Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? - Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger, via

This is enough to clarify what I mean by “geek anti-intellectualism.”  Let me step back and sum up the views mentioned above:

1. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known.  Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.  (Cf. this essay of mine.)

2. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person speaking from authority.  In the future, information will be developed and propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other websites.

3. The classics, being books, are also outmoded.  They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes.  In short, they are boring and irrelevant.

4. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much.  We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities.  We can answer most general questions with a quick search.

5. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek.  You don’t have to go to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway.

If you are the sort of geek who loves all things Internet uncritically, then you’re probably nodding your head to these.  If so, I submit this as a new epistemological manifesto that might well sum up your views:

You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority.  For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated.  Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better.  After all, academics are boring.  A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard.  In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision.  You have contempt for the sort of people who read books and talk about them–especially classics, the long and difficult works that were created alone by people who, once upon a time, were hailed as brilliant.  You have no special respect for anyone who is supposed to be “brilliant” or even “knowledgeable.”  What you respect are those who have created stuff that many people find useful today.  Nobody cares about some Luddite scholar’s ability to write a book or get an article past review by one of his peers.  This is why no decent school requires reading many classics, or books generally, anymore–books are all tl;dr for today’s students.  In our new world, insofar as we individually need to know anything at all, our knowledge is practical, and best gained through projects and experience.  Practical knowledge does not come from books or hard study or any traditional school or college.  People who spend years of their lives filling up their individual minds with theoretical or factual knowledge are chumps who will probably end up working for those who skipped college to focus on more important things.

I really dislike the ‘drop out of college and spend time on making money’ theme that has been advocated by crackpots like Peter Thiel. However, I am not sure that Sanger is right here. There is a great deal of anti-intellectualism in America, generally, so perhaps it isn’t too much of a surprise that some of the folks that don’t give a hoot about the Battle of Hastings or the newest additions to the Periodic Table are becoming involved with the web. What should we do? Use a literacy test before granting them access?

I would rather rant about the anti-intellectualism of television and pop culture as a whole.

The reality is that the web is absorbing pop culture, and being changed by that. I continue to hope that the web’s transformational character will blend change pop culture, too.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, “The anthropology of the future is the study of ourselves”, and the dry and dispassionate character of intellectualism is a poor match for today’s web involvement, which is really a form of full-contact anthropology: an on-going study of ourselves and our selves. Sanger might have spent more time castigating the educational establishment and the intellectual class for their aloof indifference to the lives of those indifferent to intellectualism, even geeks. The well-educated should know better.

A Better Way to Teach Math - David Bornstein

There might be a bell curve in natural ability, but does that mean we are condemned to a bell curve in the results of training? Perhaps not, as the Jump approach to teaching math shows:

Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened out. One reason, says Mighton, is that teaching methods are not aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens.

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.

Teaching is another era where cognitive science hasn’t really reached. Most of what educators is doing is based on folklore, and most of the premises underlying education are likely to be flawed, or totally false.