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Comment by Aelinsaar | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.

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But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that.

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.

>But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that.

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.

Yeah it felt like a superficial reflection the author wanted to concretize in words. It certainly prompts discussion but it provides only fragile arguments.

Not a bad article, but the piece as a whole appeared to be an exercise in justifying the author's own populist, conservative ideology.

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