The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

https://longreads.com/2019/05/31/the-artificial-intelligence-of-the-public-intellectual/

by axiomdata316 • 7 years ago

47 45 7 years ago

paganel3• 7 years ago

Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The good professor hadn’t done his homework.”

This is a little bit harsh on Peterson because a lot of Marxists themselves haven't read Marx. You could say that the intellectual history of marxism (at least in the second half of the 20th century) is comprised of a large majority of "marxists" who haven't read his works and a small minority who have done so and who at least have a general idea of what marxism really is about (if it matters I do believe that Žižek has indeed read Marx and he knows what he's talking about).

ptah2• 7 years ago

nice whataboutism. fact remains peterson is clueless about marxism

paganel3• 7 years ago

Accusing a non-marxist that he is clueless about marxism is not that big of a thing. The demise of marxism (at least in the Western world) started when clueless people like Marcuse started riding on its wave without having any idea what they were talking about.

And on the back of clueless intellectuals like Marcuse you have today's pseudo-intellectuals (including people like Peterson) who ignore the big marxist elephant in the room: the fact that poor people are being exploited by the rich to this very day, instead they are focusing their intellectual "fights" on irrelevant things (like being a feminist or an anti-feminist).

To point back to the article, we have no Zola of our times.

vixen99• 7 years ago

What is the point of this kind of comment? Can you not see that its information content is zilch. How about telling us why you take this view and then we might not have wasted seconds reading something to no purpose.

kofejnik3• 7 years ago

fact: marxism is a steaming pile of horseshit.

Source: lived in the USSR

challenger222• 7 years ago

Most of Peterson's experience with Marxism is through reading about it's effects (Gulag Archipelago, collecting soviet era propoganda), not reading about it's philosophy. The philosophy can be understood pretty easily from social context without having read the Manifesto.

nabla9• 7 years ago

Studying Marx and his work extensively should belong to the historians studying Marxism. If "Marxism" is valuable path of thinking, it musth have evolved and some things Marx said are not considered outdated or wrong by today's Marxists.

If what "Marxism really is about" has not changed, it's stale and outdated ideology.

If all outsiders understand Marx wrong, I very doubt that it's worth of reading his original works. He clearly can't write clearly if you need dedication to Marxism to really understand.

unknownkadath• 7 years ago

He's a professor, though, and critcising the left is kind of his specialization.

LoSboccacc• 7 years ago

while it's important to criticize intellectuals on their positions, especially if they show ignorance on a topic they're debating and especially if they're tryng to position themselves as expert in the subject matter, it's a little unfair to expect them to come into life fully formed and knowledgeable about everything. as long as they're honest about it I think it's ok for debates to happen between people that aren't subject expert. how are they supposed to learn, alone in a cave?

ggg2• 7 years ago

the problem seems to be the publisher (which some researchers double as) framing it in a peer-consensus way when it's not.

michjedi• 7 years ago

This article is full of ad hominems and doesn't present any challenges to ideas. Rather poor in my opinion

sago2• 7 years ago

There is a certain degree of oxymoron in the term 'public intellectual'.

Reality is complex. Terrifyingly so. The academics I have the most respect for walk a tightrope in a state of barely contained vertigo. It is very difficult to make a strong point, almost impossible to make it both correct and understandable, and (IMO) definitely impossible to make the tightrope accessible for others to walk. To make the point, all nuance needs to be stripped; ambiguity calcified into surety; counterpoints strawmanned for easier demolition.

Ideally the person doing that simplification does so knowingly for the purpose of education. But that is entirely opaque to public view.

So it is no surprise that those who gain most recognition are those most willing to misrepresent the nuance of their field. Or to caricature the opponents of the viewpoint they wish to espouse. How do even informed members of the public tell? A PhD from Harvard as a shibboleth, sounds about right.

I'm not saying the public is dumb. Just that none of us have the expertise or the dedication or the time. We rely on tribal signalling. So we are primed for intellectual hucksterism.

0815test• 7 years ago

To make the point, all nuance needs to be stripped; ambiguity calcified into surety; counterpoints strawmanned for easier demolition.

This isn't really true, though. Rather, I think there are tradeoffs. You can be really, really sure about a quite complex and nuanced statement, or make helpful simplifications but then have to admit to some uncertainty, if only because your statement might be misinterpreted. More than anything, you can provide clear, unambiguous, broadly available references to enable anyone who's actually relying on your claims to fact-check them.

Seeming more confident than you actually are is a common rhetorical trick, but one that we should be training the general public not to fall for so easily. Because a bad actor can seem so much more confident, no matter how fringe their claims might be - it's a loser move! One can take pride in sticking to the minimally-necessary amounts of ambiguity and/or nuance, whatever those might be in any given context.

sago2• 7 years ago

This isn't really true, though. Rather, I think there are tradeoffs.

One might say I stripped all nuance (etc) to make my point.

I agree with your second paragraph. On your first: I have a long-standing beef with references, though. The selection of references, I think, is much more significant than the contents themselves. And it takes a lot of expertise to intuit the degree of selection bias. It takes ground knowledge of the things not selected. I think a part of this Dunning Kruger trap is the illusion one can fact check and verify an argument. So the very presence of references becomes the shibboleth.

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

I don’t think it’s unreasonably to think the public is broadly dumb. Just take a look at people’s political opinions, for both sides. Like, ignore whatever you think about who should be in power, and observe just the reasoning that people provide. For both sides, a non trivial proportion are driven by complete nonsense. For the majority, emotion and group identity norms trump reason. Hence people being exceptionally easy to manipulate at a large scale.

claudiawerner3• 7 years ago

Don't you think the opposition between 'reason' and 'emotion' is itself of ideological character not driven by much sense? Isn't group identity important in forming solidarity in a system under which collective action on many important issues (labour, ecology, etc.) is frustrated? Not everyone subscribes to Kantian/Socratic rationalism.

challenger222• 7 years ago

Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.
That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community.

I do not like this article. It does not organize its criticisms well, and it is really hard to understand exactly why the author dislikes the individual intellectuals she calls out, and likes the others. For example, Peterson actively engages his audience, but doesn't get credit for it. The best guess I have for the author's position is trying to portray her left-of-center political as authoritative by appealing to higher abstractions; I honestly don't know. It is strange.

AbrahamParangi• 7 years ago

Hacking at the ideas of others (whether rightly or wrongly) without presenting any superior alternatives seems shallow to me. A mediocre idea can still be the best idea in the room.

"Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

heymijo• 7 years ago

"Hacking at the ideas of others (whether rightly or wrongly) without presenting any superior alternatives seems shallow to me."

This sounds like the idea some manager have of "don't bring me a problem unless you have a solution", which is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way of managing.

valiant55• 7 years ago

I think that style of management is just fine if it's stated as "Don't bring me a problem unless you have a proposed solution." By proposing a solution it starts a conversation about how to resolve the stated problem. Often times someone will just complain (rightly or wrongly) about an issue and then everyone just kind of stares at the floor for 5 seconds and then moves on.

uncletaco• 7 years ago

I think very differently about this.

I’ve rarely encountered a problem where there wasn’t enough time to consider alternative solutions before taking it to my manager. Also depending on how long a manager has been managing, there’s a non trivial chance the worker have more intimate knowledge of the implementation space than the manager, especially if they’re a developer or worker who has ownership over the task.

Granted it is a personal thing for me. I was told this in ROTC over a decade ago and I’ve never had a manager actually demand this of me. I’ve always imposed it on myself.

ppod2• 7 years ago

This article is a bait and switch. It starts as though it has a general point to make about the idea of the public intellectual, when in fact the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political opinions to the author.

Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

This article is a bait and switch.

No, it's not.

It starts as though it has a general point to make about the idea of the public intellectual,

Which it does.

when in fact the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political opinions to the author.

But it's not, if by that you mean the particular “reactionary” figured mentioned in that paragraph, the criticism of whom in that paragraph is of he same tenor as that of public intellectuals of different political stripes in the paragraphs preceding and following that one (the next begins, “But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off...” Your thesis seems to be based entirely on taking that paragraph out of context and pretending it is the secret central point of the article, when it is clearly not, and comes off as the kind of knee jerk defense of those figures (particularly Peterson) common from certain corners of HN.

The actual central criticism of the article is made explicitly later, standardly enough in the two paragraph conclusion which also includes a resolution as well as a criticism; the main criticism being not focussed on any one political leaning, “The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality.”

ppod2• 7 years ago

I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would be aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not "reactionary".

The article doesn't have to be perfectly balanced in criticism of different political groups of course, but if you can read it start to finish and think it doesn't have an obvious bias then I think you're deluding yourself. I picked an extract that seemed to me the post obviously politically focused, but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

Everything outside academia being pseudo-intellectual sounds rather presumptuous.

The author insinuates the topic to be about sex and race while the general public actually seems to be better situated here compared to academia. I think it is very easy to make an argument based on proximity as to why this may be the case.

Many of the most important intellectuals often had no big role in academic circles. Quite the contrary. Due to prevalent morals of the times.

cafard• 7 years ago

About 50 years ago, Time Magazine ran an article on somebody's list of the 100 leading intellectuals in America. I remember almost no names from the list, but do remember a definition from an official at Harvard, a dean perhaps: An intellectual is a scholar who is living beyond his scholarly means.

Honestly, public intellectual has always been an odd calling. Who would you define it? One who writes serious, scholarly books, yet also articles in the popular or semi-popular press? The difficulty might then be in judging whose serious books are serious.

The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

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