Comment by _7fvc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _7fvc | Hacker News Reader

I find that different cultures and countries draw different lines between intellects and beliefs. I came from Vietnam. It has a communist leadership. The subject of evolution is widely taught and agreed. People in school show off their scientific intellect. There's an emphasis on the study of science subjects. You'll hear a lot about science competition, local scientists. Religious doctrines are suppressed. You rarely hear about them except through some friends who are associated with religions. Even those friends rarely talk about their religions in public.

In America, there's a somewhat different divide. Academia teaches evolution and almost never mentions religion. Churches and mosques are the places you would learn about religions. Government seems neutral. But if you dig around, you can find a lot of religious materials. You can meet people who openly expresses their religious beliefs. In some ways, science feels suppressed and has to compete with religions.

But this anti-intellectualism may make science better. Rather than agreeing with science, we constantly question it.

The idea of questioning science and informed skepticism is valuable, but I don't think it stems from anti-intellectualism. How can people who distrust science to that degree come up with meaningful criticism? I don't see what value climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers are bringing to science, for example.

It's not that climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers are themselves improving science, it's that their existence forces scientists to up their game. If you know that someone is going to question your findings, you tend to work harder to ensure that you're actually saying something true and there are no holes in your reasoning. This holds even if those people never actually question your findings - even if you never interact with them at all. The benefit is all because of your own self-criticism.

It's like how competition tends to make companies provide better service, even if the competition never actually steals a single customer away. The fact that it could changes the incentives in a way that makes you do your job more rigorously.

That would make sense if science was a monoculture and could only be challenged from the outside, but scientists question each others' findings all the time. You can't have a scientific process without scrutiny.

Why couldn't it be both? Internal scruitny is necessary but I'd say that how well communicated research is influences how much funding and attention it gets which obviously matters a lot in shaping the scientific community.

I'm not sure how their existence improves science, considering the questions they often demand of scientists come from no area of scientific rigor or examination.

If anything we've started seeing the clear opposite, where the climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers have been outright suppressing scientists and reports that disagree with their skepticism.

but I acknowledge that questioning your beliefs is good. It's foundational to the scientific method. I just don't see how uninformed challenges are worthwhile. At this point things like vaccine effectiveness are basic facts. What more can scientists do?

>But this anti-intellectualism may make science better. Rather than agreeing with science, we constantly question it.

Anti-intellectuals by definition don't possess the intellectual curiosity necessary to contribute to science, rather, they fear and mistrust such curiosity, and any result of it more complex or less intuitive than high school algebra.

The myth that science is just slavish dogmatism is pushed by the anti-intellectual crowd, and by people who want to discredit scientific theses like evolution, climate change, parts of physics and astrophysics, mainstream medicine or vaccines. Science already has a process of constantly questioning itself - that's literally what the scientific process is. That constant questioning by science of its assumptions and revising them in the face of new evidence has led iteratively to models of reality which have proven fairly robust against criticism, and appear to accurately describe and predict the universe.

The anti-intellectuals, meanwhile, just scoff derisively at the "globalist elites" in their "ivory towers" with their "mumbo jumbo."

Intellectuals have fueled the rise of plenty of terrible ideas and outcomes. People -- even deplorables and bitter clingers -- are right to question intellectuals and in some cases raise barriers that are difficult for them to overcome.

Sometimes the mumbo-jumbo is bullshit or dangerous.

I'll grant this, but an outsider perspective isn't the same thing as basic rejection of serious rigorous inquiry. Thomas Kuhn's work certainly argues that scientific consensus isn't as meritocratic as we would like, but there are plenty of folks doing relatively fringe work that is nonetheless rigorous and intellectually based.

Climate change denial in particular isn't a product of outsiders seriously questioning the scientific consensus on any grounds; it's a manifactured controversy, founded on outright lies by companies that stand to benefit if we don't do anything about it.

The reasons for anti-vaccine ideas are more complex, but they aren't the product of a serious engagement with the other side of the argument.

>People -- even deplorables and bitter clingers -- are right to question intellectuals and in some cases raise barriers that are difficult for them to overcome.

By mentioning "deplorables and bitter clingers" you're admitting that much of the motive for such questioning among anti-intellectuals is rooted in politics and tribalism - and the premise that "intellectuals" are of the opposite or enemy tribe (leftists, liberals, feminists, Jews, atheists, pick your poison) and that therefore their work is inherently fraudulent or meaningless.

>Sometimes the mumbo-jumbo is bullshit or dangerous.

But anti-intellectuals tend to consider everything they don't understand, or anything that's part of the "establishment", to be "mumbo jumbo." If they had a credible, rational basis for their criticisms, rooted in an understanding of the domain they criticize, they would no longer be "anti-intellectual."

In some ways anti-intellectuals create space for other intellectuals to get traction when opposing bad ideas promoted by establishment embraced intellectuals.

While, anti-vaxers, et al, are raised as examples of the harm anti-intellectuals can cause, many great harms have been caused or celebrated by intellectuals over the ages.

>In some ways anti-intellectuals create space for other intellectuals to get traction when opposing bad ideas promoted by establishment embraced intellectuals.

They really don't, though. At least, not a productive space. Intellectuals are quite capable of getting that traction on their own, and doing so on the basis of fact and evidence, rather than anger and a nihilistic mistrust of order and complexity.

You're putting a lot of effort into painting a heroic narrative of anti-intellectualism and of the harms of "the establishment" and intellectuals "over the ages," but that's a political stance, and one that assumes the anti-intellectuals are filling a necessary role in the ecosystem that intellectuals, themselves, cannot.

I put forth that there is no value to anti-intellectualism. Skepticism, yes. Questioning of authority? Yes. Opposing bad ideas? Yes. None of those are the particular domain of anti-intellectualism. Rather, those are all hallmarks of intellectualism.

The anti-intellectuals are the ones burning down the observatory so this never happens again. They're not helping.

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