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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I still think he's confused. I've never yet met a geek that was anti-intellectual. Anti-college, anti-snob, anti-something... But not anti-intellectual.

The 2 are too much at odds. The geek loves information, and (often) spreading that information, and using that information. Information is a geek's stock-in-trade.

He continues to claim that he's only talking about geeks, but by definition he can't be. Because anti-intellectual means anti-geek. And I've never yet met a geek who hates other geeks. Okay, maybe some particular brand of geek rubs them wrong, but not all geeks.

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I teach philosophy at a university. Whenever we discuss basic issues about the mind, my computer science students are always dismissive about any and all positions that don't simply say "the brain is a computer, the mind is software." It turns out that this is a pretty naive and simplistic way of thinking about the issue; but that's the "easy" way for them to frame the problem, and they often think that, because computer science is difficult subject, this response must be pretty good.

Just computer science students? I would generally expect most scientists or engineers to have have a developed antipathy to anti-reductionism.

"The brain is a computer, the mind is software" is in fact a very naive statement, but I hope your problems with it have more to do with the non-existent in reality hardware/software distinction than silly constructs like qualia.

I find this deliciously ironic. I can hear myself arguing as a sophomore CS student, "but whatever is going on that constitutes the mind is observably a process on information that happens entirely inside your skull, of course we can model it with software," to which I would today answer "you can model any phenomena with software, stating as such doesn't constitute a model."

Perhaps I am being naive, but hasn't the study of the mind now shifted to the neuroscience department?

I think he's trying to imply anti-academia is anti-intellectual, which would be hilariously ironic.

The quality of academia has been in decline for almost a century now as the bar has been progressively lowered by financial and political pressures in order to make them more "accessible to the common man". A post-secondary education is still somewhat useful in teaching one how to think, and in exposing one to higher ideas, but it's nowhere near the level of excellence of previous ages. A simple reading of theses and journals past expose the stark differences in thought.

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