Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world
thesmartset.com
thesmartset.com
During my time in academia (PhD), I'll admit now I had very little idea of what life was like for the majority of people.
Since then I've been living among many working class and poverty-level folks. Average household income in my neighborhood is <$22K (U.S.). As a result, my thinking has changed to unions are overall good ideas, UBI is foolish, and ramping up education investment is pretty minimal in its returns. Creating real neighborhood community (work, education, family, etc) is the best solution... it's just really hard to do!
I'm interested as opinions for and against it do tend to be from 30,000 feet.
For them, UBI is fantastic. How many more Googles/GNUs/Apples would there be if engineers could quit existing companies and form, all while guaranteed basic sustenance.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around.
And then you start having issues convincing people to go for higher education (even assuming its free).
Wait, what about lower education?
Go to school, get good grades, or else you'll ... get a livable wage anyways?
Why should I write essays when I can play video games instead?
Then, until everything is automatable, you still need to get people to work under the hot sun, picking potatoes.
If you have a livable wage without it, why would you go? And how much will the farmer need to pay workers to go?
As the quality of life provided on UBI-only declines, the incentive for additional productive work will increase.
(of course, lots of people now continue to expend additional effort beyond what is necessary for a minimally livable existence, so I don't see this as likely to be a great problem.)
My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI (such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century), for every Newton or Voltaire were many more unknown nobles who spent their life grooming their mustaches.
I don't believe our society is that much better now.
In a sense, but in this particularly case it operates as a negative feedback control mechanism which prevents the actual feared problem from occurring, so is hardly a "tragedy".
> My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI
There are no societies with UBI to look back on.
> such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century
A benefit restricted to a particular social class is not a UBI (or, at least, not much like what modern UBI proposals target, and not likely to serve as a guide as to what one can expect from them), nor, even ignoring that aspect, did the upper class of Europe through any of that time have anything remotely resembling a UBI, which is a flat, equal, unconditional grant to all members of a society.
Now, in much of that period, individual nobles had (either by definition or just disproportionately, depending on the particular time and place) either claims to income from substantial properties or family connections to those who did and who would support junior family members with, often quite conditional, support, but that's more the position of a wealthy capitalist or their associates in the modern era than that of a UBI beneficiary.
So we think that if only I'd have guaranteed income, I'd finally get around to fixing Firefox, or making an Open Source Google, or whatever. Therefore, it would be better for society if people would be free to leave "useless work" and innovate instead.
But once you see the "real world," you realize that it's not going to happen. Most people would just sit at home playing CS or chatting on FB.
Now once humanity is retired, and of no more use (singularity), then sure, why not. It'll be the AIs innovating everything, running everything, and no one will be doing anything useful anyways.
But until that point, I don't know if we can realistically afford three quarters of the population to just go into early retirement.
I'm one of those who views UBI as a way of dealing with productivity explosion implied by (some models of) the singularity (as opposed to a form of welfare.) It seems a realistic option, and more desirable than e.g. slavery or genocide, once things are getting closer to the limit, eh?
Which is cheaper than housing even a small number of them in prisons. One of the hopes is that by eliminating much of the desperateness from poverty, we'll save a bundle from the accompanying reduction in crime.
Maybe extrapolate from what they do...
> Maybe extrapolate from what they do...
People over the age for drawing public pensions (whether or not those are UBI-like; most I'm familiar with are not) are probably not representative of the broader population in their decisions with regard to engagement in the labor market, entrepreneurship, etc., and how those decisions are impacted by changes in available resources.
Look at all the lengths people throughout the ages have gone to to make money. People LIKE money. They like it so much they are willing to work for more of it, even when they already have enough to barely survive.
Could you elaborate on what made you change your mind regarding UBI? It'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this.
One of the principal selling points for UBI as a replacement for existing means tested social benefit programs is that it eliminates the perverse incentives created by means tested programs in which benefits are reduced by outside income (especially from work), at a rate that, in aggregate across the programs a person may be eligible for, may even exceed the after-tax income from work.
A selling point it has as a replacement for minimum wage is that it provides a quality-of-life safety net without preventing work that people would willingly do, and which would be economically valuable for employers, by setting a floor on minimum hourly pay.
UBI is, arguably, more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo it is offered to replace.
Currently, many social benefit programs give people less money the more they work. If a person is eligible for enough of these programs, they can even make less money by working than they would by not working.
UBI (universal basic income) doesn't have this problem because it pays people the same amount regardless of weather they work. Thus, it is arguably more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo is.
EDIT: Made translation more precise.
It took me a few minutes (no exaggeration) to parse your post. But you made some excellent points, so I decided to simplify it for other unlettered folks like myself. (We have a hard time picking apart 70-word long sentences.) It would be even better if you could write for us directly. Even just capping your sentences at 30 words would make a big difference, I think.
Maybe true for the standard retired beneficiary, but not for everyone. A friend of mine is on SS disability. His condition changes over time and has improved some in recent years. When he can work, he has to make sure he doesn't work too much, or his benefits go away.
Replace that with something else and this thinking will change.
I'm confused about your stance on education. At first blush you seem to be diminishing it's impact while promoting it. Care to elaborate?
IIRC there already seems to be a shortage of craftsmen (carpenters, welders, plumbers etc) and a surplus of people with various higher educations.
Say you need 10 more welders - but those guys really don't like risk so they would need a big increase in the salary, maybe 50%-100%. But you know that than the word will get out and the older workers will demand similar salaries.
So it's a big jump in total labor-costs per work-unit. And let's not forget - revenue per employee can be quite limited in many places. So maybe paying low is the better state for the business.
Man I sometimes wished I had a valid mechanicans or electricians certification during the oil boom here ;-)
in the uk, the plumbers/electricians are lucky to make £20/hr.
It depends where they work - London and the SE pay a lot better than the run down cities in the North - and how good their network is.
I used to know someone with a well-paid City job who retrained as a plumber. He earns almost as much as he did and is considerably less stressed. The only downside is occasional snobbery.
http://www.demos.org/blog/12/2/15/why-education-does-not-fix...
Education should be for the sake of learning; companies should be willing to train laborers, from machinists to drivers to software engineers.
Especially since we've largely abandoned previous institutions that provided this: regular neighborhood hangout spots, social clubs, adult recreational leagues, and especially churches.
> unions are overall good ideas
Maybe. Depends. I frequently see union demands oriented around last decade's operational patterns instead of next decade's. Like requiring specific outdated jobs be filled (like toll booth workers) when it would be more value-added to have the same person clean or provide general customer service. A union looking out for its members would embrace that some jobs would fade away and provide (or demand) retraining for its workers so they're qualified for new jobs, even in other industries if need be.
True, though I think new institutions will come back. Things like Meetup groups seem to be gaining more traction--The groups are just slow to adoption because they're so new that nobody can be grandfathered in yet by friends or family who have been long-term members.
> Unions are overall good ideas -- Maybe. Depends.
I see unions as just another corporation - they're satisfying a need of "workers should not be exploited", their revenue model is "members pay X% and in return get our strength in numbers", and their activity streams are "fight for favorable legislation" and "Threaten uncompliant businesses".
The problem with unions is they are not treated as corporations in their own right, so unions have become monopolistic, heavily involved in lobbying and partaking in generally corrupt behavior--responding more strongly to incentives to survive and make money than incentives to keep its members happy.
Unions are still powerfully beneficial, but I'd wish there were multiple unions for any industry that competed with each other, some with stricter requirements to get in, each offering different freedoms and protections to its workers
UBI would be much better than unionizing the entire country (the IWW is the only union I know of that would accept all people regardless of skill). Everyone would be guaranteed unlimited strike pay that can sustain them. The effect on employee-employer relationships would be amazing, every degrading/dangerous job would instantly have to 2x or 3x its salary to keep workers. Every worker would be able to negotiate from a position of safety knowing they effectively have 'fuck you money'.
Most of their ideas lack intellectual rigor and merely follow the fashions of power. BI in particular is a simplistic continuation of printing money to overstimulate the economy.
So... intellectuals were right about the issues that they were focused on, but somehow populists are right that they are out of touch? Those seem contradictory to me, if they are problematically out of touch, then why were their ideas still correct? Who cares? At worst these seem like separate qualities, clearly being out of touch didn't make them wrong about the actual issues directly.
Intellectuals can be wrong on any given issue (especially since, for any issue, you can find an intellectual on both sides). But more to the point, intellectuals can be wrong (or at least completely out of touch) in the choice of questions that they think are important.
I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real world that so often leads the common man to be more correct about some very simple things that the intelligentsia misleads them here, because money is not a very concrete thing. It can seem like it is, because you've got this "cash" and this "gold" and it all seems very concrete, but the true driver of the economy, how people subjectively measure value, is very abstract.
But intellectuals can also say some blitheringly idiotic things, like promoting the glorious Five Year Plans when anybody who has ever had to make real plans for the future knows that you generally encounter important divergences in the first week of implementation, or that battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, etc. I also do not endorse economics in general; it is true that "the gold standard" is not good, but economic's track record of telling us what is good is bad.
Intellectual pursuits can be a very powerful and noble thing, but when it fails to correctly ground itself in reality it can become a very powerful and evil thing. I have great respect for intellectuals who admit error and craft new theories or ideas in response to failure and great, great contempt for the majority of those who fancy themselves intellectuals who instead cling to words and theory far, far beyond what is justified when evidence of error confronts them. (Yes, one can't drop a theory the instant one slight deviation is seen, but there are theories still alive today in the intellectual world that should have died decades, and in some particularly sad cases, centuries ago.)
1) It's ridiculous to conflate modern science and Stalin. It's worse than ridiculous.
2) Even if you can somehow convince yourself that it's reasonable to treat Stalin and modern scientists as a homogenous pool, Stalin's actions worked out quite well for Stalin. Which was pretty obviously his goal.
3) Your core argument is 'some systematic approaches to understanding have failed; so we should give up'. That's defeatist nonsense.
4) Your secondary argument is the intellectuals are actually good (and you pretend to respect them), but some aren't, therefore intellectuals are bad. That's not even an argument.
Please down vote me if you are an extremist ideologue.
It's such an intense and personal attack; and it's so wildly dishonest... It completely eliminates all possibility of a useful conversation in a single sentence. It's poo.
'jerf didn't say that academia is evil because Stalin, but rather that intellectualism which becomes too far divorced from reality can be an extremely dangerous force; he cited Soviet central economic planning as an extreme example of the sort of danger to which he refers.
I don't think it is controversial to say that Soviet economic policies were derived primarily from a political theory which was developed by people whom it's accurate to describe as "intellectuals", in the demonymic usage we seem to be taking as conventional in this thread. I also don't think it's controversial to say that these policies produced widespread, severe privation among the population on whom they were tried.
And I don't think it is accurate, or fair, to say that 'jerf meant this example as a general indictment of modern academia. Nothing in his comment seems to me to suggest anything of the sort. But I can see how, if I were myself an academic and an "intellectual", I might take some of what he did say as a very direct attack on my identity and sense of self-worth, and respond to that rather than to the arguments actually being made.
I hope I'm not coming across as patronizing here. I'm really not trying to be. It's just that, as a tradesman, I don't really have a dog in this fight, and as someone who's worked among academics in the past, I've had the opportunity to develop some insight into some patterns of thought which people who work in that paradigm might share. Among those, I think, is a general feeling of being constantly under attack by a populace which is both ignorant of what science and academia actually do, on the one hand, and on the other deliberately misinformed by a variety of demagogues for their own political benefit.
It wouldn't surprise me to see someone, who is accustomed to what I'd almost call this siege mentality, to react aggressively to anything which looked even a little like a critical analysis of the value of academia or intellectualism as a whole. It's very natural to respond in such fashion to an attack on one's livelihood. But I don't think what is going on here really is such an attack, and maybe the conversation we could all have about what 'jerf is saying would be more interesting and mutually satisfactory than the one we currently seem to be having.
Either that, or I'm completely wrong about what's going on and I've totally misread the entire situation. I don't think that's the case, but how can I be sure?
Any intellectualism that's divorced from reality and impervious to critique and verification does not deserve to be called intellectualism. It's ideology. There's nothing preventing you from making 5 year plans, as long as you adjust them continuously enough. The word to best describe the Soviet "intellectuals" you mentioned would be "ideologue". A less polite way would be "a sold-out who sells credibility to a government that pays for it".
True, but that's a definitional debate. I would be happy to see the huge pile of ideology today masquerading as academia correctly renamed, but before that can happen it seems a lot of people (in the general sense, not targeting this statement at any individual) must be introduced to the idea that there are a lot of things currently labeled "academic" that are just ideology.
It's hard because you have to separate it on a case-by-case basis. I'm broadly unimpressed by most of what is called sociology but Jonathon Haidt particularly impresses me, for instance. I'm sure there are others who would impress me if I took the time to learn. But the field as a whole seem to have a gestalt consensus that strikes me as quite resistant to falsification.
First of all, I absolutely place Communism in the domain of "intellectualism". The only reason to do otherwise is simply because it failed and you don't want the stain of Communism on the word "intellectualism", but there is no other reason. It was, and remains, an intellectual-driven movement, since Communism is hardly dead. It is impossible to understand it from any other point of view. There were no Communist revolutions I know of led and driven by "the people". There were no Communist revolutions I know of where "the people" ended up in charge, rather than an intellectual who drove it. It started with intellectuals sitting around and theorizing, and was continued by other intellectuals taking the theories as truth and then trying to put them into practice despite the complete lack of evidence in their favor. (One can't help but feel that the fact that it flatters their egos played a significant role.) If there weren't communist intellectuals still running around today, I would let it go, but it is absolutely one of the things I had in mind that are still alive that should have died decades ago.
Secondly... Five Year Plans are alive and well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China And I hear the phrase from other places every so often as well. The idea that you can make grandiose plan years in advance is hardly dead. (The word "grandiose" is not extraneous. I have multi-year plans to pay off my mortgage, for instance, but that's not "grandiose".) While I fully intended the Stalinist overtones, the general criticism is about glorious planning disconnected from reality, which many large institutions (governments, corporations, etc.) become prone to.
Finally, you missed the true core of the post, which is that I have contempt for so-called intellectuals who react to the failure of their theories by clinging to them all the harder. One of the things about being an intellectual is that you have the mental firepower to rationalize harder than the common man, and I have contempt for those who use their mental firepower that way. Words and theories must not take priority over the facts on the ground. That way lies madness. I do not theorize about how that way lies madness because I need merely look out at the facts on the ground and see a wide variety of "intellectuals" propounding insane theories with epicycles piled on epicycles that they should have given up decades ago, some of which have had devastating consequences on the world. For instance, I lay the bulk of the blame for the obesity epidemic on certain intellectual's disastrous failure to notice how blindingly wrong their theories about healthy eating were when the evidence was staring them in the face (and gut, and thighs, and heart, and cholesterol, ....). So if I seem a bit incensed about false intellectualism, it's this sort of thing that leads me in that direction. Most fat slobs you see waddling down the road next to you are caused by false intellectualism by my reckoning.
One can be factually correct yet emotionally incorrect (indeed, in my experience that's been at the root of some nasty interpersonal unpleasantness).
I was a little confused by this statement. I thought that the populists of yore like William Jennings Bryant were opposed to the gold standard, and the modern consensus is that the gold standard is a bad thing. So weren't the populists right about it?
Not at all. It says highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks because these categories have very different ranges of first-hand experience.
I've worked at some of the biggest names in the tech industry. I've also literally beaten iron with a hammer in a dirty factory. I've lived in some of the most advanced democracies in the world. I've also lived under true-blue communist dictatorship. I've seen the life of some pretty fancy, posh suburbs in the Silicon Valley. I've also seen the life of the traditional Eastern Bloc peasant. I know it's hard to believe, but with a broad experience comes the understanding that intelligence and scholarly education alone don't automatically provide all answers, nor do they grant you the Always Right card. No matter how smart or polished you are, if you don't walk into the humble folks' shoes for a while, your understanding of what their lives truly are will be necessarily incomplete and warped.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. A neural network that wasn't provided with the necessary training set will not "see" the right answers no matter what. All I want to do is plant the seed of "what if". Perhaps it will grow into a broader understanding, later. But that can only come with experience.
The fundamental point of the article - that scientists don't understand society because they are somehow different and privileged - is wrong at best and dangerously anti-intellectual at worst.
I do think it is a mistake to leap from this conclusion to the much broader one that Burger King employees understand "the world" better. Not only does that claim not mean much of anything, it also discounts the fact that the institutions and practices to which a professor is exposed may be more powerful, despite having fewer participants. But I think GP's similar and more specific claim, that "highly educated people are out of touch with the realities of life of average folks," is very plausible.
In general, I think a lot of people in this thread are confusing the stereotype threat they experience around the "unworldly intellectual" idea, and what Lind, who is himself an intellectual of no small repute, is actually saying. It seems like there might be more light and less heat in the discussion if everyone were to take a moment and reflect on the difference. But I'm sorry to say I don't have much confidence that will happen.
They definitely have a better understanding of that slice of the world that they experience while the professor doesn't.
The whole point of the article is aptly summed up by the "let them eat cake" anecdote, by the way.
This is a facile argument, because the implication is that the outlook - which includes the interests - of ordinary people is morally more significant than the outlook of a minority of clever people.
It's effectively saying that intellectuals are worthless because sometimes they're wrong and/or out of touch.
In reality, if you round up all the intellectuals and kill them - something last tried by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot - you don't generally get an improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people.
Is that extreme? Then how about simply ignoring all experts and professionals? Many experts and professionals are clever, and some surely count as intellectual.
Will ignoring them make life better for everyone else?
The author seems to be implying so. Personally, I'm not convinced - precisely because this kind of anti-intellectualism is a reliable cheap shot used by demagogues and authoritarians to direct attention away from other groups that are more likely to be causing deep problems.
Oh, hell no. I've seen that side of the story, too, and it's completely wrong. We agree on that.
> In reality, if you round up all the intellectuals and kill them - something last tried by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot - you don't generally get an improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people.
I lived under communist dictatorship for 20 years, and I have first hand experience with the results of those policies. Had to work my way through those mentalities, at times. To say you're not telling me anything new would be an understatement.
I've also participated to the 1989 anti-communist revolutions, and I've seen anti-intellectualism rearing its ugly head again - thankfully without dire consequences.
So the extremes are bad, as they always are.
But I don't think the article implies that intellectuals are worthless. The way I read it, perhaps biased by my own life track, is that intelligence and scholarly education are greatly enhanced by a broad range of experience. No matter how smart or polished you are, you'll judge the simple folk in a different way if you walk in their shoes for a while.
Which is kind of irrelevant to the subject here, which is really about academics focused on areas of social and policy significance having gaps in that specific subject area that would be filled in if they were just forced to spend a year working in a random working-class non-academic job.
It is specifically not about gaps outside of the targeted academics' areas of work, which is what you seem to be focusing on.
Its more like saying that being forced to spend a year working construction instead of programming would fill in critical gaps in your understanding of computer programming.
In not just car mechanics. If you're focused on areas of "social and policy significance" it's even worse to be out of touch with social reality and the effects of policies.
And in fact much much worse (and much much more common) than an engineering professor who can't fix a car.
Because the professor works at a university, having first attended the university and then graduate school, whereas the person working at Burger King most likely never graduated college, and works at Burger King rather than as a professor at a university. Those seem to me to be rather different "ranges of first-hand experience". I don't see how they could be considered anything but different.
Because they had studied in a university (most people haven't), have a cushy academic job (most people don't), live in nicer neighborhoods, don't have to flip burgers or drive cabs to survive, more often than not have parents who were like that, and tons of other reasons besides.
>Do you honestly think someone working at Burger King has a better understanding of the world than a professor? I urge you to actually have a conversation with such a person.
And I urge you the same. Only don't ask him abstract stuff or history/etc, ask him pragmatic stuff about how the working world works, and about how most people live.
Whether or not "intellectuals" are generally of above average intelligence isn't the point. The point is that the experience of intellectuals, a numerical minority, is atypical relative to the population as a whole.
[1](https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Expert-Predictions-Beli...) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox)
- The idea of educating intelligenzia by having them work on the fields for a year sounds a bit too much like the cultural revolution of China in the 1960's. It was bad.
- It seems very silly to me to question the value of education. Learning about earlier mistakes is a great way to avoid repeating those mistakes. Learning is good.
- If education is only available for those with a lot of wealth, it certainly brings about both an alienating effect and a lot of bitterness. That's too bad. I'm from a country with free universities and government subsidized students' loans. I think it's a good system, couldn't have afforded any university education without it, being from a poor family.
- In the discussion an idea seems to loom that a less informed opinion is evened out by the fact that more people share it. This I can not abide, although it is the basic idea of democracy. I always thought democracy is mostly a safety measure against tyrants and a pretty ineffective mode of government in its weakest. An enlightened democracy is much better than a populist one. Both are better than a non-democracy, at least most of the time.
- The difference between an enlightened democracy and a populist democracy is evident in its leaders. John Stuart Mill was an enlightened democrat for one. The bad ones can be spotted out by their spitefulness.
- Too bad some populists riding on the tide of anti-intellectualism have managed to turn democracies into tyrannies. Sometimes ships capsize.
Many professors do realize that their lives are quite different from those of most folks, but they're not often found in American elite institutions, so they don't show up on CNN.
Inside the US, too. Many of our academic institutions were founded on the strength of such gifts, but that's hardly where their money comes from today.
In particular, when it comes the issues of the humanities that revolve around "how should you live your life?"; a professor who is tenured has nothing to say to people subject to the "flexible economy" other than to implant false conciousness.
Human civilization has been based on increasing specialization and that specialization has been both an adaptation and a marker of the ruling elite - the first specialists were essentially priests, which makes it clear specialization has always a signal[1] of power even if said specialization involved some efforts find truthful representations of the world.
The scientific method, which to some extent verifies specialized knowledge and beliefs, is much younger than specialization and it's much harder to apply to knowledge about how human - both because human society is hard to do repeatable experiments on and because it can offend the existing specialized beliefs that order society - religion, political beliefs, morality, etc.
[1]Broadly, a display signifying various evolutionary or social traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
Yes... but for context, we can compare an academy with a factory, a military, a primary school, a hospital, a ride-share, or a church. If a person spends the majority of his time on writing papers, shaping steel, marching in formation, tagging on a playground, tending to sick people, driving strangers around the city, or praising god... well, all that focused labor is going to warp his world view a bit. And that is quite deliberate. Institutions are defined by how they isolate their members, direct their members' focus, and acquire comparative-advantage.
Of course, institutions in our time are not absolute. If we turn our attention away from categorical institutions... and instead look at individuals... then the situation gets much more interesting and less dark (but still imperfect)...
What makes you think you know about other people's lives if you don't live among and with and as them? Just reading a few essays now and then? You would not accept that view if a committed layperson tried to give advice to physicists (referring to yesterdays thread that pointed to https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...) but instead insist they'd have to study physics and not just read a few papers. Thinking the issues of the "working class" are different because "how difficult can it be" doesn't seem consistent or right to me.
Everybody's view of the world is limited by their own experiences. Does that mean everybody therefore misunderstands the world?
So the french fry cook understands the perspective of a larger proportion of people in the world than the philosopher does.
Or so the argument goes. I'd disagree -- a large part of academic education, the humanities, is about learning to understand the perspectives of others. I'd say the philosopher understands the french fry cook's perspective better than vice versa, and that the philosopher is better positioned to misunderstand /less/ across all walks of life (though misunderstanding is inevitable) than most everyone else.
For intellectuals trained exclusively in STEM/social science who sprint from the humanities as quickly as humanly possible, yes the critique is spot on.
(In truth, they went in-depth in calculating percentages and timelines and cost-benefits, etc. That summary trivializes their work.) But the basics of this discovery made by this elite team of academic researchers is something that every single working-class person in the country, even high school dropouts, knows as a simple basic fact of everyday daily life.
The idea that you would need to educate and train several people for many years, to the level of being professors at top colleges, then assemble a team and give them a grant to do a study to discover such a common part of daily life seems a bit ridiculous to non-academics.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
On the flip side, my father had a PhD in Physics and taught at the local university. I believe I probably did better than most when it came to genes and funding, but I graduated high school with people who got up and milked the cows before coming into school and I know their lifestyle as well as my own.
I think this article itself is out-of-touch.
Systems can be tremendously complex. There are countless unknown and unknowable variables in play. Moreover, the interactions between those variables can also be unknown and unknowable.
The intellectual world (academia) is based upon professors and schools who can teach the "right way" of doing things and thinking. That's how PHDs work--you have to come up with a "new" idea to get your PHD. As you can see, it creates a conflict of interest.
It would be much better if academia taught simple principles, variability, and how to think.
One that stood out for me was the idea of cities that concentrate intellectuals, which was studied much more deeply by pg in "Cities and Ambition".
Both are valid.
Its essentially a radical rejection of the idea of study and transmissible, shareable knowledge of the world.
When I say this I think of the anecdote in the article about how "intellectuals" prescribe more education as a panacea for social reform instead of the ideas offered by the author. This as a possible case of their own biases precluding a systematic approach.
As I write this, the "frankly crap" part comes to mind again. There's not much substantive here, just a bunch of opinions.
If that was the problem the piece hoped to address (and it certainly is a problem in, e.g., media punditry -- though I'd argue that's not because of any general problem with "academics" but with the process by which media pundits get selected), one would expect that it would say so, and that the solution would be some better scrutiny to assure prescriptions come from systematic study, not a solution unconnected to the problem like suggesting that "every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse."
EDIT: Additionally, if this was the issue, you'd expect that the author would actually support the argument with evidence from systematic study supporting the nature and source of the problem and the utility of the recommended solution.
If someone who considers themselves a "citizen of the world" (a very old idea in Western culture, going back to the Stoics) cannot understand why anyone would hold a different opinion, they probably shouldn't be in academia. This article makes it sound like unless you're a patriot, you cannot understand patriotism; unless you're poor, you can't understand poverty; if you're educated yourself, you cannot evaluate whether education is effective. If that's the case, then academics aren't "out of touch." They're incompetent. Or else very basic ideas about epistemology are wrong.
By the way, if I understand correctly, this was the death blow to logical positivism. Michael Polanyi pointed out that logical positivism required objective observers, and all we had were human beings, who were never really objective.
Really, no, absolutely not. The bias is assumed, that's why double-blind is the gold standard too. I'd argue that at its best, intellectualism is all about building a deeper awareness of our limitations and foibles, while developing systems to compensate for them.
I suspect that that sentence would have been just as accurate with "and so" replacing "yet"... The various errors (I got a 500 when I first tried to read it, but got through later; others have reported DB errors) are because the infrastructure can't handle the attention.
Error establishing a database connection