If I am reading this entry correctly, I may beg to differ with it. It would be a sign of higher intelligence if someone IS able to be a generalist and collate and interpolate data and meaning across a wide variety of topics, but who also is able to wave the white flag of humility and admit when they are in over their head. If by contrast they are unable to do so, and just tend to forge ahead on the SS Dunning-Kruger to the Land of the Grand Fallacies of Ignorance, then yes I think I am justified to look down on their overall intellectual abilities. That they may be competent in their one narrow area of expertise may simply indicate that they have successfully absorbed the surface tenets therein (as put forth by people wiser and more knowledgeable) but without necessarily pondering them more deeply. That by itself doesn’t impress me (much).
[Newspapers are a somewhat inapt entity to focus such analysis on since we are by definition dealing with many individual minds and not just one, but even there implicit editorial and institutional biases may be at work. I’d rather focus on individuals tho.]
My fave example from my own sphere is the baseball analyst Bill James. I occasionally dropped into his own personal web site, and had always looked up to him as an impartial analyst who would bend over backward to be objective.
Imagine my total shock to see him casually dismiss some political positions of people he came across on another site as “social justice warriors”, a right-wing dog whistle term of course, which indicated that he at least has a lot of sympathy with MAGA views. I was thus instantly confused, since I’d figure a mind such as his would approach politics with the same exact objectivity and rigor that he did baseball, and thus grasping the subtleties of how out society and political systems operate that he would be the LAST pundit to use such loaded and biased language. I was wrong, obviously.
Note I had however by that point already noted some blind spots in his baseball analysis, and in fact had picked up on a subtle but telling little throwaway note in his The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract [from 2001], about my favorite pitcher of all time in point of fact, Greg Maddux. He had earlier outlined situations where a player misses playing time but still deserves credit, such as wartime seasons. However I noted that he DIDN’T include time missed due to player strikes, something rather glaring by omission.
Maddux’s two best seasons of course were the strike-shortened years 1994 and 1995; give him credit for the missed starts there and his peak in those seasons becomes one of the best ever.
He dismissed those concerns with a casual throwaway line, calling it “crying over spilled milk.” I was rather puzzled by such a lapse in his objectivity for years afterward, until I saw the SJW note, and realized that, being an extreme right-winger, he must have been HIGHLY biased against labor rights and thus the rights of workers to strike for better conditions, and allowed this bias to affect his baseball analysis. When I put 2 and 2 together I was yes rather appalled. His books lie in a box somewhere (after a couple of moves in the last 6 years) and I haven’t felt much of an urge to consult them since then, since noting these blind spots made me wonder where else his objectivity has lapsed. [In any event his work, while certainly groundbreaking, has been subsequently surpassed by others in the field.]
IOW if someone has a lapse or blind spot outside their field of expertise, it likely will feed back into their core profession or area of putative expertise as well, and you will likely spot such lapses if you dig deep enough, and in any event I think I am more than justified to judge anything they say (in or out) at least a bit more harshly, because such a lapse isn’t likely to just be a one-time thing but indicative of deeper deficiencies that will likely cut across a wide swath of knowledge in the case of the individual in question.
I was unimpressed by his statistics regardless, and his response to criticisms (where he won’t even say what those were) left me even less impressed, so I don’t think one needs to look at his political terminology to criticize Bill James.
If I am reading this entry correctly, I may beg to differ with it. It would be a sign of higher intelligence if someone IS able to be a generalist and collate and interpolate data and meaning across a wide variety of topics, but who also is able to wave the white flag of humility and admit when they are in over their head. If by contrast they are unable to do so, and just tend to forge ahead on the SS Dunning-Kruger to the Land of the Grand Fallacies of Ignorance, then yes I think I am justified to look down on their overall intellectual abilities. That they may be competent in their one narrow area of expertise may simply indicate that they have successfully absorbed the surface tenets therein (as put forth by people wiser and more knowledgeable) but without necessarily pondering them more deeply. That by itself doesn’t impress me (much).
[Newspapers are a somewhat inapt entity to focus such analysis on since we are by definition dealing with many individual minds and not just one, but even there implicit editorial and institutional biases may be at work. I’d rather focus on individuals tho.]
My fave example from my own sphere is the baseball analyst Bill James. I occasionally dropped into his own personal web site, and had always looked up to him as an impartial analyst who would bend over backward to be objective.
Imagine my total shock to see him casually dismiss some political positions of people he came across on another site as “social justice warriors”, a right-wing dog whistle term of course, which indicated that he at least has a lot of sympathy with MAGA views. I was thus instantly confused, since I’d figure a mind such as his would approach politics with the same exact objectivity and rigor that he did baseball, and thus grasping the subtleties of how out society and political systems operate that he would be the LAST pundit to use such loaded and biased language. I was wrong, obviously.
Note I had however by that point already noted some blind spots in his baseball analysis, and in fact had picked up on a subtle but telling little throwaway note in his The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract [from 2001], about my favorite pitcher of all time in point of fact, Greg Maddux. He had earlier outlined situations where a player misses playing time but still deserves credit, such as wartime seasons. However I noted that he DIDN’T include time missed due to player strikes, something rather glaring by omission.
Maddux’s two best seasons of course were the strike-shortened years 1994 and 1995; give him credit for the missed starts there and his peak in those seasons becomes one of the best ever.
He dismissed those concerns with a casual throwaway line, calling it “crying over spilled milk.” I was rather puzzled by such a lapse in his objectivity for years afterward, until I saw the SJW note, and realized that, being an extreme right-winger, he must have been HIGHLY biased against labor rights and thus the rights of workers to strike for better conditions, and allowed this bias to affect his baseball analysis. When I put 2 and 2 together I was yes rather appalled. His books lie in a box somewhere (after a couple of moves in the last 6 years) and I haven’t felt much of an urge to consult them since then, since noting these blind spots made me wonder where else his objectivity has lapsed. [In any event his work, while certainly groundbreaking, has been subsequently surpassed by others in the field.]
IOW if someone has a lapse or blind spot outside their field of expertise, it likely will feed back into their core profession or area of putative expertise as well, and you will likely spot such lapses if you dig deep enough, and in any event I think I am more than justified to judge anything they say (in or out) at least a bit more harshly, because such a lapse isn’t likely to just be a one-time thing but indicative of deeper deficiencies that will likely cut across a wide swath of knowledge in the case of the individual in question.
I was unimpressed by his statistics regardless, and his response to criticisms (where he won’t even say what those were) left me even less impressed, so I don’t think one needs to look at his political terminology to criticize Bill James.