Browsing through the blog of a real life friend of mine, I stumbled across a brief discussion of Niall Ferguson and Jonah Lehrer along with a bunch of links to more complete discussions. My favorite of the group was Justin Fox‘s:
That’s the link (of Ferguson) with Lehrer and Zakaria, who are (or probably were, in Lehrer’s case) big on the speaking circuit as well. Zakaria is a hugely accomplished thinker and writer (go back and read his breathtakingly good October 2001 Newsweek cover story “Why Do They Hate Us?” for a sample) who seems to have stretched himself too thin. Lehrer is a smart young upstart — his third book, Imagine: The Art and Science of Creativity, had been tearing up the bestseller lists before scandal hit — who seems to have made good storytelling a higher priority than the truth. That progression may tell a lot. The path to lucrative thought-leaderdom blazed over the past couple of decades was to establish yourself with dense, serious work (or a big, important job) and then move on to catch-phrase manufacturing (I spent a few weeks following Tom Friedman around in 2005, and learned that he had made this transition very deliberately). Nowadays ambitious young people looking to break into the circuit often just aim straight for the catch-phrases. Speakers bureaus need pithy sales pitches, not complex erudition — and while speaking fees might be spare change for Mitt Romney, for journalists and academics they often represent their only real shot at a top-tax-bracket income.
The result is an intellectual environment that seems to increasingly reward the superficial, and keeps rewarding those who make it into the magic circle of top-flight speakers even if they don’t have anything new or interesting to say.
I’m not that keen on including Fareed Zakaria in this particular rogues’ gallery because his transgressions are relatively minor (and because his article on wet martinis was brilliant), but it’s still an interesting point: there is a big market for breezy, pseudo-intellectual commentary from “big name” thinkers and that market will tend to attract frauds and charlatans. It’s not so different from drugs or prostitution or pandora bracelets; people want to buy it, someone’s going to sell it. And even worse, after people have given money to hear some jack ass wank about Chimerica or Bob Dylan’s creativity, they’re going to brag to their friends about how great it was, and the epidemic will spread further.
The thing is, there is nothing of any intellectual substance that you can learn from a brief lecture or TED talk (or Newsweek article). Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch. Or argue with friends on the internets. But don’t take the glib superficial musings of a high-brow hustler seriously. It’s all just totebag heroin.
Amanda in the South Bay
I had to look up who Jonah Lehrer is, and I could really give a shit about him regardless of his fabrications. I guess a lot of your post (and those links) read as pretty dense inside baseball. Also, no mention of Malcolm Gladwell? Now there’s an overrated charlatan who markets himself to the right kind of people (I swear, a couple of years ago everyone in Silicon Valley was carrying around copies of his works). Seriously people, read real books for crying out loud.
Susan K of the tech support
You had me at Totebag Heroin.
taylormattd
I’ve never seen that martini article. Now that’s the kind of Slate contrarianism of which I approve.
It also makes me want to read a book about booze.
Anoniminous
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Curious.
What didn’t you like about “Outliers?”
superfly
I think you could make a killing off of “Totebag Heroin”
Let’s “workshop” that…
Amanda in the South Bay
@Anoniminous:
It seemed shallow, especially his digressions about why Asians are such math genuises. Also, I didn’t need to pay 30 dollars (I didn’t but you get the point) to have someone tell me what I already knew-the 1970s were a great time to get in on the ground floor of Silicon Valley and computing. Next you’re going to tell me there’s a sweet spot of ages of WW2 vets who were born between 1915-1920!
Anya
@Amanda in the South Bay: I really don’t get Malcolm Gladwell’s appeal. I tried to read Blink but couldn’t finish it. The whole premise seemed ludicrous to me.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Anya:
I think Gladwell is really appealing to a certain sort of intellectual, educated person who isn’t very well read, but who finds his style of writing appealing for airplane rides, or the Caltrain commute to work.
DougJ
@Anya:
I find Gladwell’s books boring, but he hasn’t gotten busted peddling lies or plagiarizing. SO he’s got that going for him.
Carnacki
@Amanda in the South Bay: I did like his talk on the Norden bomb sight but that could be because I am a fan of Cottage to Let and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon
Anoniminous
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Thank you. I agree.
Tactically, I find “Outliers” a good reference for people who, putting it kindly, turned their brains off immediately after getting their Bachelors. The book is persuasive in a low-brow kinda way.
KT
Not sure why you’re so down on TED. It’s purpose is not to make you an instant authority, it’s to expose you to ideas you may never have encountered before. It is a fantastic resource for all kinds of interesting stuff. Art, science, music, philosophy, etc. Sort of a Scientific American in video.
Bill E Pilgrim
People also like paintings of clowns and cowboys. I’d say it’s more comparable to that than to drugs or prostitution, unless someone were hiring some shallow cheap imitation of sex because the real thing took too much effort and disturbed them.
Oh. Actually okay maybe it is like prostitution in some cases.
I once read a book that made me feel much smarter than I am about math (The Code Book, by Simon Singh), and several blurbs on it said the same thing, it’s so good because it makes you feel like you understand things you didn’t think you could. Now I’m not saying this book was like an article by Nial Ferguson, only that we like being flattered and made to feel as if we understand something. In the area of geopolitics, the real story would freak everyone out too much. So they read Tom Friedman.
MonkeyBoy
“Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch”
In the academic world one often hears sayings like “giving a talk is not really about conveying information. Instead a talk should be regarded as an advertisement to motivate people to read the papers”.
On the other hand there are people who think they can learn from short talks who may be the same people who don’t read books but instead read reviews o books so that they can “talk intelligently” about them.
Amir Khalid
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It seems to me that Malcolm Gladwell’s books are essentially collections of magazine articles that assert a phenomenon. He manages to make the assertion sound intriguing, but never quite convinces me that he’s on to something of real substance. I read a couple of his books, came away none too impressed. I reckon you’ve got Gladwell pegged just right: his work is a nonfiction analogue to mediocre novels.
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Simon Singh is pretty good.
I’m not trying to be hard core and tell people not to read Simon Singh and Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Pinker, just not to think that they’ll learn much from a 45 minute talk about Chimerica.
Suffern Ace
Not really willing to cut zakaria slack. He can simplify his work schedule if he feels that he can’t complete his many jobs without resorting to theft. He could also have just quoted the article. But he didn’t and won’t. Unlike a lot of us, the media stars can control their work.
ericblair
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Sure, that’s why you should have sunk all your money into big, successful Wang Laboratories in the 70’s. Oh, wait. No, those pimply bunch of guys over there with the CP/M operating system ripoff and no hardware. Yep. Simple.
There seems to be an awful lot of cherry picking, survivorship bias, and curve fitting going on with this stuff. There’s a skill in making things look obvious in retrospect, but that doesn’t mean anything going forward.
However, it does work wonders as comedy: Dow 36,000! Any real estate boom book! Great stuff. Just like giggling over a book on the four bodily humors.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age argues that we are currently in the transition to a post-literate society. If he is correct then you might as well rail against the tide coming in for all the good it will do you. But I can’t do justice to the depth of his ideas in a short blog comment, so you’ll just have to go out and get the book and read it for yourself
Zagrobleny
This is why you are my favorite.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: Oh no I’m agreeing with you more than you think. I think. I’m just fleshing out the reasons, saying that it’s comparable to why people buy clown paintings on velvet by the truckload rather than more serious art.
It sells because its pablum rather than adult food, not despite it. Americans have developed a weak intellectual digestive system.
I would have no idea how Singh’s stuff would seem to a mathematician, but in the case of Friedman I know a lot more about his subject matter so I can see how idiotic his take is more easily.
Singh can write, I should add, and that’s something I can judge more confidently since it’s what I do. Friedman is comically inept at writing, as Taibbi has so wonderfully documented over the years.
cat
Oh the irony of “It’s all just totebag heroin” in a post bemoaning the superficiality of “catch-phrase manufacturing”
DougJ
@cat:
It’s all in the game.
gloryb
@Susan K of the tech support: me too.
? Martin
On your quest to understand conservatives, take advantage of the work others have done for you. Brad DeLong will periodically lay out the thinking from the right in understandable ways on economics:
And farther down:
This is a situation where the left and the right generally have adopted their own definitions of unemployment and savings. The left always thinks of cyclical unemployment and promotes cyclical unemployment solutions because the New Deal is a template for cyclical unemployment and was a Democratic plan we can point to and say ‘look! we were right’! whereas the right always thinks of structural unemployment and promotes structural unemployment solutions because Reagan’s plans were a template for structural unemployment and was a Republican plan they can point to and say ‘look! we were right!’. It’s no more the fault of the right that they don’t recognize cyclical unemployment than it is the fault of the left that we don’t recognize structural. It’s mostly a matter of happenstance that the current situation is cyclical and therefore at this moment we’re right.
The same holds for savings. We see savings as investments in the broad economy that will reduce the overall cost for the economy to function – from business to consumers. It’s roads and shit. The right sees saving as cash in the bank and investments in the stock market, which sometimes are really, really needed – but not now. When interest rates are high, it’s expensive for companies to borrow, but in a strong stock market, they can issue new stock and raise money much more inexpensively. And we point to the New Deal as our definition of saving and they point to Reagan as theirs. Neither one is absolutely the right path – it depends on circumstances. Again, it’s just happenstance that the current situation favors our notion of saving over theirs. Sometimes tax cuts are the right solution, and sometimes cutting spending is, and so on. Just not now.
Part of the GOP’s stubbornness comes from their plan having worked most recently, therefore they assume it’s more right, or at least a sufficient substitute for our plan. Democrats were similarly stubborn in the 70s about their plan, at a time when it was the wrong plan. A lot of current Republicans remember that stubbornness, and Republican’s plans working, and they really hate the Democrats because of it – they branded the left as always being wrong about economics, because in their formative political years, Democrats more or less were (Carter was more right than much of Congress, however). The overwhelming preference for Democrats by young people will likely create a similarly large and entrenched Democratic base in 20-30 years for precisely the same reason – they grew up watching the GOP fail spectacularly at this, be stubborn, and they’ll hate them for it.
It’s just one cross-section, but I think it’s a useful one.
? Martin
@Suffern Ace:
A million times this. Not only does that attitude lead to overreaching (as it did with Zakaria) but it also deprives other people of work to fill that demand. It’s not like these guys can’t make the mortgage without the extra gigs.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
Except that for the middle class and below, right now they are engaging in this type of savings (reduced consumption), but it is going to debt reduction rather than building positive financial assets for those folks. The problem with our economy right now is that such a large fraction of our output is being consumed by household debt service, which is the consequence of a multi-decadal period of household wage stagnation and decline combined with the consumer spending boom in the late 90s and mid 00s.
I don’t know if this changes the argument Brad DeLong is making, but it is worth noting that very few American families will come out of our current period of reduced consumption with surplus cash or other liquid assets.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@ericblair:
I was quite young, but around and aware during the Digital Pre-Cambrian.
As a general rule, the technically superior solutions tended to NOT win. Other factors drove the early industry, not technical excellence. The winners tended to be the solutions that were ‘good enough’, more aggressively marketed, better funded, and adopted by more users more quickly for whatever reason.
And that’s fine, business is business. But the constant retconning in the tech industry whenever it decides to gaze up its own ass in wonder and amazement does get pretty irritating.
MattF
Look, some stuff is hard. You can spend a lifetime thinking about these things and no series of half-hour lectures will teach you how they work or what they mean. Also, a lot of people think they’re interested in learning about these hard things, but in fact, they’re not.
Digression about dry martinis. Once upon a time, I fell in with a crowd of moderate-to-heavy drinkers. Here’s a piece of advice: when you find a bottle of gin under the sink and the otherwise sweet and brilliant woman you’ve just met blinks and says “Think of it as a dry martini” it’s time to back out.
Maude
@Anya:
Blink is an awful load of tripe. he had another one come out after that. I didn’t bother.
He is a writer of the intellect as MBA Bush.
It’s hard to learn and perhaps people want to read easy claptrap.
DougJ
@MattF:
The horror.
rageahol
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
facebook.
WereBear
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: And then there’s the part that goes “I’m in reduced consumption because I’m in reduced income!”
No savings of any kind flow from that one.
WereBear
I was in a reader’s group for a while; dropped out when my ride did, because they read things I didn’t, though I appreciated the exposure to stuff outside my norm.
These were bright ladies with NO FRIGGIN’ TIME. They had jobs and kids and found these little books about the “bloody obvious” wonderful because they had no time for more depth.
Bill E Pilgrim
@MattF: You know who’s a terrific exception to all this however? Paul Krugman. He writes well, explains things clearly, and often makes it simple without seeming to dumb things down, or adds a “wonkish” warning when he gets a little more complex and technical.
I could never get through two pages of Tom Friedman, it was just so muddled, badly-written, and generally either baffling or boring. I could read Krugman all day long, have read several books, and felt more educated and informed as a result. Which is sort of the best we can ask for, really.
slag
I don’t know why I bother reading this blog since clearly it’s not teaching me anything of intellectual substance. I will go read a book instead. Thanks for the advice dougj, you illiterate son of a bitch.
DougJ
@slag:
If you don’t even catch the “Big Pimpin'” reference, you’re a lost cause.
Mike B
@Susan K of the tech support:
Ditto. I think we have a new euphemism.
AA+ Bonds
Amen. Against Ortega’s mass-man 24/7 and that’s the way it is
AA+ Bonds
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Fuckin nobody, that’s who, don’t try to justify if you want to brag you know macro w/o doing the reading
AA+ Bonds
@? Martin:
What do you mean “we”, liberal man
Naw, that ain’t “the left”
Maude
@rageahol:
Isn’t facebook losing members? The IPO sucked big time. I think it was two years too late.
Bill E Pilgrim
@AA+ Bonds: I’m not bragging that I know macro, I said I felt more educated and informed than before I read it.
I never felt that way for a moment reading Friedman or Gladwell, that was the point, which you seem to have missed.
There’a a vast difference between what Krugman does and what Friedman does. Granted, Krugman is a professional in the field that he writes about compared to say Gladwell, but so is Steven Pinker, who Doug brought up.
Friedman is as well, since he’s covered his subject matter for years while he worked as a professional journalist. This just makes it even worse that he can’t write without tripping over his typewriter on roughly every third word.
Brachiator
Yawn. TED talks, even Newsweek articles, have often pointed me to original research and further reading. Nobody ever suggests that you rely on this as your main source of information. What’s next? You gonna shit on Terry Gross’ “Fresh Air” program for being too middlebrow and superficial?
When bloggers aspire to be the new intellectual gatekeepers, you know that someone is getting too big for their britches.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Jewish Steel
Heroin is the good stuff, DougJ. Totebag Methadone is what we’re talking here.
Randy P
I’m not sure why the hating on “Blink”. It’s a model that fits most of the most important decisions of my life and my most successful experiences with problem solving.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top
We should have an open thread about Fashion Week!
I hear pantslessness is in.
Maude
@Randy P:
Pfft.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Sounds like fun. From an actual conversation two of my fashionista friends in New York recently had: “He doesn’t know Paul Smith from Prada”.
Maude
@schrodinger’s cat:
Good idea.
It’s the year of the shorts.
srv
I’m glad anti-disenstablish-TEDism is taking root now. There is so much good thinking out there, but the masses want their soundbites.
I’m blame the internets.
Just returned from Praha. Nine years ago it was six months ahead of the US on the music front. Last week it was twelve months behind on the top 40.
Must be the Russian influence or something.
Brachiator
@srv:
People keep saying this, but rarely actually deliver with useful recommendations that are something more than the usual suspects.
And I am always amused by people who may love the masses, but who are always fastidious about not being a part of the masses in matters of taste.
reflectionephemeral
I’ll go you one more & say it’s worse. When the model of successful “big thinking” is glib generalization, impressionable young minds will gravitate toward glib generalization, and genuinely believe it to be the highest intellectual pursuit.
I was a committed Tom Friedmanite centrist as a well-educated young-20s think-tanker; had the invasion of Iraq that I supported not disabused me of my misapprehensions about our discourse, I’d likely be there still.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I am partial to the work of Neil Postman, the foreword of whose “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is depicted in cartoon form here, and which was the inspiration for the early ’90s Roger Waters album “Amused to Death”. Will have to check out that book, which I hadn’t come across, thanks for mentioning it.
Matt McIrvin
Actually, at least when it comes to scientific content, books are the worst offenders. Pursue primary sources if you can, and if a popular book is the primary source it’s likely to be a crank trying to go over the heads of the scientific community to a mass audience.
Carnacki
@DougJ: Pimpin ain’t easy doug
shep
@Matt McIrvin:
There’s a reason for that. Primary sources tend to be laden with jargon and methodological details that may be poorly understood and/or of little interest to laymen. I’d say, at least make sure the book is well-sourced and, hopefully, written by people who have done some of the research. Without books that cover a subject, you may have to do enough research to write a book yourself.
shep
I say Zakaria’s wet-Martini article is all wet. First-off the hipster’s main sin was ordering his with a “lemon twist,” not very dry (which, according to my 50s-era Playboy Bar Book, is 12-1). A real Martini is all about the gin so, if you’re going to drown it with Vermouth, definitely don’t order a very refined gin like Sapphire (regular Bombay or Beefeater will do), you’ll overpower it completely. And a splash of vermouth coating the inside of the glass (not a shaker – stirred but never shaken – the other most common sin) before pouring the gin, is a perfectly decent way to make a very dry Martini.
What Zakaria may be missing (he’s a relative youngster) is the reason Martini’s and many other “mixed-drinks” were heavily mixed back in the (pre-to-post prohibition) day is because the liquor tasted like shit. Thankfully, those days are long gone, along with 4-1 Martinis.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@taylormattd: Try it. Olives soaked in Gin with lotsa olives soaked in gin& vermouth. Try it Vermouth is de reguer [sp?]
.
SRW1
“It’s all just totebag heroin.”
No doubt, that dude possesses a certain level of creativity. But too many rough edges. And he’s insulting the wrong kind of people. Sorry, no big fee career on the speaking circuit for you, DougJ. Besides, how would you build a brand for a shape shifter?