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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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".

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".

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.