I looked up anti-intellectualism and here is the definition:
>Anti-intellectualism is a profound skepticism or hostility toward science, higher education, and critical thought, often viewing intellectuals as detached elites
. Driven by populist politics, religious dogma, and economic anxiety, it manifests as rejection of evidence and scientific consensus. It undermines democratic decision-making by prioritizing emotional narratives over expert analysis
I would say that there is another possibility to this. Experts and Expert opinions are susceptible to the same problem of social media echo-chambers[0].
Where new ideas and thought tend to be rejected because experts tend to rely too strongly in positions established over the course of a carrier.
So the concept of anti-intellectualism is not solely based on emotional responses. But also based on this concept of creating too much absolute certainty about a situation that doesn't always exist. People have a tendency to reject scientific basis of some information because of this echo-chamber as this dilemma tends to ignore other factors that are not well known. Also scientific pursuits have the possibility of being game by bad actors.
The difference between science and this random shower thought you decided to grace this thread with is that science has some sound epistemological basis, typically evidence, whereas you have nothing.
> The difference between science and this random shower thought you decided to grace this thread with is that science has some sound epistemological basis
Science can have sound epistemological basis, but many times overspecialization can force confidence in areas where there is none and its echo-chambered by people in the field to keep the sense of authority on a subject going.
A weird claim when science is littered with a history of poor, insane explanations for phenomena.
People play back the “Greatest Hits” without really going into the historical misses. The reality is that the quality and predictive power of science is covariate with culture.
There are a lot of good reasons to think that academic culture right now has a groupthink problem, mostly because the group is so much larger. Alternative theories typically have to wait for an incumbent group of thinkers to die. But if the gradient of thought is more continuous then do bad ideas become more sticky?
Tech here can refer to many things. Given the context stated in the article (and literally the title) I think it’s clear the author is talking about SV elites which by definition excludes most of the open source community. And no, a tech company releasing open source code doesn’t amount to much in the face of the firehouse of cash they print. But you should just stick your head back in the sand, it’ll feel better.
> They pay lip service to innovation but hate the deep mental work and creativity that produces novelty and original thought. They care about such things only if they can be turned into a $20-a-month subscription service and then parlayed into mission-critical enterprise software.
What a deeply anti intellectual person herself. This person thinks their slop that is automated with a 20 dollar subscription is deep mental work. We have AI helping us solve open problems in mathematics but sure. A woke journalist has decried that LLMs deprive us of creativity so we must bow down to her and accept this. Thankfully a critical mass of people are noticing the latent elitism and hollowness of leftist elites and they are rejecting this rhetoric.
You doth protest too much! It’s clear that things can still be “inexpensive” but require deep mental work - taking a course to understand Calculus is work, and it could all be done with a $100 calculator. To minimize you, personally, working at it so you understand the very movements of the Spheres in Heaven, simply because it can be done on a cheap calculator, is the deep anti-intellectualism.
The knowledge has worth; we should be cheering that it is cheap so that we can all partake in it, like the Gutenberg press made having our very own copy of Thucydides a simple thing. We should demand more of the deep well of culture and thought to which we are heirs, because its transmission and reproduction is so cheap! Not less.
It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.
> It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.
? It’s the Silicon Valley that made LLMs that are now used to create more understanding. You wrote a lot of words with close to nothing to say.
The stock egg photo was deep. It made me thing of eggs. I like eggs. I often make eggs into scrambled eggs and sometimes as sunny side up, not to mention soft boiled, which are probably the best. I assume Peter Thiel is bad guy who does not like eggs?
The coddled naïveté that allowed the “right wing” movement to thrive in Silicon Valley circles; the kind of embarrassing thinking that led to Trump and people who unironically call things “woke” derisively.
Watching people so stiff about “western culture” to lay claim to the fruits of the enlightenment for a bunch of embarrassing tech bros in Silicon Valley has been wildly disappointing.
“Toss an insult on the ground and the owner will pick it up”, as they say; watching the comments devolve, with skin so thin, “woke woke woke” - simply because they’ve been undressed so completely.
I keep saying this and you can check my comment history to verify - HN is botted to an extreme degree. There’s absolutely no restrictions on spinning up additional accounts and any hacker worth their salt could easily spin up an LLM to set up apparent opposition to a linked idea. It’s clear HN has absolutely no problem with this.
What is inexcusable is the large fraction of the community that sees the logic behind the article but avoids getting involved for fear of irritating some future employer, or just because they want to avoid confrontation here. We’re watching tech billionaires usher in a dystopian society in real time. And we want to talk about what exactly? Apparently anything but the Peter Thiel shaped elephant in the room.
Seems like HN is doing something to combat this, considering how many [dead] comments I see in every post (which you can enable by setting showdead in your user profile).
I've only recently enabled it so I don't know how frequent dead comments were before the LLM era.
To be fair, I've been here for like 15 years and have had show dead on for most of it, and although the quality of them has certainly gotten lower, I'm not convinced that they are more frequent.
I think HN needs user karma and subdivisions/subforums in addition to the current system. Users will have a very limited amount of votes (like 1 or 2) per each user to up or down their karma. And subforums would have karma thresholds voted by participants, to prevent spam and low effort posting. There are even more complex approaches with better self-control too.
Sure, such systems have their own drawbacks, but as a complete system, they are usually better on average than no-karma forums.
PS: current karma should be better called a score or something similar, it is not very useful.
The Anti-Intellectualism of the Hacker News Elites.
AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.
27 comments
>Anti-intellectualism is a profound skepticism or hostility toward science, higher education, and critical thought, often viewing intellectuals as detached elites . Driven by populist politics, religious dogma, and economic anxiety, it manifests as rejection of evidence and scientific consensus. It undermines democratic decision-making by prioritizing emotional narratives over expert analysis
I would say that there is another possibility to this. Experts and Expert opinions are susceptible to the same problem of social media echo-chambers[0].
Where new ideas and thought tend to be rejected because experts tend to rely too strongly in positions established over the course of a carrier.
So the concept of anti-intellectualism is not solely based on emotional responses. But also based on this concept of creating too much absolute certainty about a situation that doesn't always exist. People have a tendency to reject scientific basis of some information because of this echo-chamber as this dilemma tends to ignore other factors that are not well known. Also scientific pursuits have the possibility of being game by bad actors.
[0]: https://truenorthoutreach.com/the-science-of-echo-chambers-h...
> ...It undermines democratic decision-making...
You can tell an intellectual came up with that definition.
> The difference between science and this random shower thought you decided to grace this thread with is that science has some sound epistemological basis
Science can have sound epistemological basis, but many times overspecialization can force confidence in areas where there is none and its echo-chambered by people in the field to keep the sense of authority on a subject going.
People play back the “Greatest Hits” without really going into the historical misses. The reality is that the quality and predictive power of science is covariate with culture.
There are a lot of good reasons to think that academic culture right now has a groupthink problem, mostly because the group is so much larger. Alternative theories typically have to wait for an incumbent group of thinkers to die. But if the gradient of thought is more continuous then do bad ideas become more sticky?
>that science has some sound epistemological basis
"Epistemological basis" the "intellectual" chortled moments before unironically claiming men can become pregnant and math is racist.
Doesn't even discuss open-source when a key point its making is "tech is built on the backs of others".
> They pay lip service to innovation but hate the deep mental work and creativity that produces novelty and original thought. They care about such things only if they can be turned into a $20-a-month subscription service and then parlayed into mission-critical enterprise software.
What a deeply anti intellectual person herself. This person thinks their slop that is automated with a 20 dollar subscription is deep mental work. We have AI helping us solve open problems in mathematics but sure. A woke journalist has decried that LLMs deprive us of creativity so we must bow down to her and accept this. Thankfully a critical mass of people are noticing the latent elitism and hollowness of leftist elites and they are rejecting this rhetoric.
The knowledge has worth; we should be cheering that it is cheap so that we can all partake in it, like the Gutenberg press made having our very own copy of Thucydides a simple thing. We should demand more of the deep well of culture and thought to which we are heirs, because its transmission and reproduction is so cheap! Not less.
It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.
Bleats the sheep: “woke, woke.”
> It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.
? It’s the Silicon Valley that made LLMs that are now used to create more understanding. You wrote a lot of words with close to nothing to say.
It takes the most uncharitable interpretation of every single person listed here. This person has also listed Thiel as an anti intellectual.
The whole world uses the products made by Silicon Valley elites. I don’t think the author wants to come to term with what this really means.
The coddled naïveté that allowed the “right wing” movement to thrive in Silicon Valley circles; the kind of embarrassing thinking that led to Trump and people who unironically call things “woke” derisively.
Watching people so stiff about “western culture” to lay claim to the fruits of the enlightenment for a bunch of embarrassing tech bros in Silicon Valley has been wildly disappointing.
“Toss an insult on the ground and the owner will pick it up”, as they say; watching the comments devolve, with skin so thin, “woke woke woke” - simply because they’ve been undressed so completely.
Good stuff.
What is inexcusable is the large fraction of the community that sees the logic behind the article but avoids getting involved for fear of irritating some future employer, or just because they want to avoid confrontation here. We’re watching tech billionaires usher in a dystopian society in real time. And we want to talk about what exactly? Apparently anything but the Peter Thiel shaped elephant in the room.
showdeadin your user profile).I've only recently enabled it so I don't know how frequent dead comments were before the LLM era.
Sure, such systems have their own drawbacks, but as a complete system, they are usually better on average than no-karma forums.
PS: current karma should be better called a score or something similar, it is not very useful.
AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.