The Field of Expertology: Some Observations With Intermittent Ranting

I can see the oh-so-human need to feel a sense of accomplishment in one's studies. You have read a few books and a handful of articles on some subject, you have an overweening interest that bubbles over and suddenly you find yourself taking out loans for college to study much more intensively in your area. (Almost) everyone admires your pluck and determination. In two or three years of taking classes and writing papers, you get a degree. Congrats! <cue Sir Edward Elgar's warhorse>

But: do you now qualify as an "expert" in your field? With a Master's degree? With a further two or three years of working in the field? Maybe. Definitely yes, if you want to use the word "expert" to sell yourself to the public. And if you're an "expert," what do we call the person in your field who won the Nobel Prize, or the Field Medal, or the Booker Prize, or some similar whopping cash prize accompanied by prestige? A "god" or "goddess" in the field? You did two years of Neurobiology and got accepted for the PhD gauntlet, but bowed out after ten months due to worldly needs. You know a helluva lot about the brain, but if you're an "expert," what is Eric Kandel then? Has the term "expert" become watered-down? I think so, but it's tricky...

How many "experts" can there be in any given field? Is it really desirable to believe yourself an "expert"? I can see some downside to it. A complacency. A smugness. A slowly growing laxity in "keeping up" in the field. Hey wait a minute: is it even possible, given the supernovae of knowledge, data, information in any given field...to "keep up"? I very seriously doubt it. Gradually, you will be merely pretending to keep pace.

But yes, using the term "expert" as a self-marketing tool makes sense, especially if you are a freelancer. If you already have a full-time job doing what you specialized in, we can see that you must be some sort of "expert." (Or someone is being fooled!) The old saw from generalists about experts: that an "ex" is a has-been and a "spurt" is a "glorified drip" seems mean-spirited and unfair. And it's not even funny. Let us give more leeway to self-declared "experts" who have a degree in some discipline. These people definitely know something of value, which is much more than we can say for the (m)asses.

My personal take on the semantics of "expertise" is that it's mostly bogus, and eventually evident in pretentiousness. One ought not want to be an "expert," save for the aforementioned self-marketing tool. You need a job, you know stuff and have some specialized training: call yourself an "expert"! You'll probably get paid more, because if there's anything the public loves, it's someone who will tell them what's going on, what to think, how to have an opinion that at least sounds halfway intelligent. It seems to help if you pretend to know more than you do, and to answer every question immediately, without taking time for considered thought, which is seen as "weak." Also, make your shoulders look wide, and speak with a brassy, well-modulated voice. If you speak near the basso profundo range yet with not a thought in your head you will be given due consideration as Wise. In my country, Unistat, the Cult of the Expert reigns in a major way. People seem to think the actor who reads the news on TV has gravitas, and is a serious mind to contend with, about which the less said the better.

And you say to yourself, "Of course this chap who openly extolls his 'overweening generalist' thing would be anti-expert." And you'd be right. But why do I think this?

Mostly because I pay overweening attention to what "experts" have said in the past, and then notice what happened. But it's far more complex than that. Of course, sometimes they were accurate, but we wonder if a taxicab driver could've flown the same prognostications and ended up close to the mark, too. If so - and this is not as far-fetched as it might sound - what do we make of the remarkable powers of the taxi driver?

Okay: I say, as of this date, that it's a horridly under-appreciated fact that all knowledge is contingent. This makes even the best "experts" wrong, eventually. Indeed, it seems built into the "expert" territory.

Trofim Lysenko. Franz Joseph Gall. Franz Mesmer. All "experts" at one time.

Furthermore, as a generalist, I've noticed that non-experts who are nevertheless intelligent and obsessive readers, often have a better developed ability to convey the knowledge of the more widely-recognized "experts." Often, such people go by the name of "journalist," or "freelance writer" and they may have some academic background in the area of "expertise," but it is not their specialty. (Rather: not specializing is their forte and strength!) Additionally, the "expert" may have an axe to grind, which skews his presentation to a public hungry for a lucid narrative about some difficult process or concept or series of events. And Expert-Person may not be able to effectively imagine the lay audience, due to surfeit of arcane information. They fall prey to jargon, rely too much on former colleagues, or evince a misplaced punctiliousness. I don't think we truly have as many "experts" as we think we do, nor should we. We should have more people who know maybe "quite a lot" in a one field, and then be diligent generalists. 

But we don't have that, and I think it's the aura of the "expert" that fools many people into pursuing this social role. We all must find our niche and specialize; the time has come for this. Or so we are told. (By "experts"?) We have entered some sort of epoch in which you must do whatever you can to pass as "expert," and then...maybe you will pay the rent that way.

It's a sorry state. Because unless you're being paid very well to work in your role as an "expert" you might better serve yourself and society by eschewing the "expert" role and instead be more of a generalist. The pace of information doubling in any given field - probably subject to something close to Moore's Law - means you are fooling yourself that you're really an "expert" in the semantic sense I'm talking about here.

And society is getting crazier and crazier because the pace of change seems logarithmically accelerated, and anxiety is increasing, and the know-nothings want "experts" to tell them Who Is Causing This? And there is no end of PR "experts" and think-tank "experts"who are paid ridiculous sums to tell Joe and Josephine Q. Sixpack who is to blame. We need well-rounded, well-informed, generally epistemologically prudent people to keep the sanity! (I am such the romantic!, I know, I know...)

Hell, it's great knowing just "really really a lot" in some field; call yourself an "expert" if the gullible will pay you more to play that role, but you're not an "expert" and you probably shouldn't even want to be one, unless you have a real shot at it. And if you do know a lot about a subject, fer crissakes: learn how to convey it to the Public. It will not do, for example, to be an expert in late 20th century literature and write like this.

Another insidious aspect of the need to feel an "expert" is that, indeed, you have a far-from-layperson's grasp of some area of knowledge. But then you gradually, imperceptibly, fall into some corner implied by the hypertrophy of something like Zipf's Law . Some sort of law of least resistance ensues; we all want to lead with our strength. (I, for one, resist this inclination, for obvious reasons.) Zipf's or Someone Else's Law kicks in and then, after many years of having not much of a social or bathing life you know more and more about some micro-specialty - possibly theoretically suspect among the Old Ones in the field - but hey, you're rolling, maybe no one knows a few things you know, why not push it further and sub-sub-sub-microspecialize...and then, we hate to inform you, but you're a moron! Yep. Sorry! Suddenly, one day, you wake up and you have written 843 pages on some forgotten dispute (and why won't the Journal of Boo-Huzzle Studies publish my paper? Why won't that know-nothing editor even write me back?) about the finer points of whether the frammigoshes can be distimmed better using one modeling process, versus the absolutely, titanically full of crap Non-Xers who think frammigoshes are not even the main point; they should be distimmed in any number of ways and subject to experimental validation, but the main point is how to build a better model of a fleezix? You are sure they Got It All Wrong 70 years ago, and you will make the Boo-Huzzle world pay for its neglect of the lost knowledge that could've...something. (At this point, one equally whacked character in Belgium is fascinated by your work, but other than that, no one even knows what it was you were trying to do! Nor do they care. This is something to be avoided, to be plain. If you fall into this stuff, you're a pathetic ass, to be obvious.)

On second thought, anyone who falls prey to the world described above was probably headed there anyway, so let us make sure they don't wander into oncoming traffic and, fer gawdsakes, someone be a Good Sam and just take a machete to the weeds in the front yard? The neighborhood kids can get lost in there. Does that guy ever eat anything but Dominos? (Don't laff. I live in Berkeley, and these people are legendary. They tend to end up within a ten mile radius of our greatest universities, and their beards are, shall we say, unkempt. This goes for the women, too.)

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One of the funniest books I have on my reference shelf at home is The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, (1998), expanded and updated edition, edited by Cerf and Navasky. 

Since this topic is close to home, I'll give a few examples:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981

"We don't need you. You haven't got through college yet." - a Hewlett-Packard executive, responding to  Jobs and Wozniak's attempts to interest them in the personal computer, 1976.

"I think there is a world market for about five computers." - attributed to Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation, at the World Future Society convention, 1977

"What the hell is it good for?" - Robert Lloyd, engineer of the Advanced Computing Systems Division at IBM in 1968, after being told by his colleagues that the microprocessor was the wave of the future.

"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may only have 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons." - Popular Mechanics, March, 1949

-see pp.230-231, op.cit

Expertology is the field of the study of experts, obviously. The above-named book is filled to the gills with such pronouncements from throughout history, in every human field of endeavor. It is also a minor field of..."expertise"(?), probably because we love our experts so much and never notice their errors or quickly forget them. I assert the (m)asses are in general, Authoritiarian, and love to be told what to do, think, what's desirable, what values to have, who to kowtow to, etc. Therefore, Expertology tends towards a certain bias against "experts." If only as a necessary corrective...(Methinks the field is still failing, alas.)

I would like to add that, in my present state of advanced confusion and wonderment, that the physical sciences and technology, despite the examples I chose above, seem less inclined, on the whole, to rampant buncombe or "expert" asses. When you're competing against Art "experts," literature "experts," music "experts," economics "experts," psychology "experts," it's not even a fair fight. But lo! all fields of "expertise" recoil in reflexive horror at the prospect of putting their best bullshitting "experts" up against the Men of God, throughout human history.

Well, that's my little spiel. I can see I haven't convinced anyone, so if you were amused at all, let us consider this a draw? And if I wasted your time, I apologize and wish you well in furthering your <cough> expertise. In the meantime, I'll be happily hanging with the generalists, that admittedly ignorant, minority lot.

On Scientific Specialization, and How It's Like Cholesterol, With Rant Sandwiched

When I started this blog, in a whimsical mood three or so weeks ago, my first blatherings riffed off of Robert A. Heinlein's oft-repeated line, "Specialization is for insects," which my staff and I (total: 1 person) tracked back to Heinlein's novel Time Enough For Love. For Generalists, it's a line that functions as a rhetorical battle cry, and, while it seems pretty damned argumentative, it's also pithy, eh? Yea, verily, it's got great pith, and has survived in the memetic fitness struggles, with its seeming hermetic dynamics, and I'll leave it at that.


The plea for less specialization has been made countless times (or rather, in my limited scope, I have lost count) in the 20th century and on into the 21st. Two of my favorite Generalists, Robert Anton Wilson and Buckminster Fuller, were talking (RAW interviewing Fuller):


"The problem with Fuller's talk, as well as his books, is that he has always been a comprehensivist. 'If nature wanted us to be specialists,' he likes to say, 'we'd be born with one eye and a jeweler's lens attached.' He refuses to discuss any one subject without relating it to other subjects. When asked in an interview in 1980 if he had one most important idea, he snapped, 'Absolutely not. There is no 'one most important thing,' since every system in Universe is plural and at minimum six. No, I have never found one most important thing. I deal in Universe always and only.'" - from pp.109-110 of Robert Anton Wilson's Right Where You Are Sitting Now


Maybe the main "problem" with thinkers like this is: you need to put in a big initial effort to grock their comprehensivist, unified field ideas. It takes "time," that seemingly increasingly tricky taskmaster.
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A Quick Rant Sandwich With a Side of Aside?

My circumambient peripheralizations and non-definitions of just what I mean by "Generalist" will be fleshed out more explicitly over time (wot?); however, I would think a reader's gestalting faculty would have given them a sufficient purchase over three weeks of my blogposts, dancing around the idea. Or: if half of all the Humanities students who graduate in 2011 end up with jobs that don't require a degree at all, why do we even teach that stuff any more? Oh, because in a democracy we want well-rounded people, blah, blah, blah? Hey, that sounds great, but what about the $75,000 in student loans they have to pay off? (And the Dubya admin put an end to filing for bankruptcy regarding student loans...)

I smell a Racket. A lot like the Housing Bubble. Not good. The previous paragraph seems overweening (it was), a big non-sequitur (think again), and now I revert to the generalistic:

I recall my college days, talking with fellow students about courses we'd taken, and often hearing something like this formulation: "I've already had Astronomy and American History till 1876; I still need it up to 1976. Have you had Humanities yet?"

As if these fields are innoculations. Have you had your booster of Statistics? (Good. Then you'll never need it again! You're safe!?) Best to take Plato to Spinoza now, so you can stop worrying about getting that in the future. (What about medical students who take a class in Immunology? What if the professor's humor is infectious? Now I'm being flippant.)

To quote 50% of Simon and Garfunkel, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...," it was tacitly implied that Shakespeare had nothing at all to do with Current Events (the class was actually called that); 20th Century History had nothing to do with what you'd be studying 15 minutes later: Biology. Und so weiter...

It was only when I took some time off from school that I learned all that was bullshit; there were no Iron Curtains between anything I studied, and all it took was a little bit of imagination to see how everything impinged upon everything else, seemingly disparate "areas" of thought suddenly were seen as suffusing another branch (grafting?) of knowledge, and it was too easy to mix metaphors because of all of this.

I will say: this feeling one gets when one suddenly sees how the boundaries are artificial, for whatever socially constructed and bureaucratic reasons? For me, it was dizzying-unto-vertigo. And then: fantastic and liberating-unto-euphoria. I realize now that this feeling is not as common as I would have thought. Anyway, I've been stuck "there" ever since...
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Did I mention cholesterol? Okay, I'll get on with it:

Not long ago I enjoyed a short essay by a climatologist named Gavin Schmidt called "Why Hasn't Specialization Led To The Balkanization of Science?," as collected in What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited by Mr. Third Culture John Brockman's son Max. 


Schmidt says that, like cholesterol, specialization in the hard sciences has a good version and a bad one, and in a minute I'll go over his notion of studies that are "centrifugal" and ones that are "centripetal." But first let me say that Schmidt writes engagingly and gives excellent specific examples in his short essay, based on his area of expertise, climate science, which anyone could imagine, involves quite of lot of knowledge of General Systems as they pertain to the dynamics, chemistry, and composition of the atmosphere, the land, the oceans, and ice fields...and how they all interact.


Now, just within this broad discipline, there are specialists who study sea level changes from satellite data. Others spend years studying El Nino effects in the Pacific and its variability. Ice-core samples taken from sophisticated deep drilling in Antarctica, measuring gases trapped 800,000 years ago? That's another sub-speciality. Others take massive data sets and build models to gain a firmer grasp of various situations.

Schmidt begins his essay by quoting John Ziman: "Scientists are those who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing." Catchy, and maybe at one time (circa 1900-1950?), sorta "true," but not now. And why? Why hasn't science kept specializing until most scientists can't understand what any other scientist is talking about?

First off, reductionism has worked marvelously well in the history or science, but there will be periods of diminishing returns, and the way out of the problem is interdisciplinary studies. As for centrifugal and centripetal?

Centrifugal forces in science, Schmidt says, drive increasing divergence, deeper knowledge about narrower and narrower phenomena. Centripetal forces counter the trends of the centrifugal studies. It's easy to see why centrifugal studies are needed, but Schmidt says they can go on too long for reasons that are "institutional, avoidable, and to be deplored."

(When I read this essay I couldn't help but think that Kuhn's period of "normal science" involved a lot of centrifugal-like endeavors.)

The exponential growth of scientific data and specialist publications with their occult-like impenetrable jargon (available only to a select few initiates) creates isolated sub-fields and sub-sub-sub disciplines, and a sad resultant is that no one can stay "on top"of all of "the latest" in the general fields. So what do specialists do to avert a Platonic Cave vision imposed by their specialist everyday realities?

Answer: popularizations, ambassadors and publication in the specialist literature. Edward N. Lorenz wrote some of the seminal papers in Chaos Theory, but more scientists know about it via James Gleick's book. O! The value of a good popularizer of science who really understand the stuff and can write for a large, intelligent lay audience! (Gleick's masterful, difficult-to-put-down work on chaos theory Amazon link is here. It's a thrilling read, and highly recommended for most Generalists. Take it to the bank!)

The Ambassadors are specialists who like to talk with scientists in other fields; they tend to bring about more collaborations. They would be a species of "Connector" in the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the term.

Specialist publications are usually impenetrable, not only to the lay public but to scientists outside of that discipline. But every now and then some specialist article is so interesting because it's about something "really big," like the Alvarez's 1978 finding about the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous. Another type of specialist paper that arrests Balkanization is something that appears with data that could potentially impact a variety of subdisciplines, like "the possible human role in the extinction of large mammals at the end of the last ice age."

The third and most important specialist article that moves this Centrifugal-Centripetal Dialectic forward is the kind of robust, meta-analysis study of new large-scale models. These are works of intricate synthesis and encourage new cross-disciplinary research.

Schmidt's fascinating article ends with this:

"Fundamentally, the drivers of interdisciplinary science lie in our desire to explain what we see and in recognizing that the answers we seek are not tied to individual scientific disciplines or specific tools or methodologies. Those are human constructs, and they are simply no match for the forces of nature."

And I will sum up thus: bureaucratic excessive specialization = "bad" LDL cholesterol; synthetic centripetal, productive interdisciplinary work = HDL or "good" cholesterol. Errr..something like that.

At any rate, as of this date: Balkanization in science: staved off!
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This has been a stab at an article about specialization within the physical sciences for a reader who's interested in being a Generalist, if not an overweening one. We must say, when we look at the role of specialization in the physical sciences, that, if indeed specialization is for insects, we appreciate the insect-work! A colony of digger-ants and their Hive Mind architecture and division of labor is truly a marvelous thing to behold. And insects don't do synthesizing, centripetal work. (That we know of?) We appreciate (almost) ALL ways of employing the grey matter. Hat's off to the not-insect and quite-human specialists (and synthesists) in the physical sciences! Huzzah!

I hope my attempt to enlighten about a species of non-Generalist didn't bore you to tears, and thanks for reading! I see my prolixity got the better of me and will try to write more pithily subsequently, but hey, blog posts are cheap.

Recent Article on Virtuoso Geeks and Something of Alvin Gouldner; On a "Moral Stance" Towards Media

I've mentioned I admire the Geeks but feel quite alienated from their visions, and a lot of that - cut to the chase - has to do with my frankly fuddy-duddy bookish slant. Books of all sorts, on a gleaming vast welter of topics, are my main squeeze. And I'm paranoid about Kindle and associated gadgets. (Come to think of it, my asthma has been acting up again, too. And we're out of fabric softener? Will it ever end?) I feel my Book Culture sliding away in the ever-acceleration of info and technology. Please tell me I'm merely being paranoid, and this time they are decidedly not out to get me? Anyway: The Geeks fascinate me, especially virtuoso ones like the M.I.T. people as featured in this recent article...

As lost in my own Cloud-Cuckooland with my books as I am, I have to admire these types. And my envy of their success is quite great...

In general, I think the renegade Socratic Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner was right about the "New Class": it's made up of two parts, and this is from my memory of reading Gouldner:

• The old "humanist" intellectuals, and they probably go back to the literate priests who kept literacy for themselves. Today they include historians, theologians, poets, literary critics, most social "scientists," musicologists, philosophers...you get the drift. They tend to be politically liberal or "radical"and try to make cultural change through their use of various rhetorics, usually conducted through writing and verbal/oral skills. Their impact has become less and less politically powerful, especially during the Roaring 20th c.
• The more recent technical intelligentsia, who rose mightily since around 1600. These are the Geeks who use the language of mathematics. They're physical scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists) and technological innovators and maintainers of the technical infrastucture. Throw in doctors, lawyers, and engineers here. Certain types of high-level bureaucrats and C.E.Os who don't own stock in their own company too...They tend to be more conservative, but their impact on society has been radical. The Third Culture types have made a somewhat convivial bridge between the Two Cultures, but to my eyes they are still rooted in the technical intelligentsia.

Both groups compete for funding, the older class making a spectacular loss to the newer tech-intelligentsia, especially since 1945.

Both groups have an overweening sense of entitlement, are jealous of their prerogatives, and, basically, the Platonic Philosopher King Complex holds in both courts. Both groups have together been wrestling with the Old Money class for cultural power. Think of the characters and values of, say, the National Association of Manufacturers, longtime backers of the Republican Party in the U.S.

The major difference, for Gouldner, between the two intellectual groups versus the Old Monied class is the former's insistence on CCD: the Culture of Critical Discourse, which means, among other aspects, that it doesn't matter if you're wearing jeans with holes in them, or you have tattoos, and and Rastafarian hair and it's well-known your father is a drug dealer: if you have a good idea and you're articulate, they will listen. Rational, critical, careful discourse knows nothing of Inherited Privilege. To dismiss any idea because it's not from a wealthy upper classman is the height of idiocy for the New Class. Good ideas can come from anywhere. (All of this a thumbnail sketch from Alvin Gouldner's fascinating and slim 1979 volume, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. )

One more thing that sticks out in my memory of this amazing book (time to read it again!) is this: despite the aforesaid overweening sense of its own entitlements, this New Class (both the old humanist and the new technical intellectuals together) is the best card History has dealt yet.

[Note: I'd give an Amazon link to the Gouldner book, but the prices were ridiculous! Get thee to your local library for it! For people interested in ideas about how intellectuals see themselves, this book is an absolute must-read.]
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Regarding a moral stance toward dazzling electronic gadgetry and its social networking possibilities and what it all "does to" our nervous systems: I am like Marshall McLuhan, who personally preferred books and conversation to radio, TV, films, and...everything since. But unlike the Bard of Media Ecology, I love some of the stuff: some TV, a great many movies. I use a cell phone as a portable telephone booth and would rather not talk on it. I love compact discs, but they're on their way out, and I've never downloaded music from Internet, nor do I know how to do MP3s or podcasts.

The Internet would've blown McLuhan's mind, and in many ways MM is one of its Patron Saints. Internet has blown my mind, most assuredly. I don't Tweet or Facebook, although friends and family have urged me to do so. I love email. I could go on and on, but suffice: McLuhan is wildly and erroneously thought of as LIKING all the electronic media he famously wrote about, and nothing could be further from the truth. As Douglas Coupland writes in his recent book on MM, "He hated, loathed, abhorred it." The point is, McLuhan had a professionally amoral stance towards all of it. He thought a moral stance got in the way of understanding it, because in "probing" the new media, there were ideas to mine that, artfully, gave a sort of anthropological perspective on humans. And what did Marshall like more than ideas? (A: probably nothing.)

I'm more or less a piece with him on this. And I often wonder just how weird this "makes" me, because McLuhan was a very wonderfully weird guy. We have different politics, and I actually like-unto-love some of the 20th century media that (supposedly) is re-tribalizing us in the Global Village, whilst always beating a hasty retreat back to my books.

Back to the marvelous Geeks:

Here's the Wiki about the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Something recent (as of the above date) from the Media Lab that seems to argue for a Jonah Lehrer (-ish?) Fourth Culture going on there (10 mins):

Here's a video about the M.I.T. Media Lab (note the 8 other equally freaky science-fiction-y vids available after this one):

Some Words on the "Third Culture"

Intellectual entrepreneur and publisher John Brockman's idea, or he takes most of the credit. I have a link to Edge.org over there on the side--------->a ways down. It'll give you some background. There's a whole lot of mind-stuff there and I happen to find almost all of it fascinating.

Situating itself in a lineage that includes The Invisible College and The Lunar Society, the Edge thinkers are all part of what Brockman calls the "Third Culture," a historical succession from the problem described by novelist and physicist C.P. Snow, in his 1959 book The Two Cultures, which lamented the artificial iron curtain between the humanist intellectuals and the physical scientists. Professors of English literature were almost proud to not know anything about, say, quantum physics; academic chemistry professors felt bad they were not up on Lake Poets. Or something like that. The point is: this divide was harming knowledge as a whole; all of knowledge belongs to all of us, and we ought to know more about other things, but you know what? The literary critics are just incorrigible in their disdain of science and the language it's written in, mathematics. 


Brockman steps in and says the time of the snooty New York literary critics is over. No one reads them anymore. They have become stale, predictable, and there's a rather large and fairly sophisticated audience of lay readers who are craving the buzz from scientists who can write well for the public. And the ideas coming out of science happen to address almost all of the perennial philosophical questions; only don't expect "God" to play as big a part here. (Or rather: when He does show up, He's probably more surreal than you'd imagined. He might even be an It, or pan-sexual, who knows?) It was Brockman's mission to bring these scientists-writers to the public, and the Third Culture was born. It's a big tent, too. 


You know, for me, it's been a smashing success. As I said, most of this stuff I find fascinating. (Scientists who can explain their version of string theory, or what nanotechnology can already do, or new inroads in Artificial Intelligence, or black holes and the multiverse, or evolutionary psychology and what it says about our sex habits, etc: Hey: OG says thumb's up.) 


It does seem to be a logical, historical succession from the previous Philosopher Kings, the small-tent New York literary intellectuals. (Much more on them in a later OG disgorgement.)


There was a time when most people "did" science, just for kicks. They'd collect specimens, did experiments, bought the most affordable microscopes and telescopes, read Popular Mechanics. When you were a kid, I bet you looked under rocks just for the joy of seeing something marvelous that might be there, hidden, and "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" Gregor Mendel was just dinkin' around! (Well, he was serious about his dinkin', albeit.) The history of astronomy is rife with dedicated amateurs who furthered the science. Why did science become so exclusive? Why did some of us lose almost all interest in it at some point? 


Progressively, science became a hard-core discipline, driven by business interests and the military-industrial complex, which fed the universities. If you were a terrific geek or nerd with math chops, you would have a job. Scientific training became more and more regimented because regimentation "works" in producing an army of "left-brained" technical intelligentsia that can do marvelous things, working in teams...


As you got into the university, if you were "good at math" of had a knack for basic physics or chemistry or biology, you were strongly encouraged - herded - into the sciences. Because the rewards could be so great. (And some smart people really seem to love their physical science; clearly, they receive intrinsic rewards in the teasing out of Nature's puzzles.)


But in this hothousing of more and more scientists for the "Establishment," (<---when was the last time you saw that term?), very many young people who were not great at math got turned off by "science," as if it wasn't for them. On campuses Art and Science were different worlds. Each felt a bit envious of the other, superior, and tragically incomplete: Snow's Two Cultures.


A basic way of looking at this: the intellectuals who were adepts at verbalization and the written word called themselves "the intellectuals," for awhile and got away with it. The scientists, adept in the language of math, were perhaps biding their time?


In science, specialization is all. In fact, you specialize as soon as possible (when qualified), then sub-specialize, then you microspecialize: voila! Ph.D! The synthesizers seem the vast exception: creative, they see the problems accumulating in different areas of one discipline, sense patterns, develop hypotheses, test, experiment, tinker....new theory! (Very rarely: new paradigm!) And it all eventually turns into plasma TVs, laser-beam weapons, the Internet in the palm of your hand, biomass fuels, an fMRI machine, machines that correct other machines, etc, etc, etc.


Brockman's scientists (and he also invites non-physical scientists, and even humanities people to join in the conversation about Big Ideas, much to his credit, and probably because he was involved in the Art world beforehand?) are the cream. They may be geeks, but they are eloquent and interesting to read and listen to. U.S citizens desperately need these people; too bad it's probably the already-formally educated who are paying attention...(NB: the lamentable level of public discourse on evolution, global warming, stem cell research, on and on. These Third Culture types are standing by! They're sitting on shelves in your public library! Oh? American Idol is about to start? Nevermind...)


Now: a proto-Third Culture had lurked long before Brockman got into Wiggy Ideas. When Ilya Prigogine put forth his theory of dissipative structures (early 1970s), he was tapping into a vein that poet-mystic-philosophers had been talking around for a long time. People like Henri Bergson. Titanic thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead. Weird polymaths who sought wisdom from the East. Prigogine (Nobel Prize) said his findings (in thermodynamics) were like a "science of becoming,"a "deep collective vision."


Prior to Prigogine, there was Ezra Pound's project.


Even further back...


If Brockman and his crew have included him, I missed it, but Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that the first Third Culture occurred when the new nomothetic social sciences arrived. This was 19th century stuff. What is "nomothetic" social science? Economics, political science, and sociology and the 19th century search for "law-like" formulations within those fields. The rise of those disciplines created a Third Culture in the ruins of the long-running medieval faculty of philosophy, which split up and became physical science vs. the humanities. Into the lurch: Econ/poli-sci/sociology, all of them fairly dismal, if you ask me...With some major exceptions, in my view. (Some other time, my friends.)


Back to Brockman's cadre of engaging scientist-public intellectuals: there are a lot of them, their work is almost always mind-blowing (to me, at least), and it's a boon for the Overweening Generalist, to say the least. Now, before I apologize for going on too long here, I ask you this Question: is there a Fourth Culture in our midst? If so, who are its constituents, and what's their main thrust?


Apologies for veering into verborrhea; if you stuck with this rant: thanks. And please: any thoughtful dissent is welcome.

Notes on the "Free-Floating" Intellectual

Drawing from and greatly fleshing out Alfred Weber's concept of a freischwebende Intelligenz, or "the socially unattached intelligentsia," Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia, the Ur-text in the sociology of knowledge (pub in German in 1929, translated into English in 1936), argued that all ideas in the political, economic and cultural fields were rooted in class interests and social and economic circumstances of the thinker. No one from any strata had a complete purchase on the "truth." A very small group of thinkers, however, were subject to the least amount of bias and were able to articulate viewpoints about the cultural scene from a wider and more encompassing stance: a relatively classless stratum of free-floating intellectuals. 


Mannheim was historicistic (is that even a word?) enough that he rejected the notion of "relativism" because it seemed to assume there existed a Platonic realm of Eternal Truth, True Being, etc. Mannheim favored "relationism": as history moves on the truth changes according to time and place. In this he was influenced by pragmatism. Anyway, the idea of a special class of intellectuals who were able to see more than their institutionally attached academic brethren in the universities, churches, think tanks, and government: this has long appealed to the marginalized (indeed: the marginal themselves?) book readers living in their cold water flats, surrounded by stacks and piles of books and magazines, a cot, and maybe some food. But to what extent does this concept hold (cold?) water?


Mannheim thought a main value of this posited group would be the development of a "dynamic synthesis" of all the other ideologies of the other groups. Anyone know a writer in 2011 who has accomplished this? I think I know a few, but you will probably disagree with me. Anyway, I'll get to it in some later blog-spew...


Well, certainly the institutionally-attached seem to be indebted to larger interests. Probably too many to enumerate here...But the institutionally-attached have far more resources at their disposal, too. (The itinerant academic and full-time scholar Morris Berman has cited the "McWorld" values that American universities have devolved to for much of their faculty and students. Some studies in 2010-2011 have suggested there's never been a time in U.S. history when a university education was so expensive, and the after-graduation job expectations so dismal. Start here?)


Back from the digression: The relatively unattached stratum are free to study anything, at any time, to keep their own hours (apart from their rent-paying job, if they have one), and to edit, publish in little magazines, 'zines, write plays, radical essays, blather on in blogs, etc. (What would Mannheim have made of blogs?)


In an essay in 1969 by Noam Chomsky, published in the New York Review of Books, "The Menace of Liberal Scholarship," he very articulately decries the increasing role of specialist, technical intelligentsia from the universities as playing strong roles in the administration of the State. Because of Chomsky's ethics, he is almost always criticizing the U.S, because it is "easy" to point out what's wrong in some other country's political maneuvers; a truly free intellectual will focus on criticism of their own country. (This basic idea of Chomsky's seems criminally misunderstood, or rather, actively non-understood. What is interesting is that he has developed and sustained his incredible body of critiques of the U.S. while "attached" to M.I.T. He has answered questions surrounding this seeming paradox many times, as you probably know. See one discussion around this issue here.)


Why does Chomsky think specialist, technical intellectuals go in for service to the State? Senator Fulbright had recently lamented (this was 1969) that universities had failed to serve as a counterforce to the military-industrial complex. Fulbright thought the lure of money was too much to pass up for these...geeks. Chomsky saw access to money and influence and access to a highly restricted, almost universally shared ideology and the "dynamics of professionalism." Then, 30-odd years after Mannheim's discussion of the possible role of the "free-floating intellectual," Chomsky writes:

"The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect."

Ouch! Was Chomsky right? Is he still right? Some of us unattached, generalist, inveterate readers of thick texts hope not. Has the rise of the Internet changed the ratios a tad? Maybe?

More later; this topic is - for moi - too rich to abandon here.

Specialization Is For Insects

Yea, verily it seems unto me that specialization is still for insects, long after Robert A. Heinlein made that claim. This creates certain very real problems for overweening generalists like you and me. Why? Well, you probably have some good answers for this, but one of my best answers is that specialization has increased with the hyper-technological boom, especially in the post-WWII era. The Geeks have elbowed their way to the top of the intellectual and financial world, their niches a product of ever-increasing acceleration of omni-ephemeralization microchip-ruled world.

Don't get me wrong: I love what the Geeks have accomplished. I'm impressed as all get-out. And I like a lot of Geeks personally. And I am jealous of their specialized skills. Some of them frighten me with their powers to alter the social structure. But in the haze of wowee-gee digital gadgets and virtual thises and thats, "killer apps" and the Gamer Welt, etc, etc, etc...I wonder about the value of knowledge. Or rather: certain kinds of knowledge, certain modes of knowing and thinking, particular ways of approaching Being that may be getting drowned out in the Tweeting.

Also: I am not claiming the Digirati and Associated Geekdom (a name for your next band? it's yours!) are "insects." Heinlein's line about specialization was a rhetorical flourish; most geeks I know are intellectually fluent in a few areas. And they're fun! (generally speaking)

Now look: I'm on a blog. I can't believe how cool and easy some Geeks made it for some damned Generalist and dead-tree book reader like myself to start ranting on a blog. I'm not fundamentally against any digital media; I love that you/we/I can use it, and the social media world has clearly enveloped us.

I just want to muse here about what it might mean for us. And by "us" I mean the human race, my favorite of all the species alive now. I read recently that, of all species that have ever inhabited the planet Earth, 0.01 of them are still alive, now. And we're part of that small number. The 99.99% have gone...well, let's leave that for another day.

I want us to be a success in the multiverse. I'm one of those Socrates-like people who asks annoying questions. That's mostly what this blog will be about. I think we Generalists need to speak up. I think the Kulch needs us. Maybe I'm wrong, but I will go on, in the spirit of pragmatism and assume the Kulch needs those of us who are passionately interested in perhaps "too many things."