We Should Expect Most Public Intellectuals To Be A Stupid Person's Smart Person

But maybe that's not such a bad thing

The most common charge made against public intellectuals is that they’re a stupid person’s smart person. One can find people making this accusation against Jordan Peterson, Noam Chomsky (lol), Ben Shapiro, Aldous Huxley, and various others. It’s a nice insult that amounts to little more than saying that those impressed by a public intellectual who you don’t like are stupid.

Yet despite this, I think this charge is often right. More precisely, one mostly becomes a public intellectual by being an average person’s idea of a smart person.

One becomes a public intellectual by producing ideas that are widely regarded as impressive. But crucially, this is not enough to become a public intellectual. No one doubts that Terrence Tao is an off-the-charts genius, but he’s not a public intellectual. The things he writes about are not fit for public consumption, so no one regards him as a thought leader. He’s taken seriously by professional mathematicians, but by others, he is ignored.

Now, in Tao’s case, he’s not a public intellectual mostly because the things he talks about aren’t ideas that most people can follow. The first word in “public intellectual” is, after all, public! But there are lots of people who do write about important topics but are not public intellectuals.

For example, Alexander Pruss is, by universal recognition, an insane genius. He has a Ph.D in both math and philosophy, as well as a gargantuan stack of published papers. Even when I disagree with Pruss about many, many topics, I recognize that he’s almost superhumanly clever.

Pruss will never be a significant public intellectual.

Pruss’s arguments are too clever for most people to grasp. He could never succeed as an apologist, because the things that he says are far beyond the grasp of most people. Many of his articles go over my head, and they’re usually about topics I know a thing or two about. Instead, the public intellectuals who get famous for defending the existence of God are clowns like Frank Turek who, to quote a memorable phrase from Feser, “wouldn’t know metaphysics from metamucil.” Because Turek is accessible and clear, his ideas are fit for public consumption.

Nearly everyone agrees that Derek Parfit was, likewise, a towering genius of philosophy. And not only that—he was a genius who wrote about important things. He wrote about personal identity, normative ethics, and whether morality was objective. Despite this, however, he is a marginal historical figure, primarily influencing other philosophers. Because he was a philosopher and not a polemicist, his criticisms of moral relativism will never be as widely regarded as Jordan Peterson’s uninformed rants about relativism.

Motivated reasoning is among the most powerful forces in the universe. People want to be told what they already know. They value persuasive defenses of their existing views over new, genuinely valuable insights. Occasionally a public intellectual can rise to prominence by providing sufficiently mind-blowing new ideas, but most public intellectuals become prominent simply by finding increasingly clever ways to argue for the ideas espoused by the masses. C.S. Lewis was widely regarded because many loved his convincing defenses of Christianity, but if Lewis had been a Hindu, he’d have remained entirely unknown.

Thus, most public intellectuals become influential by finding persuasive arguments for things that loads of people believe. People don’t value insights in a vacuum, unless those insights can be used to beat their political opponents over the head with. A middlebrow philosopher arguing for the pro-life position has a higher chance of becoming famous, because millions of people want to hear arguments against abortion. If another philosopher had similarly good arguments against meat-eating, their insights would be ignored.

Thus, Chomsky became a prominent public intellectual because he argued persuasively for left-wing ideas. He wrote long books defending those ideas, and he never seemed to lose an argument. William Lane Craig became prominent because he kept crushing atheists in debates about the existence of God. Ben Shapiro became prominent for debating well in defense of right-wing ideas. This is the general path toward fame for a public intellectual: say something people want to hear, and argue for it well.

This is, of course, not the only path. Peter Singer became prominent not because he was arguing for a position that was previously popular, but because he presented new ideas that few had considered. He shone a light on the horrifying mistreatment of animals in factory farms. One can sometimes become an influential public intellectual not by convincingly defending old ideas, but by generating or publicizing new ones.

Scott Alexander became a prominent public intellectual by writing ridiculously long and thoughtful pieces on almost every topic under the sun. People read Scott Alexander not because he tells them what they want to hear (“See, I was right about Aducanumab all along!!!), but because he writes things that are hilarious, convincing, and informative. Scott Alexander isn’t famous as an average person’s smart person, when his readers aren’t average—their average IQ is ~128. Similarly, I’m not a very influential public intellectual, but I’m pretty sure the main reason people read me—with my lengthy posts about the anthropic argument and God that you almost all agree are wrong—isn’t because I tell you that what you already believed is right.

But despite these exceptions, the most common path towards being a public intellectual is being regarded by average people as smart and persuasive. This often places a cap on how smart and thoughtful you can be—the most thoughtful and reasonable people don’t have views that break down neatly on partisan lines, and thus can’t be uniformly cheered for by people on either side. There’s a reason that there’s no person as influential as Ben Shapiro, with a regular show, who has the political views of Scott Alexander!

But despite this, I think those who dismiss public intellectuals as being an average person’s smart person are making a big mistake. For the crowds are wise.

Whatever you think about Ben Shapiro, he’s not a moron. He graduated high school at 16, college at 20, had written two books by the age of 21, and was a nationally syndicated columnist at 17. Similarly, Chomsky is obviously insanely intelligent—he’s the most cited living public intellectual, and has revolutionized linguistics multiple times, making him by far the most influential linguist in world history. If someone offered me a million dollars to be a far-left partisan, spending all my days studying left-wing talking points, I could not do as well in debates as Chomsky—his breadth of knowledge is almost superhuman. William Lane Craig, while prone to overstate the force of arguments for God’s existence, still is an impressive and well-regarded philosopher—having written extensively on a whole range of topics.

The factors that cause a person to be regarded as intelligent by average people correlate greatly with intelligence. To be well-regarded by average people, it helps to be thoughtful, able to convincingly rebut opposing arguments, have a good deal of verbal intelligence, and know lots of things. But if one has the aforementioned traits, they’re probably pretty smart.

There are, of course, systematic errors that average people make when evaluating public intellectuals. They have a tendency to overestimate the competence of partisan hacks, and underestimate those who provide fair, objective analysis. Not every thoughtful person can, therefore, become a public intellectual, and sometimes being more thoughtful can hinder one’s public intellectual status. Ben Shapiro would have an easier time if he weren’t thoughtful and principled enough to have major objections to Trump. He’s a much smarter guy than Tucker Carlson, but much less successful, because Tucker is better at appealing to average people with more populist inclinations.

But despite these errors, the assessment of average people is a good guide to how perceptive people are. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize a genius. You don’t have to have to have an IQ within 50 points of Chomsky to recognize that Chomksy is terrifyingly intelligent.

Therefore, while public intellectuals generally rise to prominence by being an average person’s idea of a smart person, this usually is because they are, in fact, a smart person. There’s a great deal of correlation between those who are regarded as smart by average people and those who are genuinely really smart.