Public Intellectuals, Richard Posner

I was unable to find a decent review of this work, so I'll substitute the intro from the Harvard University Press: 

In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey.

With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademic whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse.

Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today.

Posner identifies intellectuals as "those who opine to an educated public on questions of or inflected by a political or ideological concern."

My definition of an intellectual is a person whose "product" is ideas. An often-repeated quote allegedly from Aesop is applicable to public intellectuals - 

"After all is said and done, more is said than done." 

Posner spends a lot of time defining who is and is not a "Public Intellectual". I'd be happy with "I know one when I see one", but for those who would like a bit more definition: 

The public intellectual has been with us for a very long time, even if we ignore the ancient world. His exemplars include Machiavelli, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and his ideologist is Kant, who linked philosophy to politics through the argument that the only morally defensible politics is one based on reason.

I found this quote to be worth some thought: 

One of the chief sources of cultural pessimism is the tendency to compare the best of the past with the average of the present, because the passage of time operates to filter out the worst of the past.

This certainly the case with personal nostalgia as we age. We much prefer to remember the good fondly and forget as much of the bad as we are able. Culturally however, I'd argue that like all human thought, our analysis is heavily tainted by our biases ... chief among them, progressivism vs conservatism.  For a progressive the past is inherently bad while the future would be bright if the nasty conservatives would just be finally defeated. That may take genocide, gulags, and other unpopular measures, but to a progressive, the (undefined) ends justify the means. Conservatives are largely guilty as charged ... we "remember" a past that is largely imagined filtered through rose colored glasses. 

Much of what I try to do in this book is simply to place the public-intellectual market in perspective by showing that, and why, its average quality is low ("disappointing") and perhaps falling.

The problem with being a public intellectual is you get more and more public and less and less intellectual.

I recommend the book to those who are inclined to intellectual commentary vs producing something that is of real value.  I personally "gave at the office" in 34 years at IBM, now I relax and comment from the cheap seats. 

When I've read the book on Kindle and shared my comments on Goodreads, I may try to do more of this sharing for those that want a deeper dive. 

Gamma Variant Immunity

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/the-cdcs-voodoo-epidemiology.php

Looks like the "COTD" (Covid Of The Day) is soon to be Gamma rather than Delta. 

Thus even as vaccine breakthrough infections multiply around the world, natural immunity is robust to the Delta and other variants. With respect to the Gamma variant, a recent analysis of an outbreak among a small group of mine workers in French Guiana found that 60% of fully vaccinated miners suffered breakthrough infections compared with zero among those with natural immunity.

Much like what the experts / media tell us, one wonders they just failed to look up the ordering of the Greek alphabet (as I had to), or they are developing their own idea of reality as with Covid (Covid is not serious - Trump is racist for restricting travel from Wuhan, Trump restricted travel too late, masks don't work, you are killing people if you are unmasked ...).

As a Covid "survivor" (I've "survived" other versions of flu over the years as well), it is gratifying to see evidence that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity. Seeing 60% infected after vaccination vs 0% after having it seems worth of reporting -- if course it won't be. 

Do I believe this ? Only to the degree it fits with common sense. The experts told us that carbs ought to be the base of the food pyramid when I was a kid, they said we were out of oil in the 1970's, Obama said there was no way fracking would get us energy independence, etc 

Another look at the immunity provided by surviving. 

Belief In The Ignorance Of Experts

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/when-to-trust-the-science/

Whenever I see the term "expert", I think of Richard Feynman's (Feynman is a brilliant Nobel Prize winner in Physics) National Science Teachers speech in 1966: 

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

The linked talks about a tweet by Paul Graham which states: 

If you think you don't trust scientists, you're mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you're unaware of this doesn't mean it's not so.

Well, no. You "trust" engineers, and all the people in the chain that built and tested the many thousands if the components in the aircraft, the mental health and competence of the pilots, ATC, other pilots,  the people that produced the fuel ... a nearly infinite chain of trust. Or, basically you are taking a "leap", that isn't really "faith", because most have not thought about any of this. Nor should you really, because a life that can actually be lived is based on all sorts of unconscious assumptions. 

It would be very good however if many more people were aware that we ALL live by faith, all the time. If more people realized that, we would likely be somewhat kinder to others. 

"Science" is a method. a tool - it makes hypotheses and tests them. Very few of the people in that long chain were "scientists", they were "experts" in some sort of discipline generally blindly following the "rules" (standard procedures") of that discipline.  

In this world, the "experts" are imperfect and often fail. The passengers on the 737 Max trusted the chain of "experts", and the chain failed. The list of "expert failures" is endless ... in these times it often starts with the Titanic. My favorite example is Trofim Lysenko whose "expertise" combined with political ideology resulted in millions of deaths. 

Do the "experts" creating and pushing the new mRNA vaccine know what they are doing? We certainly hope and pray that they do. We DO know that pushing a new technology to millions of people has significant risk. In software, we say "never take the first release". Even in cars, many people want to wait a bit on a new model, because there is a good deal of evidence there will be one or more "recalls", some of which may be significantly dangerous. 

The real world is often harsher to the new technology than the theories, early testing, and politics hoped it would be. 

So before you "trust the science", be aware that what you are trusting is the bureaucratic system that decided on operation "Warp Speed", and decided that they HAD to roll out the vaccine quickly. Fortunately there were only 7 people on the Challenger when it "had to launch" on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.  

Interestingly, Feynman was the person that discovered the technical cause of the Challenger Disaster. 

The root cause was believing in "experts" (rather than understanding their ignorance), and the application of those beliefs by a bureaucracy to the launch decision.