I don't have the time to organize these coherently, but I'll throw a few thoughts out there that this piece gave me.
1. The possibility of a systemic failure, i.e. conditions growing worse short and long term, seems to hang in the air as a feeling moreso than it did in the 2010s, I think. Back then the big bad was climate change, and it was something in the popular conscience that could be solved by turning off a few more lights and recycling. (Nuclear war as well, but that's perennial.) But now the distrust in elites, which did exist before, is now more total and more widespread. There is certainly no more halo around the office of the president as there was, or around any office to be honest.
2. The game in academia is completely rigged. Again, the popular notion of an "expert" is now not someone who is smart/knows a lot about the field but is ignorant to some practical aspect of ordinary life, but someone who is out of touch completely with the average person, perhaps even a mere puppet for someone else's agenda etc.; because it is no longer possible for an average person to become at the same time an expert.
3. At the same time the "elite human capital" is getting harder to find, we've degraded societal norms and ethical obligations to others and adopted a morality-is-for-suckers attitude. The remaining functions and roles formerly played by morality have been absorbed by cultural and political beliefs. More can be said, and I would like to find a good book on this that's neither overreactionary the-west-is-fallen nor snarky "um every generation thinks the younger ones are terrible!", preferably with a critical and honest historical analysis.
4. In every era until around the mid-20th century, to be an intellectual elite generally meant you were well-versed in a classical education, and you understood not everything but a sufficient deal about history, politics, philosophy, mathematics, arts, sciences, etc. even if you specialized in a certain area; because there was simply less you needed to know to know a sufficient amount. Now unless you are insanely dedicated you can't do that because you need to be spending all your time specializing. Plus K-12 school curriculums have been on average dumbed down and even the kids who fail get pushed along anyway, because the incentives have been fucked and gamed. I knew someone who thought the Romans flourished before the Greeks, that the Bible was something "found at some point on the Sea Scrolls", and didn't know that Christianity had its roots in Judaism or Islam in Christianity. We're seeing hordes of future "experts" go into grad school to become professors with not even a baseline functioning idea of the history of the world.
Well sadly, I completely agree with everything you've said here!
I think we've learned from the rise of the tech right that expertise and intelligence alone do not guarantee wisdom and prudence in making decisions about public policy. Government inherently involves manipulating highly complex systems and making incredibly difficult ethical choices on a regular basis, and increasingly few people are capable of handling those kinds of decisions, even as the decisions themselves become more technical.
It seems like an intractable problem-you can have hyper-specialized experts or you can have well-rounded intellectuals, but you can't have both, because a human life is only so long and our collective knowledge is continuously expanding, while the capacity of a human mind is the same as it's ever been. Inevitably you end up with very smart people who lack fundamental knowledge that we used to consider essential to being part of an intellectual elite, and suddenly Elon Musk and his tech kids are tearing apart the federal bureaucracy without the slightest clue of what it is they're even cutting.
I do wonder how much of the specialized knowledge we rely on we will eventually be able to reliably offload to AI while being able to place more emphasis on the "core" classical curriculum that made for a robust elite. My best friend is a software engineer and he's already offloaded most of the time he spent coding to AI, for example. Of course, that raises all sorts of other problems!
I don't have the time to organize these coherently, but I'll throw a few thoughts out there that this piece gave me.
1. The possibility of a systemic failure, i.e. conditions growing worse short and long term, seems to hang in the air as a feeling moreso than it did in the 2010s, I think. Back then the big bad was climate change, and it was something in the popular conscience that could be solved by turning off a few more lights and recycling. (Nuclear war as well, but that's perennial.) But now the distrust in elites, which did exist before, is now more total and more widespread. There is certainly no more halo around the office of the president as there was, or around any office to be honest.
2. The game in academia is completely rigged. Again, the popular notion of an "expert" is now not someone who is smart/knows a lot about the field but is ignorant to some practical aspect of ordinary life, but someone who is out of touch completely with the average person, perhaps even a mere puppet for someone else's agenda etc.; because it is no longer possible for an average person to become at the same time an expert.
3. At the same time the "elite human capital" is getting harder to find, we've degraded societal norms and ethical obligations to others and adopted a morality-is-for-suckers attitude. The remaining functions and roles formerly played by morality have been absorbed by cultural and political beliefs. More can be said, and I would like to find a good book on this that's neither overreactionary the-west-is-fallen nor snarky "um every generation thinks the younger ones are terrible!", preferably with a critical and honest historical analysis.
4. In every era until around the mid-20th century, to be an intellectual elite generally meant you were well-versed in a classical education, and you understood not everything but a sufficient deal about history, politics, philosophy, mathematics, arts, sciences, etc. even if you specialized in a certain area; because there was simply less you needed to know to know a sufficient amount. Now unless you are insanely dedicated you can't do that because you need to be spending all your time specializing. Plus K-12 school curriculums have been on average dumbed down and even the kids who fail get pushed along anyway, because the incentives have been fucked and gamed. I knew someone who thought the Romans flourished before the Greeks, that the Bible was something "found at some point on the Sea Scrolls", and didn't know that Christianity had its roots in Judaism or Islam in Christianity. We're seeing hordes of future "experts" go into grad school to become professors with not even a baseline functioning idea of the history of the world.
That's all, I think.
Well sadly, I completely agree with everything you've said here!
I think we've learned from the rise of the tech right that expertise and intelligence alone do not guarantee wisdom and prudence in making decisions about public policy. Government inherently involves manipulating highly complex systems and making incredibly difficult ethical choices on a regular basis, and increasingly few people are capable of handling those kinds of decisions, even as the decisions themselves become more technical.
It seems like an intractable problem-you can have hyper-specialized experts or you can have well-rounded intellectuals, but you can't have both, because a human life is only so long and our collective knowledge is continuously expanding, while the capacity of a human mind is the same as it's ever been. Inevitably you end up with very smart people who lack fundamental knowledge that we used to consider essential to being part of an intellectual elite, and suddenly Elon Musk and his tech kids are tearing apart the federal bureaucracy without the slightest clue of what it is they're even cutting.
I do wonder how much of the specialized knowledge we rely on we will eventually be able to reliably offload to AI while being able to place more emphasis on the "core" classical curriculum that made for a robust elite. My best friend is a software engineer and he's already offloaded most of the time he spent coding to AI, for example. Of course, that raises all sorts of other problems!