House of Eratosthenes

I’m bestowing the eighty-sixth BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) award upon Prof. Thomas Sowell, not just because the sentence is good, but because it is important in this day and age. In an interview with Investor’s Business Daily, he is asked to define intellectuals. Much of the interview would later be spent making the same points we saw during John Hawkins’ interview. But defining the word, as is often the case with defining-of-words, is an ingenious and eye-opening approach:

I define intellectuals as persons whose occupations begin and end with ideas. I distinguish between intellectuals and other people who may have ideas but whose ideas end up producing some good or service, something that whether it’s working or not working can be determined by third parties.

With intellectuals, one of the crucial factors is their work is largely judged by peer consensus, so it doesn’t matter if their ideas work in the real world. [emphasis mine]

The “peer consensus,” of course, is a cosmetic substitute for the third parties. If it were my quote, I would change third parties to “stakeholders,” or something less awkward and more precise than that. Owners of the situation that is subject to influence by the merits of the idea.

The ideas are ideas outside of practice. “Properly maintaining your automobile has been found to be beneficial toward gas mileage as well as vehicle life” is an idea. But it is a practical idea, one validated by real-life events, and outside the scope of what Dr. Sowell means, I think. We are awash in intellectuals peddling ideas that do not and cannot contain the words “has been shown to.” “Is good for” is a much more common fragment among the intellectuals and their ideas. “A robust, thriving middle class is good for society.” “I just think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” “Unplugging your coffee pot is good for the environment.”

The other minor itch left unscratched by the Sowell definition, I would say, is the intellectual mindset. A lot of us non-intellectuals have ideas and our ideas are also full of “ifs,” “whens” and “woulds.” But when we have these ideas we have some curiosity about whether it would really work, and if so, then what bits of it would have to be refined. We are frustrated by the fact that we cannot gauge this until such a time that a prototype or proof-of-concept vehicle has been constructed. And so we feel an urge to build said prototype, and the urge festers if it is not satisfied in some way. We are frustrated that the idea is remaining an idea and nothing more than that.

Intellectuals also want to build their machinery, but “prototype” has nothing to do with it and there is no “proof of concept” about it. The dream, it seems, is the universal scope of influence itself. The frustration is that we have not “made it happen” yet, which means to commit to implementing the idea, non-incrementally, over every available square inch. No crevice or hamlet or valley should escape it. And when that happens, and the data flow back starkly indicating the idea is a crappy one or requires some alteration, the intellectual offers a rather stunning lack of curiosity about this. The criticism is to be marginalized somehow, or else the details are to be left to others.

As long as I’m jotting down my notes about this, there is one other thing I notice: The intellectuals are often subscribers and not originators, nor do they pretend to be originators. President Obama, for example, does not claim (to my knowledge) to have originated the idea that “when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” But I’m sure He would be eager to offer His subscription to this idea, as a testament toward His credentials as a brainy intellectual fellow. Ditto for Paul Krugman and Keynesian economics, Eve Ensler and global warming, Christopher Hitchens and not-believing-in-God.

And I would offer these as cherry-on-the-cake, supplemental additions to the definition. Intellectuals are ready to add to their virtual curricula vitae by listing ideas they did not invent, and would not pretend to have invented. If they do invent some kind of an idea, they are disinterested in the prospect of seeing it evaluated by those who would hold a stake in the idea working out well. They do not provide much impetus or motivation for the idea being put into a prototype, and are only interested in discussing the idea insofar as they can be congratulated on having it — not given suggestions on how to improve it.

They’re pretty easy to detect, because their ideas don’t have a lot to do with cost/benefit. With a practical non-intellectual, this is the origin of the idea: “I’m paying a lot of money to do X, how can I get around that.” “I’m spending a lot of time doing X, is there another way.” “These poor saps are having to send their product clear over here and wait for it to come back before they can get started on this other task over there…how can we sever this prerequisite relationship between these tasks, so they can be worked in parallel.”

With the intellectuals, the appeal of the idea is the irony. That is what makes them scary. The idea has to contradict other ideas, which may be presumed to arrive first. Too much of the time, the idea flouts common sense in order to do this. That would be okay, if the intellectuals possessed the same drive to have the idea validated in the plane of reality that the rest of us do with our ideas.

But, as has been explained above, they do not.

With the intellectuals, the appeal of the idea is the irony. That is what makes them scary. The idea has to contradict other ideas, which may be presumed to arrive first.

Yup. And this has to do with egotism. Too clever by half, as the saying goes.

Because those who have come up with ideas that were contradictictory to common sense and it turned out the facts backed those ideas up … they have been hailed as brilliant. And so “intellectuals” tend to try to mimic this by “thinking outside the box”. You know, “imagination is more important than knowledge” (Which is Things Phil Knows #14 “Imagination without knowledge is mere amusement.”)

It’s all fine and good to thiink outside of the box, but if you can’t then bring your idea back to the box and incorporate it constructively into the box and make it a bigger, better box — well you need to go back to the drawing board, not just tape it to the side of the box and call it “knowledge”.
- philmon | 03/04/2010 @ 07:36
Exactly.

If you can’t claim credit, and don’t even feel motivated to claim credit, for originating the idea; and the idea has to contradict common sense in order to have a hope of arousing your inner passions; and after the idea is executed, you can’t claim vindication from the superior results and don’t even feel motivated to try (taping it to the side of the box) — then you’re simply adding your voice to the exercise, not your mind.

This whole phenomenon is merely a natural consequence of our schools getting out of the teaching business, and into the teach-how-to-socialize business. The grown-up kids are going out in the world as solutions in search of a problem, trying to find a good fit for the skills they built, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. This also explains Obama’s popularity: He doesn’t look desperate when He does this, so others who are doing the same thing, don’t feel desperate about it when they watch Him. He really is a President for our times.
- mkfreeberg | 03/04/2010 @ 07:49
[…] Palin on Tonight Show Best Sentence LXXXVI Ebert’s Folly Reality Check For Speaker Nan American Reliance on Government at an All-Time […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/04/2010 @ 08:03

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Best Sentence LXXXVIWednesday, March 3rd, 2010

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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010