Are popular public intellectuals smarter than the average person, but also way more dishonest than the average person?
Nah, dishonesty is widespread. More broadly, just putting random average people in charge wouldn’t fix things.
Yes current intellectuals are usually smarter in some senses than most people.
I think schools have subpar (probably higher opinion than you have) teaching of grammar, but at least they present the topic. So smart students learn it on their own and then they become public intellectuals. I think I’m probably overestimating how much the smart students become public intellectuals, and how much they can learn on their own when being presented a topic by authorities.
I guess the fact that students think of the teachers as authorities makes them try to guess how the teachers actually are correct. It probably requires great integrity, especially for young and ignorant people, in order to see the truth. Also they have to do more of the creative work themselves when presented with wrong material, so it’s not just about seeing the truth. Then they also have to do extra work in order cut out the wrong stuff.
Now that I wrote this; I think it’s way harder to learn in such an environment than I thought before.
I think I’m underestimating how important conscious conceptual knowledge of grammar is, and overestimating how far intuition from book-reading takes you. Or I’m too accepting of a 10% error rate, when I should expect less than 1% error rate.
Being right by rule of thumb means they don’t always understand when they are right. So when they get things right by accident, they may actually be misunderstanding things while the reader thinks the writer understands.
I think I’m accepting your opinion here too quickly though. I should probably gain more grammar knowledge and then judge for myself from reading intellectuals.
I remember being a bit shocked by Pinker’s confusion when watching this video. I hadn’t read anything from Pinker, but by the way he presents (I was fooled by him), and by the type of the ideas he has (enlightenment and rationality), I thought he would be better than the average intellectual on this stuff. Is he better than the average intellectual? I would think he’s better than most philosophers, especially better than types like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Judith Butler, Baudrillard, etc (I haven’t read these authors).
I don’t know.
I don’t know. I wouldn’t be confident about that claim. I don’t think people like Heidegger and Wittgenstein are representative.
Sometimes I worry that I write unnecessary and dumb/obvious stuff that will get ignored and only clutters up the conversation. But then I get long and great replies; like to this quote. So in general I think it’s better to post more of what I think.
I think I’ve changed my psychology to accept more what my immediate thoughts are. Not that I only reply with what my immediate thoughts are. If I think there are problems with my immediate thoughts, I’ll think more about them and try to think of criticisms. But when I can’t think of anything better I just accept that this is the best I have.
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Is it about fooling those reasonable intellectuals into changing their psychology, or do you need to use more benevolent tactics, like making them value cooperative truth-seeking more by persuading them with rational arguments.
Paths Forward already fits a lot of widespread, pre-existing ideas about rationality. A lot of it is reasonably self-explanatory. It fits with existing knowledge well enough that people often feel immediately pressured as soon as you bring it up and start saying some of it. They can immediately see how it does good things in a more clear, effective, transparent way than what they’re used to doing. They feel right away that they should do it or that refusing without a good reason risks losing face. (This makes it easier to spread.)
Lots of the public knows they aren’t great at rationality but believes intellectuals already are. Lots of people already want and expect intellectuals to be doing Paths Forward type things, but they don’t have all the words for it, and don’t clearly see that it isn’t happening. They think a lot happens behind closed doors, or in academic journals that they don’t read, and they don’t feel entitled to demand transparency (most people also don’t demand or get much transparency from their government, but that is bad and if government transparency were a bigger issue for more people that would improve society).
Lots of debates between intellectuals are confusing and indecisive, so most people find it hard to evaluate who is right (or they are biased tribalists who favor one side for the wrong reasons). With Paths Forward, people able to win debates decisively, in a clear way that regular people can understand, would gain more prominence. Right now most intellectuals avoid debating people like that. Also people could learn CF epistemology in order to learn how to approach debates more decisively, so that more people would be able to debate effectively. Right now I think a ton of people blame themselves for not having clear evaluations of debates, or they blame the topic for being too hard, when actually its the intellectuals who are failing to bring clarity to the issues and are debating with bad, confusing methods.
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I think most people assume/believe gatekeeping is actually doing a reasonably good job and if an idea had a ton of merit it would have a high chance to get past gatekeepers. And they’d be horrified and outraged if they had access to transparent, honest, true information about how gatekeepers make decisions.
A lot of people know their boss/manager is an idiot who makes stupid, biased hiring decisions and many other bad decisions. But a lot of those same people think that people doing academic admissions, academic hiring, or gatekeeping academic journals, are much better and more rational. But they aren’t. And it’s not just academia; e.g., think tanks or research departments of wealthy companies have similar issues.
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