Is math a socialist plot?
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Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem Children Zone) had an interesting comment during an economic competitiveness summit on a similar trend:
"There is a sense in this country that in my belief is anti-intellectual. There is almost a case to be made against smart people and that has penetrated I think from the top leadership in this country right through the ‘hood’ where people look down on folk who are academically prepared gifted and we’ve gotta change this culture, America is fascinated by whether you can drink a beer. That’s not, that should not be the qualification for a president. A president ought to be able to lead the nation in a direction where young people aspire for the kind of genius that’s around this table."
"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things and deserve some of the disdain they get, but I'm just disappointed how much social value is placed on silly things like excessive beer drinking which leads to popularity and thus what some young people aspire to do because intellectuals are seen as irrelevant and dull.
I think there is some connection between this perception and lower desire by students to want to enter into math and computer science... right at the point in history where such skills are in demand.
(p.s. video of summit where Canada made the comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )
Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots.
That's just one example of the problem, I could go on. But those examples alone are sufficient to establish my point.
While it's true that America's distrust of intellectuals has blurred into a distrust of learning, there is a kernel of truth there. Intellectuals have a great failing that has cost millions their lives and caused misery for billions more, which is trusting their beautiful theories too much, even when reality is smacking them across the face with the fact that the theories are wrong or not working. (For the love of Pete, some "intellectuals" still study Marxist economics as if it has some sort of bearing on reality! Studying it for historical reasons is one thing, but not as if it's real.) Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position. If the 20th century taught us anything it is that reality is irreducibly complex and the beautiful-but-invariably-oversimplified theories beloved of intellectuals can not possible capture reality, but this lesson doesn't seem to have filtered out of the mathematical domain very well.
The problem is that to really understand what's going on you have to detach "learning" from "intellectualism". I like learning, I distrust intellectualism and still see no overwhelming reason to start trusting it.
We're in the middle of one failure of intellectualism even as we speak, as the global warming consensus falls apart; I don't know what truth will replace it but I feel very confident it will be much more nuanced. That came close to beggaring the entire world in the service of an intellectual theory. And more quietly, IMNSHO we're in the middle of the intellectual dietary consensus falling apart. And if I'm right about that, you can chalk up tens of millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of people in unnecessary fat misery into intellectualism's column, in the service of the simple-but-wrong theory that the body can be modeled as just a passive rubber bag.
That's hard to get across to a large mass of people, of course, and easy for it to get blurred. But if you don't understand this, you won't understand the real reasons for the anti-intellectual strain of American thought. It isn't just "we hate dem dare learnin' folk", which is just an excuse for not understanding.
This is, maybe, a non-sequitur, but for the sake of intellectual correctness, I believe the Cultural Revolution, at least, was anti-intellectual. Mao closed down schools, burned books, and put teachers and intellectuals into re-education camps until they were ready to join work groups where they toiled in factories and fields. Mao's greatest intellectual rival, Deng Xiaoping, was held under house arrest for years. Mao promoted hard work and nationalism, not intellectualism.
"Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東; pinyin: Máo Zédōng; Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung) About this sound pronunciation (help·info) (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and Communist leader. He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism, military strategies, and his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
(Wikipedia, the true sign of a lazy citer. :) )
Look, it's a fact that ideas, when misapplied by powerful individuals or institutions, can lead to needless suffering. You could point to large scale suffering resulting from communism, from a misplaced belief in ethnic or cultural superiority, from capitalism, from religion, and so on.
The fact that various beliefs (whose social implementation results in suffering) have been propounded by intellectuals does not warrant the conclusions you are drawing. I am tired of this tendency among some HN readers with a bee in their bonnet about communism to just drag it into any discussion and use the deaths of large numbers of people as currency for laying out an irrelevant political argument.
I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples. Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.
Furthermore, all 3 men in your example were, strictly speaking, populists who crafted themselves as intellectuals only through propaganda. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were never known for their intellectual prowess until they took power and their respective propaganda machines rebuilt their image.
And your central claim, that contemporary distrust of intellectuals is somehow rooted histories butchers begs the question: why isn't anti-intellectualism more widespread, especially on the populations most devastated by these monsters?
The type of anti-intellectualism outlined in this thread and news story is a distinctly American version. Yet in your rationalization of this view you name none of the cultural causes in the US for this view.
The intellectuals are deeply at fault because it was the intellectuals who gave the orders. The militaries just carried them out.
You can argue that the pilot of the Enola Gay had some responsibility of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, it's absurd to argue that FDR and Truman had less responsibility for that bombing.
The examples being listed against intellectuals would be more appropriately applied against charismatic leaders who either instigate or take advantage of populist sentiment in populations during difficult times.
I'm guessing we have very different views of what an intellectual is, so let me make this clear: Being smart and well educated doesn't make you an intellectual. It just makes you smart and well educated. If that's your standard, HN is probably exclusively populated by these intellectuals. No offense, but this isn't the case ;).
The point was that leaders are responsible, not that those specific leaders were intellectuals.
It's interesting that you defend intellectuals against the charges of mass murder by using your definition of intellectual, but don't mention that the folks in question, while not intellectuals according to your definition, got their ideas and justifications from folks who do satisfy your definition of intellectuals. And, that went both ways - they were also supported and praised by intellectuals.
The whole point of being an intellectual is that words have consequences.
I'm not saying that a leadership's intellectual advisors and supporters are as responsible for the purges as the leadership, but it's absurd to claim that they had no responsibility. That claim is especially absurd coming from someone who tried to argue that the leadership was far less responsible than the folks who carried out their bidding.
Also, what can this following sentence possibly be but doublethink?
> Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position.
(What is intellectualism if not a deep faith in rationality itself?)
I'd like to note that, even if they are correlated, this does not in itself show that there is a causative relationship between intellectualism and dangerous ideology.
To rephrase the grandparent comment's line of reasoning in a more sarcastic way: "Wildfire kill Ogg family! All fire bad! Ogg anti-fire!"
Faith in the academy.
I think this mistrust of intellectuals is misplaced. Any kind of person, no matter education level, is susceptible this. Any person who is single-mindedly perusing his crazy view of the world and does not care of consequences is dangerous. Historically, intellectuals have had more means and knowledge to pursue their crazy ideas and I guess that is why they are more prominent.
It's certainly true that non-intellectual theories of the world can be very destructive if society places too much trust in them. That would be "superstition", I think. But it hasn't been the problem in the 20th or 21st century in most places.
Superstition does rack up its own respectable death toll though; a number of the other slaughterings that can't be credited to intellectualism of any kind can be credited to some large degree to superstitions, especially if you're willing to call racism a sort of superstition, which is at least debatable.
Good catch. I was trying to give a reason for this misattribution and not justify it.
But back to the larger point. It strikes me that intellectuals who have racked up the greatest kill-scores have done so because of their views in humanitarian fields (politics, philosophy, etc.) I am yet to see a genocide in the name of math or art. One exception I see is the misrepresentation of climate data to support global warming (if indeed that is true).
With that said, I don't know what your operating definition of "intellectualism" is. Mine is just one who values and seeks out learning for its own sake.
Further followup, it is obvious that "intellectualism" can have many definitions. My primary point is to demonstrate that for a large set of definitions, mistrust is rational. Playing with the definitions as so many of my repliers do makes it easy to lose the point in a flurry of words as we redefine "intellectualism" to something harmless by definition, which proves nothing about what's out there in the real world. All this is a way of obscuring and hiding from my point, though, which is that there is a kernel of truth here. That there are definitions of "intellectualism" that are not scary does not prove that there isn't a rather large, scary line of "intellectualism" that has proved very dangerous in the real world, seductive academic ideas and theories trusted over empirical evidence to dangerous effect.
I hope you think it's absurd. If a madman and a thug takes inspiration from a theory, it's hardly the fault of the theorist.
Most westerners are able to see the absurdity of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but they fail to see the absurdity of blaming the Holodomor on Marx. This is probably because the intellectual climate here has been poisoned by decades of cold-war propaganda, which created a paranoid sense that all socialism would necessarily devolve into Stalinism.
I was referring more to the high-school-like effect where people interested in exploring "intellectual" topics like math tend to be treated as "uncool" because of how our education system tends to focus on how to perform a calculation rather fostering its real applications as Devlin mentions here.
If math was just boring calculation, I would also say it's "uncool."
Bad Theories + Power --> Bad Results.
Bad theories come from all over the spectrum but power tends to fall into the hands of smart people.
I guess the problem is that the kind of intelligence needed to get into power and the kind needed once in power can be different. I view the latter as requiring a lot more critical thinking/questioning of your own ideas (although for the former you may need to question others ideas).
But some of the biggest prescriptivist assholes are incredibly stupid people. My favorite example is the Westboro Baptist Cult. These people actively eschew any kind of real education, history, science, or even causality. And yet they protest everyone's activities ceaselessly with offensive signs. Surely the WBC members think "they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences." But are they "smart"? Surely not.
edit: jerf13 is making this point better than I am.
How is that any different from cloaking the prescriptions (or proscriptions, I suppose) in biblical claptrap? Or historical or cultural nonsense? A lot of people believe things are in the bible that are actually not there, at best. Why? Their minister told them. I was one of these people in my youth; I assure you it happens.
Personally, I think this is a classic example of anti-intellectualism. A lot of people get angry arguing with "smart" people because they seem to have "an answer for everything." This is far more infuriating to deal with than the relatively static arguments of Wu Proponents or Creationists, who simply reiterate the same tired nonsense over and over until you can simply ignore it the way you do any droning, repetitious sound.
You left out the part after "well that's what we believe" where they say "because...". Usually that's what gets people. And I grew up around people from whom the existence of math and statistics for something almost guarantee'd they dispute it.
Perhaps you find the scientific claptrap more ugly because you understand it better, but science and pseudoscience are far from the biggest masters of people's lives in the wide world.
> how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off.
There are these countries–incredibly populous countries–where one dude spouting off religious nonsense is the literal law of the land. You disagree? You die or are imprisoned indefinitely.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=126...
It took only a few minutes to read the article in its entirety, and although it was maybe a little longer than it could have been, it wasn't bad as is.
So, if even HN readers don't have the attention span for something like this, then where does that leave us?
I thought the meandering conversational tone with all of the asides was flat out tedious.
Which is a shame because it is a very important topic.
It implies elitism and a lack of practicality: the 'over-educated' person is privileged, (how else could he afford such an education?) considers himself better than the average person and worthy of telling him what to do and how to live, but has not contributed to society in any meaningful way himself.
Of course, Aristotle was a bourgeois (i.e. not proud of being ignorant) and his opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
If the author has never heard this term before, it suggests the accusation is correct in his case.
If you did, and are still reading, my ploy was successful.
Your ploy was not successful. A pity, because judging by the number of comments here, it may have been interesting.
He could have said this in a more direct way without all of the asides and weak socialist plot bait. Clear and concise communication is a mutually exclusive to math skills.
And there's the rub. Having studied math in grad school, I'd say at least 99% of mathematics research has little or no connection to anything tangible in the real world.
One of my good friends is a professor of math, and every once in a while I make sure to rip on him about being "the world's leading expert in something nobody gives a shit about," because it's true. There are probably fewer than 10 people in the world doing work that's closely related to what my friend is doing.
The thing is, (we) mathematicians like it that way. We're proud of the fact that we choose to work on hard theoretical problems that might not have any kind of real world payoff in our lifetimes because what we're really doing is investigating fundamental logical structures.
And, to an extent, part of the reason it's hard to come up with applications of math to daily life is that the mathematics of daily life has become invisible. Sure, I can talk about how CDs use error-correcting codes so they can survive being scratched up a bit and still play, or I can tell (say) my mom about how Google's pagerank algorithm works to help provide her with good quality hits when she searches the web, but CD's and Google searches are such a part of daily life anymore that these things utterly fail to impress. The "average" person probably thinks mathematics is irrelevant to his or her daily life because they never studied much of it in school and still managed to get by without it.
I'd be surprised if it were that high a percentage. But, I'd agree with your statement with one alteration: "yet".
I find your last para quite persuasive but if you compare it to how you might consider your own knowledge of cardio-pulmonary chemical processes to be irrelevant to your need to and ability to breathe then I think a Googlers argument that maths is irrelevant to them still wins.
Also, the commenters cited in the article who originally raised the notion were probably trolls and/or being sarcastic.
It sounds like a ploy but it hints at something real, namely "scientific socialism" where certain individuals claim the power to engineer the lives of others, by force if necessary. As it turns out, force is always necessary, and this turned much of the planet into a bloody abbatoir during the 20th century.
Math and science make me humble, not arrogant. Familiarity with distributed systems, computability, chaos, probability, trade, and the subjective theory of value have enhanced my appreciation for purely voluntary action, and my disgust with the top-down application of force.
I suggest that it wasn't rampant intellectualism that caused the 20th century to be such an abbatoir, but the influence of industrial and technological change on the ancient human practice of warring with ones' enemies, combined with new technologies such as motion pictures and speedy photography which helped to make us more aware of the costs of war.
The US civil war was particularly bloody and gruesome, even though there was nothing resembling the 'scientific socialism' you decry; one might also point out that in the Viet Nam war, the opponents of communism had no problem with dropping napalm and various toxic defoliants all over a country to which they had no territorial claim in the first place and seemed perfectly willing to engineer the lives of others by force in the name of freedom.
I recently spoke at length with an older man who was deeply involved in Vietnam before the Kennedy and Johnson escalations. At the time they focused on killing specific communist leaders and training the South Vietnamese -- pretty much low-key guerilla tactics. But after Diem was assassinated the full military-industrial complex was engaged and they all had a party with Other People's Money.
True about the US civil war. Slavery was part of it. A burgeoning abolitionist movement, both in the north and south, threatened the institution of slavery. Many southerners feared slave revolt ("servile insurrection"), and many northerners feared an influx of freed slaves. The advent of mechanized agriculture was also making slavery obsolete. The other part was tariffs. If the south seceded, the north would be hard up for revenue. Even the governor of New York was talking about secession, and battles were fought in downtown Manhattan.
The industrial and technological change of which you speak also made the US civil war particularly bloody. They fought battles the old way, facing off in lines, but did it with vastly improved weaponry. That's how you got over 20,000 people killed in a single day at Antietam.
I am very happy to see increased awareness of the perils of force. The 21st century is bound to be a happier, freer time. (wink ... gulp)
Both India and China would fit I think. As would Japan. Large chunks of Asia certainly.
I think China's intellectuals need to show more spine in demanding intellectual freedom in discussions of national policy before I would credit China with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism. It's still not clear whether authority and stability or truth and freedom are the paramount values in China. I think all people everywhere ultimately learn to cherish freedom, but some places have more grass-roots demand for freedom at present. In this regard, India compares very favorably to China at the moment.
As for India: what percentage of Indian kids get a full education?
An increasing percentage over time. The question at hand was about aspiration and what a society works towards, not the measure of success achieved to date. By this logic, unless you've conquered intergalactic space travel already, you can't aspire to a space program.
How many people in India aspire to give their kids a full scientific education? Practically everyone, even the desperately poor. Has the number of kids getting an education been increasing or decreasing over time? Teh former.
Does India deliver a high quality education to every kid born in the country? Not at all. But we are working towards it. There are huge problems to be solved and progress is slow.
And it varies over India too. In my home state of Kerala we have 100 % literacy and almost every kid goes to school till 15 years or so. (No evolution phobia either btw ;-)). In Bihar,(say) many kids drop out due to poverty and remain illiterate or barely literate.
The original question was "Is there a (developed, or developing) country in the world right now with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism?"
Respect for learning and intellectuals is the issue. A country could have a great educational system and still disdain intellectuals - the United States say?
The question was about societies that respected education.In India (and China I dare say) an uneducated man respects the educated man, vs disdaining him as an intellectual snob. We are proud that our Prime Minister is a PhD from Oxford. He doesn't have to face accusations of "elitism" like Obama does. We are proud that our last President was a rocket scientist.
One last question: how's religious tolerance in India? Assuming that a foreigner doesn't go around proselytizing, does religion come up often as a point of discussion?
Very often. As to religious tolerance,India is largely tolerant of religions except in certain pockets/times.
Over the last decade or so, there his been a rise in religious tension largely between Muslim and Hindu radicals, but religion is open to discussion and is a safe topic unless you are going around proselytizing in some of the trouble spots where there is a history of religious tension (which you said you are not planning to do). More than that it is hard to generalize. If you have specific questions, I'll try to answer. My email is in my profile.
It is kind of like how in the USA we respect science until it challenges the Bible. Except that the Turkish objections are to more recent events, and is more likely to result in things like jail time.
However --- what I wanted to say in the first place --- people who can afford it, delight in sending their children to university. `Hard' (sciencey) subjects are appreciated.