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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit annoyed by this:

"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.

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Intellectuals share a common culture and common political beliefs from that culture, which they often neglect to apply any sort of skeptical thought to. That makes them like the rest of us, except they are more annoying because they claim to be more objective and rational.

They are more objective and rational; that's what makes them intellectuals.

In at least the one narrow area of their lives where they make a living, maybe. And that's assuming that they are the kind of intellectuals that run empirical tests on things and not the kind of intellectuals who invent elaborate networks of concepts with little relations to the real world (post-modernists, non-empirical sociologists, feminist philosophers, and literary critics - I'm looking at you).

I see no evidence that intellectuals are less prone to human biases than the rest of us (well, I suppose I qualify as an intellectual, but the rhetorical point stands).

If you disagree with popular beliefs in academic social networks, you can be shunned by your peers as quickly as a high school student that doesn't follow the latest fashions. Human nature is universal.

I didn't say they were completely rational, of course humans are humans, but intellectuals are more objective and rational than non intellectuals, which is all I said; I stand by my assertion. They're also more precise with words, and tend to actually mean what they say rather than what you think they implied.

> but intellectuals are more objective and rational than non intellectuals

I've spent too much time around intellectuals to take that seriously.

> They're also more precise with words, and tend to actually mean what they say rather than what you think they implied.

Actually, they're far more likely to play word games and set word traps. It's how they preen. It's just like body-builders flexing, not that there's anything wrong with that.

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?

If Star Wars had cost several billion dollars a ticket and been ten hours of pictures of lifeless rocks, I predict it would not have been that popular, either.

This is the part of the article which bothered me. There are consistent references to creativity being a child putting every object in their mouth or a dog eating everything because of it's natural curiosity whilst simultaneously arguing that abstraction is a form of intelligence not expressed in the old times.

Would a person with the ability to abstract feel the need to generate every pattern? Would Western Europe have really demonstrated its "creativiity or intelligence" by creating every version of a pattern....or just a few?

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