I had the misfortune to watch part of a comedy tv show in a restaurant. I don’t know which show, but it featured two smart guys who were annoying to the women they were talking with for the high crimes of being funny-looking, not dressing well, and insisting on talking about intellectual matters.
I think one of the things which can take rationality down is that it’s associated with not taking status markers seriously, and people who are invested in status markers defend those markers.
I can remember when being intelligent was considered to be bad (I picked this up from the culture more than from individual people, I think) because it was both unfeminine and unmasculine.
Maybe we live in a short lucky period of time, where people remember that you can make a ton of money by being good with computers and perhaps some other science… and this gives some status to smart people (other than managers). Nobel price is probably helpful here, too, because it’s something that everyone knows, so people know that science can somehow translate to very high status.
people who are invested in status markers defend those markers
Then, why don’t smart people do the same thing? Instead of (or in addition to) competing with each other, why don’t we insist more that being smart is cool (and being stupid is incool)?
Status games are zero-sum on individual level (whether Alice is more popular than Bob, or the other way round, is only important to the Alice and Bob), but when comparing groups, it can have an impact on the whole world. For example, higher status of scientists would probably mean more science, which improves everyone’s life. Just to put things in perspective: we spend $2×10^6 for Khan Academy, but 50×10^9 for the latest Winter Olympics. (I’m choosing two activites than anyone can enjoy; as opposed to a specific school or stadium where the access is limited.) Yeah, that’s factor of 25000. Because running really really fast is so much more imporant that understanding numbers.
Then, why don’t smart people do the same thing? Instead of (or in addition to) competing with each other, why don’t we insist more that being smart is cool (and being stupid is incool)?
To an extent, I think that does happen.
I think that part of the problem is that a lot of people think that “smart=successful=does well in school=the establishment figure”, and that therefore people who don’t do well in school tend to lash out against it for fairly obvious reasons. If a person who can’t do well in school views himself as “not smart”, then for reasons of ego-self-preservation he will tend to decide that “being smart isn’t important” and lash out against things he associates with that trait.
We do live in a short lucky period of time. I agree that people suddenly being able to make a lot of money in IT improved the status of smart people.
As for why smart people don’t do more to improve the status of smart people.… I only have guesses. One is the feeling that status manipulation is unclean—it takes being in the falsehood business. Another is the perception that it’s hard.
I may as well mention treachery—the writers of that tv show got the details right for intelligent talk.
Our short lucky period is embedded in a long unlucky period. As I understand anti-intellectualism (the American variety—I don’t know whether it’s different in other places), it’s theoretically valuing practicality over theory. This is not always the wrong choice, considering the consequences of bad theory, especially state communism.
This might be amusing, considering that a lot of theory went into the surprisingly effective American government. Don’t laugh—the founding fathers had to invent it. So far as I know, there was no prior experience with large-scale democracy.
However, the valuing of practicality only makes sense for people who actually have practical knowledge, and that’s becoming less common because so much more is automated.
I only know a little of the history of how sports came to be hugely important, but I know they weren’t such a big deal in all times and places. We should put them on the list of supernormal stimuli.
As I understand anti-intellectualism (the American variety—I don’t know whether it’s different in other places), it’s theoretically valuing practicality over theory.
That doesn’t sound right to me. “Valuing practicality over theory” is usually called “science”. The slaying of the beautiful hypothesis by a little ugly fact, and all that.
I see anti-intellectualism as consisting of mostly two parts: (1) making smartness to be a bad thing, something to be ashamed of; and (2) suppressing anything outside of groupthink and the general stress on the “us vs them” paradigm.
“Valuing practicality over theory” is usually called “science”.
The greater the inferential distances, the less it seems so. What exactly is the practical aspect of string theory? On the other hand, microwave is pretty useful, but somehow it doesn’t feel scientific. It’s just a technical thing.
It’s like the specialization is too extreme for our intuitions today. It used to be:
Average people who use stuff.
Smart people who do science and create stuff.
But these days it’s more like:
Average people who use stuff.
Skilled people who create stuff.
Smart people who do science… which seems kinda unrelated to the stuff.
The romantic science types like MacGyver or the mad scientists (I’m sure there are many good examples, but they don’t come to my mind right now) are people who study science and then apply it. But in real life, the people who create science, and the people who apply it are not the same.
For example, I can create computer programs, but I never invented anything scientific in computer science. And then there are people who have PhD’s in computer science and publish in peer-reviewed journals, but probably couldn’t make a decent text editor. The link between the top science and doing cool stuff is lost. Einstein can say some weird things about the space-time, but unless he had the Nobel price he couldn’t even become rich from this knowledge. He can’t use his space-time knowledge to build a spaceship or a teleport in his garage. He doesn’t have the power in his hands. A carpenter can make you a new table, but Einstein can’t do anything for you directly.
We don’t see the science directly translated to power, by the scientists. Eisteins are smart, but Zuckerbergs are rich. And even that’s awesome, because Zuckerberg at least is a programmer. It could be worse… you could have a bunch of poorly paid smart programmers (preferably working remotely from some third-world country) making some IT-illiterate boss rich.
I see anti-intellectualism as consisting of mostly two parts: (1) making smartness to be a bad thing, something to be ashamed of; and (2) suppressing anything outside of groupthink and the general stress on the “us vs them” paradigm.
Disagree. Here is a blog post by Eric Raymond describing five different types of anti-intellectualism. You’re (1) and (2) correspond roughly to his thalamic and totalizing types respectively.
Here are his descriptions of the other three:
One kind of “anti-intellectualism” is opposition to “intellectuals” considered as an interest group or social class in the Marxian sense – what Russian writers called the intelligentsia. The only more specific term I can think of for this is anti-intelligentsianism, an ugly coinage which will have to do for the duration of this essay.
Another kind is what I’ll call traditionalism. The traditionalist believes that intellectuals discard or undervalue what Russell Kirk called “the organic wisdom of institutions” (in England and continental Europe this position is associated with Edmund Burke). The traditionalist opposes intellectuals not because they form an interest group but because he believes their ceaseless questioning carelessly damages the organic fabric of society, woven by history and supporting human happiness in ways not understood until it is torn asunder.
Next we come to what I’ll call the epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly. Where the traditionalist decries intellectuals’ corrosion of the organic social fabric, the epistemic skeptic is more likely to be exercised by disruption of the signals that mediate voluntary economic exchanges. This position is often associated with Friedrich Hayek; one of its more notable exponents in the U.S. is Thomas Sowell, who has written critically about the role of intellectuals in society.
Yeah. When people start using “intelligence” as a label for their ideology, of course the people who dislike the ideology will reject the label. There is a risk of the same thing happening to “rationality”. We have to actively oppose this misuse, because if it becomes popular, most people won’t care about the technical definition of the word.
Traditionalism and skepticism make a lot of sense in a world where many scientific experiments don’t replicate, doesn’t it? It’s like treating all new information as an extremely weak evidence. Which makes sense if you have very low trust of the source that generates the information. And sometimes the sources really are not trustworthy. My only problem with these people is that they don’t understand that some scientific disciplines are more trustworthy than others. On the other hand, even some scientists would object to this.
My only problem with these people is that they don’t understand that some scientific disciplines are more trustworthy than others.
In my experience these people are pretty good at treating different scientific disciplines differently. Frequently much better than the scientists themselves.
...a lot of theory went into the surprisingly effective American government. [...] So far as I know, there was no prior experience with large-scale democracy.
This depends crucially on what you’re counting as large-scale democracy. The Roman Republic in some periods may qualify, although most of the time it seems to have been a de-facto oligarchy and its franchise was always quite limited. Iceland was governed by a representative body, the Althing, between 930 and 1262, but its population has never been very large. Venice had a (rather odd) electoral system during its city-state period. The development of the British Parliament from an advisory council into a full-blown representative body and major seat of government was extremely gradual and started quite early; Wikipedia cites De Montfort’s Parliament in the late 13th century as the first elected one.
I think it’s fair to cite the US under its current constitution as the first modern democratic republic of any great size, but I don’t think I’d call it the first one.
Making intelligence high status means having public role models who are intellectuals. We can’t really agree on role models.
Sport fans can agree that Tiger Woods is awesome even if the don’t like golf.
Agreeing that an extremely smart charismatic figure like Julian Assange is awesome is much harder because it’s political. Agreeing that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are awesome is political. Agreeing that Peter Thiel is awesome is political.
Steve Job management to have status while expressing his intelligence but he was a Buddhist who painted himself as being serious about beauty.
As a community we also don’t agree that we want to stand our ground on intelligence. When talking about LW PR implications someone argued that being seen as a crowd of people who think that they are smart is bad for LW.
When doing QS presswork I never tried to pretend to be no geek. In one instance I put on EEGs with a friend and danced while throwing the visualization of the EEGs with a projector against the wall behind us. The goal was to stand the ground that being a geek is cool.
On LW people try to tell me that using the age old technology of a bow and practicing firing arrows is cool and that the activity maximizes their coolness function.
If the idea of smart people to be cool is about firing arrows with a bow, why should anyone consider smart people to be cool and high status?
It’s difficult to be a sport star, but it’s easy to recognize a sport star. Doesn’t work the same with science. At least we have the Nobel price to tell us who the cool scientists are, otherwise most people wouldn’t know. But being told is not the same as seeing. People enjoy watching sport. (Actually, it’s only easy to recognize the sport stars in a specific environment. If no one ever organized golf championships, we wouldn’t know who the best golf players are.)
If we could perhaps make the scientists somehow… compete with each other in a few-minutes sessions… doing something that the audience could understand at least on the “who is winning now” level. (This understanding should be supported by expert commenters.) Okay, this is another big problem: science is slow, and people want quick closures. You could make a competition in something science-related, but it would be the true science; the best scientists would not necessarily win. -- Even so, I think it would be nice to have some science-correlated role models. So, inventing a science-ish TV competition is one possible way.
The sport stars are well-compartmentalized. I am using this as on opposite of “political” you mentioned. It’s not necessarily politics in the usual sense of the word, but the truly awesome intelligent people do something significant; and when you do something significant, you are almost guaranteed to be hated by a lot of people, because you disagree with them or even prove them wrong. The sport stars are safe: they stay at their place and usually don’t move outside. So in some sense the sport stars are popular because they are at the same time awesome and completely useless. Admirable, but not threatening.
If the idea of smart people to be cool is about firing arrows with a bow, why should anyone consider smart people to be cool and high status?
Perhaps it’s not about what you do, but how you do it, and who you are. As an example, imagine that a movie star would buy an ultra-expensive arrow-firing range; would invite there dozen celebrities and a television, and they would chat, drink and eat, and fire from the bows. It would be cool and high-status, and it could even start a new fashion wave. However, if you do this with a small group of geeks, it will not have the same effect.
The way to be cool is to optimize directly for coolness. Just like in the Paul Graham’s essay. Although he says that this stops when you are out of high school. I’d say that when you are out of the high school, the punishments for not being cool enough simply stop being so severe, so you are allowed to just live your life. But if you want to be cool, it’s stil tough, and it won’t happen accidentally. Firing arrows with a bow per se is not optimized for coolness. It could be upgraded to be a cool project, but that would require lot of resources. Yes, being cool is also expensive.
The only way to be cool is to optimize for the coolness explicitly. Preferably without other people realizing that. I believe this is actually what most people perceived to be cool do, although they would probably deny it. (This creates a problem of how to falsify my hypothesis.)
Firing arrows with a bow per se is not optimized for coolness. It could be upgraded to be a cool project, but that would require lot of resources. Yes, being cool is also expensive.
Cool can mean expensive but it might very well mean that you are simply willing to break some silly convention that other people take for granted but that nobody really cares about.
Let’s say I wanted to be a music star in the 21st century. What do I need? A good scenery for Youtube videos.
Song texts that have some message, maybe about the value of Bayes Rule. I don’t need to be able to sing because of auto-tune.
If I want to do something QS inspired by could run live data of a QS device through some algorithm that converts it into sound that people can listen to.
Fulfilling those steps takes some effort but the financial part isn’t that big. At the end I do have a project that’s remarkable in Seth Godins sense of the word.
I probably wouldn’t even need to contact bloggers myself but they will come and want to hear from me to write a story about me.
Once you are willing to violate a few boundaries coolness happens.
I don’t understand why there nobody who is seriously open about using auto-tune as a way to convert meaningful texts into music.
In a world where established stars use it to hide but the establishment treats it as a sign of decadence there a story in using it when you can’t sing at all to express a message that isn’t expressed in today’s media.
I had the misfortune to watch part of a comedy tv show in a restaurant. I don’t know which show, but it featured two smart guys who were annoying to the women they were talking with for the high crimes of being funny-looking, not dressing well, and insisting on talking about intellectual matters.
I think one of the things which can take rationality down is that it’s associated with not taking status markers seriously, and people who are invested in status markers defend those markers.
I can remember when being intelligent was considered to be bad (I picked this up from the culture more than from individual people, I think) because it was both unfeminine and unmasculine.
Maybe we live in a short lucky period of time, where people remember that you can make a ton of money by being good with computers and perhaps some other science… and this gives some status to smart people (other than managers). Nobel price is probably helpful here, too, because it’s something that everyone knows, so people know that science can somehow translate to very high status.
Then, why don’t smart people do the same thing? Instead of (or in addition to) competing with each other, why don’t we insist more that being smart is cool (and being stupid is incool)?
Status games are zero-sum on individual level (whether Alice is more popular than Bob, or the other way round, is only important to the Alice and Bob), but when comparing groups, it can have an impact on the whole world. For example, higher status of scientists would probably mean more science, which improves everyone’s life. Just to put things in perspective: we spend $2×10^6 for Khan Academy, but 50×10^9 for the latest Winter Olympics. (I’m choosing two activites than anyone can enjoy; as opposed to a specific school or stadium where the access is limited.) Yeah, that’s factor of 25000. Because running really really fast is so much more imporant that understanding numbers.
To an extent, I think that does happen.
I think that part of the problem is that a lot of people think that “smart=successful=does well in school=the establishment figure”, and that therefore people who don’t do well in school tend to lash out against it for fairly obvious reasons. If a person who can’t do well in school views himself as “not smart”, then for reasons of ego-self-preservation he will tend to decide that “being smart isn’t important” and lash out against things he associates with that trait.
We do live in a short lucky period of time. I agree that people suddenly being able to make a lot of money in IT improved the status of smart people.
As for why smart people don’t do more to improve the status of smart people.… I only have guesses. One is the feeling that status manipulation is unclean—it takes being in the falsehood business. Another is the perception that it’s hard.
I may as well mention treachery—the writers of that tv show got the details right for intelligent talk.
Our short lucky period is embedded in a long unlucky period. As I understand anti-intellectualism (the American variety—I don’t know whether it’s different in other places), it’s theoretically valuing practicality over theory. This is not always the wrong choice, considering the consequences of bad theory, especially state communism.
This might be amusing, considering that a lot of theory went into the surprisingly effective American government. Don’t laugh—the founding fathers had to invent it. So far as I know, there was no prior experience with large-scale democracy.
However, the valuing of practicality only makes sense for people who actually have practical knowledge, and that’s becoming less common because so much more is automated.
I only know a little of the history of how sports came to be hugely important, but I know they weren’t such a big deal in all times and places. We should put them on the list of supernormal stimuli.
That doesn’t sound right to me. “Valuing practicality over theory” is usually called “science”. The slaying of the beautiful hypothesis by a little ugly fact, and all that.
I see anti-intellectualism as consisting of mostly two parts: (1) making smartness to be a bad thing, something to be ashamed of; and (2) suppressing anything outside of groupthink and the general stress on the “us vs them” paradigm.
The greater the inferential distances, the less it seems so. What exactly is the practical aspect of string theory? On the other hand, microwave is pretty useful, but somehow it doesn’t feel scientific. It’s just a technical thing.
It’s like the specialization is too extreme for our intuitions today. It used to be:
Average people who use stuff.
Smart people who do science and create stuff.
But these days it’s more like:
Average people who use stuff.
Skilled people who create stuff.
Smart people who do science… which seems kinda unrelated to the stuff.
The romantic science types like MacGyver or the mad scientists (I’m sure there are many good examples, but they don’t come to my mind right now) are people who study science and then apply it. But in real life, the people who create science, and the people who apply it are not the same.
For example, I can create computer programs, but I never invented anything scientific in computer science. And then there are people who have PhD’s in computer science and publish in peer-reviewed journals, but probably couldn’t make a decent text editor. The link between the top science and doing cool stuff is lost. Einstein can say some weird things about the space-time, but unless he had the Nobel price he couldn’t even become rich from this knowledge. He can’t use his space-time knowledge to build a spaceship or a teleport in his garage. He doesn’t have the power in his hands. A carpenter can make you a new table, but Einstein can’t do anything for you directly.
We don’t see the science directly translated to power, by the scientists. Eisteins are smart, but Zuckerbergs are rich. And even that’s awesome, because Zuckerberg at least is a programmer. It could be worse… you could have a bunch of poorly paid smart programmers (preferably working remotely from some third-world country) making some IT-illiterate boss rich.
Disagree. Here is a blog post by Eric Raymond describing five different types of anti-intellectualism. You’re (1) and (2) correspond roughly to his thalamic and totalizing types respectively.
Here are his descriptions of the other three:
Yeah. When people start using “intelligence” as a label for their ideology, of course the people who dislike the ideology will reject the label. There is a risk of the same thing happening to “rationality”. We have to actively oppose this misuse, because if it becomes popular, most people won’t care about the technical definition of the word.
Traditionalism and skepticism make a lot of sense in a world where many scientific experiments don’t replicate, doesn’t it? It’s like treating all new information as an extremely weak evidence. Which makes sense if you have very low trust of the source that generates the information. And sometimes the sources really are not trustworthy. My only problem with these people is that they don’t understand that some scientific disciplines are more trustworthy than others. On the other hand, even some scientists would object to this.
In my experience these people are pretty good at treating different scientific disciplines differently. Frequently much better than the scientists themselves.
This depends crucially on what you’re counting as large-scale democracy. The Roman Republic in some periods may qualify, although most of the time it seems to have been a de-facto oligarchy and its franchise was always quite limited. Iceland was governed by a representative body, the Althing, between 930 and 1262, but its population has never been very large. Venice had a (rather odd) electoral system during its city-state period. The development of the British Parliament from an advisory council into a full-blown representative body and major seat of government was extremely gradual and started quite early; Wikipedia cites De Montfort’s Parliament in the late 13th century as the first elected one.
I think it’s fair to cite the US under its current constitution as the first modern democratic republic of any great size, but I don’t think I’d call it the first one.
I think the core issue is cooperation. Eliezer’s why our kind cant cooperate provides a perspective.
Making intelligence high status means having public role models who are intellectuals. We can’t really agree on role models.
Sport fans can agree that Tiger Woods is awesome even if the don’t like golf.
Agreeing that an extremely smart charismatic figure like Julian Assange is awesome is much harder because it’s political. Agreeing that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are awesome is political. Agreeing that Peter Thiel is awesome is political.
Steve Job management to have status while expressing his intelligence but he was a Buddhist who painted himself as being serious about beauty.
As a community we also don’t agree that we want to stand our ground on intelligence. When talking about LW PR implications someone argued that being seen as a crowd of people who think that they are smart is bad for LW.
When doing QS presswork I never tried to pretend to be no geek. In one instance I put on EEGs with a friend and danced while throwing the visualization of the EEGs with a projector against the wall behind us. The goal was to stand the ground that being a geek is cool.
On LW people try to tell me that using the age old technology of a bow and practicing firing arrows is cool and that the activity maximizes their coolness function.
If the idea of smart people to be cool is about firing arrows with a bow, why should anyone consider smart people to be cool and high status?
It’s difficult to be a sport star, but it’s easy to recognize a sport star. Doesn’t work the same with science. At least we have the Nobel price to tell us who the cool scientists are, otherwise most people wouldn’t know. But being told is not the same as seeing. People enjoy watching sport. (Actually, it’s only easy to recognize the sport stars in a specific environment. If no one ever organized golf championships, we wouldn’t know who the best golf players are.)
If we could perhaps make the scientists somehow… compete with each other in a few-minutes sessions… doing something that the audience could understand at least on the “who is winning now” level. (This understanding should be supported by expert commenters.) Okay, this is another big problem: science is slow, and people want quick closures. You could make a competition in something science-related, but it would be the true science; the best scientists would not necessarily win. -- Even so, I think it would be nice to have some science-correlated role models. So, inventing a science-ish TV competition is one possible way.
The sport stars are well-compartmentalized. I am using this as on opposite of “political” you mentioned. It’s not necessarily politics in the usual sense of the word, but the truly awesome intelligent people do something significant; and when you do something significant, you are almost guaranteed to be hated by a lot of people, because you disagree with them or even prove them wrong. The sport stars are safe: they stay at their place and usually don’t move outside. So in some sense the sport stars are popular because they are at the same time awesome and completely useless. Admirable, but not threatening.
Perhaps it’s not about what you do, but how you do it, and who you are. As an example, imagine that a movie star would buy an ultra-expensive arrow-firing range; would invite there dozen celebrities and a television, and they would chat, drink and eat, and fire from the bows. It would be cool and high-status, and it could even start a new fashion wave. However, if you do this with a small group of geeks, it will not have the same effect.
The way to be cool is to optimize directly for coolness. Just like in the Paul Graham’s essay. Although he says that this stops when you are out of high school. I’d say that when you are out of the high school, the punishments for not being cool enough simply stop being so severe, so you are allowed to just live your life. But if you want to be cool, it’s stil tough, and it won’t happen accidentally. Firing arrows with a bow per se is not optimized for coolness. It could be upgraded to be a cool project, but that would require lot of resources. Yes, being cool is also expensive.
The only way to be cool is to optimize for the coolness explicitly. Preferably without other people realizing that. I believe this is actually what most people perceived to be cool do, although they would probably deny it. (This creates a problem of how to falsify my hypothesis.)
Cool can mean expensive but it might very well mean that you are simply willing to break some silly convention that other people take for granted but that nobody really cares about.
Let’s say I wanted to be a music star in the 21st century. What do I need? A good scenery for Youtube videos. Song texts that have some message, maybe about the value of Bayes Rule. I don’t need to be able to sing because of auto-tune. If I want to do something QS inspired by could run live data of a QS device through some algorithm that converts it into sound that people can listen to.
Fulfilling those steps takes some effort but the financial part isn’t that big. At the end I do have a project that’s remarkable in Seth Godins sense of the word.
I probably wouldn’t even need to contact bloggers myself but they will come and want to hear from me to write a story about me. Once you are willing to violate a few boundaries coolness happens.
I don’t understand why there nobody who is seriously open about using auto-tune as a way to convert meaningful texts into music. In a world where established stars use it to hide but the establishment treats it as a sign of decadence there a story in using it when you can’t sing at all to express a message that isn’t expressed in today’s media.