On Jason Stanley and pseudo-intellectual arrogance
Take a look at this tweet thread (via):
People who are actually clever generally don’t need to boast about it. So for example, you don’t hear Elon Musk or Linus Torvalds repeatedly point out clever they are or that only people who’ve written lots of books are allowed to disagree with them. Nor did Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman keep beating their own chests with “I’m really clever, me”.
Of course they didn’t. They didn’t need to. If someone is demonstrably good at a severe intellectual task, they don’t have anything to prove regarding their intelligence.
The severest intellectual tasks are those that involve contact with external reality, since nature is utterly indifferent to human wishes. When someone works in a STEM discipline, or anything that butts into external reality, that external reality will tell them when they’ve got it wrong. If you build a wall or a bridge and it falls down, you did it wrong. If you’re a surgeon and your patient dies; if you’re a pilot and your plane crashes; if you’re an aircraft designer and your planes all crash; or you’re a programmer and your program won’t run: in all those cases that’s external reality pointing out the flaws in your mental map of the world.
People who work with external reality therefore get lots of feedback about whether their thinking is correct or not. They know if they’re basically on the right path and have nothing to prove to themselves.
But where people work in fields that don’t have the severe discipline of external reality breathing down their necks correcting their work, there is less pressure on them ot be right. Their disciplines thus become full of bullshit and crony beliefs. At some level they know this, they know they are bullshitters and are defensive about it. Hence the desire to gatekeep, saying only people who’ve written lots of books and journal articles, only people who can spout the right jargon, have any right to disagree with them.
(It’s like when the Catholic church banned translation of the bible into the vernacular, and executed Tyndale for that crime; the motivation was to prevent the laity from being able to debate theology with the clergy, who considered themselves their betters.)
Based on all this, we can predict that Jason Stanley’s work isn’t in a discipline that works with external reality; and looking it up it appears he is a Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I expect deep down he knows he’s a pseudo-intellectual fraud.