The terms you picked, while convenient, have somewhat wrong connotations for me.
What you called “geeks” are really the Russian/Eastern European concept of “intelligentsia”—and note that as opposed to true Western geeks, intelligentsia is overwhelmingly liberal-arts people, not hackers.
And what you called “jocks” I would call get-shit-done people. The are not necessarily into sports or machismo, they’re just… practical.
The Russian word “intelligentsia” is very complicated, it does not translate into “geek” either as used by OP, or by anyone else who is an English speaker. There is a lot of cultural context, worldview, and Russian history behind this word. It also means something quite different from the word “intelligentsia” in English.
There is an element of “the invisible aristocracy” (with all that this entails).
Well, sure, but I’m not trying to use the Russian word here, I’m trying to convey the concept of liberal arts/humanities people who have something of a disdain for the material world (and think that is the proper attitude) and generally think that ideas matter much more than things. Oh, and of course they have a high opinion of themselves X-)
Well, sure, but I’m not trying to use the Russian word here
What you called “geeks” are really the Russian/Eastern European concept of “intelligentsia”
???
of course they have a high opinion of themselves
It’s not just that. There is:
(a) aristocracy (ordering from better to worse, moreover by birth)
(b) invisible (independent of actual rank in society)
There is also an element of “noblesse oblige” and “betterment of all mankind at the expense of self” in how the intelligentsia is to conduct itself. Self interest considered “vulgar,” etc.
None of this has anything to do with the OP’s posts on building a better asshole.
Well, it is true that I think that I think to post effectively on LW is to translate my rather diverse life experience to Americanese and it is leaky. But it is nowhere this leaky.
There are mind people and body people. Where it comes from is a good question, but this phenomenon goes back to tribal chieftains vs. shamans, warriors vs clergy and who knows where.
Ultimately it comes from the fact that man is a smart animal and these two aspects are in a constant tension. Satoshi Kanazawa have put it so that as IQ is a general problem-solver, it tends to suppress earlier adapted problem-solver instincts, making intelligent people not too good at things like common sense, read signs of romantic attraction, pick up social cues and so on.
So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic. The warriors were the perfectly primates, who represented what is in humans like in every animal, who respected physical health and strength, liked such challenges, liked tackling problems head-on preferably clubbing them over the head, liked direct and impulsive action and raised the fiercest of them as chieftains. And the shaman was the intellectual who represented what is specifically human in man, the intelligence, which was back then probably interpreted as suggestions from spirits and gods perhaps through a bicameral mind setup.
If Kanazawa is right that the tension is inherent, because not only stupid people are not smart but also smart people are not good at being instinctive and sensible, then I think that explains it. But even when not I think the basic tension can also be seen empirically.
Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock. The whole point is that with some influence from body people they are more likely to become hackers than postmodernists :-) (Intelligentsia is much more a French than Russian concept.)
And the get-shit-done comes from the same body-orientation as machismo or sports come from, as our heads can be in any kinds of clouds but our body is always in the here in now, it is through the body how minds have contact with reality. People who care about their ass sitting on an uncomfortable chair will be practical and fix the chair. People who are not interested in their ass being uncomfortable because the body is a mere lowly vessel of their minds won’t.
So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic.
That, ahem, sounds like bullshit to me. I would like to see some empirical evidence.
Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock.
I disagree. I think they are very different kind of people—you may know their opposition as poets vs. techies. Of course both are different from rah-rah idiots, but that still doesn’t make them similar.
Well, you know anthro is hard, because the fact that currently living hunter-gatherers stayed so while everybody else moved on makes them rather atypical and unrepresentative, and everything else is just reasoning from archeology aka throwing darts to a football field from a helicopter. So I cannot provide that.
As for poets vs. technies being a very different kind, sure, my post is about the difference, I am just arguing they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer, because he has a certain respect for the blacksmith with a hammer, this kind of my point.
...they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer
And that’s what I’m disagreeing with :-) I think they are two different subspecies and even if a poet picks up a hammer out of the respect for the blacksmith, he’s not going to become a techie. Similarly, a techie who puts down his hammer is not a poet.
Okay. Let’s try to get empirical—which will not be easy. In my high school, 1992-96, correlation between interest in computers and interest in literature: high. Getting good grades in literature or history vs. math, science: mid-high. Visual arts vs math: low.
I think there is a large gap between hard mathy science and the visual arts.
But the gap between programming and reading / writing stuff not high—most of programming is not actually that mathy as it is advertised to be, while schools like to start with computing the Fibonacci, much of it in real life is just a bit more rigorous way of defining processes in pseudo-English. To give you a good example, Ruby on Rails is considered a fine piece of hackerdom, I think DHH won some hacker award with that, I looked into the codebase, and it is smart, often too much so (i.e. hairy, at least the early version I looked at) but it is more of a writing type of brilliance twisting expression this way and that way rather than mathy hard-science kind. Or another example, and this is considered a tutorial with fairly high-level concepts, http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database.html frankly it is way easier for my non-mathy mind than even calculus. It is just writing rigorously.
Hard mathy science, programing, writing, visual arts
Putting it differently. The closest relative to programming is that kind of more rigorous analytical philosophy Wittgenstein was doing. Like the “Is the king of France bald?” problem which cannot be answered with Y or N if you know France has no king. A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class and it used to have instances and now it has no instance, and baldness is an instance attribute and...”
And I think the gap between analytical philosophy and quantum physics is huge. The gap between that and writing smart essays, not so much.
One evening, when a friend and me were drunk, we seriously got into discussing things like the Krshna-religion he was interested in is basically the idea that the godhead is the base class all other classes inherit attributes from, and I was saying I am more interested in Buddhism because I see no fixed classes just processes bit like in Erlang and and and… my point is we seriously built theology on top of programming. I am not exactly proud of this exercise, but we were drunk and young. So my point is, we went really far off the softest soft science—liberal arts direction and we were still related to programmers-hackers.
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math. I, too, think that math and programming are not as close as they are usually made out to be.
I disagree that literature (fiction) and writing are close to programming. Academic or technical writing, maybe, but fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Yes, there is Tolkien with his world-building, but notice how he is beloved by (techie) geeks and looked down at by (poet) high-culture literary types. Those literary types much prefer writers like James Joyce, or Nabokov, or maybe Marquez, writers who are not analytic and are not much concerned with logic, consistency, etc. And, of course, there is poetry.
A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class...
Yeah. Reminds me of an old joke about a programmer who each evening would put two glasses on his nightstand: one full of water if he gets thirsty during the night; and one empty one if he doesn’t :-)
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math.
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking. You wouldn’t expect to use, say, calculus or linear algebra in a Rails database application, but math-heavy computer science (databases, parsing and whatnot) comes up all the time.
fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Even literary fiction uses common narrative tropes all the time. And one ingredient that makes it popular in liberal-arts academia (and that’s sorely lacking in the likes of Tolkien, and most sci-fi/fantasy) is basically characterization of an introspective kind. But HP:MoR is heavily based on that kind of introspection. Also, even James Joyce only used “non-logical” language as a hack to immerse the reader in the characters’ thought process. A lot of poetry does the same thing: it’s highly evocative and not at all “logical’, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be understood on its own terms. There’s no real divergence, only a contingent cultural divide.
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking.
Technically speaking, yes, practically speaking, no. In particular, people good at logical/analytical thinking are not necessarily good at math and vice versa.
So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic.
Do you have good anthropological evidence that this “dynamic” actually exists / existed, and corresponds to what you’re referring to?
“How our proud ancestors lived” in popular culture is full of bad/old science, romantic notions, nationalist/political propaganda (in either direction), and I trust it as much as I trust talk of “positive energy”.
There are a bunch of stories (books, movies, games...) set in a fictional past, and they are often made understandable by projecting modern stereotypes there (because nobody has a good idea what life was millennia ago, and more importantly people don’t care, they prefer modern issues with an exotic backdrop). It seems that you’re seeing the resemblance of modern social stereotypes with “shamans” or “warriors” in popular culture, and acting as if it revealed some kind of profound truth about mankind.
(note that I don’t know that much history or anthropology myself)
Well, it is true that I think that I think to post effectively on LW is to translate my rather diverse life experience to Americanese and it is leaky.
And some of us then have to translate that again into their own cultural concepts. “Jock” is not a word or a concept here in the UK, and “geek”, if it means anything here, just means someone into computers and sci-fi. Judging from Google, “jock” even in its home culture doesn’t mean what you’re using it to mean either. All that leaves is a pair of character sketches that don’t seem to correspond to any real categories.
Yes, because the UK is very special and excellent at it. Even Tolkien, the textbook example of the room-temperature scholar wrote to his son he was a “fierce” rugby player and “got his colours” in a year which I am not sure what it means but probably something good. Or Kate Middleton played hockey. So the UK is absolutely excellent and unique at not letting people bifurcate into body people / lower-class and mind-people / upper-class but also pushing high-class / mind-people to also be body people.
But in this article I was focusing on a different aspect, practicality, and again this is something that works very well in the UK, when I worked in Birmingham I constantly got the impression that people are more interested in tinkering / invention than overly abstract high-browery.
This is my point. If your culture is already on the balance, you don’t notice the problem at all but then OK because for you it is already solved.
An obvious close counter-example is France. Intellectuals of the Sartre type were never properly practical.
The terms you picked, while convenient, have somewhat wrong connotations for me.
What you called “geeks” are really the Russian/Eastern European concept of “intelligentsia”—and note that as opposed to true Western geeks, intelligentsia is overwhelmingly liberal-arts people, not hackers.
And what you called “jocks” I would call get-shit-done people. The are not necessarily into sports or machismo, they’re just… practical.
The Russian word “intelligentsia” is very complicated, it does not translate into “geek” either as used by OP, or by anyone else who is an English speaker. There is a lot of cultural context, worldview, and Russian history behind this word. It also means something quite different from the word “intelligentsia” in English.
There is an element of “the invisible aristocracy” (with all that this entails).
Well, sure, but I’m not trying to use the Russian word here, I’m trying to convey the concept of liberal arts/humanities people who have something of a disdain for the material world (and think that is the proper attitude) and generally think that ideas matter much more than things. Oh, and of course they have a high opinion of themselves X-)
???
It’s not just that. There is:
(a) aristocracy (ordering from better to worse, moreover by birth)
(b) invisible (independent of actual rank in society)
There is also an element of “noblesse oblige” and “betterment of all mankind at the expense of self” in how the intelligentsia is to conduct itself. Self interest considered “vulgar,” etc.
None of this has anything to do with the OP’s posts on building a better asshole.
Awesome. If I borrow this for the sequence name, do you want attribution?
Also, I think I really need to write “ethics as if the world was boring” now to explain it (^・ω・^ )
No (thank you though).
Concept, not word. Intelligentsia is a valid English noun.
Ok, done here.
Well, it is true that I think that I think to post effectively on LW is to translate my rather diverse life experience to Americanese and it is leaky. But it is nowhere this leaky.
There are mind people and body people. Where it comes from is a good question, but this phenomenon goes back to tribal chieftains vs. shamans, warriors vs clergy and who knows where.
Ultimately it comes from the fact that man is a smart animal and these two aspects are in a constant tension. Satoshi Kanazawa have put it so that as IQ is a general problem-solver, it tends to suppress earlier adapted problem-solver instincts, making intelligent people not too good at things like common sense, read signs of romantic attraction, pick up social cues and so on.
So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic. The warriors were the perfectly primates, who represented what is in humans like in every animal, who respected physical health and strength, liked such challenges, liked tackling problems head-on preferably clubbing them over the head, liked direct and impulsive action and raised the fiercest of them as chieftains. And the shaman was the intellectual who represented what is specifically human in man, the intelligence, which was back then probably interpreted as suggestions from spirits and gods perhaps through a bicameral mind setup.
If Kanazawa is right that the tension is inherent, because not only stupid people are not smart but also smart people are not good at being instinctive and sensible, then I think that explains it. But even when not I think the basic tension can also be seen empirically.
Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock. The whole point is that with some influence from body people they are more likely to become hackers than postmodernists :-) (Intelligentsia is much more a French than Russian concept.)
And the get-shit-done comes from the same body-orientation as machismo or sports come from, as our heads can be in any kinds of clouds but our body is always in the here in now, it is through the body how minds have contact with reality. People who care about their ass sitting on an uncomfortable chair will be practical and fix the chair. People who are not interested in their ass being uncomfortable because the body is a mere lowly vessel of their minds won’t.
That, ahem, sounds like bullshit to me. I would like to see some empirical evidence.
I disagree. I think they are very different kind of people—you may know their opposition as poets vs. techies. Of course both are different from rah-rah idiots, but that still doesn’t make them similar.
Well, you know anthro is hard, because the fact that currently living hunter-gatherers stayed so while everybody else moved on makes them rather atypical and unrepresentative, and everything else is just reasoning from archeology aka throwing darts to a football field from a helicopter. So I cannot provide that.
As for poets vs. technies being a very different kind, sure, my post is about the difference, I am just arguing they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer, because he has a certain respect for the blacksmith with a hammer, this kind of my point.
And that’s what I’m disagreeing with :-) I think they are two different subspecies and even if a poet picks up a hammer out of the respect for the blacksmith, he’s not going to become a techie. Similarly, a techie who puts down his hammer is not a poet.
Okay. Let’s try to get empirical—which will not be easy. In my high school, 1992-96, correlation between interest in computers and interest in literature: high. Getting good grades in literature or history vs. math, science: mid-high. Visual arts vs math: low.
I think there is a large gap between hard mathy science and the visual arts.
But the gap between programming and reading / writing stuff not high—most of programming is not actually that mathy as it is advertised to be, while schools like to start with computing the Fibonacci, much of it in real life is just a bit more rigorous way of defining processes in pseudo-English. To give you a good example, Ruby on Rails is considered a fine piece of hackerdom, I think DHH won some hacker award with that, I looked into the codebase, and it is smart, often too much so (i.e. hairy, at least the early version I looked at) but it is more of a writing type of brilliance twisting expression this way and that way rather than mathy hard-science kind. Or another example, and this is considered a tutorial with fairly high-level concepts, http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database.html frankly it is way easier for my non-mathy mind than even calculus. It is just writing rigorously.
So let’s define a scale
H--------------------------------------------P---------W--------------------------------------------------------V
Hard mathy science, programing, writing, visual arts
Putting it differently. The closest relative to programming is that kind of more rigorous analytical philosophy Wittgenstein was doing. Like the “Is the king of France bald?” problem which cannot be answered with Y or N if you know France has no king. A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class and it used to have instances and now it has no instance, and baldness is an instance attribute and...”
And I think the gap between analytical philosophy and quantum physics is huge. The gap between that and writing smart essays, not so much.
One evening, when a friend and me were drunk, we seriously got into discussing things like the Krshna-religion he was interested in is basically the idea that the godhead is the base class all other classes inherit attributes from, and I was saying I am more interested in Buddhism because I see no fixed classes just processes bit like in Erlang and and and… my point is we seriously built theology on top of programming. I am not exactly proud of this exercise, but we were drunk and young. So my point is, we went really far off the softest soft science—liberal arts direction and we were still related to programmers-hackers.
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math. I, too, think that math and programming are not as close as they are usually made out to be.
I disagree that literature (fiction) and writing are close to programming. Academic or technical writing, maybe, but fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Yes, there is Tolkien with his world-building, but notice how he is beloved by (techie) geeks and looked down at by (poet) high-culture literary types. Those literary types much prefer writers like James Joyce, or Nabokov, or maybe Marquez, writers who are not analytic and are not much concerned with logic, consistency, etc. And, of course, there is poetry.
Yeah. Reminds me of an old joke about a programmer who each evening would put two glasses on his nightstand: one full of water if he gets thirsty during the night; and one empty one if he doesn’t :-)
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking. You wouldn’t expect to use, say, calculus or linear algebra in a Rails database application, but math-heavy computer science (databases, parsing and whatnot) comes up all the time.
Even literary fiction uses common narrative tropes all the time. And one ingredient that makes it popular in liberal-arts academia (and that’s sorely lacking in the likes of Tolkien, and most sci-fi/fantasy) is basically characterization of an introspective kind. But HP:MoR is heavily based on that kind of introspection. Also, even James Joyce only used “non-logical” language as a hack to immerse the reader in the characters’ thought process. A lot of poetry does the same thing: it’s highly evocative and not at all “logical’, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be understood on its own terms. There’s no real divergence, only a contingent cultural divide.
Technically speaking, yes, practically speaking, no. In particular, people good at logical/analytical thinking are not necessarily good at math and vice versa.
Do you have good anthropological evidence that this “dynamic” actually exists / existed, and corresponds to what you’re referring to?
“How our proud ancestors lived” in popular culture is full of bad/old science, romantic notions, nationalist/political propaganda (in either direction), and I trust it as much as I trust talk of “positive energy”.
There are a bunch of stories (books, movies, games...) set in a fictional past, and they are often made understandable by projecting modern stereotypes there (because nobody has a good idea what life was millennia ago, and more importantly people don’t care, they prefer modern issues with an exotic backdrop). It seems that you’re seeing the resemblance of modern social stereotypes with “shamans” or “warriors” in popular culture, and acting as if it revealed some kind of profound truth about mankind.
(note that I don’t know that much history or anthropology myself)
And some of us then have to translate that again into their own cultural concepts. “Jock” is not a word or a concept here in the UK, and “geek”, if it means anything here, just means someone into computers and sci-fi. Judging from Google, “jock” even in its home culture doesn’t mean what you’re using it to mean either. All that leaves is a pair of character sketches that don’t seem to correspond to any real categories.
Yes, because the UK is very special and excellent at it. Even Tolkien, the textbook example of the room-temperature scholar wrote to his son he was a “fierce” rugby player and “got his colours” in a year which I am not sure what it means but probably something good. Or Kate Middleton played hockey. So the UK is absolutely excellent and unique at not letting people bifurcate into body people / lower-class and mind-people / upper-class but also pushing high-class / mind-people to also be body people.
But in this article I was focusing on a different aspect, practicality, and again this is something that works very well in the UK, when I worked in Birmingham I constantly got the impression that people are more interested in tinkering / invention than overly abstract high-browery.
This is my point. If your culture is already on the balance, you don’t notice the problem at all but then OK because for you it is already solved.
An obvious close counter-example is France. Intellectuals of the Sartre type were never properly practical.