The more I have been studying, the more it has been coming to me that knowledge must not be an end to itself. This is because there is an infinite amount of knowledge out there (care to catalogue the shapes of grains of sand on Earth?), but only a very small subset of it is useful (for example, the fact that sand consists mostly of SiO2 represents much more useful knowledge than the above-mentioned detailed catalogue of shapes). Knowledge is an attempt to describe complexity, and since complexity of the Universe is enormous, the amount of knowledge that can be gathered is enormous as well. So one must not seek knowledge indiscriminately.

The traditional academic way of teaching material to students has been to cultivate the idea that knowledge (academic knowledge in particular, something that went without mentioning) is of tremendous value in and out of itself. I disagree with this (see my argument about grains of sand). Some kinds of knowledge are more valuable than others.

Now that we all agree with this, the question becomes what is it that we value. The problem is that people define value in different ways. Some talk of spiritual value (which I find to be complete nonsense -- an artifact of a runaway brain process). Some talk of some "eternal" value that will benefit humanity in a very long term (but I tend to be skeptical of claims that cannot be measured). The bottom line is that this is not an argument about knowledge but an argument about either values or priorities. Given a choice to know (for example, whether or not a killer will come to your house tomorrow) or not to know, most sane people would choose "know". The "intellectualism" the author espouses is the type of intellectualism that relies on emotional thinking to instill the belief that we have a "duty" to know even things that are of little measurable value. I am sorry, but I prefer to see numbers first.

Ironically, the reason why becoming a scientist is not a great life decision compared to, for example, becoming a lawyer, a businessman, or even a computer programmer, is that science does a poor job measuring its own impact (i.e. it is ironically not empirical enough), despite of the fact that it claims to be based entirely on our ability to measure and on the empirical method. In other words, science, while denying religion for the most part, itself relies on this religious-type thinking that knowledge possesses some mystical value in itself (it doesn't).

Small edit: I wish there were more good scientists, not less. I think the value of scientific contribution is enormous. I only think that our current way of doing science (grants, journal citation indexes, reviews by very small circles of peers which can often be mistaken, ignorance of financial aspects, the coupling with teaching) is a bad way and that a better one is possible.