A. I’m not entirely sure that things that used to be human nature no longer are. We deal with them, surpress them, sublimate, etc. Anger responses, fear, lust, possesiveness, nesting. The animal instincts of the human animal. How those manifest does indeed change, but not the “nature” of them.
B. We live (in the USA) in a long-term culture of anti-intellectualism. Obviously this doesn’t mean it can’t change… Sometimes it seems like it will (remember the days before nerd-chic?), but in a nominally democratic society, there will always be a minority of people who are relatively “intellectual” by definition, we should recognize that you don’t have to overcome anti-intellectualism, you just have to raise the bar. While still anti-intellectual, in many ways even the intentionally uninformed know more than the average person did back in the day. (just like there will always be a minority of people who will be “relatively tall”, even as the average height has tended to increased over the generations)
Interesting. If my experience is representative, then a sizable subset of Less Wrongers are what the author calls epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectuals.
It seems slightly odd that there are many on LessWrong whose justification for not looking deeply into the philosophy literature is that philosophers “are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness” and end up shooting their own philosophical feet off, but that subset of LessWrong doesn’t seem to overlap much with those who are epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectuals in the more political sense. Admittedly my own view is that the former subset is basically wrong whereas the latter is basically right, but naively viewed the two positions would seem to go together much as they do with neoconservatives. …I feel like I’m not carving up reality correctly.
I’m probably referring to all of the above. That’s an interesting speciation of anti-intellectualism, but I am meaning it in the broad sense, because I’ve seen all of them. If someone calls me a “liberal elitist”, is it version 1, 3, or 5? Does the class issue also result in a gut reaction? Is the traditionalism directly related to the totalizing? I understand the differences as described in the article, but I’m not sure they are easily separable. Sometimes yes, but not always.
So: A. I think the differences are interesting, and useful, but not always clearly delineated, and B. when generalizing about a group, I’m not sure it’s necessary.
If I say “New Yorkers really like dogs”, it’s probably not cricitcal which breed I mean. If I say “that person really likes his/her dog” then it matters more.
(and we all know that when you generalize about things it’s like when you assume things: it makes a general out of I and, um, ze)
As relates to the original quote: which type was Godin referring to? He talks about being ashamed at being uninformed, which touches on 1 and 5, possibly 2, and interacts with 3. (pobre quatro)
One of the things we’ve slowly seen is the other side: being unashamed at being informed...or politically unpunished, for that matter. Politicians want to be “regular people” because they are berated for using subclauses in sentences (John Kerry), for being a know-it-all (Gore), elitist (everyone, per Palin), destroying the fabric (Obama), utopiansim (the 90′s Clintons), etc...
(and we all know that when you generalize about things it’s like when you assume things: it makes a general out of I and, um, ze)
What really entertained me about this clause is that I spent a noticeable period of time trying to remember which of the many competing novel pronoun schemes “ze” was in, before realizing from context that it had to be a second-person pronoun and wondering why would we create a new second-person pronoun given that the English “you” is already ambiguous about gender and number and basically everything else, and only then did my parsing of the rest of the sentence catch up and make me realize it was a joke.
A. I’m not entirely sure that things that used to be human nature no longer are. We deal with them, surpress them, sublimate, etc. Anger responses, fear, lust, possesiveness, nesting. The animal instincts of the human animal. How those manifest does indeed change, but not the “nature” of them.
B. We live (in the USA) in a long-term culture of anti-intellectualism. Obviously this doesn’t mean it can’t change… Sometimes it seems like it will (remember the days before nerd-chic?), but in a nominally democratic society, there will always be a minority of people who are relatively “intellectual” by definition, we should recognize that you don’t have to overcome anti-intellectualism, you just have to raise the bar. While still anti-intellectual, in many ways even the intentionally uninformed know more than the average person did back in the day. (just like there will always be a minority of people who will be “relatively tall”, even as the average height has tended to increased over the generations)
Which type of anti-intellectualism are you referring to?
Interesting. If my experience is representative, then a sizable subset of Less Wrongers are what the author calls epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectuals.
It seems slightly odd that there are many on LessWrong whose justification for not looking deeply into the philosophy literature is that philosophers “are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness” and end up shooting their own philosophical feet off, but that subset of LessWrong doesn’t seem to overlap much with those who are epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectuals in the more political sense. Admittedly my own view is that the former subset is basically wrong whereas the latter is basically right, but naively viewed the two positions would seem to go together much as they do with neoconservatives. …I feel like I’m not carving up reality correctly.
I’m probably referring to all of the above. That’s an interesting speciation of anti-intellectualism, but I am meaning it in the broad sense, because I’ve seen all of them.
If someone calls me a “liberal elitist”, is it version 1, 3, or 5? Does the class issue also result in a gut reaction? Is the traditionalism directly related to the totalizing? I understand the differences as described in the article, but I’m not sure they are easily separable. Sometimes yes, but not always. So: A. I think the differences are interesting, and useful, but not always clearly delineated, and B. when generalizing about a group, I’m not sure it’s necessary. If I say “New Yorkers really like dogs”, it’s probably not cricitcal which breed I mean. If I say “that person really likes his/her dog” then it matters more.
(and we all know that when you generalize about things it’s like when you assume things: it makes a general out of I and, um, ze)
As relates to the original quote: which type was Godin referring to? He talks about being ashamed at being uninformed, which touches on 1 and 5, possibly 2, and interacts with 3. (pobre quatro) One of the things we’ve slowly seen is the other side: being unashamed at being informed...or politically unpunished, for that matter. Politicians want to be “regular people” because they are berated for using subclauses in sentences (John Kerry), for being a know-it-all (Gore), elitist (everyone, per Palin), destroying the fabric (Obama), utopiansim (the 90′s Clintons), etc...
What really entertained me about this clause is that I spent a noticeable period of time trying to remember which of the many competing novel pronoun schemes “ze” was in, before realizing from context that it had to be a second-person pronoun and wondering why would we create a new second-person pronoun given that the English “you” is already ambiguous about gender and number and basically everything else, and only then did my parsing of the rest of the sentence catch up and make me realize it was a joke.