Gutenberg press had on our culture.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Geeks are supposed to be, if anything, intellectual
I disagree, geeks should be doers. They should make things, be it overly detailed costumes, or new pieces of electronics. I don't think the hacker ethic is about intellectualism, it's about doing. The intellectual part is a side-effect, and a helper, but it is not a requirement. Maybe I'm wrong to refer to hot-rodders as car geeks though.
You can be an intellectual and a doer. In fact, I would argue that most intellectuals are doers.
How the hell can I respond to this?
I can't. Someone who could write such a statement is beyond help. Too many like him and we are all beyond help.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I find myself agreeing with all the positions that the source article is criticising. But, the funny thing is that not once in the essay does the author use any terms relating knowledge to "reasoning". This is what separates us geek anti-intellectuals from the other anti-intellectuals; we prise reasoning above memorization.
I also find the traditional academic intellectualism has lost its way. It is no longer about the progress of civilization, but it kind of become an exclusive club that speaks its own language and exists only propagate itself. This isn't limited to the humanities. If you ever tried to read any recent papers on object oriented design you end up wondering if it is possible to make such a simple idea even more complicated. (That is until you make the mistake of trying to read another paper)
More like a rebellion from traditional intellectualism.
A school is an institution of knowledge, yes, but it is also a bureaucracy.
To abandon the bureaucracy is not to abandon the institution.
Though I'm not sure whether that's his own failing, or whether it just reflects the attitude of the people he's discussing — perhaps especially those in the world of education.
Personally, I see external devices (reference books, handheld devices, Internet access, etc.) as a pretty good repository for data; also for facts (if you can sort out issues of trust and validation), and maybe even for knowledge. But wisdom is something very different, and can't be externalised in the same way.
To use the article's example, there's little point in memorising the data of the Battle of Hastings simply so that you can respond to questions like “When was the Battle of Hastings?” However, knowing that date allows you to relate it to other dates, events, situations, trends, and patterns; it can become part of a mental framework that gives you a broad understanding of the whole time and place, and that's the sort of thing that no external references can substitute for.
To pick a more extreme example:
And any discussion of ‘knowledge’ which fails to distinguish those cases is going to get mired in misunderstanding.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
To be considered "intellectual", I believe you need to be knowledgeable in more than just what is applicable to your "business or IT environment".
You're saying that knowledge and "mental prowess" is only important if it's applied to a paying job.
It's a reason that the most well known intellectuals are also known as great thinkers.
That's my take on it anyway.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
You have to separate the questions you're asking. Is college worth it? No. The price has been skyrocketing past inflation for 40 years now and the more education you get, the less the marketplace will reward you for getting it relative to the cost of getting it. What's more, the value of the deliverable can be had for pennies not on the dollar but on the $100.00 unit. Think of how many high quality books and months of internet access you can buy for your typical $2,500 course.
Colleges are a business concerned with 1) staying alive and 2) making money. What they're not concerned with or in competition over is the quality of education. High quality colleges don't educate- they select the best from a population which is capable of educating themselves and this is how they retain their reputation. No college attempts to teach people to learn, be creative, be curious, be engaged, or be effective. They compete over those students that are already those things.
The other question your asking is are geeks anti-intellectual? Not more so than the underlying population. Too many geeks easily fall prey to junk science, like climate change denialism (ESR comes to mind) but these are allegedly college educated geeks. The problem is something like a third of the US population is openly hostile to science and the another third have had their brains hoovered out by the nice man selling a "free market" / libertarian ideology which evaluates everything , all knowledge, from an instrumental point of view and rejects whatever part of reality clashes with the preordained conclusions of their philosophy.
But this isn't specific to geeks. Not everyone who programs is smart. Not all smart programmers are rigorous thinkers. Not all rigorous thinkers apply good judgement to all spheres of knowledge. Academia is the only place where untrue "knowledge" gets systematically outed and rejected and that's not because scientists start out better thinkers, it's because the system of journals and peer review those scientists must survive in is set up to systematically seek and destroy falsehood. You are what your environment makes you become. It's not just about IQ or interest in techie things. It's about having your pet theory about reality torn to shreds by your peers or seeing it happen to someone else and sobering up to what the word "true" actually requires of anyone who wants to sling it around.
College might as well stick a fork in itself, because it's done.
Of course there is the anti-intellectual geek movement. The charge is lead by Sara Pallin, followed closely behind by the Tea Party. And their main source of information is Fox and AOL. :P
Hi all, author of TFA here. I have a bunch of replies, which address many of the things said here on Slashdot, on my blog.
The exact opposite, actually: so you can analyze them for their strengths and weaknesses, and adapt their strengths to make your own new discoveries and realizations.
No. That does not happen. By and large not until a person reaches their 40's or 50's. Young impressionable ( and often very drunk ) children enter college and are indoctrinated with the discoveries and realizations of those past. Doing the least amount possible to skate by. You will not do anything new, by repeating what's already been done. I agree that philosophy must be taught, so that people learn how to think. That can also be done outside of college. We over glorify college and it's outcome and as a result we have these retards entering the workforce today. America's decline in education shows this to be true. Don't try to tell me that doesn't happen, I have had to clean up their messes more times than I like to count.
And yet, as your comment's parent points out, you will have zero understanding of the concepts involved: you can memorize and regurgitate facts, but that's it. And without guidance by a credentialed expert in the field, you will have no understanding of the scholarly context to put them in their proper place.
Do not twist my words. For the most part those coming out of college have zero understanding. It's almost impossible to conceive an adequate response to this. You have a terrible arrogance. I understand what I do so much more than you realize. As do Millions of my peers. You are in effect stating that no learning or understanding is possible unless you have an instructor in some educational institution. You have definitely stated that any learning or understanding outside of college is useless. I, and millions more around the world prove this concept to be false. And for you to claim I have no understanding of the material involved because I eschewed anything more than the classes I took to get the information that is relevant to the task is infuriating. I would say this action demonstrates the ability to focus on what is important, and not be distracted, or lazy.
I have to ask where you draw the line? How much do you need to know in order to program in C or PHP? Do I need to know how to process the raw Silicon and know how to etch wafers, build a motherboard, the bios, and everything that goes into making a computer? Do I need to understand every logic bit that is switched per CPU cycle to be an effective C or C++ developer? Do I need to know how to build the car from scratch in order to be a professional driver? A pilot? Granted, you aren't going to see many successful self-taught doctors out there. There are a things a college is good for. But for anyone to say I have little to zero useful knowledge because I didn't *PAY* for the privilege, or to say that college endows the student with intelligence is unacceptable.
If there weren't people with ideas that refused to accept the current taught dogma the Earth would still be flat, and that the sun would still rotate about the Earth.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Are you talking about schools not teaching the general population properly? Because I was under the impression that the topic was geeks.
A wikipedia page is a nice starting point as always, but self-teaching can lead to narrow knowledge, since there's no teacher to kick your butt and point out all the stuff you completely overlooked.
As I understood the topic, it was about geeks eschewing "Intellectual pursuits" and attributing lack of interest in outdated standards, such as college as an example.
You're an unoriginal automaton right now. It seems you're the person who should be reading some of the books mentioned. Or rather, any book from outside your current world view (the mentioned authors are by no means a requirement). "Expanding one's horizon" is something one rarely understands before actually having done it numerous times. I'm not saying you're narrow-minded, but simply latitudinally challenged on this particular topic.
This isn't about pontificating with a book and wine glass in hand, it's about experiencing ideas you never realized could exist.
Even colleges demand you focus by picking a Major. The point of my debate was the statement that you aren't considered an "intellectual" unless you had read certain works, or had a representation of the alphabet after your name. Everyone just sort of jumped on my bashing of college as a missed marker for intellectualism.
Right, so you appear to be concerned with business requirements, career, problem solving, possibly money. If this is the full extent of your interests, have fun!
In the future corporate states of America, this may well be more life saving than a gun.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
This says it so much better than I could hope to.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I think what you are trying to say is Intelligence is separate from knowledge, College gives you knowledge but not intelligence, yet knowledge magnifies intelligence.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Here you are most correct, and I must admit to attacking the example provided, rather than the argument providing it. Having this pointed out I had to hang my head.
but showing contempt for that curiosity is pretty contemptible.
The rest of your post echos my sentiments very deeply, and in a few places, chastised me. However I hold one thing out. I prefer to focus as much as I can on my particular profession / interest in order to excel in every capacity that I may be called in it. I see nothing wrong with that.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
The problem is poorly posed. There is a distinction between intellectuals and academics. What has passed here for anti-intellectual is really anti-academic. I grew up in a very intellectual environment. All of my fathers friends were engineers from the era of BIG engineering projects. Few of them had more than a BS degree some were completely self taught. Only the younger parents of my friends consistently had degrees and only because of the GI bill following WWII. My mothers friends were equally intellectual. Many were writers and poets and artists, many with household names but only a small fraction had degrees and those that did were in English Literature or Art History and only Bachelors degrees at that. I could have a good discussion about French literature with the engineers or Galloping Gurdy with the poets because they actually knew about such things and would gleefully talk to anyone from high school student to Nobel Laurette without prejudice.
When I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts to go to school (I won't mention which one) I found what I can only describe as an anti-intellectual environment. Oh there were the greatest living authorities in fill in the blank and you could get as snotty as you like but the truth is the quality of intellectual curiosity was grossly inferior to the salons and backyard barbeques I grew up with. The problem was that you encountered one of two attitudes: First, this is MY field and I am THE expert in it and I won't lower myself to engage in conversation with you. OR, That's not my field and I know nothing about it so I won't lower myself to talk to you. I can honestly say I have never encountered more bullshit than I did during my years in Cambridge Massachusetts among the "Very Smart and Important People" some of whom inhabit the highness positions in the land.
Nooo... the earth would be (near) sphere, and would rotate around the sun, just as it does now. People might believe otherwise, but that wouldn't change the facts.