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"Jim Manzi reviews the Levitt-Lott feud"

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

When it comes to public intellectuals, it's primarily marketing and salesmanship. As with any competitive human endeavor, the winners use their greater leverage to (re)write current history to their benefit and their foes’ detriment.

Hopefully, such purported experts at least have some instinct to recognize issues and creatively combine important work from real experts into an enjoyable read like the occasional New Yorker story. What is insufferable is when public intellectuals like Gladwell (self-evident, shallow and meaningless business “paradigms”) and Freidman (evangelizing repackaged commonplace ideas as new and groundbreaking) appear to be drinking the very cool-aid they just concocted with their PR flacks in the backroom.

It's extremely rare that an acknowledged public intellectual is actually considered the real deal by experts in his field. Richard Fineman is the only one I can think of off the cuff. Einstein was more a dorm poster than a charismatic communicator like Fineman.

- JAN

9/11/07, 10:28 PM

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