This essay by Hollis reminded me to revisit the Richard Hofstadter paranoid style essay, and the intellectual-vs-intelligent distinction.

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.…

Then I also got reminded to reread Walter Russell Mead on the Jacksonian tradition, which pairs very well. Trumpism is the intersection of the Jacksonian tradition and the paranoid style. Unfolding in the age of AI, making for a crazy combustible mix.

The issue she’s raising is society-wide, not restricted to campuses.

I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the term “intellectual,” and have on occasion been bizarrely accused of being one. I’ve also been more credibly accused of being anti-intellectual. To the extent I think of the reflexive tech-hostility and uncritical humanism of stereotypical intellectuals as actually pseudo-intellectual midwittery, wearing the garb of the real thing, this is fair. But that doesn’t make me sympathetic to paranoid-Jacksonian politics, which I’m even more hostile to. But I’m not in-between either. I prefer the measured disposition of intellectual culture but the reality based skepticism of “intelligent but not intellectual” culture (which includes at least the engineering corner of STEM; engineers are thankfully not usually suspected of being intellectuals by default, which causes resentment among engineering academics but I’m thankful for).

Hence my weakness for veiled insults like “intellectuals: the interior decorators of intelligence.” But I don’t go as far as Taleb’s IYI (intellectual-yet-idiot) characterization. They’re not idiots. Merely self-important.

But AI stresses the idea of an intellectual in a very different way than paranoid Jacksonian politics and it’s important not to conflate the two effects just because they’re acting simultaneously. The latter is an eternal dialectic that’s far older than the particular manifestation in American politics. But the former is a genuinely new thing, a secular shift, and there’s more to be said than in Hollis’ essay.

Chris Anderson made the first version of the “AI vs intellectuals” argument in 2008, in the “Big Data” prequel moment to modern AI, “Who Needs Theory?” It was… crude and sensationalist as a lot of that era of Wired-ish tech discourse was.

But now I think we can make a more sophisticated and less easily dismissible version of the argument. One pointing to the obsolescence of “intellectualism.” In the 19th century Nietzsche declared God dead and theology was demoted from the first rank of cultural activities. I think “intellectuals” are set to follow. There’s a 2×2 of what comes after here:

X: Paranoid style vs measured style politics

Y: Post-AI vs pre-AI forms of discourse

• I’d put myself in the measured + post-AI quadrant. Tech-positive but not in a paranoid accelerationist way.

• Trumpism is trying to spawn a kind of paranoid post-AI anti-intellectualism (Musk, Miller). Tech accelerationism is paranoid, that’s why it gets along well with Trumpism.

• Trad intellectuals are gradually zombiefying in the pre-AI + measured quadrant. Their “God” — “interior design for intelligence” — is dead. They’re in deep hysteresis.

• Pre-AI + paranoid is now the permanent underclass.

I’m not sure there can be anything like a “life of the mind” anymore. AI has collapsed the divide between vita contemplativa and vita activa.

The life of the mind is now a chat session in a techno-bicameral cognitive mode.