Maybe there’s a filtering effect for public intellectuals.
If you only ever talk about things you really know a lot about, unless that thing is very interesting or you yourself are something that gets a lot of attention (e.g. a polyamorous cam girl who’s very good at statistics, a Muslim Socialist running for mayor in the world’s richest city, etc), you probably won’t become a ‘public intellectual’.
And if you venture out of that and always admit it when you get something wrong, explicitly, or you don’t have an area of speciality and admit to getting things wrong all the time, maybe there’s a cap to how much of a ‘public intellectual’ you can become?
After all, maybe CNN, MSNBC, etc, don’t want to risk having someone on their program who’s likely to say that something they said, and the program broadcasted, was wrong?
One can say that being intellectually honest, which often comes packaged with being transparent about the messiness and nuance of things, is anti-memetic.
Seems to rhyme with the criticism of pundits in Superforecasting
i.e. (iirc), most high profile pundits make general, sweeping, dramatic sounding statements that make good TV but are difficult to falsify after the fact
Maybe there’s a filtering effect for public intellectuals.
If you only ever talk about things you really know a lot about, unless that thing is very interesting or you yourself are something that gets a lot of attention (e.g. a polyamorous cam girl who’s very good at statistics, a Muslim Socialist running for mayor in the world’s richest city, etc), you probably won’t become a ‘public intellectual’.
And if you venture out of that and always admit it when you get something wrong, explicitly, or you don’t have an area of speciality and admit to getting things wrong all the time, maybe there’s a cap to how much of a ‘public intellectual’ you can become?
After all, maybe CNN, MSNBC, etc, don’t want to risk having someone on their program who’s likely to say that something they said, and the program broadcasted, was wrong?
Maybe less articles cite them as a source?
One can say that being intellectually honest, which often comes packaged with being transparent about the messiness and nuance of things, is anti-memetic.
Seems to rhyme with the criticism of pundits in Superforecasting
i.e. (iirc), most high profile pundits make general, sweeping, dramatic sounding statements that make good TV but are difficult to falsify after the fact