Consumer culture is approximately as old as the Industrial Revolution (maybe a little bit older). You might be able to argue a qualitative or quantitative change at some point, but you can blame just about anything on a "rise in consumer culture" happening at about any point in recent history...
Well yes but that's the author's point. Where it used be that 'the men in Whitehall' resisted consumer culture and aired programs which were not necessarily something the public wanted but something that was good for them, they've now given in and just air whatever gets the most viewers. It's a case of consumer culture penetrating an area that used to be slightly protected from the revealed preferences of the public.
And I suspect it's not even really an aversion to big ideas, I think it's an aversion to depth. People love big ideas, look at Malcolm Gladwell and similar authors, they have plenty of big ideas but there's a bit of a pop-shallowness to them. Unfortunately the depth is what's needed and I'm not sure a culture which focuses on individual preferences will ever give it to the public at large.
I've met a lot of British people who did humanities undergrad degrees followed by something more commercial like Software/Law/Finance for a masters. Is that really common? Looking back I think I'd have loved to have done that.
It's not all that common - I don't have the figures to hand but its probably likely the number of those in the UK with Masters degrees is dwarfed enormously by those with just undergrad ones.
That said, I certainly noticed an uptick in post-grad popularity in my cohort of friends (including me!) around 2010, but for us anyway this seemed driven by a tough post-recession job market and a desire to have more directly marketable skills, which a Software Masters provided in relatively short order. I was fortunate enough to study in Scotland where an undergraduate degree is still paid for by the State and Masters are relatively affordable - this is increasingly not the case in the rest of the UK, especially England, so if anything it's likely only going to get less common than it is now.
Lots of working class mums that are young and single, literally paid to breed and live off benefits, which increasingly is creating a big underclass. The richer are having fewer kids.
Intellectuels are rarely from working class. Of course it's possible but it's way easier to achieve higher studies and a PhD and a carrer in academia by example when you don't have to worry about money or working. And thats not about only money but education too. Class, in fact.
Ah, the old "single mums are to blame for all social ills" line. Classic.
Incidentally, if you really think that Britain's burgeoning peasant underclass is the fault of self-impregnating single mothers you've been mislead; I suggest you change newspapers.
I don't think the OP is blaming any social ills on the single mums, he's instead pointing out that this is a symptom of a much larger problem, like the canary in a coal mine.
Having most of your kids being born to a society's most impoverished and least-educated members is not a recipe for long-term success. Saying this isn't blaming the poor, it's pointing out that there's something seriously wrong with the society, and it's not going to lead to the society improving in the long-term, but probably rather the opposite.
Population growth is mostly prevented by war, famine, disease and education.
Since Britain is mostly without war, famine or disease, we need education to do the heavy lifting to control the population. In areas, social and economic circles where education is low, the population tends to go up.
A big part of why couples stay together are the pressures that keep them together - economic, social, societal, legal. Right now is just a really shitty time for married couples in Western countries - it is increasingly anti-social, anti-religious, much more individualistic, ultra mobile, but high on public services. Parental laws heavily favor mothers over fathers.
So, combine situations where populations tend to go up with a legal / social environment where staying together is completely unnecessary for leading a meaningful life and we have a large amount of single mothers.
We can blame the single mothers, or we can assume that, given a set of opportunities and constraints, people generally behave in a predictable fashion. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
You've broken the HN guidelines multiple times today with political and national flamebait. We ban accounts that do this, so please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it any more.
I find this blog post somewhat ironic. The author starts the post by saying that the trigger for the post was Marx's 200th birthday.
Britain might have declined slightly, but Marx's home country, Germany, has comparatively fallen from the top of the world, intellectually. It's still a heavy hitter, but if you compare it to pre-WW1/pre-WW2 Germany, it's just a ghost.
You're assuming that the native Germans were somehow second rate scientists. Re-check my list :)
Germany not only destroyed its Jewish population willingly, therefore losing some of Germany's best minds but also destroyed its own research facilities, economy and even a good chunk of its native German scientists by shipping them off to war or having them bombed back at home.
Folly of the greatest magnitude, any way you look at it.
Kick out a few key faculty members and the rest of the good ones will follow, Jew or not, because they are good and have the choice to leave. You don't need all your faculty to be Jewish in order to lose all your good ones by kicking out a single Jewish faculty member.
If you lose 4/16 of your academics but all 4 of those were the Giants, then you haven't decimated your department, but you have lost what made it good in the first place.
Even before the war reached the borders, German mathematics was decimated. Sometimes by numbers, but always by the numbers that mattered. Because anyone good knew someone effected, and everyone good had the option to leave.
About a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!"
Not sure that fully explains it, but its a sad and tragic loss nevertheless.
Yup. America's intellectual prominence owes a lot to the Jews (and others) who flead Germanic countries during ww2. Goedel, Einstein, Von Neumann, Fermi, Bethe. And countless others who refused to stay silent as their best colleagues disappeared. America feasted on the output of those people and their intellectual progeny. Meanwhile, the great German faculty were (in some cases literally) decimated.
Germany is a special case. Nazism literally wiped the entire German intelligentsia, both physically (killing Jews and leftists, removing freedom of research, and eventually turning the country in a bombed-out wasteland that instigated the emigration of anyone with the opportunity to do so) and culturally (as it tainted anything that could have even remotely contributed to the rise of Nazism). The newer generations were suddenly rudderless and self-loathing. You could make a similar argument with Russia before and after Stalinism, or Italy before and after Fascism. Totalitarism destroys culture.
I don't particularly agree on the article's premise, but I don't think bringing Germany in the picture helps the debate.
On both front benches today there are pitifully few people one could call intellectuals (as distinct from intelligent): Jesse Norman and Barry Gardiner are the only ones I can think of...
It's rare that a whole thesis can be undermined by the author in less than a full sentence.
Two British politicians, [0], [1], Conservative and Labour respectively, both educated at well known institutions, and both of whom have been academically active. They are being compared against other front benchers, but not the wider British intellectual community.
I don't really buy into this. There's still a lot of great academic and intellectual programming on the BBC - Life Scientific and In Our Time come to mind - and British universities are ranked as the best in the world [1].
Long debates about philosophy might not have been what the public wanted, but BBC bosses thought they were good for us.
I think a form of education is one of the primary purposes and responsibilities of a country's national TV. Managing a broadcaster so that it gives the public what it wants, rather than what's better for them, is akin to giving kids fries and coke all day, because that's what they want.
Assuming the “public” is equal to “children.” A bit arrogant to suggest that. Adam Smith suggests that people will always act in their own self interest; perhaps advanced philosophical knowledge doesn’t have the same utility to normal people. The attitude that the public doesn’t know what’s good for them is disgusting; it’s the very core of the nanny state.
However, I will concede that many people would consume a healthier diet of entertainment of it were available. But suggesting that people need to have broadcasters or governments to be parents of an ignorant citizenry smacks of the same though patterns condemned in the book 1984.
> The attitude that the public doesn’t know what’s good for them is disgusting; it’s the very core of the nanny state.
It’s very demonstrable though - it’s why practically every country has an equivalent to US Social Security - and why most democracies are Representative instead of Direct.
Your argument would have more strength if the BBC or national arts funds operated in a vacuum - but they exist in competition with other private, profit-driven organisations. I feel it’s important that the public get exposure to programming that commercial sponsors (and thus network-execs/channel directors) wouldn’t touch. And it’s also essential for unbiased (or as close to unbiased as we can get) broadcast journalism.
(I accept that when a “Premium”-service customer base is large enough, e.g. HBO-sized, the need for state funding is minimised - I think HBO in particular is in a good place to launch a US-based, commercial-free broadcast news service - but smaller countries and markets would definitely need to employ some form of state funding to ensure editorial independence and an informed populace - which can only be good for democracy)
Not quite "in competition". If I understand the way TV licenses work (or perhaps worked, in the past) in the UK, you didn't have a choice of paying for the BBC if you had a TV at all.
If that has changed, it might lead to the BBC having to face competition now, when it didn't in the past. That might have an effect on the content, which might be (at least part of) what the article is observing...
The public, the great mass of humanity, does not always know what’s good for them. They often times do dumb things, allow irrational fear to take over, or engage in senseless mob activity. In the U.S. there are great numbers of people who decry taxation as theft but want roads to be fixed. A balance is needed. We need learned people in charge who are not too selfish and where too much power is not too concentrated.
This isn't some new argument, and was an issue thoroughly hashed out by the time of the American Revolution and was the basis for the Bill of Rights and why a republican form of government was chosen. All of history's examples of smaller, less accountable forms of government had been tried and failed. All the more accountable forms of government even including direct democracies had been tried and failed.
Representative democracy, with a mostly unaccountable judiciary, wasn't picked on a whim, and hasn't lasted this long by accident. We certainly don't need to change it to some technocracy like has been tried over and over with genocidal results.
We are in agreement so long as those who get elected are not too selfish or too easily duped and there is balance in the system. But as far as I know all empires eventually fail. Some last much longer than others. Since the U.S. style republican form of governance is a recent thing it’s hard to conclude that it’s the best form. Why is it better than the British constitutional democracy? Or Canada’s system?
You also seem to be unaware of the U.S.’s role in genocide within its own borders and its role in genocide within other borders. We should keep in mind that it used to be the case that only white, land owning males could vote. That slavery existed for a long time in the U.S. and then we had Jim Crow.
The American Republic will last as long as there is balance in the system and only if those we elect are not knaves and fools. Populism based on fear or hatred is a dangerous thing in any system and can bring instability. The U.S. is not immune to forces that can destroy the essence of the country.
I think it was perhaps poorly worded, but I have to agree with the spirit.
Contrast bookshops vs libraries. We expect the state to provide libraries, not bookshops. Not because we think bookshops are bad, but because we believe libraries should exist despite not being commercially viable.
The state broadcaster (in our case, the BBC) should be providing the library, not the bookshop. Not because "we know what's good for them", but because there's hundreds of commercial channels to "give them what they want".
History has shown that form of government to be far less deficient than the opposite which would be a small band of highly educated technocratic leaders, which always ended in genocide.
>a small band of highly educated technocratic leaders, which always ended in genocide.
Exactly how many historical examples of that form of government are there? 1? 2? 0? If you're talking about Nazi Germany, I don't remember the Nazis being "highly educated", and in fact, they were known to throw the intellectuals in the gas chambers. Over in China, Mao was some kind of farmer, and not at all an intellectual. The Soviets were all about the "proletariat" (the workers), not the intellectuals. I seriously can't think of any real-world historical examples of a government of "highly educated technocratic leaders". Such people usually tend to shy away from government. The closest I can think of is probably modern-day China, and they haven't committed any actual genocide that I know of (maybe some oppression of certain groups, but that's not genocide, and almost every government is guilty of this to some extent).
Every non-democratic government has claimed some form of reason they alone are uniquely qualified to run the country, be it the socialist governments saying they are doing as science and reasoning guide them, or even the Nazis who likely had more PhD's in their government than any since.
Is it that arrogant? The public are children - and so are theire masters and various Lichtgestalten.
Every article on neurology, every new app hacking that legacy eletric-jellyfish proofs it.
The dignity and rights we got, are not because we are some sort of superior beeings, but because we all together decided to turn the eyes away from the mess and give even the most primal beeing, sitting in a cardbord box near the train station, rights and respect, disregarding of birth, status, accomplishment and intellect.
The debate is not about wether we the people need behavioural checks and balances, the questions is how to prevent those enforcing and enacting them from doing that with similar runaway retardations.
I have no answer to that.
It seems to me that not a lot of thought and introspection was put into that comment, because I highly doubt you have that same benign attitude towards everyone. I'm sure there are plenty of stories about what people think/say/do that make you take a different position. For example, just today I read a story about a man who murdered his wife - with the son in between, and he pushed the knife through the boy to hurt the wife. But the problems were there long before, and such people exist aplenty. It's easy to be satisfied with everybody and their choices only for as long as you don't get to know them all too closely...
I doubt there is a single person that really benevolently accepts what each and every person does/says/thinks. Except maybe my late grandmother, who probably never raged about anyone in her entire life.
I think this issue is a bit subtler. Month to month viewership statistics are not the same as an explicit ballot.
Grown adults consistently reveal preferences that are different from their stated preferences.
In other words, people may lose what they really want by voting against it with their eyeballs and pocket books. Even when they woukd vote for it in an explicit ballot.
"I would prefer to eat healthy, but ice cream is just so much better tasting than broccoli."
One check on this is a regulator who imposes the choices for you based on your stated preferences, which is a check that grown adults often choose to add to their lives. Dieticians and personal trainers are popular for a reason.
I think this just strengthens the case against ratings-oriented broadcasting decisions (side-note: broadcasting, by its very definition and due to the scarcity of spectrum, necessarily requires making decisions for others. The only question is whether ratings are the best way to determine what people really want!)
Our office has someone in charge of food. That person used to pay attention to what people would/would not eat and then purchase accordingly. LOTS of pizza/brownies, not a lot of salads. We (unanimously!) asked that person to just ignore our gluttonous choices and gather explicit preferences. We now eat more healthily. Of course, our preferences did not change -- we'd all totally opt for the pizza and brownie over the salad. But the choice is easier to make on a ballot than when both options are in front of you and you're salivating... needless to say, the person who just does what we explicitly ask them to isn't manipulating us into eating more healthy food.
Similarly, pure ratings-driven programming in an ad-driven business model almost necessarily means setting up others' lives (building viewing habits) to achieve what you want (selling ads)!
So, de-emphasizing ratings is NOT equivalent to manipulation! And emphasizing ratings can sometimes be in service to a manipulation!
One major theme running through this article is the idea that smart people should know what's good for us, and organize society so that we get it. I've never understood how they are expected to actually do this: wouldn't they always prefer to figure out what's good for themselves and then organize society so that they get that?
Try as we might to find a good crowbar to pry democracy off of our representative governments, we can't forget that the "will of the people," however misguided it might be, is the only thing that reliably includes not ruining them as a priority!
The will of a person is different from the will of all the people averaged together. Even in a society of completely amoral people, each person will think that nobody else should ruin the commons. If you put littering to a vote, you'd have one yes and three hundred million "no"s - everybody would want to stop other people's crimes, and that would be enough. The situation only gets better if anybody is principled.
Tinpot dictators ravage their land in pursuit of resources to sell to richer nations all the time. The elites aren't going to be more principled than the proles - if you're nasty and educated that just makes you better at being nasty.
I was with you on that first paragraph, then you had to bring in the "will of the people."
Democracy simply replaces "smart people" with "a majority of voters," which is almost always a minority of the population. So instead of the ruling elites determining what's best for everyone, now you have a larger group of people -- still a minority -- determining what's good for themselves and foisting it upon everyone else.
That's not fair. Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone. If you don't like what the people who actually voted picked, then try voting next time.
Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone
I don't follow. Forcing things on a set of people who wanted something else is exactly how it works, and will still work that way with 100% participation in the vote. When two wolves vote to eat the lamb for dinner, the lamb having voted not to be dinner doesn't make it any less forced on the lamb.
>Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course.
> One major theme running through this article is the idea that smart people should know what's good for us, and organize society so that we get it. I've never understood how they are expected to actually do this: wouldn't they always prefer to figure out what's good for themselves and then organize society so that they get that?
Being smart is necessary, but not sufficient. A sense of duty is also needed.
Even that isn't enough. The fatal problem of central planning is always that nobody has enough information to make it actually work. Even very honest, very smart people only can know what they think would be best for either some crude average of people, or some small sample of specific people.
And we don't have any angels to do the job. All we have are human beings. They are sometimes selfish, and sometimes foolish. Sometimes they find it easy to take "what's good for me" and think it's "what's good for everybody" - even if they have the best of intentions. And sometimes they don't have the best of intentions, but use "good for everybody" as a smokescreen for their own selfish desires.
My perception is that unlike in the past, a huge percentage of the population in modern Western democracies believe things that most everyone used to consider matters of opinion, are now considered matters of fact and should not even be subject to a public debate.
Canada is currently going through this on the topic of immigration - we are starting to experience significant issues with housing costs and economic inequality (both are directly affected my immigration to a degree), but many people considering any opinion not consistent with the status quo to be literally racist. And unsurprisingly, you rarely can find one that will defend their beliefs, at best you will just get general dishonesty and never ending changing of the subject.
I think this new culture is going to have some very serious negative long term effects.
EDIT: Out of curiosity, which part are people disagreeing with here? That political views are more polarized? The inflationary housing prices claim? Inflationary housing prices not being reflected at all in CPI? Whether immigration has an effect at all on wages or real estate prices? That the word racist is commonly used to quash dissent (heck, even our mayor is on record doing it)? That people won't defend these racist charges? That any of this has changed? That these changes, assuming it is true, will have an effect?
I thought it was off-topic to my statement, but not completely irrelevant to the topic of "intellectual decline". And, while it might provoke a flamewar, it was not stated in a flame-bait fashion.
I wonder if this isn't just downvote-to-disagree by people who won't "defend their beliefs". (And thereby proving mistermann's point - ironic, that.)
downvote-to-disagree is (or was) explicitly ok according to HN guidelines, so that's why I asked WHY the downvoters disagree. Are the things I wrote not factual (interestingly, this is the inverse of my above complaint...former matters of opinion are now considered matter of fact, but also things that were previously objectively factual are now "considered" matters of opinion)? I've been scolded for not being agreeable, should people who downvote facts not also get a talking to?
As for whether it might start a flame war....well, that is my ongoing concern, that free speech, or more specifically certain opinions are no longer tolerated, or even more specifically, you can say something (unacceptable) once, but if someone disagrees with you, any reply is considered "argumentative" or "not appropriate behavior".
Perhaps I'm completely wrong on some of my beliefs. Personally, I enthusiastically encourage people to disagree with me or challenge my ideas, it wasn't so long ago that this was considered admirable for a variety of very good reasons. When people start believing their ideas are beyond challenge, to me that seems like the sort of thing that's dangerous.
The more educated the populace in general, the more they can recognize being hoodwinked into supporting things that are detrimental to their interests instead of being lead around by emotional pandering. Education is not a monolith, though. Such insight requires a specific form of education that challenges, inspires original thought, and isn't just a fancy vocational school or daycare with busy work.
Even education has its dangers. It can be co-opted into the process of hoodwinking: something that actually works better when it's not focused on job training. (A true vocational education wouldn't help people become more sophisticated, but it wouldn't twist them around either.)
I don't think you're arguing against education, but it kind of sounds like you are, which explains the downvotes.
I think your general point is correct though. We should be careful who we let set our curriculums and try to ride a reasonable line between ideology and hard data.
I don't see how anybody could argue for or against education, at least when you zoom out far enough that you're also considering "education" in oppressive countries. Education isn't a commodity like baked beans or pipe, and you can't just order up more or less.
That's why I mentioned a specific form that is needed. Education is treated like a commodity currently (speaking about the U.S.) even if that doesn't make a lot of sense. Teachers are paid to pour facts into kids' heads, which they promptly regurgitate for tests. Perhaps some of the accelerated classes will approach exercises in independent thought, but it's really not the focus of primary education. College has traditionally been a place where broader "learning how to learn" and critical, methodical inquiry was taught, but that has become less so because of the focus on preparing for careers, overemphasis on STEM but not the philosophies that created it, and of course the massive financial burden. People complain a lot about useless degrees, but one of the original purposes of a liberal Western education was to provide a lot of context, examine the "shoulders of giants" that current knowledge rests upon, and learn about all of the big questions that have already been asked instead of re-asking them and inventing the same new fads and tragedies each generation. Basically, we emphasize the "what" and "how" and neglect the "why". The "why" is dangerous to existing power structures. So, even college educated people often neglect to ask "why" at their own assumptions (after all, they went to college and know better!), or they're too busy drowning in debt to care . Public education has been largely based on an industrial model, like a factory. An assembly line stamping correct facts and behavior into minds. It's become dysfunctional even in doing that due to a number of factors.
- Bernard, if the right people don't have power do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. Politicians, counsellors, ordinary voters.
- But aren't they supposed to, in a democracy?
- This is a British democracy!
- What do you mean?
- British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the Opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities ... both of them.
The problem is the all prevalent Western Media Mindset - as the Russian media describe it.
Since Kosovo and onward many lies have been told. Dare to say so and you are deemed Communist. The Overton window is set by the BBC in the UK, this being the acceptable spectrum of thought, from left to right.
Because of the deep lies about how these wars start there is belief instead of knowledge. So it is a church with some different doctrines but no questioning of the creation myths.
Lies have to be disseminated, truths can be arrived at by studying facts. We normally have gatekeeper radicals to keep the pretence up, for decades it was Tony Benn. Only Tony Benn dared to question Trident, today we have the likes of whatshisname Brand gatekeeping the acceptable radical thinking.
If you were someone others respected and you told them you were ditching the job because you wanted to go into politics then people would think you had gone mad.
The odd thing is that there is no escaping it. People are deeply conditioned in the UK. Luckily there is Brexit to shake things up a bit.
Maybe we can escape our shackles of history then and engage with the world as grown ups to be treated as we wish to be treated.
I don't know why you think that, the leader of the opposition is against renewing Trident and that is widely reported in the media, at the BBC and elsewhere.
The author discredits himself by referring to Daniel Hannan as an "ignorant gobshite" on Marx or anything else; Hannan speaks French and Spanish fluently as well as English, which, I suspect, is two languages more than the author does. Hannan studied History at...wait for it...Oxford University. So that 'ignorant' line alone made it difficult for me to take this blogger quite seriously (though I upvoted this story as I have no doubt the overall trajectory of Britain's intellectual decline is accurate as otherwise described, all things considered).
Hannan might not be ignorant but he is definitely a gobshite. Everything I have heard him say comes through the lens of his dislike of the EU, there is little room for fact or even nuance.
Dislike of the EU != "gobshite." Hell, if that were true then half the world might be classified by you as gobshite! Perhaps you'd be better off demonstrating what you find so objectionable about Hannan's view of the EU and which "facts" he's mistaken about (given that he speaks three of its languages fluently) instead of engaging in ad hominems.
There's been a recent influx of this sort of discussion in Britain. Most of it seems to be, at the core, the elites' (and those who would like to style themselves as elites) attempts to justify their disillusionment with democracy, which the referendum result caused. It's amazing how quickly people turn on the idea of giving the everyman a say in government, when it gives them the result they don't like. The referendum was a rare example in Britain of where the result wasn't able to be hand-waved away, like is typical with FPTP elections. The result was so significant because it saw the majority of the public reject all the major parties' platforms on the issue, and --I think-- undermined the pretenses of a lot of those in power, who like to frame themselves as being "of the people". Hence the disillusion.
A lot of the discussion reminds me of the arguments put forward by the hereditary peers in the late 90s, before most of them were chucked out of the House of Lords: that their experiences and positions in society made them uniquely able to make important decisions about the country. It's all rather ironic.
I think in addition there's a more visceral reason as well. It's the first time in a long time that a decision taken by the populace will adversely affect the "elite" directly. People who have done very well out of EU integration will suddenly find themselves actually having to figure out what to do without it.
Most of them are wealthy and will be able to adapt, but for the first time in a long time they haven't been insulated from the consequences of public opinion.
Indeed, but the Tory victory at the 2015 election was a surprise to everyone. Tory High Command likely thought another coalition with the Liberal Democrats would have allowed them to scribble out that line of their election manifesto with a coalition agreement.
One hypothesis (similar to Curtis above) was that there were two energised generations, post WW2 and 1960s, who believed that public debate and ideas could change things, and a variety of new-ish institutions and technologies (BBC, TV) could enable that change. They were partially successful, but the energy and enthusiasm dissipated over time.
Another argument is that Britain is reasonably anti the public intellectual (e.g. unlike the French but much better than the US), apart from during certain times of fairly major change (Royal Society/Glorious Revolution; Scottish Enlightenment; post WW2 settlement etc.) and we are going back to our dormant state.
A third may be that the nature of 'public' has changed, and the debate is going on, but not in media forms which stifle and trivialise it (Less optimistic here, the Greens tried hard to change public debate, some say Momentum, certainly we are quite good at up-market PR, brand design and marketing, all of which suck the energy/deflect from certain debates)
In my experience, in private the quality of debate isn't too bad, though a touch cynical
There was "public" debate/discussion before. And then there was the conversation at the tavern, which was a different (and less intellectual) thing. What's changed is the internet, which kind of combined those worlds.
Someone would make a speech or state a position. It would get reported on, in a newspaper article. Many people would have comments, but the newspaper would only print one or two replies (the very best ones) for the world to see. The rest of the discussion would happen in the tavern, where only a few people would hear any individual comment. Such comments would be clearly distinct from the replies printed in the newspaper.
But now the reporting is online, with a comments section, which doesn't filter the replies. The equivalent of the tavern (all the taverns put together) is now right alongside the original article.
And I think that this may have changed the level of the reporting to some degree, too. They're moving toward the level of the comments - not all the way, but in that direction.
This effect is easily confirmed by comparing a periodical from today with back issues written 50 years ago. By contrast, today's fare has been simplified for both style and substance, presuming the reader has no foreknowledge of science, and more markedly, zero facility in math.
This is no more apparent than in "Scientific American". The writing in the issues from the 1980's back through the century before was intended for professionals -- the engineer, scientist, or serious amateur. By contrast, the literacy of today's SciAm has declined to the level of a middle school. And substance suffers comparably; regular contributors of fare that required nontrivial thought like Martin Gardner and Doug Hofstadter are long gone.
But SciAm isn't an isolated case. Even today's more literate magazines like Harpers and The New Yorker seem to have difficulty writing for a thoughtful audience, all too often preferring to provoke the reader not with provocative ideas or fresh perspectives, but by eliciting anger with the injection of irrelevant references to base politics.
But is the readership smaller today than it was 50 years ago?
I'm totally fine if SciAm writes for a broader audience because it has grown from a niche publication for academics to something that most American's have at least heard of.
But if the reading level has declined AND the readership has declined, that might indicate a problem.
I still hold out hope that this is a result of knowledge fragmentation more than anything. The computer scientist of 50 years ago, may have been better inform broadly on all the sciences, but maybe gave up that breadth of knowledge to read focused journals on quantum computing, and other topics the computer scientist of 50 years ago would have trouble understanding.
Would knowledge fragmentation explain why general interest pubs (like SciAm) would have less appeal today, leading to their being "dumbed down"?
Conversely, if as I think you suggest, there had been a rise in the number of literate thoughtful in-depth pubs focused on narrow specialization, then I'd accept that today's minds are equally active as yesteryear's but have just turned their attention inward. But I see nothing like that. Even semi-technical pubs like those in the computing space have degenerated into product and project promos (as MIT Tech Review has done).
Where are today's equivalents to Creative Computing or Dr Dobbs or WiReD circa 1998 or InfoWorld circa 1985? The closest I've seen might be the Maker/Arduino/Pi pubs, but their agenda isn't insight, it's small specific ideas of projects (like Popular Mechanics often was in the 60's). All deeper fare on science faded out about 20 years ago. I side with the OP's interpretation; their absence is striking and suggests something big has changed.
Doesn't such a "shallowing" (a la Nicholas Carr) and narrowing of interests imply we've all become less generally curious? Aren't these signs that we're less inclined to explore novel possible worlds, or we're satisfied to do so in less depth, than a generation (or two) ago?
Online forums are no substitute for serious recreational inquiry, even the (very) few that are as constructively and generally clued-in as HNN.
96 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadAnd I suspect it's not even really an aversion to big ideas, I think it's an aversion to depth. People love big ideas, look at Malcolm Gladwell and similar authors, they have plenty of big ideas but there's a bit of a pop-shallowness to them. Unfortunately the depth is what's needed and I'm not sure a culture which focuses on individual preferences will ever give it to the public at large.
Here is a link to a short doc that aligns with this article: https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-tv-journal...
That said, I certainly noticed an uptick in post-grad popularity in my cohort of friends (including me!) around 2010, but for us anyway this seemed driven by a tough post-recession job market and a desire to have more directly marketable skills, which a Software Masters provided in relatively short order. I was fortunate enough to study in Scotland where an undergraduate degree is still paid for by the State and Masters are relatively affordable - this is increasingly not the case in the rest of the UK, especially England, so if anything it's likely only going to get less common than it is now.
Incidentally, if you really think that Britain's burgeoning peasant underclass is the fault of self-impregnating single mothers you've been mislead; I suggest you change newspapers.
Having most of your kids being born to a society's most impoverished and least-educated members is not a recipe for long-term success. Saying this isn't blaming the poor, it's pointing out that there's something seriously wrong with the society, and it's not going to lead to the society improving in the long-term, but probably rather the opposite.
Since Britain is mostly without war, famine or disease, we need education to do the heavy lifting to control the population. In areas, social and economic circles where education is low, the population tends to go up.
A big part of why couples stay together are the pressures that keep them together - economic, social, societal, legal. Right now is just a really shitty time for married couples in Western countries - it is increasingly anti-social, anti-religious, much more individualistic, ultra mobile, but high on public services. Parental laws heavily favor mothers over fathers. So, combine situations where populations tend to go up with a legal / social environment where staying together is completely unnecessary for leading a meaningful life and we have a large amount of single mothers.
We can blame the single mothers, or we can assume that, given a set of opportunities and constraints, people generally behave in a predictable fashion. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Thank goodness. I think we could all do with more intelligence and less 'intellectual' snobbery.
Equally, whilst Thatcher and Attlee disagreed about almost everything they had at least one thing in common – a loathing of referenda.
There's been a lot of faux intellectualism and requoting of Poppler et al since the last referendum. Seems a very thinly veiled article to me.
The irony of that typo is hopefully not lost on you.
Britain might have declined slightly, but Marx's home country, Germany, has comparatively fallen from the top of the world, intellectually. It's still a heavy hitter, but if you compare it to pre-WW1/pre-WW2 Germany, it's just a ghost.
Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_von_Liebig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Rontgen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Geiger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Born
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_List
etc, ad infinitum.
Also, I forgot to include philosophers... a very scary concept, considering the caliber of German philosophers (Kant, Nietzsche, etc.).
Germany not only destroyed its Jewish population willingly, therefore losing some of Germany's best minds but also destroyed its own research facilities, economy and even a good chunk of its native German scientists by shipping them off to war or having them bombed back at home.
Folly of the greatest magnitude, any way you look at it.
Kick out a few key faculty members and the rest of the good ones will follow, Jew or not, because they are good and have the choice to leave. You don't need all your faculty to be Jewish in order to lose all your good ones by kicking out a single Jewish faculty member.
If you lose 4/16 of your academics but all 4 of those were the Giants, then you haven't decimated your department, but you have lost what made it good in the first place.
Even before the war reached the borders, German mathematics was decimated. Sometimes by numbers, but always by the numbers that mattered. Because anyone good knew someone effected, and everyone good had the option to leave.
About a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!"
Not sure that fully explains it, but its a sad and tragic loss nevertheless.
I don't particularly agree on the article's premise, but I don't think bringing Germany in the picture helps the debate.
It's rare that a whole thesis can be undermined by the author in less than a full sentence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Norman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Gardiner
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
I think a form of education is one of the primary purposes and responsibilities of a country's national TV. Managing a broadcaster so that it gives the public what it wants, rather than what's better for them, is akin to giving kids fries and coke all day, because that's what they want.
However, I will concede that many people would consume a healthier diet of entertainment of it were available. But suggesting that people need to have broadcasters or governments to be parents of an ignorant citizenry smacks of the same though patterns condemned in the book 1984.
It’s very demonstrable though - it’s why practically every country has an equivalent to US Social Security - and why most democracies are Representative instead of Direct.
Your argument would have more strength if the BBC or national arts funds operated in a vacuum - but they exist in competition with other private, profit-driven organisations. I feel it’s important that the public get exposure to programming that commercial sponsors (and thus network-execs/channel directors) wouldn’t touch. And it’s also essential for unbiased (or as close to unbiased as we can get) broadcast journalism.
(I accept that when a “Premium”-service customer base is large enough, e.g. HBO-sized, the need for state funding is minimised - I think HBO in particular is in a good place to launch a US-based, commercial-free broadcast news service - but smaller countries and markets would definitely need to employ some form of state funding to ensure editorial independence and an informed populace - which can only be good for democracy)
If that has changed, it might lead to the BBC having to face competition now, when it didn't in the past. That might have an effect on the content, which might be (at least part of) what the article is observing...
You also seem to be unaware of the U.S.’s role in genocide within its own borders and its role in genocide within other borders. We should keep in mind that it used to be the case that only white, land owning males could vote. That slavery existed for a long time in the U.S. and then we had Jim Crow.
The American Republic will last as long as there is balance in the system and only if those we elect are not knaves and fools. Populism based on fear or hatred is a dangerous thing in any system and can bring instability. The U.S. is not immune to forces that can destroy the essence of the country.
Contrast bookshops vs libraries. We expect the state to provide libraries, not bookshops. Not because we think bookshops are bad, but because we believe libraries should exist despite not being commercially viable.
The state broadcaster (in our case, the BBC) should be providing the library, not the bookshop. Not because "we know what's good for them", but because there's hundreds of commercial channels to "give them what they want".
Exactly how many historical examples of that form of government are there? 1? 2? 0? If you're talking about Nazi Germany, I don't remember the Nazis being "highly educated", and in fact, they were known to throw the intellectuals in the gas chambers. Over in China, Mao was some kind of farmer, and not at all an intellectual. The Soviets were all about the "proletariat" (the workers), not the intellectuals. I seriously can't think of any real-world historical examples of a government of "highly educated technocratic leaders". Such people usually tend to shy away from government. The closest I can think of is probably modern-day China, and they haven't committed any actual genocide that I know of (maybe some oppression of certain groups, but that's not genocide, and almost every government is guilty of this to some extent).
Every article on neurology, every new app hacking that legacy eletric-jellyfish proofs it.
The dignity and rights we got, are not because we are some sort of superior beeings, but because we all together decided to turn the eyes away from the mess and give even the most primal beeing, sitting in a cardbord box near the train station, rights and respect, disregarding of birth, status, accomplishment and intellect.
The debate is not about wether we the people need behavioural checks and balances, the questions is how to prevent those enforcing and enacting them from doing that with similar runaway retardations. I have no answer to that.
So, for a free, subsidized public channel, it makes a lot of sense to offer something different from the commercial crap.
I learned a lot watching public funded science divulgation material.
The public are grown adults who are perfectly capable of deciding what we want for ourselves, thank you very much.
I doubt there is a single person that really benevolently accepts what each and every person does/says/thinks. Except maybe my late grandmother, who probably never raged about anyone in her entire life.
Grown adults consistently reveal preferences that are different from their stated preferences.
In other words, people may lose what they really want by voting against it with their eyeballs and pocket books. Even when they woukd vote for it in an explicit ballot.
"I would prefer to eat healthy, but ice cream is just so much better tasting than broccoli."
One check on this is a regulator who imposes the choices for you based on your stated preferences, which is a check that grown adults often choose to add to their lives. Dieticians and personal trainers are popular for a reason.
It's not reasonable to try to setup other people's lives so that they achieve the things you want.
Our office has someone in charge of food. That person used to pay attention to what people would/would not eat and then purchase accordingly. LOTS of pizza/brownies, not a lot of salads. We (unanimously!) asked that person to just ignore our gluttonous choices and gather explicit preferences. We now eat more healthily. Of course, our preferences did not change -- we'd all totally opt for the pizza and brownie over the salad. But the choice is easier to make on a ballot than when both options are in front of you and you're salivating... needless to say, the person who just does what we explicitly ask them to isn't manipulating us into eating more healthy food.
Similarly, pure ratings-driven programming in an ad-driven business model almost necessarily means setting up others' lives (building viewing habits) to achieve what you want (selling ads)!
So, de-emphasizing ratings is NOT equivalent to manipulation! And emphasizing ratings can sometimes be in service to a manipulation!
Try as we might to find a good crowbar to pry democracy off of our representative governments, we can't forget that the "will of the people," however misguided it might be, is the only thing that reliably includes not ruining them as a priority!
What about a Tragedy of the Commons scenario?
Tinpot dictators ravage their land in pursuit of resources to sell to richer nations all the time. The elites aren't going to be more principled than the proles - if you're nasty and educated that just makes you better at being nasty.
Democracy simply replaces "smart people" with "a majority of voters," which is almost always a minority of the population. So instead of the ruling elites determining what's best for everyone, now you have a larger group of people -- still a minority -- determining what's good for themselves and foisting it upon everyone else.
I don't follow. Forcing things on a set of people who wanted something else is exactly how it works, and will still work that way with 100% participation in the vote. When two wolves vote to eat the lamb for dinner, the lamb having voted not to be dinner doesn't make it any less forced on the lamb.
(The above assumes that there are only those two options, of course. Are there any other options?)
>Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course.
Being smart is necessary, but not sufficient. A sense of duty is also needed.
And we don't have any angels to do the job. All we have are human beings. They are sometimes selfish, and sometimes foolish. Sometimes they find it easy to take "what's good for me" and think it's "what's good for everybody" - even if they have the best of intentions. And sometimes they don't have the best of intentions, but use "good for everybody" as a smokescreen for their own selfish desires.
Canada is currently going through this on the topic of immigration - we are starting to experience significant issues with housing costs and economic inequality (both are directly affected my immigration to a degree), but many people considering any opinion not consistent with the status quo to be literally racist. And unsurprisingly, you rarely can find one that will defend their beliefs, at best you will just get general dishonesty and never ending changing of the subject.
I think this new culture is going to have some very serious negative long term effects.
EDIT: Out of curiosity, which part are people disagreeing with here? That political views are more polarized? The inflationary housing prices claim? Inflationary housing prices not being reflected at all in CPI? Whether immigration has an effect at all on wages or real estate prices? That the word racist is commonly used to quash dissent (heck, even our mayor is on record doing it)? That people won't defend these racist charges? That any of this has changed? That these changes, assuming it is true, will have an effect?
I wonder if this isn't just downvote-to-disagree by people who won't "defend their beliefs". (And thereby proving mistermann's point - ironic, that.)
As for whether it might start a flame war....well, that is my ongoing concern, that free speech, or more specifically certain opinions are no longer tolerated, or even more specifically, you can say something (unacceptable) once, but if someone disagrees with you, any reply is considered "argumentative" or "not appropriate behavior".
Perhaps I'm completely wrong on some of my beliefs. Personally, I enthusiastically encourage people to disagree with me or challenge my ideas, it wasn't so long ago that this was considered admirable for a variety of very good reasons. When people start believing their ideas are beyond challenge, to me that seems like the sort of thing that's dangerous.
I think your general point is correct though. We should be careful who we let set our curriculums and try to ride a reasonable line between ideology and hard data.
- Bernard, if the right people don't have power do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. Politicians, counsellors, ordinary voters.
- But aren't they supposed to, in a democracy?
- This is a British democracy!
- What do you mean?
- British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the Opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities ... both of them.
-- Yes, Prime Minister (S02E05)
Since Kosovo and onward many lies have been told. Dare to say so and you are deemed Communist. The Overton window is set by the BBC in the UK, this being the acceptable spectrum of thought, from left to right.
Because of the deep lies about how these wars start there is belief instead of knowledge. So it is a church with some different doctrines but no questioning of the creation myths.
Lies have to be disseminated, truths can be arrived at by studying facts. We normally have gatekeeper radicals to keep the pretence up, for decades it was Tony Benn. Only Tony Benn dared to question Trident, today we have the likes of whatshisname Brand gatekeeping the acceptable radical thinking.
If you were someone others respected and you told them you were ditching the job because you wanted to go into politics then people would think you had gone mad.
The odd thing is that there is no escaping it. People are deeply conditioned in the UK. Luckily there is Brexit to shake things up a bit.
Maybe we can escape our shackles of history then and engage with the world as grown ups to be treated as we wish to be treated.
I never said that it does.
As someone from east Europe, I find this pretty funny.
>Today, his most high-profile critics are ignorant gobshites.
You must read 10k pages of related work, before you can criticize someone like Hitler or Nazism....
Trust me it causes brain damage :-)
A lot of the discussion reminds me of the arguments put forward by the hereditary peers in the late 90s, before most of them were chucked out of the House of Lords: that their experiences and positions in society made them uniquely able to make important decisions about the country. It's all rather ironic.
Most of them are wealthy and will be able to adapt, but for the first time in a long time they haven't been insulated from the consequences of public opinion.
This seems true in parts, a friend became intrigued by the quality of debate for Britain's membership of the EEC in 1975 vs. Brexit. Two examples for 1975 are ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2jUYryRYII and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zBFh6bpcMo) and these certainly seem of higher quality.
One hypothesis (similar to Curtis above) was that there were two energised generations, post WW2 and 1960s, who believed that public debate and ideas could change things, and a variety of new-ish institutions and technologies (BBC, TV) could enable that change. They were partially successful, but the energy and enthusiasm dissipated over time.
Another argument is that Britain is reasonably anti the public intellectual (e.g. unlike the French but much better than the US), apart from during certain times of fairly major change (Royal Society/Glorious Revolution; Scottish Enlightenment; post WW2 settlement etc.) and we are going back to our dormant state.
A third may be that the nature of 'public' has changed, and the debate is going on, but not in media forms which stifle and trivialise it (Less optimistic here, the Greens tried hard to change public debate, some say Momentum, certainly we are quite good at up-market PR, brand design and marketing, all of which suck the energy/deflect from certain debates)
In my experience, in private the quality of debate isn't too bad, though a touch cynical
There was "public" debate/discussion before. And then there was the conversation at the tavern, which was a different (and less intellectual) thing. What's changed is the internet, which kind of combined those worlds.
Someone would make a speech or state a position. It would get reported on, in a newspaper article. Many people would have comments, but the newspaper would only print one or two replies (the very best ones) for the world to see. The rest of the discussion would happen in the tavern, where only a few people would hear any individual comment. Such comments would be clearly distinct from the replies printed in the newspaper.
But now the reporting is online, with a comments section, which doesn't filter the replies. The equivalent of the tavern (all the taverns put together) is now right alongside the original article.
And I think that this may have changed the level of the reporting to some degree, too. They're moving toward the level of the comments - not all the way, but in that direction.
This is no more apparent than in "Scientific American". The writing in the issues from the 1980's back through the century before was intended for professionals -- the engineer, scientist, or serious amateur. By contrast, the literacy of today's SciAm has declined to the level of a middle school. And substance suffers comparably; regular contributors of fare that required nontrivial thought like Martin Gardner and Doug Hofstadter are long gone.
But SciAm isn't an isolated case. Even today's more literate magazines like Harpers and The New Yorker seem to have difficulty writing for a thoughtful audience, all too often preferring to provoke the reader not with provocative ideas or fresh perspectives, but by eliciting anger with the injection of irrelevant references to base politics.
This problem is hardly unique to Britain.
I'm totally fine if SciAm writes for a broader audience because it has grown from a niche publication for academics to something that most American's have at least heard of.
But if the reading level has declined AND the readership has declined, that might indicate a problem.
I still hold out hope that this is a result of knowledge fragmentation more than anything. The computer scientist of 50 years ago, may have been better inform broadly on all the sciences, but maybe gave up that breadth of knowledge to read focused journals on quantum computing, and other topics the computer scientist of 50 years ago would have trouble understanding.
Conversely, if as I think you suggest, there had been a rise in the number of literate thoughtful in-depth pubs focused on narrow specialization, then I'd accept that today's minds are equally active as yesteryear's but have just turned their attention inward. But I see nothing like that. Even semi-technical pubs like those in the computing space have degenerated into product and project promos (as MIT Tech Review has done).
Where are today's equivalents to Creative Computing or Dr Dobbs or WiReD circa 1998 or InfoWorld circa 1985? The closest I've seen might be the Maker/Arduino/Pi pubs, but their agenda isn't insight, it's small specific ideas of projects (like Popular Mechanics often was in the 60's). All deeper fare on science faded out about 20 years ago. I side with the OP's interpretation; their absence is striking and suggests something big has changed.
Doesn't such a "shallowing" (a la Nicholas Carr) and narrowing of interests imply we've all become less generally curious? Aren't these signs that we're less inclined to explore novel possible worlds, or we're satisfied to do so in less depth, than a generation (or two) ago?
Online forums are no substitute for serious recreational inquiry, even the (very) few that are as constructively and generally clued-in as HNN.