Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?

His argument about children and their lack of genuine creativity seems a little misplaced - they are disparaged as 'tinkerers' rather than creators, but I can think of no better word than 'tinkerer' to describe Leonardo, or indeed many other great artists/scientists.

Aside from all that, I can think of plenty of reasons why anti-intellectualism would exist:

- not all forms of expert knowledge are equally valid. It was only around 100 years ago that medical expertise progressed to the point where it was more likely to cure than kill you.

- the value of expert knowledge/intellectual capital can be hard to determine. For example, once you move past the hard sciences, to sociology and literary theory and beyond, how much is contributed to human knowledge and wellbeing? How much power/status should be accorded to people in these intellectual disciplines?

- societies are composed of counterbalancing forces, between elements which are conservative/progressive, peaceful/aggressive, practical/visionary etc. No more than every business can be a startup, how can all people in a society consider intellectual investigation the main objective, as opposed to more mundane aspects of maintaining and running the society?

- science seems to have been stranded on one side of an ideological divide, where its support/derision is now a badge of political identity.

"I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games. Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all you have to do is commit to a criterion for testing. It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?"

As example, was the development of a cell phone a new idea? I believe the idea of combining a radio, a simple computer, and a battery into a portable device intended to connect to the existing telephone network is not particularly creative, but an extraordinarily useful variation on existing ideas. A variation that has had sufficient impact that we tend to think of it as a new idea. If one goes back to the development of each of the pieces, I believe one can paint a similar picture for each of the priors. Even if one goes back as far as basic technology like fire, spears, agriculture or the wheel I think similar stories could be told.

The point of this is not that there are no new ideas under the sun, but that tinkering is the process of experimenting, and I don't particularly believe that it is possible to create a new idea (under whatever definition of new) without experimenting or tinkering with the priors.

"Why did the same society that flocked to Star Wars decide only a few years earlier that the real adventure of going to the Moon was too expensive to sustain?"

I kinda liked Star Wars, but I'm opposed to spending money on manned space flight. IIRC, many in the scientific community think it's a waste of resources as it costs 10x as much to build a vehicle that has a chance of returning a human to earth safely as it does to send up an unmanned vehicle that can be jettisoned when its work is done.

My point isn't to argue about the benefits of visiting the moon, but it's somewhat ironic that an article on anti-intellectualism would pose such a false question.

But what are most phd programs but social rituals in which people first absorb all of the field's dogma, then take prelims, and then work on a niche area of their own advisor's well known work? Such a ritual confers upon the participant the status of "intellectual", but it's primary purpose is social filtering, much like a fraternity hazing ritual or a Dick Cheney duck hunting trip.

Why is creativity not more widespread? Simply because it isn't valued by society. An established professor isn't looking for a totally fresh take on ideas, he's looking for someone who highly values his existing contribution and is willing to do grunt work in exchange for the stamp of institutional approval.

This is also what Society wants. The role of the intellectual is to help keep the status quo in society... hence hte need for a 5 year ritual to pass the gilded baton. Now, anyone can simply look at the embossed seal and feel totally confident that the recipient knows what he is talking about.

In my opinion, intellectuals are people who enjoy being rational and creating biproducts of rationality. Most doctoral theses don't fall under this definition. Most are so unbearable by the time of the defense that the student drops the area of study completely and enters the private sector, aided by the official seal of his institution and the perks of being part of a select social group.

Some people don't like to read, to think, or to discuss ideas. So be it. Such a person may still come up with a brilliant solution to a problem, even by accident. In most cases such a person (like the phd student) has no incentive to change the status quo, merely to play along with it and collect a paycheck. But so be it.

Intellectuals typically surround themselves by others with similar interests and skills. To the true intellectual, creativity is everywhere, from the lyrics of a rap song to the carona on an espresso to the small improvement to the glibc strlen function.

When creativity and insight are coupled with personal courage we get things like linux, Einsteinian physics, and many smaller but equally courageous accomplishments.

Sitting in academe complaining about anti-intellectualism is not creative, intellectual, or courageous!

One thing that strikes me about most of the comments here on HN is that they don't address the meat of the argument, which is that people are anti-curiosity. It is very possible that anti-intellectualism is motivated by all sorts of proximal causes, but the author's argument would still be valid if people, by nature, just weren't curious.

Of course, addressing the author's argument is hard, because it is based on a redefinition, and a fuzzy one at that. He wants curiosity to be something above the sort of "tinkering" that children do to find out about their world. He never sets any metrics, or really gives any examples, to show the difference between the two.

Intelligence has given our species an advantage because of the predictions we are able to make on given evidence that allow us to avoid danger, the mechanism that allows us to make these predictions is somewhat obfuscated at this point.

So as a person develops from childhood their model of the world will contain many contradictory ideas. Given a certain set of circumstances these contradictions are brought to light and depending on the usefulness, and sometimes, but not always, the correctness of the predictions each of these ideas allowed one will survive or grow stronger.

The modern world has allowed us to measure things more closely, and more rigorously trim our ideas. This is done mainly in smaller elite circles of academia.

Then anti-intellectualism is simply the result of people who have models of the world that reject ideas which would do them harm, sometimes with no real benefit. I say no benefit because these new "intellectual" ideas simply aren't verifiable to most of the population. Them believing these ideas would be equivalent to believing parishioner.

However, I would say certain discoveries, or actions broaden general populations worldview and prime them for scientific ideas. The moon landing, technology in general are good examples.

I'm a curious and intellectual person. I spend most of my time learning and exploring.

While I have traveled to various parts of the world, I would not spend months traveling by foot or horse risking barbarian attacks, disease, and hypothermia, in order to discover new land.

Therefore, it's possible that the Romans were curious and intellectual even though they didn't explore Scandinavia.

"there is a great deal of hostility toward [systematic and disciplined inquiry] by people who feel their values threatened"

This is the most widespread and most damaging anti-intellectual mindset in our country today. People do not take the time to understand their own values, what makes them so, and are too stubborn to flip-flop when evidence emerges or changes significantly.

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/050506.html

I can put this another way:

EVERY place that the Romans explored, they conquered.

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific.

This falsifiability criterion is what determines whether a theory is scientific, but there is a larger category of theories which are not all empirically testable yet are subject to rational criticism, and are therefore rational, though we must generally hold them with a lower degree of confidence than we do our scientific theories.

In fact, his very claim is an example of a rational yet non-scientific theory! For he himself has not provided us with the evidence it would take to prove his theory that evidence is necessary wrong! And so we see that there are meaningful, important ideas which can be judged on criteria other than evidence (in this case, internal contradiction, though that is far from the only criterion).

Second:

But the view that we all start out curious and creative, and have those qualities systematically stifled, fails to address some core questions. Why should it be possible to stifle these qualities at all? If there are people who see benefit from stifling curiosity and creativity, why should those benefits outweigh the benefits of encouraging curiosity and creativity? And assuming that there are people with a vested interest in stifling curiosity and creativity, why should they be able to prevail over those members of society who value curiosity and creativity? If curiosity and creativity are general traits of human beings, anti-intellectualism should be a rare and aberrant phenomenon. It should be regarded as a variety of mental retardation, or a condition as undesirable as impotence. The only possible conclusion is that there is something fundamentally wrong with this model of human nature.

This is certainly not the only possible conclusion. Only if you presume that human behavior never has unintended consequences must you think that someone must see themselves as "benefiting" from an act in order to do it. The simple fact is that our educational institutions do do tremendous damage to curiosity and creativity, and they do so despite having the exact opposite motivation.

Further, his examples of civilizations that failed to make various or other accomplishments (Sub-Saharan Africans, Romans, etc.) is only evidence that problem-solving is hard, and that the innate curiosity that human beings are born with is not enough. We need a good tradition of scientific and rational discovery to complement our innate curiosity, in order to create great things.

I can not imagine anything more creative than two ancient people sitting there and thinking, hmm we do need to keep a record of how much crop we are making so that we can be prepared for natural disasters and not starve. I've noticed that usually in the summer we do good, but in winter not so good, how much do we need to survive winter? And then sitting there and thinking hmm well I suppose if I make a line on this thing that means x amount, two lines mean well x amount. Basically they are both agreeing on a communicating system through symbols. If that is tinkering, then what is creativity? Is creativity imagining what alien life looks like? Or is that tinkering? Is perhaps creativity the synthesis of many tinkering? I simply don't get it, but then the guy studies pseudo-science? It seems he is merely speculating and very subjective. What do I mean by subjective? Well subjectivity is thinking of what creativity could be. When one indulges in subjectivity they start making their own rules, they start fantasising and lose track of reality. In my opinion, that is what this guy is doing.