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Comment by prewett | Hacker News Reader

Why don't Americans elect scientists? Because current American culture is anti-intellectual. I can't really back this up concretely, but as an American, it's hard to find anything intellectual around. A long time ago, people went to hear lectures on the weekends, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were well attended. Now, TV "news" is a joke, and even NPR is becoming a bit entertainy. I get the feeling that few Americans want to think.

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One thing I absolutely despise about the phrase "anti-intellectual" is the ambiguity about what it means. There was a great explanation of why people should be suspicious of "intellectuals" in an HN comment from a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310. ESR also had examined the various possible meanings: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001

In general, though, "anti-intellectual" seems to usually mean, "Why won't those damn hick Republicans just get out of the damn way!?"

I think when people call the mainstream Republican party "anti-intellectual" they are referring to things like: the quite obvious skepticism of even the most mainstream scientific theories, constant rhetoric deriding intellectuals and artists, policies that are guided by puritan morality rather than a rational evidence-based approach aimed at a certain outcome (drug policy, abstinence-only sex ed., myriad other distracting culture-war issues), policies that place little value in the arts/education (Romney's recent proposed budget would slash the National Endowment for the Arts by half, saving something like $70 mil), etc.

Surely you're not suggesting that the Democrats are more accepting of "science". (They're not - they just accept different things and want to do different things in response to said science.)

As to grant-supported "artists", they've entered the political sphere. That has consequences.

And, very little of it is art, let alone deserving of tax money. (Cowboys can pay for their own poetry and so can rich people.)

> Cowboys can pay for their own poetry

No idea what you're talking about. I'm assuming an utterly insignificant amount of government money went to something that looks at least superficially wasteful and now the right is shrieking about it when they have better things to do.

Has the right done anything else since Obama came into office?

Objections to the National Endowment for the Arts predate Obama.

> Has the right done anything else since Obama came into office?

Yup, plenty.

Are you going to claim that everything Obama has done is peachy keen?

I note that the Dem senate hasn't bothered to pass an Obama budget. That takes 51 votes, which the Dems have. They all voted against the last one. They probably won't even bother to schedule a vote on this one.

Thank you. I often feel the term "anti-intellectual" is used on a person who simply disagrees with a notion thought up by someone that has been labeled "intellectual" by someone else or worse, themselves.

American culture has always had an anti-intellectual component. The country was initially settled by merchants and religious fanatics, two groups not exactly known for intellectual curiosity. What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country, considering half the population has generally held them in contempt.

This book is a bit dated but is a pretty good history of American anti-intellectualism:

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Ric...

> What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country

They've been successful at delivering concrete, immediate results. Fundamental science at the highest levels is usually done elsewhere.

That used to be the case in the past. However with the increased government expenditure on basic science in the wake of the cold war, more of the fundamental science did happen in the US (foundations of CS, foundations of Crypto, lot of AI & ML, string theory, lot of work in Math, etc.). Now with the decreasing focus on the funding of science, fundamental research (especially in high energy physics but in other areas too) is again shifting to other places like Canada, Europe, Israel, China and Australia.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the shifting of industrial jobs to other countries as well? Maybe when more tangible goods were being produced in the US there was a higher respect for science/engineering, which is in large part a study of the tangible (or physical). Now that many jobs in the US are financial, legal, etc. there's more of a disconnect between what people see as the basis of the economy and what scientists are studying.

I can say for a fact that Israel has very little heavy industry of its own, but its tech sector competes with agriculture for #1 sector in the economy and its R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is (IIRC) first in the world.

People still go to lectures - or find them on YouTube, download them from the web or torrents, etc. And the debates are as much "attended" and more - people just don't have to be physically there anymore. It's all right with Americans and thinking - it's just most of them don't turn their thinking towards government. Which is a blessing - it is brilliant minds who brought us the current financial crisis, for example, with their delusions about their ability to calculate risks and always stay on top of the game (check out Nassim Taleb about this). Mediocre people bring mediocre failures, brilliant people would bring spectacular - and catastrophic - ones. If a brilliant scientific theory fails, well, a couple of egos are brused, but nobody's hurt. If a brilliant political theory fails, millions die. Look what happened to marxism. They thought of themselves as political scientists building society on a rational scientific basis. No emotions, no stupid democratic politicking, just straightforward implementation of proper science. Worst nightmare of the century. I'd rather take the bumbling mediocrities in the government, thank you very much. I don't like them but at least they are less dangerous this way.

Except Marxism was extremely anti-intellectual. You didn't have scientists in positions of power, instead peasants became majors. Children of intellectuals were forbidden to attend universities and forced instead to work in the industry.

There's nothing marxist in what you describe. Maoist or Leninist, maybe. Then again that's the case for the description you responded to as well.

Really? Have you read Marx at all?

I think you are referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (I can not think about anything that fits your description in the Soviet history, for example) - but that has little to do with Marxism and does not follow from it. Of course, almost all communist regimes feature mass purges, especially at the beginning of their rule, but usually these purges are not specifically aimed at intellectuals but at "old elites" in order to destroy the existing power relationships and establish the new ones. I do not see anything specifically anti-intellectual in Marxist theory or practice.

You just got Marxism mixed up with the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century, such as the Soviet Union.

Please read the Communist Manifesto before you lambast it with an uninformed critique.

The Communist Manifesto leads directly to the "dictatorial regimes of the 20th century". The Communist Manifesto is not founded in any reality (psychological, political, economic), and as it is applied but fails to bring the promised benefits as it is completely ungrounded in reality, it also encourages the leaders to come to the conclusion that the only reason this can be is that the people aren't trying hard enough. This requires a stronger centralized rule to fix the problem and force the people to comply, but strengthening the centralized rule just causes more problems because centralized rule doesn't work, and it certainly doesn't work with the horrifyingly wrong Communist economic model. This causes yet more centralized power to be amassed and yet more crackdowns, until it crumbles under its own weight.

It's utterly predictable, mostly because we've seen so many try to apply it and fail in exactly the same way each time. We're well past the point where we can say the Communist Manifesto directly leads to dictatorial regimes. I will recant this statement when someone manages to apply it without turning into a dictatorial regime, but don't hold your breath for that.

You'll have to detail these applications because having studied 20th century history I haven't seen any countries implement anything that looks remotely socialist, except 1930s Barcelona.

Now were I disagree with Marxism is the advocation of the "Dictatorship of the proletariat" which I believe results in these state capitalist dictatorial regimes. I'm not an intellectual, don't take my work for it. Chomsky is a good source of information regarding the Soviet Union: http://youtu.be/K4Tq4VE8eHQ

This is called the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, and it's one of the sloppiest fallacies you can commit. It's astonishing how many people cling to it with regards to Marxism. The same thing can be said of anything. The Nazi regime wasn't really fascist. Obama isn't really a liberal. Bush wasn't really a conservative, etc, etc. All of those statements are true. And no true conservative would start a war of aggression. And no true Marxist would butcher millions.

In fact, the Soviets were constantly justifying their policies based on the writings of Marx and Lennon.

Based on Wikipedia's definition of this fallacy, I don't think your examples fit. From Wikipedia:

No true Scotsman is an informal logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.

The key part is "without reference to any specific objective rule", which I don't think you're taking into account.

This isn't the case. Marx differs from other ideologies in that it was Karl Marx himself that wrote The Communist Manifesto.

I can't do the same for most other ideologies; there's no Conservative Manifesto as it were.

With that in mind we can take Marx's book and compare it against history in these countries. If you do this then you will come to the conclusion that these regimes were not Marxist and in fact not even close to socialism.

Here's the danger of making assumptions about people you don't know on the internet. As it happens, I not only read the manifesto, I was born and raised in the country that had the study of the discipline of "Scientific communism" a requirement for getting any higher education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_communism So I have a very good reason to assume that my background in both theory and practice of Marxist regimes is no less than yours. While one could have legitimate differences on the merits of teaching of Marx, it is obvious to any informed person that they were presented as the scientific basis for building new kind of society both in theory and in practice. Even if the theory was false and the practice made it degrade into dogmatic repetition of meaningless drivel, it was still presented as the scientific approach and meant to be so.

"Intellectuals and society" by Thomas Sowell is an interesting book on the subject. His central thesis is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp...

Fantastic book. He also talks a lot about how being good at one thing doesn't make you good at another. Sowell's notion of effective intelligence is rooted more in experience than in aptitude. So a scientist with no political experience is less likely to be good at politics than someone of lesser intellect with that experience.

One example is president Jimmy Carter. Brilliant thinker, scientist and business man. Mediocre skills in leadership and absolutely dismal in working through beauracracy. He had the one-two punch of having an oil crisis and recession, unlike Obama he just couldn't get it turned around in time for the next election.

I could remember that Carter was in the US Navy - turns out he had a pretty interesting career there - including being in charge of a team disassembling an onshore experimental reactor after a meltdown!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

Yeah I recall him touring Three Mile Island not long after the accident. Carter is not lacking intelligence, but his political skills were certainly lacking and his presidency was pretty much a debacle.

Negative effects on what?

Without reading the book I assume what he's getting at is that the sciences are often the barers of bad news. Cancer this, climate that, death this, unsafety that. Eventually people get fed up with having their worldview turned around and actively choose to ignore the incoming evidence.

My best example would be cellphones in cars. We did just fine without them 10 years ago but now whenever an area talks about legistlation the people get all up in arms. Numerous studies have shown that they're equal or worse to drunk driving but the inconvenience of not being able to text and drive prevents people from accepting that.

Disclaimer: I obviously could be very far off base of what the posted author speaks about because, as stated, I've not read the book.

Of course Sowell would criticize intellectuals. He's an unapologetic conservative Republican.

> Of course Sowell would criticize intellectuals. He's an unapologetic conservative Republican.

Bravo! No need to look at whether he's correct, he's a Republican.

I think America has always been "anti-intellectual" in the narrow sense that it didn't have a large elite class like many European countries have, the prevailing attitude has usually been the "self-made man" as opposed to egghead. This may or may not be a bad thing (e.g. elite classes by their very nature are hard to break into).

As far as I understand from your command, you tend to correlate the sentiment you call anti-intellectualism with the right-wing politics on the rise in the US (this is what I infer when you say "even NPR"). This, of course, is true, but is half the story. Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior. An old but interesting read on this matter is The Closing of the American Mind.

> Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior.

That's a good point, but I don't think you really see this reflected on the public stage like you do with the right. For instance, I'm not aware of any barefoot, herbal-medicine/astrology enthusiasts on the national political stage.

The idea that gvt should be run by common people is quite old in the US (Jacksonian democracy). I am not American, and this traits always made me wonder every time I go the US, as this is the only developed country where I heve been to where this is so pronounced. This article by Fukuyama was quite interesting in that regard: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/fukuyama/2012/01/31/w.... He explains it by the fact that the US existed before a bureaucracy, which is the opposite of pretty much any other developed country.

I don't think that essay says what you described. There was a bureaucracy before the US - how did the British, French, and Spanish Empires run without a bureaucracy? And of course the Chinese bureaucracy was established long before the Americas were settled by Europeans.

It looks more like it's saying the US started with a distrust of bureaucracy, which it inherited from experience with the European empires, which caused us to "hobble" our bureaucracy, which were therefore less effectual, which lead to continuing distrust.

This may be a syntax error of my part: I meant that the US existed as a nation before a bureaucracy existed in the US. Obviously, bureaucracies elsewhere predates the US declaration of independency.

I still don't think his essay says that. Before the US independence, the colonies were part of the British Empire, with local legislatures in each colony. How did the British Empire manage the 13 colonies without any sort of bureaucracy?

Instead, the essay you pointed to suggests that the bureaucracy existed, but the new Americans were distrustful of it.

How do you interpret the quote "The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes." ? It is possible that I misunderstood it (and would be glad to be corrected if I did).

The word "consolidation" makes a difference. Each of the colonies had its own government and bureaucracy, consolidated under British rule. We of course didn't like the policies of the British Parliament, both temporal and ecclesiastical. When we formed our own national government we first tried to minimize consolidation, via the Articles of Confederation, and then when that proved unwieldy we formed the current national government, which started the consolidation.

I know less about the European democracies. Did the French revolution, and return of democracy after Napolean, keep the existing bureaucracies in place? What about after the German Revolution of 1918–1919? I'm pretty sure that they did not devolve power but instead transferred control from the aristocratic regime to the democratic one.

(Post WW2 separation and latter reunification of Germany might be a counter-example. Iceland had local control, then control by the Norway and by Denmark, so might be another counter-example. Perhaps Belgium as well.)

Anti-intellectuality aside. Understanding science is important, but a good scientist ≠ good manager. A scientist is usually someone with narrow, but deep knowledge/experience, as a politician I want someone with a broader set of experiences & knowledge.

I mean, MSc president - sure. PhD president - probably no, thank you :)

There's also the fallacy that scientists will only make pure objective decisions but scientists are in the end only humans and have their own believes, failings and political agendas. The whole system of peer reviewing and the acknowledgement that every scientific theory can be falsified is a testament to this realization. Unfortunately I have the impression that in politics too often individual experts are only heard and thus the whole system of checks and balances in science is circumvented and particular scientific opinions might get more weight than justified.

Still, I believe that the scientific methodology (not necessarily individual scientists) is still our best hope to actually achieve improvements as shown by our rapidly expanding knowledge since it was more formally defined. It just has to be tempered with clear political goals.

Not sure if that's the falsifiability you meant, but a scientific theory _must_ be falsifiable by definition. As in -- there must be a way to setup an experiment with a possible outcome that would prove this theory to be wrong. It is impossible to disprove a theory that "invisible pink unicorns exist" -- because for every suggested experiment you can just say "well, they are invisible, so we can't see them". Of course falsifiability is not the worst problem with this particular theory (how can something be pink and invisible bothers me more for example), but it is a necessary condition any scientific theory must meet.

I brought up falsifiability casually because it is an important corner stone for my understanding of the scientific methodology and keeps scientists from proclaiming dogmas (or at least it should). It is also an acknowledgement that our current theories mostly reflect our current understanding and may be prone to change in the feature.

scientists are in the end only humans and have their own believes, failings and political agendas. The whole system of peer reviewing and the acknowledgement that every scientific theory can be falsified is a testament to this realization.

I fully agree with the first part, but care to explain how "believes, failing and political agendas" relates to the concept of falsifiability?

It's unusual for a 'scientist' to be working alone now days. In academia it's fairly common for a single 'scientist' to manage 2-12 graduate and post doc students. And groups of 10's or even 100's of people working together on the same project is increasingly common.

PS: By 'scientist' I mean someone with a PHD doing research. Plenty of people do research that don't fall under that umbrella, but that's a side issue.

This. Also, getting grants is for a large part doing politics as well.

This attitude is frustrating and sadly widespread. Basically, you're saying that you can trust someone with some scientific training, but only up to an arbitrary limit. You assume this is a zero sum game, that it is impossible to learn a lot about biology without simultaneously acquiring some compensating deficiency. Or that only the deficient personality would pursue a Phd.

How is it anything but anti-intellectual to say that having too much expertise makes one a less capable leader?

I can only trust someone with substantial experience outside of academia. While there are people who have this and also have a PhD, they're a vanishingly small minority compared to those who have that experience and an MSc.

There is an important distinction between not trusting someone without non-academic experience, and not trusting someone with too much academic experience. I agree with the first, but was refuting the second.

In my experience, as someone who completed a Phd after a few years working, phds often have richer real-life experience than the 'average' person, and almost always richer than the common stereotype inferred in the comment i responded too.

I finished my master's degree in computer engineering in December 2010 and by June of 2011 was put in charge of a team of interns. They left at the end of the summer, but I'm now managing another intern on a year-long project. I'm the local PI on a large, multi-site project; every week, I have meetings and conference calls for that and other projects. I'm not a manager, just a member of technical staff in a research group, but I'm certainly expected to take leadership/management roles and interface with many different groups.

We're not all Doc Brown, weird and secluded in our labs as we work on solitary secretive projects :)

But the same is also true of lawyers.

That'll be the same reason Americans don't elect a Juris Doctor who was President of the Harvard Law Review, right?

I'd bet fewer than 25% of American adults can tell you both of those things.

Plain and simple:

Obama got elected because he is a great speaker and he's charismatic. Qualities much closer to being a popular actor or religious figure got him elected rather than his intellect.

It didn't hurt that people were tired of the previous party (this is a common pattern).

A JD is not a research degree. It is a second entry degree, meaning there is no necessary reason it could not be an ordinary bachelor's degree. A JSD is the US Law School equivalent to a real doctorate.

Obama was the first President of the HLS in yeeears not to publish. He's a very, very smart man but calling him an intellectual might be pushing it. His popular works are not brimming with ideas.

Don't forget that 46% of the country still voted for John McCain - a person was extremely terrible academically even after the Republican Party had launched two disastrous wars, exploded the deficit and their lack of regulation and oversight had caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. And as others have pointed out, Obama wasn't really elected because of his intellectual ability but because of the state of the economy at the time and because he's a charismatic speaker.

You sir, nailed it.

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