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?"

Comments

False Premmise

[AvitarX]

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.

Re:False Premmise

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Agree completely. My graduate education was almost completely liberal arts, I only had a token EE class as an undergrad (CS major) and I still spend a ton of time with my soldering iron. I consider myself a geek, although I play city-league basketball and don't live in my parent's basement so maybe I'm a hybrid. I guess the point of my rambling is that the need to create is what defines me as a geek, not any pseudo-intellectual ivory tower nonsense.

Re:False Premmise

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeri Ellsworth: highschool dropout, race car builder, race car driver, FPGA designer, builder of transistors from scratch.

School does not promote intellectualism, school is rote training. Anyone who loves learning does it in spite of school.

Re:False Premmise

[obarel]

It didn't take long to start discussing the definition of a geek.

Any what is the definition? Are you saying that someone who spends all his time sitting in a library and reading every book about insects is not a geek? On the other hand, if you spend all your money and free time trying to build your own wind turbine then you're also a geek.

What is the conclusion? Either there is no definition, or any definition is broad enough to be useless.
One thing is clear: Chuck Norris is not a geek.

Re:False Premmise

[second_coming]

Chuck Norris is/was a karate geek.

Re:False Premmise

[Hognoxious]

Isaac Newton, Cambridge graduate, member of the Royal Society (and later Prpresident thereof), mathematician, physicist, astronomer, philosopher, theologist.

OK, he was also an alchemist. But he was probably a better statistician than you. I know I am.

Re:False Premmise

[grcumb]

It didn't take long to start discussing the definition of a geek.

And that is a pretty good place to start defining geek nature.

Rather than being anti-intellectual, geek nature is unconventional, in the sense that a typical geek:

• Prefers empirical evidence to hypothesis;
• Questions whether the dictionary is right;
• If necessary, writes his own damn encyclopedia;
• Prefers reasoning to received wisdom;
• Is not nearly as susceptible to appeals to authority as others;
• And - the sometimes fatal flaw - prefers others to partake of his wisdom than to partake of theirs.

Re:False Premmise

[StarvingSE]

not any pseudo-intellectual ivory tower nonsense. I think this is the kind of anti-intellectual thinking the article is referring to...

Re:False Premmise

[StarvingSE]

In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.

I feel like comments such as this are what programmers who didn't go to college say to feel better about their decision.

Why assume that just because someone spent four years in college, that they had to be spoon fed coding knowledge? Many of my classmates were tinkerers well before college.

Higher education provides many advantages, many of which are intangibles, that help one rise above a simple "tinkerer" to someone who wants a career in a field.

Re:False Premmise

[Comboman]

"Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one."
- Lord Chesterfield

Re:False Premmise

[Comboman]

Intellect doesn't make you an intellectual anymore than being an adult makes you an adulterer.

Re:False Premmise

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.

In the programming world, I find that that education levels almost never come up in day to day discussions. You can either design, code, debug, think -- or you can't. I've encountered people capable of all of the above -- and don't find out for weeks, months, years (or ever) whether they have a degree or not.

Re:False Premmise

[green1]

I think the larger point is that spending 4 years in college doesn't make someone a geek, there is no degree that transforms a non-geek in to a geek. Likewise, not going to college doesn't disqualify one from being a geek. Being a geek is who you are, not how you were educated.
Likely the geeks you knew in college were geeks long before they got to college, and the non-geeks likely didn't magically become geeks by going through the process.

Re:False Premmise

[phlinn]

That's not anti-intellectual, it's anti academia. Intellectual != college educated.

Re:False Premmise

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

There are people who will pay hundreds of dollars for a pair of Nikes when they can get a perfectly good pair of sneakers for a fraction of the price. They're paying for the brand.

Re:False Premmise

[AK Marc]

I think the larger point is that spending 4 years in college doesn't make someone a geek,

Given that college is considered an intellectual pursuit, and geeks look down on people with college as having been "spoon fed" and it can't make one more geeky (I'm a geek with an MBA, so fuck you anti-intellectual geeks), it seems you are not disagreeing with the premise that geeks are anti-intellectual. The only exception to the "geeks look down on those with degrees" I've seen here is that engineering degrees are tolerated because they are required to be engineers, which is inherently geeky.

But then, I've found that the collection of "nerds" here (it is news for nerds after all) is not well representative of the nerds/geeks I've encountered in real life. And I'd say that geeks are anti-intellectual because so many geeks are inherently bad at school (a geek is a free-form learner and doer, and schooling is the opposite of free-form learning) and there is some jealousy between those who just can't do schooling and those who have completed a higher level. I know more than one geek millionaire that dropped out of college (and not in the "had an idea so I quit" sense, but the "failed all my classes so they didn't let me back in" sense) and went to work in tech. It wasn't that they weren't capable of learning all that college had to teach, but that they weren't capable of completing the classes in the structured environment required. Since a "real geek" would fail out of college (according to the geeks that fail or don't even try) then those that go on to get degrees must not be "real geeks."

And thus, anti-intellectualism is linked to geek-ness.

Re:False Premmise

[jhoegl]

Your logic is sound, but the conclusion would not be "anti-intellectualism", it would be "anti-structure" or "anti-conformist", or both.

I have seen both, none, and each. No one can be put into a nicely wrapped box of explanation, which is why we find ourselves in our own conundrum of definition.
I view it as a waste of time, and would rather look into tougher issues plaguing society than societies definition of who people are.

Re:False Premmise

[mbkennel]

University study is very useful to teach you lots of things that human civilization, which has included a boat load of people every bit as smart as you, and quite a number of people a hell of a lot bleeping smarter, has happened to have figured out already.

Anti-intellectualism means that is all BS. It's a radically arrogant---and yet the numbskulls continually complain about those "arrogant elites".

And the 18 year old self-taught know-it-all who really doesn't is prime recidivist offender.

Re:False Premmise

[n5vb]

I disagree. Neither formal education nor the acquisition of degrees correlate exactly with either intellectualism or geek-nature. (Some, including myself, might argue that the correlation isn't even all that close.)

I might dare to suggest that the academic environment can in some cases do more to kill geek-nature than it does to nurture it. There are exceptions, but a lot of institutions actively discourage geekery in favor of rote "learning" models that work great for turning out corporate-ladder fodder than they do for instilling any sense of creativity. And geekery is a creative enterprise from the foundations on up.

I don't know how true this is for anyone else, but for me, the feeling is definitely anti-academia and not anti-intellectual. The fact that I'm self-educated does not negate the fact that I'm very much an intellectual.

(p.s. by the way, it's "premise"..)

Re:False Premmise

[TeknoHog]

Died a virgin, a true geek.

Re:False Premmise

[sortius_nod]

I don't think that saying university/college is a "waste of time these days" is anti-intellectual. In fact, it's the complete opposite.

As someone who has been to university and left due to a complete contempt from most lecturers/tutors for thinking outside the box, I can assure you that University isn't about being intellectual at all. These days it's about getting a piece of paper and getting a high paying job. I have met very few people who actually respect intellectualism that have gone through university. The ONLY people I have met that are actually pro-intellectualism and have been through university are people with their PHDs working in science. The mentality drastically changes between degree and masters/PHD study, going from rote learning to actual thought.

I think one of the big problems is that university lecturers (and consequently their tutors) have spent so long locked up in academia that anything that challenges their knowledge is disregarded. This has a flow on effect of forcing students to stop thinking and just start parroting. Spend 5 minutes in a university bar and you'll see all the arts students parroting their lecture notes, or engineers acting like their still high school jocks, and so forth. Getting an intellectual conversation that doesn't rely on course notes going is quite difficult.

This is not ALWAYS the case, I had a great philosophy lecturer that did encourage thinking, advised not to write notes and refused to give any reading material. Instead of telling the students what to think, he taught the students how to think. Then again, I had a linguistics lecturer who refused to accept or (even discuss) new research or any challenge to the theories presented in the course book.

I don't look down on people who've been to university, but I do approach anyone who has with caution. I have been disappointed many a time by people with degrees. Even my partner will admit her degree didn't teach her to think, nor did it teach her anything relevant to current technology (she did a Info Sci degree).

While she is "using" her degree at the moment, it took a lot of learning to get up to speed with current tech. How can anyone agree that university is an intellectual pursuit when you aren't even equipped with the tools required to do the jobs the degree is designed for when you graduate?

Re:False Premmise

[michael_cain]

In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.

Depends.

Much of my career was real-time programming, both hard and soft. In many cases, one of the critical questions the programmer needed to be able to answer was "What's the worst-case run time for this code?" The person who spent four years in college almost certainly has been exposed to computational complexity and analysis of algorithms; the self-taught coder, probably not so much. Or the (typically) opposite side of the coin that may crop up in embedded systems: speed is not critical, but we're damned tight on main memory, how can you pack the needed functionality into less space? Again, the degreed person seems more likely to have been exposed to concepts like special-purpose languages and virtual machines that may provide the answer.

Programming is often more than just coding.

Re:False Premmise

[hey!]

I think you need to develop an ontology of geekdom. The root class (the union of all kinds of geeks) are people whose interests are incomprehensible to most people. Beneath that overarching class that you have

(a) geeks that do unusual things
(b) geeks that know unusual things
(c) geeks that create unusual things

Membership in just one of these subclasses qualifies you as a geek, although naturally the subclasses overlap. To illustrate, let's take the Society for Creative Anachronism. Participating in SCA events qualifies you a geek that does. Knowing the history of Medieval fashion qualifies you as a geek who knows. And if you make medieval clothing that qualifies you as a geek who creates. If you sew your own costume based on your own research, then wear it to an SCA event, you're a hat trick geek.

Re:False Premmise

[tnk1]

Sure, college can teach you about the accumulated corpus of human learning. That is a far cry from presuming that it is the only way to learn a significant portion of that.

I'm not one of the people who will call college "useless", I went to college myself. A very good one, by all accounts. I definitely did learn things there, but there were also a lot of things that I did not pick up as well in the classroom as I did on my own, in my own time.

I would not advise someone to drop out of college, but that advice has more to do with their future success than it does their ability to learn. On average, you need a degree to get a decent job. There are some huge successes out there, but much of that is opportunity as much as their own ability. Bill Gates and Microsoft could easily failed to get the IBM deal that made them into what they are today. Getting a degree grants you more opportunity and that is what a college degree's major use is to most people who get one these days. It is not Anti-Intellectual to point out that simple fact.

My advice would be slightly different if they just wanted to go there to learn some subject, however. In general, you should go to college to learn because it has experts and equipment and an environment conducive to education. This goes without saying. But if you needed to bankrupt yourself to go and submit yourself to grinding debt that would make your life worse if you couldn't pay it off, I might tell you to either skip it, or at least wait until you are more secure financially to go for it. You *can* learn just about anything you learn in at least undergrad outside of a college. You would need to work much, much harder at it, and it would take longer, but it is possible.

The point is this: college is not the only way to go if you want to simply learn things. If being an intellectual means being part of a group that loves learning and knowledge and has picked that up, then you don't need college to do that. Look at the most closed minded leaders today. Even some of the anti-intellectual ones. They all went to college. Some went to very good colleges. Their distrust is born not of jealousy or a lack of erudition, but of experiencing how detached some people in academia can be from what happens outside. They shouldn't punish colleges for that, but there are certain aspects of academia that do make for a groupthink situation to occur. That means that there is a place for people of sufficient ability and motivation to make real contributions outside of that system.

Re:False Premmise

[ShakaUVM]

>>Spend 5 minutes in a university bar and you'll see all the arts students parroting their lecture notes, or engineers acting like their still high school jocks, and so forth.

I agree with you, except the bit about engineers acting like jocks. (What?)

However, I think the university experience does have a large YMMV component to it. I found my college experience to be very valuable, and everything I'd hoped it to be (except for the whole collegiate sports thing - UC San Diego has no real tradition supporting sports teams). I met lots of smart people, got to interact with interesting professors that, outside of intro classes, were genuinely interested in developing your ability to think and solve problems, and learned the kinds of things about coding you can't pick up from a book. Was well worth the time and effort to get my Master's degree in CS, too.

>>I don't look down on people who've been to university, but I do approach anyone who has with caution.

I'm... somewhat the other way around. While the smartest coder I've ever worked with was a college dropout, a lot of people that don't go to college have bad coding habits that cause problems down the line in terms of bugs, readability, and maintainability. These sorts of things traditionally get beaten out of you in your intro classes in college.

>>I had a great philosophy lecturer that did encourage thinking, advised not to write notes and refused to give any reading material.

By contrast, I had the Churchlands for some philosophy classes, and they were dismissive and condescending to anyone that didn't agree with their point of view. Their goal was to create clones of themselves, I think, since they're so outnumbered in the philosophy field.

Re:False Premmise

[Requiem18th]

I'd have to concede the point to the parent poster, "anti academia" *it's* intellectualism.

Academia is the formal practice of generating and passing on knowledge, to be against formal education is to be against the scientific method that develop it and informs it.

A point could be made that the institutions are filled with corrupted and/or clueless bureaucrats but you are arguing from the point of view that it is "pseudo-intellectual ivory tower nonsense".

Your need to create makes you an artist or just creative person in general, but it's the will and capability to analyze it formally what makes you an intellectual.

Re:False Premmise

[Requiem18th]

Oh yes, Newton the theologist, Christians always bring that up, sad thing that they can't name any advances in theology or useful models or theories of Christianity he left behind.

Re:False Premmise

[Vasheron]

Okay, you proved that it is possible to get an intellectual out of a college with your example. You didn't prove that it takes college to make one.

You've got the wrong idea. Here's the right one: College/university is to intellectual endeavors as a dojo is to martial arts. Sure you can do martial arts all alone and maybe you'll get somewhere... You might be able to figure out how to kick, punch, and perform some kata. You might even become quite good at these things, but you'll never learn how to block quite as effectively as you could if you had other people to practice with. You'll never learn more complex techniques like throwing, or locking, and you'll certainly never get to practice them. You also won't have the advice of mentors who have been practicing for way longer than you have (and learned from others as well); and therefore, you probably won't learn much of the theory behind the movements, their history, their proper application, common pitfalls, etc... You also won't be able to experience the wonderful social atmosphere a good dojo provides (which helps a lot with motivation). So yes, you could go off and be a martial artist all by yourself... but, it gets a lot better when you do it with others.

Re:False Premmise

[Idarubicin]

The plural of "ancedote" is not "data".

Successful dropouts are noteworthy because they are the exception.

No one reacts with surprise and astonishment when they hear about how someone with an advanced degree achieves financial, technical, or creative success. Why do you suppose that is?

college != intellectual

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:college != intellectual

[uniquename72]

I went to big state school, and it didn't make me more intellectual.

Nothing will make an intellectually non-curious person into an intellectual. In a perfect world, intellectuals would go to college, and everyone else would just go to trade school, or learn on their own (or just be garbage men, which is fine).

Instead, college is a business, and to maximize profits they need to attract everyone they can. Unfortunately, this means a lot of people who have no business going to college -- who will neither gain anything from their time there, nor contribute to the intellectual pool of the community (or the world in general) -- wind up drinking their way through an extra 4 years of high school.

Rather than pushing everyone to go to college -- which leads us to the broken system we have -- I'd rather we encourage more people NOT to go to college. Leave that for the thinkers and those who want to better themselves. As someone who's worked at a public university for 10 years, I estimate that these people make up less than 20% of the student body.

Re:college != intellectual

[tehcyder]

In a perfect world, intellectuals would go to college, and everyone else would just go to trade school, or learn on their own (or just be garbage men, which is fine)

You don't need to be a career academic/intellectual to gain a lot from a college education.
Besides, would you count lawyers, doctors, computer scientists or engineers as just "trades" and therefore not deserving of a college education?
In fact, now I've had time to think about it, you're a fucking twat.

Not anti-intellectualism

[GameboyRMH]

The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.

Tagging article "troll."

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, treating college as 'purely economic' is the anti-intellectual part(or a sign that you experienced a shitty school...)

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[JeffSh]

In order for the statement "college is a waste of time" to be anti-intellectual, one has to presume there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.

I find a vast majority of students (these days or perhaps any other) treat college more as an extension of high school and a social/networking opportunity more than raw pursuit of exposure to academics.

I do not like the way the question is posed. It seems to make assumptions that are not necessarily true in order to posit that "geeks are becoming anti-intellectual".

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[GameboyRMH]

Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[vlm]

Arguably, treating college as 'purely economic' is the anti-intellectual part(or a sign that you experienced a shitty school...)

Probably in his lower 20s, due to the educational bubble... Youngsters now a days need to take a lifetime vow of poverty if they go to college, very much like the only way to get an education in the middle ages was to take a vow of poverty and enter the monastery. Not much has changed in CS since then, not the money or the dating life. I think back on how much I learned post-college, which in part required me to spend money the youngsters will never have, due to $200K student loans...

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Marillion]

"College as a waste of time" is also an indicator of what's wrong with modern university education. They're turning into glorified trade schools. I've had recently graduates tell me, "We studied .NET at school." 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.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[DanTheStone]

I do not like the way the question is posed. It seems to make assumptions that are not necessarily true in order to posit that "geeks are becoming anti-intellectual".

That's called "Begging the question".

I agree with you in general. My college experience was very little intellectual experience, mostly practical work training and well-rounding busywork. I feel like I came out of it far smarter, but not more "intellectual" (depending on how you define such a thing). I think I've learned more intellectual thinking from books than college.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Anonymous Coward]

The pleasure of learning is the return on investment. Knowledge is its own reward, not just a tool for prosperity.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh, I'd be the first to agree that colleges are damned expensive, sufficiently so that most people's access to them is largely an economic question. That much is indisputable.

However, the fact that "many people can afford to pay little or nothing for those aspects of college that don't make purely financial sense", which is unquestionably true, does not imply that those aspects don't exist, just that people can't afford them.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[thisnamestoolong]

I would argue that this is only the case because of the rampant anti-intellectual sentiment in 'Merca these days. In Europe, learning for the sake of learning is still valued and is something that is feasible to the average person. By contrast, in America, where nobody gives a fuck about anything that does not have a dollar sign attached to it, this is not the case. Tuition goes up year after year and nobody does anything about it, because it is viewed as an investment rather than a tool to be used for personal growth. In fact, just the idea of self-awareness and personal growth seem to be looked down upon, as there is no immediate cash value to them. This inability to see past the next ledger sheet is, in my opinion, the biggest problem that America is currently facing today. This will be the reason that our nation of fat retards will fall.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[tuffy]

It's more like you have a guarantee to be impoverished if you don't go, and are less likely to be impoverished if you do go.

That's the crux of the college bubble. A lot of people believe that the massive investment in college education (both in time and money) is almost certain to pay off in the long run with higher paying jobs. Just like they believed that an investment in housing or tech stocks was a "sure thing".

But if that belief falters, the students will find themselves "upside-down" on their education expenses and colleges will pay a heavy price as alternatives for high school grads become more mainstream.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Seumas]

I am put off by people who clearly do have an anti-intellectual attitude and refer to people who are smart or desire to be smart or are working at being smart as "elitist". However, I can sometimes partially identify with that sentiment, when some asshole is going around saying things like "well, if you feel that you don't get enough out of college to justify the time and expense, then you are being anti-intellectual". I call that being disingenuous.

As someone who did not go to college (in fact, I did not even finish high school, but was fortunate enough to build myself a successful career which was well under way before I turned twenty), I admit that I have a bit of that "fuck institutional academia" in me as well as a little bit of what George Carlin (who dropped out in the 9th grade, just like I did) commented on as "when you drop out in the ninth grade, you spend the rest of your life proving yourself".

I don't personally have anything against people who go to college, but I don't see it as an absolute necessity. At best, I see it as a road-block. Something you must endure, to get where you need to go. Even if you know more going in than the instructors do. Even if you learn at a faster pace than they're willing to teach. You need to pay six figures and four years to get that little piece of paper, so businesses will give you a look. You need to prove that you are willing to be part of the machine, so that you can be part of the machine.

Some exceptions are made, of course. College is absolutely necessary if you're a lawyer or doctor. But is it really necessary, if you're going to be a history expert or journalist or historian or programmer?

I see college as generally a path made available for those who kind of want to do something, but don't know how to do it or don't have the passion to do it themselves. They need someone to lead the way and guide them along every step of it. Many of them are ultimately just looking for something to pay the bills. They're told that accounting is a well paying field, so they go into accounting. Maybe a decision they make in the last few months, before attending.

But then there are others. Those of us who know what we want to do. Have always known it. Have spent years learning about it on our own. Practicing it. Seeking out knowledge and experience and mentors. Those who have a deep passion for what they want to do and for whom college is almost entirely a grin-and-bear it situation, just to get an official stamp on a degree, so they can move on.

I sincerely feel for the people who went to college and came out in massive debt. Often they're doing the same thing I'm doing. Often along side me. The only difference between them and myself is that one of us went to college and one didn't. Oh, and one of us is still paying off a student loan in our 30s and the other has been earning clear and free of any debt their entire adult life.

I'm fortunate and not the most common example around, I admit. But it's possible and there are plenty of examples who have done the same and still can. It's just a matter of what the individual wants. I'm all bout your passion, experience, and capability (or at least, capacity to learn). How you arrived there -- through institutional education or on your own isn't terribly important, to me.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Seumas]

Others, much smarter than myself, have often repeated that "College is where boys go to drink, girls go to find husbands, and everyone goes to prolong their childhood another four years".

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[icebraining]

It's hard to feel such pleasure when you don't have enough money to eat.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[bigsexyjoe]

Well, you can be an intellectual who believes that one can develop their intellect without school and that college doesn't do a lot to help you. I happen to belong to this school of thought. I know plenty of college graduates who have not mastered formal logic, abstract thinking, written expression, nor have they come out of college knowing much about anything really.

Just as I've met many liberal arts grads who possess less liberal arts knowledge than myself. I know many people with technical degrees that don't know how to apply their knowledge outside narrow limits and also know little about the world. Likewise, I've met plenty of people who did not go to college (generally due to lack of opportunity) who are quite intellectual and knowledgeable and, in some cases, excellent writers.

In my opinion, the most important factor in whether you develop your intellect is having a desire to do so. We've had libraries for a long time, and with the Wikipedia, a sufficiently motivated and talented person could become a self-taught mathematician if they have a high school diploma and enough free time.

Great intellectuals who did not have much formal schooling include Joseph Campbell, Michael Faraday, and Srinivasa Ramanujan. And, of course, all great intellectual accomplishments come from self-learners of great intellectual curiosity.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[uniquename72]

Like so much in life, you'll get out of college what you put into it. If you expect your professors to push intellectual rigor upon you, you'll be disappointed.

But if you demand intellectual rigor from yourself, you'll experience the fruits of it.

Yes, that means that you can do the same thing outside of school. But it's easier to surround yourself with like-minded people and expert thinkers in a university setting.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[rmstar]

Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.

Your position is deeply anti-intellectual, apart of being factually wrong. The "become a better rounded argument" wasn't being made. An intellectual derives from his knowledge and thoughts, from his creations and his intellectual environment much more pleasure and fullfillment than most people get out of owning a sports car.

That was the anti-intellectualism in your post. The factually wrong part comes from many lower and middle-class people going to college for the pleasure of learning. They really do. It's called having a life. It might not be the best in terms of money, but it is not that bad either.

You see, not doing the things you want to do in life for purely economic reasons is also irrational behaviour.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[sjames]

However, is it absolutely necessary to intellectualism and unique to college?

If not, it is not anti-intellectual to suggest that there may be other things that provide a better value.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Antisyzygy]

With a bachelors degree you make about 1.9 times as much as someone with a high school diploma. The average salary is about 64,000 vs. 37,000. So if you figure you have 150k in debt after getting a BA or BS, you can live off the 37,000 and pay 27,000 a year to your loan. You pay it off between 7-10 years. Then over the rest of your life you will make between 837,000 - 918,000 more than a person with a high school diploma. Now, most people aren't stupid enough to spend 150k on only a Bachelors. It cost me about 40k to get my BS in Applied Math but I spent two years at a community college. You still have to factor in the recession and unemployment rate being the highest among the younger generation, but it still seems like it pays off to me.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[mcmonkey]

Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.

Why can't the pleasure of learning be the significant return?

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[metlin]

In order for the statement "college is a waste of time" to be anti-intellectual, one has to presume there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.

Yes, there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.

I cannot speak for others, but I can certainly speak for myself. I almost did a PhD in Quantum Computing and opted out. I did not realize it then (but I realize now) that the reason I decided not to pursue the program is because I was less interested in the physics aspect of it and more interested in the math aspect of it.

So, I quit to do my startup, ended up in consulting, and now I'm trying my hand at another startup, thinking that I could find a substitute for my obsession. But I could not. And somewhere amidst all this, after much soul searching, I decided that what I really wanted to do was pursue math (and not really PhD).

I figured, I'd study something different and and use my free time to do math, because, hey, you can always learn and do stuff on your own. Even in a field like math, where the community is pretty small and you can pretty much email anyone (except, of course, Grisha Perelman) and expect a response, it is impossible to do anything worthwhile outside of a university environment.

Part of what school offers is a support system, and one where when you have questions, you've peers and experts to answer them. Where you don't have long periods of waiting between periods when encountering obstacles. In grad school, if I had a question, I'd ask my advisor and he'd put me in touch with the right people, and they'd respond quickly. Outside of it, you're pretty much on your own. Nobody will be willing to explain a paper (and trust me, math papers, especially the good ones, are pretty fucking obscure).

The other part is the contacts and networking aspect, which you readily dismiss without a second thought. The ones who've done good work outside of academia have only been able to do so because they've had the necessary background, training, and *contacts* within the academia to help them out.

By supporting the premise that college is a waste of time because *some* students are not taking advantage of it is speaking for all students. Even so, the things that I learned in completely unrelated classes are useful outside of it.

I learned Fourier Analysis in high-school, which had no meaning outside or applicability (ironically, it was considered "pure math" back in the day). Come college, and I started using Fourier Analysis in DSP. And having studied Fourier Analysis in high-school made it easy for me to do very well because I had the basics licked, even when I thought it was quite pointless. My latest startup uses yield management, and I am fortunate that I paid attention to my economics classes to speak halfway intelligently to investors. That's the value of education, even when you don't realize it.

So, yes. If you're planning on doing something worthwhile and making genuine contributions to the human society and civilization, it's mighty fucking hard to do it outside a college environment/lacking a college background. And a handful of examples and exceptions don't make the rule. This is especially important when you consider the fact that the vast majority in fact need school, and the minority would have done well independent of a collegiate education.

And for the record, I believe the OP is referring to exactly the kind of anti-intellectual sentiment that you're spewing forth.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[marnues]

Because then GP would have to understand how anti-intellectual he is.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[eepok]

"Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning."

Who said anything about "luxury"? You're the one that brought in the comparison to the luxury item. Education isn't about anything but better understanding the world around you (through the lens of one of many specializations in higher education).

If you can't see the value of understanding, then you shouldn't be talking about education.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[metlin]

It's hard to feel such pleasure when you don't have enough money to eat.

Nice straw man. That is not an argument against college, that is an argument for better economic conditions.

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Vasheron]

You've got it all wrong...

College/university is to intellectual endeavors as a dojo is to martial arts. Sure you can do martial arts all alone and maybe you'll get somewhere... You might be able to figure out how to kick, punch, and perform some kata. You might even become quite good at these things, but you'll never learn how to block quite as effectively as you could if you had other people to practice with. You'll never learn more complex techniques like throwing, or locking, and you'll certainly never get to practice them. You also won't have the advice of mentors who have been practicing for way longer than you have (and learned from others as well); and therefore, you probably won't learn much of the theory behind the movements, their history, their proper application, common pitfalls, etc...

You also won't be able to experience the wonderful social atmosphere that accompanies a good dojo (which helps a lot with motivation). So yes, you could go off and be a martial artist all by yourself... but, it gets a whole lot better when you do it with others (assuming you go to a good dojo).

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[CosmeticLobotamy]

It's hard to feel such pleasure when you don't have enough money to eat.

How much money do you usually eat?

Re:Not anti-intellectualism

[Unkyjar]

I guess the question is more "What do you want do with your life?"

If your answer is live comfortably then that is good, and I hope you have a wonderful life. This does not mean you aren't smart or maybe even a genius, nor that you don't enjoy learning.

If your answer is to learn, then congrats, you're an intellectual.

Academia (Which is usually characterized as University) is really a place where many intellectuals tend to gather, and there you are most likely be to be able to both learn and make a living at learning. And more importantly this is true even if what your learning isn't of any immediate or practical use to others.

Question

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

Re:Question

[maxwell demon]

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.

Well, the point is that if it is not stored in your head, it's not knowledge. It's information which you can look up, and as such it is very useful, and if valuable enough, you can turn that information into knowledge. But it is a mistake to take that information as knowledge. Knowledge is available to you even if you don't explicitly search for it. If you know something, and then see something related, you may see a connection which you would not have seen otherwise, because you never would have gotten the idea to look up that information. And it's exactly those moments where you see relations between things which seemed to be unrelated which provide true insight.

Knowledge is live information. Your brain constantly compares new information against it and looks for connections, even if you don't notice it. Indeed, even when you're sleeping, your brain is actually working on that knowledge. On the other hand, information you have to look up is dead. It does exactly nothing until you look it up. It comes to life only as you read it.

Note that I'm not saying that this information is not useful, or that it isn't a huge advantage if you can look it up quickly. But it's much less useful than information which resides in your head. Of course, the information you can have in your head is limited, and therefore it is an advantage to easily be able to look up things. Also, there are things you might need sometimes, but which are clearly not generally relevant to you; not needing to learn those is definitively an advantage. But the idea that you could generally replace knowledge with looking up information is misguided.

Re:Question

[dogmatixpsych]

Or, is an intellectual someone who is removed from the real world by dwelling in the pillared halls of academia? Is an intellectual someone who condescendingly looks down on the unwashed masses? There are a lot of uses of intellectualism - some are positive and some are not. It depends on the person. We have to define intellectual (like you were implying) before we can have a more meaningful discussion about whether or not post-modern-neo-lib-con-uber geeks are pro- or anti-intellectualism.

None of them are geeks

[vlm]

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".

Re:None of them are geeks

[vlm]

So, you're saying you disagree with them. Right? Just checking.

The opinion of a non-geek portrayed as a geek is simply irrelevant. Right or wrong is a function of statistical randomness, not enlightened analysis. Its rather like asking Tom Cruise to answer detailed questions about F-15 flight instruction, after all, he portrayed a pilot in a famous movie, but it turns out he's just an actor.

As for right or wrong, the problem is the original article writer seeing thru very narrow 1930s-ish eyes that "intellectualism" is sitting in college, wearing tweed jackets, while puffing a (tobacco) pipe, speaking in a psuedo-british accent, and writing essays in for-profit journals. If you slightly modernize the definition to adjust to technology, nothing much has really changed amongst the geeks except they share a lot more ideas, a lot faster, and the folks "left behind" seem to be getting more than one year behind every year, very technological singularity-like.

Re:None of them are geeks

[chebucto]

And you base that assertion on what? The liberal arts have a strong association with intellectualism, if by intellectual you mean knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or considering problems with no direct practical application, or novel understanding of social systems.

There are party colleges out there where people are like you describe, but anyone who's serious about liberal arts doesn't have to look hard to find intellectual stimulation, and the attitude you describe is a ticket to mediocrity (at best) at any decent college.

Re:None of them are geeks

[t2t10]

What I'm getting at is the following.

Historically, the "liberal arts" included state-of-the-art science and mathematics education.

Many science majors at good colleges and universities will, in fact, get a good grounding in non-scientific fields: they will have to learn foreign languages, read Shakespeare and other original writers, read original historical documents and interpret them, and take philosophy classes. That's a liberal arts education in the traditional sense.

What passes for "liberal arts" these days in colleges and universities is people taking a lot of courses requiring reading and writing, but their exposure to the sciences and mathematics is superficial. It's as if science majors would watch the Reduced Shakespeare Company for their literature requirement and read Asterix for European history.

And if you talk to these people, they don't even feel guilty about it; instead, they assume that anybody who actually bothers learning about math and science must be a soulless geek, and that they are the true scholars.

The only liberal arts majors in colleges and universities are the science and mathematics majors. Everybody else is missing an large chunk of their liberal arts education.

Bull...

[shadowfaxcrx]

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.

 

Lol

[moogied]

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.

Re:Lol

[mjwalshe]

try and get a job at Google with out a degree then

Re:Lol

[vlm]

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...

Before the educational / tuition bubble really took off, my strategy was to use the then omni-present tuition reimbursement scheme at my employer(s) to pay for college.. Worked out well, except for being so far ahead of my class that I was bored silly. Graduated with basically no debt, in fact brokerage acct fulla money, new car, new house, etc. I don't think that's possible with current hyper-inflated tuition. And this was just a decade ago, not in the 50s or whatever.

And that's with a real job ... to get my real job I went to the local CC and got an associates, and kids now a days do not believe that it was financially possible to work a minimum wage job, live in an apartment, own a car, and pay near full time tuition... But it was... Of course corrected for inflation, minimum wage in the early 90s is probably equivalent to $20/hr now....

Re:Lol

[geekmux]

The reason companies like Google give priority to people with degrees is because a degree is a signal that you're the kind of person that can complete a hard task (finishing college, in this case.)

They care less about the knowledge you attained at school.

Perhaps Google in their infinite wisdom could try and prove that this ancient mentality actually results in a more effective workforce, because I have found far more focused and goal oriented individuals born out of our Military than I ever have found coming from any campus.

A piece of paper certifying that you managed to barely pass final exams using nothing more than wrote memorization skills while hung over for a period of four straight years shouldn't be used as an indicator of potential success for your organization. Fifteen minutes interviewing someone face to face should tell you FAR more, regardless of education or experience.

Google is guilty of the same crime as the rest of the corporate world. They've reduced a $100,000 degree to a checkbox to get in the door, nothing more.

Re:Lol

[theNAM666]

>College is a waste of time for anyone looking to go into the IT field.

Seriously?

Why don't you walk over to Harvard, Stanford or MIT CS, and try that?

If you're a dunce who will never rise above working for the Geek Squad, then College may be a bad idea because the college opportunities open to you are small-- and you'd do better working on your communications skills. But the reason you're stuck, is probably that you're a dunce, and think that the Geek Squad is "IT."

The age of programmers who can't bathe or brush their teeth, is largely over. And even most of them, went to College and learned real programming in a structured curriculum.

PHP hacking is an entirely different thing.

I don't think it's (only) Anti-Intellectualism.

[deathcloset]

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.

Re:I don't think it's (only) Anti-Intellectualism.

[Fallingcow]

Did poorly, too, from junior high through college. Usually knew the material as well as the top two or three in the class though, at all levels. For some reason I have a huge amount of trouble motivating myself to do school work. No problem with work ethic in any other area. Very strange.

My best guess is that I subconsciously categorize it as play, and since it's really boring and crappy play (not even any good for learning, as it's so slow), I don't want to do it. Can't figure out any other explanation. Easily learn new things and finish projects at work, easily dedicate hours to learning things I just want to know. Only formal education gives me that kind of trouble. I spent years fighting myself over it, and never did get much better.

So yeah, personally I kind of hate higher education. Couldn't pay me to go back. It's not you, though, higher ed.--it's me.

Paradigm shift

[peacefinder]

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.

Where is the anti-intellectualism?

[Toonol]

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.

Re:It's libertarianism

[geoffrobinson]

To be fair, there are numerous failures of central planners and "smart people" who try to control our lives and make decisions for us. 5-year plans, Vietnam, etc.

You can take this distrust to the extreme. Or you can follow the American Constitutional model. Keep decisions like this as local as problem and limit the scope of the failure if something really stupid is done.

Quotes

[Synn]

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.

Re:College isn't Intellectual Enough

[toppavak]

College professors and students are insulated from market forces and over time this has eroded the system.

On the contrary, I think the exact opposite is the problem. Colleges are increasingly under pressure to teach skills that will get students jobs, recruit more students to get more funding and twist every metric possible in order to move up in rankings. Take admissions and graduation statistics, for example, the more students that get rejected from a university the more "prestigious and exclusive" it becomes, on the flip side the more students that fail out of the university, the more inept it appears. It is thus in every university's best interest to encourage the widespread ideas that everybody can and should go to college and then relax graduation standards for accepted students.

Even academic research is slowly but surely moving away from high-risk, publicly funded fundamental work to applied technology development (itself not necessarily a bad thing) which has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the university Technology Transfer Office and a drive to squeeze every drop of money out of that academic research rather than focusing on the core university mission to produce and disseminate knowledge as widely as possible. While the dissemination of many technologies may benefit from patenting and exclusive licensing (particularly tech that requires significant private investment to develop and bring to market), the promise of commercial success has motivated patenting in many fields which do not fit this model.

FTFY

[TimHunter]

'At the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to everything.'

/. commenters, lacking knowledge substitute cynicism, lacking experience substitute pessimism, lacking wit substitute sarcasm, and lacking passion substitute indignation.

Re:FTFY

[Anthony]

I heartily agree. Many Slashdot commenters are indistinguishable from Youtubers.

Re:Frist Psot

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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.

It takes a special breed of geek

[northernfrights]

to manage to /. your own blog.

Re:First post

[tmosley]

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.

Wow.

[DG]

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

Not Anti-Intellectual. Skeptical.

[hobb0001]

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.

Re:money to ...

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Begging the question

[starfishsystems]

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[fusiongyro]

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[Rei]

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Ah yes. Intellectuality is useless unless provides some form of sucking at a corporate-industrial cash-teat.

Thanks for validating my thesis.

Re:Frist Psot

[similar_name]

“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

You've misunderstood what anti-intellectualism is

[mjwx]

And thus, anti-intellectualism is linked to geek-ness.

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[testadicazzo]

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 agree that there is a tendency to anti-intellectualism that is prevalent in our society. I also agree that this has spread to so-called geek culture. While I agree with most of your basic assumptions, and many of your conclusions, I have some issues with many of the specifics in your article.

First, your post equates intellectualism with university education. You conflate dislike, distrust, and/or contempt for traditional educational systems with anti-intellectualism. It is entirely possible to admire intellectual thought, strive for intellectual rigor, and apply a curious and analytical nature to the world at large without attending university. Particularly in America, where universities have become commercial institutions, bound tightly to our corporate masters and elite power structures, it easy to imagine losing interest a formal education. As a noteworthy example, I encourage you to read N

Re:Frist Psot

[thenerd]

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.

Re:Frist Psot

[Eunuchswear]

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.

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.