He missed IYI. 16 years of school makes you good at one thing, test taking. America recognizes more than other cultures the high probability of bs vendors among this test taking class.
> Maybe it’s time to take a cue from our proudly pro-intelligence and pro-education cultural cousins across the Atlantic.
Nope. I can live with the downsides of anti-intellectualism in trade for escaping the cult of "genius". People who claim to know better than the rest of us are dangerous.
I wish this attitude was applied equally to people in private industry like Elon Musk instead of only slamming government employees like the original article (and most similar articles).
> Despite the rise of Silicon Valley and its technoelites, the Revenge of the Nerds in the South Bay has managed to line stock portfolios without moving the needle on America’s cultural values. Jocks still rule high schools that spend millions on new football stadiums while starving the arts.
Elon Musk isn't considered a national hero or someone to look up to (in most parts of the US - not talking about cali).
You should visit South Korea (or Japan), where people running big business are considered leaders by everyone in the country. Not just SV people who browse HN.
I'm not from the US, but I'm pretty sure that the average person in most states has never heard of either of the people you mentioned.
I have visited both and really enjoyed the trips, thanks for the recommendation!
A movie titled 'Steve Jobs' featured half a dozen Hollywood stars and was nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress at the Oscars - and that's not even the one that Ashton Kutcher starred in. I work in a children's book store and there is a 'Who is Steve Jobs?' book sitting next to 'Who is Barack Obama?'. I think you're wrong.
I will always be for more iconoclasm and skepticism rather than less, so naturally I'm not happy with idolization of entrepreneurs, either. Or religious leaders. Or artists. Basically, anyone who is revered for their understanding of matters which cannot be explained to the rest of us.
I'm still glad that the U.S. has a healthy distrust of intellectuals and academics.
I appreciate the work of all of such people, but I reject setting them off from the rest of humanity. We are all frail, fallible humans.
in America you have the reverse: anti-"intellectual" genius cults. Eg: Gates and Zuckerberg. I've seen many people, even in CS, justify leaving college because those folks did.
I think that both things can be true. The problem is most people conflate all of the "establishment" into one. For example, one could rightly point out how terrible economists who hailed free trade as being a good thing ended up robbing many people of their lifelihood but in the same breath claim those same experts say climate change is real, whilst not knowing that these experts are separate groups of people.
I am not sure how much of this is true. In India for example - people do get called "Kitabi Kida"(bookworm) and I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine. I don't need my doctor to relate to my economic difficulties to treat my illness but this may be a desirable trait in a politician.
The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The author may have a point about schools spending lot of money on stadiums and sports and ignoring investment in science and technology but there may be other reasons for that - other than unbridled hate for smart people.
> India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister.
Yet he promotes technology (Startup India, Paperless/Digital Locker, Digital ID, Live tracking of projects online, EVMs, Soil testing labs, Solar) much more than one of the IIT educated Chief Minister. The point is that a good leader does not need fancy degrees from fancy colleges.
The IIT guy is only saying if you don't fix education and healthcare, you won't have people who can do basic knowledge work, let alone write operating systems and do other big research work.
That was the whole idea behind Nehruvian socialism. The problem in essence is in a country with poverty levels comparable to Africa, absent education systems, near zero literacy levels. How do you run a capitalist economy? The best you can manage with that kind of human resources is give them dumbest possible manufacturing jobs, by letting foreign investors control what is a newly independent country. Hence around 1947, the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, came up education institutions the likes of IITs, IIScs and other regional colleges. Once you have these people first rung of talented human resources ready, you can now use them to build your private industries. But you can't wait till then, so you still have to build your bureaucracy with pretty darn high civil services exam standards. This is important because while you are building your people, you need to build some government owned industries. This will eventually feed momentum to later to come private industries.
The net result is you get public sector industries, you get ISRO, you get DRDO, you get a stable bureaucracy. All of this will essentially run your country.
The next set of work to do is to fix primary education. So that even the bottom most layers of the society can get a shot at doing good things in life.
You also need healthcare. Because if 20% of your population is limping with polio or can't breath properly because of TB then you can't be a decent economy anyway.
For all that is told about things like Bay Area. The edge California has is not US-101-N or the Caltrain, Its the people.
The IIT guy is the first guy in decades who is taking sense, instead of trying to sell building websites(which any idiot can build) as progress.
I think there is clear distinction between being literate and being smart. Many politicians that you noted or otherwise, have used their smartness and political acumen, to achieve what they wanted. Their smartness mostly reflects in the form of misleading voices, captivating their electorate's emotions. Dishonest, but smart. I think an achievement in STEM is not the only proof of smartness.
As far as Kitabi Kida goes - to my understanding, it is used for those who spent inordinate amount of time with books - not necessarily a insult for being smart. I think there's a subtle distinction here too.
Someone could be obsessed with books to the point where it's harming other aspects of their life. Although I'm sure the insult is often used as genuine anti-intellectualism, I also understand why a society would not be impressed by someone who spends 15 hours a day reading Captain Underpants books.
But these words are targeted at people who are not actually smart, but work hard to cover it up. In the west though, people who are actually smart get the hate. In fact, if you are in the top 0.5% or so, you could consider yourself lucky when you end up JUST ostracized. (Elon Musk famously got bullied so severely he had to get his nose fixed so he could breathe well)
There is this mysterious condition first described by Hans Asperger around the WWII, that the chinese fail to recognize and western scientists gave up understanding, until it was finally reclassified as a form of autism, as by every cognitive test they could think of, the people score normal, or (often highly) above average, yet they completely fail at interacting with other people. That is, until somebody realized they are too smart and nobody wants to interact with them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/
This is a necessary consequence of individualism, as being smart in an individualist culture means you are a dangerous competition to basically everybody else, and everybody will do everything they can to make you fail. So it's pretty much certain that an individualist culture will eventually result in "idiocracy" by breeding itself stupid.
Being well-eduxated doesn't make for a good leader; Rahul Gandhi has a better educational pedigree than Narendra Modi, but in no world is he a better leader.
Not much of it is true. It's a very old derogatory attack, that goes back to the foundations of the US and the earlier colonies. The 'cultured' Western European elites mocked the region back then as uncivilized, filled with barbarians and simpletons, and so on. This was of course a time when people like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Benjamin Franklin were actually arguing and then implementing enlightenment policies in political fact, while nearly all of Europe would proceed to be ruled by despots for another 100-200 years. To say nothing of the flight of people from Europe to American shores over the coming century plus, desperate to escape extreme poverty in Western Europe. And yet the snobbish attacks continued just the same.
Take for example the song, Yankee Doodle, one of the more amusing cases of this in action -
"Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War" ... "The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap."
"It was also popular among the Americans as a song of defiance."
>>In India for example - people do get called "Kitabi Kida"(bookworm)
We also have a saying: पढोगे लिखोगे बनोगे नवाब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे ख़राब
Which literally translates to education makes you a king, and playing makes you spoilt.
The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
>>I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
Mostly in our culture we try to accumulate a lot at little effort, so cheating is a valuable skill.
>>India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
For the most of India's political history leaders were about representing people and segments of society backward compared to already well of folks. So what matters really is what policy outlook you have.
But you still have Jawaharlal Nehru who was the prime minister for 17 years, Manmohan Singh was for 10 years. Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were both well read and groomed individuals. And you could say Indira was a far better Prime minister than we've had since Nehru.
You have like a good 40 years of well read people running the country.
>>I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine.
No, its the same. If a person is a deep bigot, violence monger from within, he choses leaders who are best at that. Its just that intention doesn't show on people's faces. And whatever they may say outside, they vote with their hearts at the voting booth.
>>The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The Doctor analogy describes this better. You chose a good doctor to treat your heart. You don't go to a bad one whole smiles and cracks jokes.
> The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
No, it's a literal translation of "book worm". I've never seen it used for people who just have quirky interests and don't otherwise read or study a lot.
Ahh... that explains the poor quality of the writing in the article.
Ted Rall is perhaps the least interesting, least insightful, and least amusing living political cartoonist. He fills a certain political niche though, which I guess pays the bills.
It is used to describe over achievers in general. From wiki:
> Recent research performed at University of Waikato in New Zealand shows that a culture of tall poppy syndrome may result in a reduction in average performance of up to 20% for an organisation and explains how electronic cyberbullying can be considered a modern extension to the physical assassinations of King Tarquin's day.[17]
It depends on whose side you're on. The term is used a lot in Australia at least by successful or wealthy people who feel that they're disliked or that people are trying to bring them down just because they're successful, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that.
I think in general the average Australian doesn't care too much if others are successful or rich or whatever, but find it extremely distasteful for somebody to act as if business success or having a lot of money makes them more important than others, or more worthy of honour etc. So in my interpretation, snobby people would be much more prone to copping 'tall poppy syndrome' than a rich but humble person.
I assume this is fairly similar in NZ, but perhaps slightly different.
Smart people seem particularly prone to intellectual fads (religions in their own way) and being eager to use coercion to implement their ideas. Maybe it’s good to have a great mass of down-to-earth, practically-minded folks as a counterbalance. Open ridicule of the hoity-toity elite has been quintessentially American for all our history.
What are some examples of whackier social justice stuff?
As far as I know, plastic straw bans are to reduce the amount of unrecoverable plastic waste as well as all the resources that went into producing it. And I wrong? I don’t see how it’s an intellectual fad so much as policy that you personally disagree with. Put another way, are these intellectuals who support plastic straw bans (who??) potentially going to 'wake up' and realize one day that they were incorrect, and that in fact plastic straws are not a source of unrecoverable waste?
I very much disagree. If you look at most politicians in a high enough positions in a lot of European countries, you won't find any movie stars (Reagan, Eastwood, Schwarzenegger) nor reality TV stars like Trump.
The Prime minister of my country would never qualify for the terminator[1].
My country had "party of entertainment stars" take 2nd in parliament elections several years ago. Then long time TV star served as head of parliament. Most recent election was won by literally "farmers party" with quite a few.. interesting personalities. We alone should make up for NL being boring :) And then we got Italy...
The culture of anti-intellectualism is strong in America and children are indoctrinated in it from a very young age. Stupidity is worshiped. What would one expect from a society that loves stupidity so much it encourages violence against people who even appear smart, let alone those that are? Americans love stupidity because the majority are incredibly stupid.
Can you clarify more? My experience as an immigrant to America is that Americans tend to foster a culture of ultra competativeness on everything, including academics.
As an (European) outsider who visited the US a number of times: In academic circles you are right, but college and university are so expensive that your experience only applies to the elite (who are called all the bad words from the article by the majority of the country).
The parent comment is extreme and ends in a baseless insult, so I definitely don't want to defend it wholly, but the gist is true. If you think Americans are competitive about academics, you're probably basing that on a very specific bubble. The "from a young age" mention is especially true; in most American public schools you basically cannot be both cool and get good grades, unless you hide the grades very well and show an appropriate amount of public disrespect for authority.
In my experience, children are bullied simply for getting good grades or looking "nerdy" even if they don't get good grades. Other children are proud that they get bad grades, proud that they are not learning anything, and they are looked up to by a lot of other kids. They dictate a lot of culture in schools. People who go to college or university are often looked down upon in many parts of the country and many people are proud that they did not attend, as if being stupid is something to be proud of. We have climate change deniers, anti vaccine people, and huge percentages of the population believe the earth is around 10k years old or that the world will end in their lifetimes. High school curricula is beyond simple, almost nothing is learned, yet we still have a huge percentage of the population that doesn't even graduate that. The discourse now even on college campuses has turned from education to political correctness. Students are afraid of even being exposed to different ideas, lest they be offended, as if they have a right not to be offended. Speakers and comedians are often cancelled if they are the least bit controversial. People think their beliefs are equal to facts and they should be treated as such. The media certainly subscribes to this in the name of fairness, conflating fact and fiction just like the masses it reports on. This is anti intellectualism through and through from birth to death. I'm not saying we are unique, but it certainly is ubiquitous in our culture here. It's difficult to deal with because often stupidity and cruelty go together and it's hard to discern where one ends and the other begins. I could continue on, but I think this is enough to get the point across.
I think the author entirely misses the primary issue due to linguistic and/or cultural context omissions.
Generally speaking, when someone is called a nerd or (insert uncool descriptive modifier), it's not implied that being smart or studious is something people should be embarrassed of.
Instead, it's implying the lack of some other social skill, trait or normative behavior (i.e., not participating in sports as a child or general difficulty fitting in).
For example, being a genius or reliable hard worker is almost universally admired. Yes, even in the United States. However, if an individual is brilliant yet lacks the social skills to fit in, appears to try too hard relative to the group or makes others feel uncomfortable, their behavior may be seen as idiosyncratic or weird.
Individuals that can display their cognitive abilities while inspiring, impressing or leading others are usually admired.
I turned to Google Translate in search of a French translation for the English word “geek.” There wasn’t one.
Maybe ask a French person then. “Intello” (dismissive diminutive of the word “intellectuel”) is in very common usage amongst school kids, and has been since at least the 60s. “Premier de la classe” (first of the class) is also used very pejoratively by children. Recently though, the French have been very happy to use the word “geek” (albeit pronounced with a French accent) in its original English meaning.
On the other hand, languages like French are extremely rich in insults for stupid people: “bete comme ses pieds,” or “dumb as hell,” literally means “as stupid as his/her feet.”
American English is full of expressions just as colorful than the French in that regard, eg “not the brightest crayon in the box”, “not the sharpest tool in the shed”, “dumber than a bag of hammers”, etc.
This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
> This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
Much like psychologists, linguists suffer a constant barrage of comments and articles by people who think they understand the field but don't. It's quite easy to not know the sheer scope of our ignorance in these fields, unlike STEM where people at least tend to realize they know close to nothing.
Indeed I found the premise about romantic languages quite ridiculous as I could readily think of a few pejoratives in French from the top of my head, and pretty sure I forget or miss some of them, so when TFA reaches to French I was flabbergasted.
"Intello", "être une tête" (can be used both positively and negatively), "grosse tête", "quatre-yeux" (typical image of nerds with thick glasses), "tête d'ampoule" (probably the closest to nerd together with "intello"), "avoir une tête de premier de la classe", "binoclard", "coincé", "pingouin", "rat de bibliothèque", "taupe"...
No, that's only half of it. The other half is to smugly remind us how much smarter Democrats are than Republicans.
Clinton > Trump
Gore > Bush
Stevenson > Eisenhower
Remarkable how, in this writer's mind, an intellectual noted for "promotion of progressive causes in the Democratic Party" is obviously superior to a five-star general who played a very key part in the Allies defeating Hitler in WWII.
And doing it badly -- all the countries he mentions have derogatory terms analogous to nerd, but he couldn't get to them in Google Translate by searching for "geek", so he came to the conclusion that they don't have anti-intellectual words at all.
Nowadays geek and nerd are in every language it seems, and they even become cool (I think so, but I'm too old now to be sure).
But I've been at school in Poland in 1990, before most English influences started, and there were insults for people, not because they are smart, but because they focus too much on good grades. It was cool to be smart, it was uncool to show the effort and to care too much. Basically you didn't wanted to be a kujon (literally - a hammerer = someone who mindlessly hammers in every lesson to memory to get best grades).
We also had bookworm (mól książkowy) and "inteligencik" (mostly political label given by communists and their supporters to intellectual workers who weren't on board with the whole communist thing). Outside of politics it was mildly negative label, and wasn't used too much.
Also, there are a few new ones associated with political issues - "wykształciuchy" and "łże-elity" is a degrading way to call people who graduated some university and think they are better than you but actually know nothing. It's a word borrowed from political marketing of the current government, which includes anti-intellectualism (because most experts disagree with them on 99% of their policies, and their target demographics is less educated compared to other parties).
TL; DR: I don't think anti-intellectualism is inherently American, it's a common theme in populism. American schools are just weird (we haven't had words for bully, cheerleader, jock either).
Sorry, but America is a society that enshrines and holds intelligence so, so high. If you are "smart", you are afforded all sorts of privileges that everyone else misses out on. The intelligent don't need a sob story or a defense in America, they are scoring a close second to those that already have and control the wealth and resources here.
America, and most western countries, hold wealth in high esteem. Intelligent people tend to make more money, so they get in to positions that afford them privilege more easily. But there are plenty of counter-examples to that. Stupid people get to the top through other means and win those privileges, and clever people who choose to work in less well paid jobs aren't given any privilege at all.
Intelligence itself rarely commands much respect at all.
I see an extreme focus on GPA, even employers considering that score during hiring. This is fairly alien to the other Western cultures I've sampled.
Also the latest "taboo" is discrimination on intelligence. You can not help it that you were born below the IQ Bell curve. "You just gotta work harder for it" is like telling an overweight person to "just stop eating so much". Difficulty learning new material puts you at an eternal disadvantage, with no way to catch up to what smart people are learning in their teens and early twenties.
The big five openly discriminate on intelligence. Intelligence and aptitude is also correlated with your upbringing (Did you have smart parents to guide your academic career and interests? Were they rich enough to help put you through a good college?).
For all the renewed interest in identity politics and combating discrimination, intelligence is really the odd one out. High school teachers berate you for something that isn't your fault, it is commonly accepted to call out your low IQ, no matter how much you want to work for a tech company -- even if they favor women, poor people, minorities, war veterans, the disabled -- you are not going to get hired to fill some neurodiversity quota.
The ease with which the left ridicules, stigmatizes, and marginalizes right politicians (Bush & Trump) and those that vote for them is astounding to me. "Those idiot low-educated racists ruined it all! They are not smart enough to vote rationally!". Change "low-intelligence" with any other protected status and such language becomes vile and primitive.
In my personal experience, after you've been out of school for about a year, nobody cares the least bit about GPA or any of that stuff. It's a placeholder differential for someone who doesn't yet have relevant experience.
There's a big difference between someone born with a low-IQ and someone who actively maintains their own ignorance. You can argue whether the left is crossing that line in some places, but some portions of the right actively attack higher education, whether it's "trying to convert our kids to socialists" or "attacking Christian values" -- pursuing an education is positive, full stop, no matter what your IQ is.
Also, "stigmatizes and marginalizes right politicians"? You're arguing politicians on the right are being marginalized? And two examples you're using are the last two GOP POTUSes? That's not marginalization. And of course, notably, for all the "coastal elites" talk -- Trump is pretty much the definition of a coastal elite, a billionaire born into privilege who went to an Ivy league college and has lived in NYC his whole life.
I don't remember where I read it, but there are supposed centers in America for which virtues are held in high esteem. Intelligence was Cambridge, MA, wealth was Manhattan, NYC, power was Washington D.C., and health was Berkley, CA.
I think almost every culture has a term for people who are on the asperger spectrum and have high IQ but low EQ. In Chinese, "理工男" translates to roughly "Science Guy" and refers to people who are like Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory. "书呆子" means bookworm and refers to people with a lot of book smarts but not much street smarts.
Anti-intellectualism is pretty strong in the UK too. For example in one of the defining moments of the Brexit campaign, Michael Gove was confronted by an open letter from a large number of leading economists saying how damaging Brexit would be to the economy and said “people in this country have had enough of experts”.
While I have no love of Gove, this is a very unfair and context-free quote. The full quote is as follows:
> I think that the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying - from organisations with acronyms - saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people - these people - are the same ones who got consistently wrong.
Wow. I've seen the quote often, but never with that surrounding context. Completely makes you understand why politicians would be unwilling to talk with the press.
Do you think that there's a substantial difference between "the public is tired of experts" and "the public is tired of experts from fancy organisations getting things wrong"? Sincerely asking - I think the context helps, but the short version doesn't seem like a misrepresentation of the main idea.
One is made to look like you don't want "experts" in general, e.g. because you're anti-science or whatever. You might not even want an expert doctor, but instead e.g. pray.
The second is about not wanting BS experts (analysts, media pundits, economists) on the payroll of some "fancy organization", that have a track record of being wrong.
Anti-Intellectualism has become a thing Offlate. Brexit, rise of Trump, Modi etc.
Its the old classic thing of people wanting jobs they can't do, and then diluting the job requirements by downplaying the importance of people required to do the job.
I think it makes a difference, particularly when you look at the recent history of European economists promoting policies which have not only been unable to solve the problems they're facing, but have prolonged them (austerity measures, I'm looking at you).
Yes. One sounds like being anti-people-who-know-it-better, just because they disagree with you, the other is being anti-people-we-usually-listen-to-but-who-don't-actually-know-it-better. The former would be dumb, the second is completely understandable.
Of course, the question is to what extent it is true that experts don't know better, but I'd prefer being wrong due to misinformation than due to sheer dumbness.
Maybe because '72% of economists in a Bloomberg poll immediately after the EU referendum vote predicted that there would be a recession in 2016 or 2017. In a Royal Economic Society survey of economists, 90% said there would be a short-term loss associated with Brexit.'. Similarly top economists predicted a recession in the US after the election. Neither occurred.
Truth be told, the brexit hasn't happened yet, thus the causes of those recessions are not in place.
IIRC even Corbin acknowledges that brexit will have a deep impact on the UK's economy.
I think the connection is stronger than that. The jocks-rule culture of American high school is purloined from elite British schools, which were designed to crank out colonial functionaries with intense in-group loyalties. Alex Renton's book Stiff Upper Lip is good on this.
In fact, while it is perhaps unsurprising that Rall has missed examples in Chinese and Indian languages listed elsewhere here, it's odd that he misses the many examples in British English - swot, spod, boffin ... Several of which originate in 'good' schools.
Fwiw, I had the opposite experience when coming to the us as a high school exchange student from Germany. I did well in school, and got much more derision for this in Germany than in the US. Could possibly have something to do with me being an exotic foreigner though, not sure.
It's also possible that, as a foreigner, you simply were less aware of crappy behavior because the culture was unfamiliar. A lot of the details can get missed or be misunderstood.
(Or, alternately, they failed to grasp how smart you were because you were foreign, so they left it alone. Which might be the same thing you are saying.)
Yeah, as an American, I would be inclined to think the people who would insult you for being intelligent were more distracted by you being a foreigner, and would latch on to that to "insult" first, whereas the people who would appreciate your "exotic foreigner" status probably wouldn't insult your intelligence either.
I really don't think that is unique to the U.S. though.
But there's more to "geek". In circuses and carnivals, a geek would capture chickens, bite their heads off, and eat them. Now you gotta remember that most of the audiences lived on farms, or had family who did, so chasing chickens and cutting their heads off was pretty normal. But still ...
So anyway, "geek" is very different from "bookworm" or "egghead". It's more like unconventional, daring and uninhibited.
As a foreigner learning American English + (pop) culture in the US one of my favorite things is to ask people to tell me the difference between geek and nerd. Originally because I was having a hard time grasping not so much the meaning of the words but the connotations and projected values by those using the words. I still ask that question and find the discrepancies amusing.
But I never heard anything about bitting chicken heads off and all that. Amazing!
> On the other hand, languages like French are extremely rich in insults for stupid people
No you cannot use "on the other hand." Languages like English have at least as many if not more insults for stupid people: dumbass, shit-for-brains, dipshit, blockhead, imbecile, dullard, doofus, slack-jawed yocal, and the famous one from Mark Twain, "an idiot of the 33rd degree."
> After food and wine, the French worship the life of the mind.
And apparently the films of Jerry Lewis[1]. So let's say those end up canceling each other out[2].
> The United States, on the other hand, elected Donald “Celebrity Apprentice” Trump over Hillary “I Have a 12-Point Plan” Clinton.
I certainly cannot defend Trump's ban on Muslim face coverings in public schools[3]. There is no denying that is due to virulent strain of anti-intellectualism that has grown to dangerous-- one might say fascistic-- levels as of late.
In South Africa, the previous President, Jacob Zuma, famously used a label “clever blacks” for well educated black people who he felt didn’t support his populist / traditionalist policies. across cultures in SA, there is a definite “macho” bias and a bias towards “eloquence” (sometimes at the expense of thoughtfulness). I have spent substantial time in Asia and both of these differences are very obviously different. I would say that Europe is somewhere in between.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadBut, it was well parodied in the series 'Chuck' as the 'Nerd Herd'.
Nope. I can live with the downsides of anti-intellectualism in trade for escaping the cult of "genius". People who claim to know better than the rest of us are dangerous.
> Despite the rise of Silicon Valley and its technoelites, the Revenge of the Nerds in the South Bay has managed to line stock portfolios without moving the needle on America’s cultural values. Jocks still rule high schools that spend millions on new football stadiums while starving the arts.
Elon Musk isn't considered a national hero or someone to look up to (in most parts of the US - not talking about cali).
I'm not from the US, but I'm pretty sure that the average person in most states has never heard of either of the people you mentioned.
A movie titled 'Steve Jobs' featured half a dozen Hollywood stars and was nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress at the Oscars - and that's not even the one that Ashton Kutcher starred in. I work in a children's book store and there is a 'Who is Steve Jobs?' book sitting next to 'Who is Barack Obama?'. I think you're wrong.
I'm still glad that the U.S. has a healthy distrust of intellectuals and academics.
I appreciate the work of all of such people, but I reject setting them off from the rest of humanity. We are all frail, fallible humans.
India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine. I don't need my doctor to relate to my economic difficulties to treat my illness but this may be a desirable trait in a politician.
The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The author may have a point about schools spending lot of money on stadiums and sports and ignoring investment in science and technology but there may be other reasons for that - other than unbridled hate for smart people.
Yet he promotes technology (Startup India, Paperless/Digital Locker, Digital ID, Live tracking of projects online, EVMs, Soil testing labs, Solar) much more than one of the IIT educated Chief Minister. The point is that a good leader does not need fancy degrees from fancy colleges.
That was the whole idea behind Nehruvian socialism. The problem in essence is in a country with poverty levels comparable to Africa, absent education systems, near zero literacy levels. How do you run a capitalist economy? The best you can manage with that kind of human resources is give them dumbest possible manufacturing jobs, by letting foreign investors control what is a newly independent country. Hence around 1947, the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, came up education institutions the likes of IITs, IIScs and other regional colleges. Once you have these people first rung of talented human resources ready, you can now use them to build your private industries. But you can't wait till then, so you still have to build your bureaucracy with pretty darn high civil services exam standards. This is important because while you are building your people, you need to build some government owned industries. This will eventually feed momentum to later to come private industries.
The net result is you get public sector industries, you get ISRO, you get DRDO, you get a stable bureaucracy. All of this will essentially run your country.
The next set of work to do is to fix primary education. So that even the bottom most layers of the society can get a shot at doing good things in life.
You also need healthcare. Because if 20% of your population is limping with polio or can't breath properly because of TB then you can't be a decent economy anyway.
For all that is told about things like Bay Area. The edge California has is not US-101-N or the Caltrain, Its the people.
The IIT guy is the first guy in decades who is taking sense, instead of trying to sell building websites(which any idiot can build) as progress.
Fix your people, then your people fix everything.
As far as Kitabi Kida goes - to my understanding, it is used for those who spent inordinate amount of time with books - not necessarily a insult for being smart. I think there's a subtle distinction here too.
That's "insults for hard work" perhaps, but not "insults for smart people".
There is this mysterious condition first described by Hans Asperger around the WWII, that the chinese fail to recognize and western scientists gave up understanding, until it was finally reclassified as a form of autism, as by every cognitive test they could think of, the people score normal, or (often highly) above average, yet they completely fail at interacting with other people. That is, until somebody realized they are too smart and nobody wants to interact with them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/
This is a necessary consequence of individualism, as being smart in an individualist culture means you are a dangerous competition to basically everybody else, and everybody will do everything they can to make you fail. So it's pretty much certain that an individualist culture will eventually result in "idiocracy" by breeding itself stupid.
Not much of it is true. It's a very old derogatory attack, that goes back to the foundations of the US and the earlier colonies. The 'cultured' Western European elites mocked the region back then as uncivilized, filled with barbarians and simpletons, and so on. This was of course a time when people like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Benjamin Franklin were actually arguing and then implementing enlightenment policies in political fact, while nearly all of Europe would proceed to be ruled by despots for another 100-200 years. To say nothing of the flight of people from Europe to American shores over the coming century plus, desperate to escape extreme poverty in Western Europe. And yet the snobbish attacks continued just the same.
Take for example the song, Yankee Doodle, one of the more amusing cases of this in action -
"Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War" ... "The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap."
"It was also popular among the Americans as a song of defiance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle
We also have a saying: पढोगे लिखोगे बनोगे नवाब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे ख़राब
Which literally translates to education makes you a king, and playing makes you spoilt.
The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
>>I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
Mostly in our culture we try to accumulate a lot at little effort, so cheating is a valuable skill.
>>India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
For the most of India's political history leaders were about representing people and segments of society backward compared to already well of folks. So what matters really is what policy outlook you have.
But you still have Jawaharlal Nehru who was the prime minister for 17 years, Manmohan Singh was for 10 years. Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were both well read and groomed individuals. And you could say Indira was a far better Prime minister than we've had since Nehru.
You have like a good 40 years of well read people running the country.
>>I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine.
No, its the same. If a person is a deep bigot, violence monger from within, he choses leaders who are best at that. Its just that intention doesn't show on people's faces. And whatever they may say outside, they vote with their hearts at the voting booth.
>>The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The Doctor analogy describes this better. You chose a good doctor to treat your heart. You don't go to a bad one whole smiles and cracks jokes.
No, it's a literal translation of "book worm". I've never seen it used for people who just have quirky interests and don't otherwise read or study a lot.
Ted Rall, ladies and gentlemen.
Ted Rall is perhaps the least interesting, least insightful, and least amusing living political cartoonist. He fills a certain political niche though, which I guess pays the bills.
All of these words exist and are used in other English speaking countries.
> Recent research performed at University of Waikato in New Zealand shows that a culture of tall poppy syndrome may result in a reduction in average performance of up to 20% for an organisation and explains how electronic cyberbullying can be considered a modern extension to the physical assassinations of King Tarquin's day.[17]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
e.g. if you're gonna do crime, don't be the tall poppy that sticks out in the field of crime. Then apply that concept to more or less everything.
Googling though shows you're right. Interesting.
I think in general the average Australian doesn't care too much if others are successful or rich or whatever, but find it extremely distasteful for somebody to act as if business success or having a lot of money makes them more important than others, or more worthy of honour etc. So in my interpretation, snobby people would be much more prone to copping 'tall poppy syndrome' than a rich but humble person.
I assume this is fairly similar in NZ, but perhaps slightly different.
https://www.seeker.com/anti-vaccination-parents-richer-bette...
https://qz.com/355398/the-average-anti-vaxxer-is-probably-no...
As far as I know, plastic straw bans are to reduce the amount of unrecoverable plastic waste as well as all the resources that went into producing it. And I wrong? I don’t see how it’s an intellectual fad so much as policy that you personally disagree with. Put another way, are these intellectuals who support plastic straw bans (who??) potentially going to 'wake up' and realize one day that they were incorrect, and that in fact plastic straws are not a source of unrecoverable waste?
Plenty of ways to make fun of smart people too.
In fact, US feels much more "cult of genius" than Europe... At least from afar.
You're making the same mistake with that line of thinking that the author did.
The Prime minister of my country would never qualify for the terminator[1].
[1] https://www.government.nl/government/members-of-cabinet/mark...
Seriously, the motivations for anti-intellectualism are generally tied to the degree that intellect is valued.
Generally speaking, when someone is called a nerd or (insert uncool descriptive modifier), it's not implied that being smart or studious is something people should be embarrassed of.
Instead, it's implying the lack of some other social skill, trait or normative behavior (i.e., not participating in sports as a child or general difficulty fitting in).
For example, being a genius or reliable hard worker is almost universally admired. Yes, even in the United States. However, if an individual is brilliant yet lacks the social skills to fit in, appears to try too hard relative to the group or makes others feel uncomfortable, their behavior may be seen as idiosyncratic or weird.
Individuals that can display their cognitive abilities while inspiring, impressing or leading others are usually admired.
Maybe ask a French person then. “Intello” (dismissive diminutive of the word “intellectuel”) is in very common usage amongst school kids, and has been since at least the 60s. “Premier de la classe” (first of the class) is also used very pejoratively by children. Recently though, the French have been very happy to use the word “geek” (albeit pronounced with a French accent) in its original English meaning.
On the other hand, languages like French are extremely rich in insults for stupid people: “bete comme ses pieds,” or “dumb as hell,” literally means “as stupid as his/her feet.”
American English is full of expressions just as colorful than the French in that regard, eg “not the brightest crayon in the box”, “not the sharpest tool in the shed”, “dumber than a bag of hammers”, etc.
This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
Much like psychologists, linguists suffer a constant barrage of comments and articles by people who think they understand the field but don't. It's quite easy to not know the sheer scope of our ignorance in these fields, unlike STEM where people at least tend to realize they know close to nothing.
"Intello", "être une tête" (can be used both positively and negatively), "grosse tête", "quatre-yeux" (typical image of nerds with thick glasses), "tête d'ampoule" (probably the closest to nerd together with "intello"), "avoir une tête de premier de la classe", "binoclard", "coincé", "pingouin", "rat de bibliothèque", "taupe"...
But I've been at school in Poland in 1990, before most English influences started, and there were insults for people, not because they are smart, but because they focus too much on good grades. It was cool to be smart, it was uncool to show the effort and to care too much. Basically you didn't wanted to be a kujon (literally - a hammerer = someone who mindlessly hammers in every lesson to memory to get best grades).
We also had bookworm (mól książkowy) and "inteligencik" (mostly political label given by communists and their supporters to intellectual workers who weren't on board with the whole communist thing). Outside of politics it was mildly negative label, and wasn't used too much.
Also, there are a few new ones associated with political issues - "wykształciuchy" and "łże-elity" is a degrading way to call people who graduated some university and think they are better than you but actually know nothing. It's a word borrowed from political marketing of the current government, which includes anti-intellectualism (because most experts disagree with them on 99% of their policies, and their target demographics is less educated compared to other parties).
TL; DR: I don't think anti-intellectualism is inherently American, it's a common theme in populism. American schools are just weird (we haven't had words for bully, cheerleader, jock either).
Intelligence itself rarely commands much respect at all.
Also the latest "taboo" is discrimination on intelligence. You can not help it that you were born below the IQ Bell curve. "You just gotta work harder for it" is like telling an overweight person to "just stop eating so much". Difficulty learning new material puts you at an eternal disadvantage, with no way to catch up to what smart people are learning in their teens and early twenties.
The big five openly discriminate on intelligence. Intelligence and aptitude is also correlated with your upbringing (Did you have smart parents to guide your academic career and interests? Were they rich enough to help put you through a good college?).
For all the renewed interest in identity politics and combating discrimination, intelligence is really the odd one out. High school teachers berate you for something that isn't your fault, it is commonly accepted to call out your low IQ, no matter how much you want to work for a tech company -- even if they favor women, poor people, minorities, war veterans, the disabled -- you are not going to get hired to fill some neurodiversity quota.
The ease with which the left ridicules, stigmatizes, and marginalizes right politicians (Bush & Trump) and those that vote for them is astounding to me. "Those idiot low-educated racists ruined it all! They are not smart enough to vote rationally!". Change "low-intelligence" with any other protected status and such language becomes vile and primitive.
There's a big difference between someone born with a low-IQ and someone who actively maintains their own ignorance. You can argue whether the left is crossing that line in some places, but some portions of the right actively attack higher education, whether it's "trying to convert our kids to socialists" or "attacking Christian values" -- pursuing an education is positive, full stop, no matter what your IQ is.
Also, "stigmatizes and marginalizes right politicians"? You're arguing politicians on the right are being marginalized? And two examples you're using are the last two GOP POTUSes? That's not marginalization. And of course, notably, for all the "coastal elites" talk -- Trump is pretty much the definition of a coastal elite, a billionaire born into privilege who went to an Ivy league college and has lived in NYC his whole life.
> I think that the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying - from organisations with acronyms - saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people - these people - are the same ones who got consistently wrong.
One is made to look like you don't want "experts" in general, e.g. because you're anti-science or whatever. You might not even want an expert doctor, but instead e.g. pray.
The second is about not wanting BS experts (analysts, media pundits, economists) on the payroll of some "fancy organization", that have a track record of being wrong.
Its the old classic thing of people wanting jobs they can't do, and then diluting the job requirements by downplaying the importance of people required to do the job.
Of course, the question is to what extent it is true that experts don't know better, but I'd prefer being wrong due to misinformation than due to sheer dumbness.
In fact, while it is perhaps unsurprising that Rall has missed examples in Chinese and Indian languages listed elsewhere here, it's odd that he misses the many examples in British English - swot, spod, boffin ... Several of which originate in 'good' schools.
Well, in an era when experts give their "expert" opinion based on who pays their bills, that's true for most of the world...
(Or, alternately, they failed to grasp how smart you were because you were foreign, so they left it alone. Which might be the same thing you are saying.)
I really don't think that is unique to the U.S. though.
But there's more to "geek". In circuses and carnivals, a geek would capture chickens, bite their heads off, and eat them. Now you gotta remember that most of the audiences lived on farms, or had family who did, so chasing chickens and cutting their heads off was pretty normal. But still ...
So anyway, "geek" is very different from "bookworm" or "egghead". It's more like unconventional, daring and uninhibited.
No you cannot use "on the other hand." Languages like English have at least as many if not more insults for stupid people: dumbass, shit-for-brains, dipshit, blockhead, imbecile, dullard, doofus, slack-jawed yocal, and the famous one from Mark Twain, "an idiot of the 33rd degree."
> After food and wine, the French worship the life of the mind.
And apparently the films of Jerry Lewis[1]. So let's say those end up canceling each other out[2].
> The United States, on the other hand, elected Donald “Celebrity Apprentice” Trump over Hillary “I Have a 12-Point Plan” Clinton.
I certainly cannot defend Trump's ban on Muslim face coverings in public schools[3]. There is no denying that is due to virulent strain of anti-intellectualism that has grown to dangerous-- one might say fascistic-- levels as of late.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lewis#French_critical_ac...
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082501/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_20
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTSCRoYyM-Y