I maybe wasn’t clear about what I meant by ‘the game.’ I didn’t mean how to be a good public intellectual but rather the broader ‘game’ of coming up with new ideas and figuring things out.
One important metric I use to judge public intellectuals is whether they share my views, and start from similar assumptions. It’s obviously important to not filter too strongly on this or you’re never going to hear anything that challenges your beliefs, but it still makes sense to discount the views of people who hold beliefs you think are false. But you obviously can’t build an objective metric based on how much someone agrees with you.
The issue is that one of the most important metrics I use to quickly measure the merits of an intellectual is inherently subjective. You can’t have your system based on adjudicating the truth of disputed claims.
I maybe wasn’t clear about what I meant by ‘the game.’ I didn’t mean how to be a good public intellectual but rather the broader ‘game’ of coming up with new ideas and figuring things out.
One important metric I use to judge public intellectuals is whether they share my views, and start from similar assumptions. It’s obviously important to not filter too strongly on this or you’re never going to hear anything that challenges your beliefs, but it still makes sense to discount the views of people who hold beliefs you think are false. But you obviously can’t build an objective metric based on how much someone agrees with you.
The issue is that one of the most important metrics I use to quickly measure the merits of an intellectual is inherently subjective. You can’t have your system based on adjudicating the truth of disputed claims.