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.
[1](https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Expert-Predictions-Beli...) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox)
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.