I can’t identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong, and even then, that’s an example where the general public in many areas also had a fair bit of support for that view.
Well, on any issue, there will be both intellectuals and non-intellectuals on all sides in some numbers. We can only observe how particular opinions correlate with various measures of intellectual status, and how prevalent they are among people who are in the upper strata by these measures. Marxism is a good example of an unsound belief (or rather a whole complex of beliefs) that was popular among intellectuals because its basic unsoundness is no longer seriously disputable. Other significant examples from the last hundred years are unfortunately a subject of at least some ongoing controversy; most of that period is still within living memory, after all.
Still, some examples that, in my view, should not be controversial given the present state of knowledge are various highbrow economic theories that managed to lead their intellectual fans into fallacies even deeper than those of the naive folk economics, the views of human nature and behavior of the sort criticized in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and a number of foreign policy questions in which the subsequent historical developments falsified the fashionable intellectual opinion so spectacularly that the contemporary troglodyte positions ended up looking good in comparison. There are other examples I have in mind, but those are probably too close to the modern hot-button issues to be worth bringing up.
The question is whether the heuristic is accurate (in the sense of being more often correct than not) and, if so, how accurate it is. This heuristic seems to be one where the general trend is clear.
Frankly, in matters of politics and ideology, I don’t find the trend so clear. To establish the existence of such a trend, we would have to define a clear metric for the goodness of outcomes of various policies, and then discuss and evaluate various hypothetical and counterfactual scenarios of policies that have historically found, or presently find, higher or lower favor among the (suitably defined) intellectual class.
This, however, doesn’t seem feasible in practice. Neither is it possible to evaluate the overall goodness of policy outcomes in an objective or universally agreed way (except perhaps in very extreme cases), nor is it possible to construct accurate hypotheticals in matters of such immense complexity where the law of unintended consequences lurks behind every corner.
I’m curious about your claim that that “intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk.” This seems plausible to me, but I’d be curious what substantial evidence there for the claim.
My answer is similar to the earlier comment by Perplexed: given the definition of “intellectual” I assume, the claim is self-evident, in fact almost tautological.
I define “intellectuals” as people who derive a non-negligible part of their social status—either as public personalities or within their social networks—from the fact that other people show some esteem and interest for their opinions about issues that are outside the domain of mathematical, technical, or hard-scientific knowledge, and that are a matter of some public disagreement and controversy. This definition corresponds very closely to the normal usage of the term, and it implies directly that intellectuals will have unusually high stakes in the status-signaling implications of their beliefs.
JoshuaZ:
Well, on any issue, there will be both intellectuals and non-intellectuals on all sides in some numbers. We can only observe how particular opinions correlate with various measures of intellectual status, and how prevalent they are among people who are in the upper strata by these measures. Marxism is a good example of an unsound belief (or rather a whole complex of beliefs) that was popular among intellectuals because its basic unsoundness is no longer seriously disputable. Other significant examples from the last hundred years are unfortunately a subject of at least some ongoing controversy; most of that period is still within living memory, after all.
Still, some examples that, in my view, should not be controversial given the present state of knowledge are various highbrow economic theories that managed to lead their intellectual fans into fallacies even deeper than those of the naive folk economics, the views of human nature and behavior of the sort criticized in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and a number of foreign policy questions in which the subsequent historical developments falsified the fashionable intellectual opinion so spectacularly that the contemporary troglodyte positions ended up looking good in comparison. There are other examples I have in mind, but those are probably too close to the modern hot-button issues to be worth bringing up.
Frankly, in matters of politics and ideology, I don’t find the trend so clear. To establish the existence of such a trend, we would have to define a clear metric for the goodness of outcomes of various policies, and then discuss and evaluate various hypothetical and counterfactual scenarios of policies that have historically found, or presently find, higher or lower favor among the (suitably defined) intellectual class.
This, however, doesn’t seem feasible in practice. Neither is it possible to evaluate the overall goodness of policy outcomes in an objective or universally agreed way (except perhaps in very extreme cases), nor is it possible to construct accurate hypotheticals in matters of such immense complexity where the law of unintended consequences lurks behind every corner.
My answer is similar to the earlier comment by Perplexed: given the definition of “intellectual” I assume, the claim is self-evident, in fact almost tautological.
I define “intellectuals” as people who derive a non-negligible part of their social status—either as public personalities or within their social networks—from the fact that other people show some esteem and interest for their opinions about issues that are outside the domain of mathematical, technical, or hard-scientific knowledge, and that are a matter of some public disagreement and controversy. This definition corresponds very closely to the normal usage of the term, and it implies directly that intellectuals will have unusually high stakes in the status-signaling implications of their beliefs.