There has historically been a bias against money-makers among intellectuals. Being an academic, I inherited this bias without really thinking about it. It’s only recently that I began thinking about it again - and as normal I got there via a weird route.

I’ll spare a lot of the historical details, but I’m not saying that intellectuals historically weren’t wealthy. In fact, they were. But they rarely made their wealth by actually working - they had land, family, or positions in society that paid for their lifestyle.

I can trace this intellectual bias all the way back to Plato - who proposed that good men, and by analogy, good cities, would fall by concerning themselves with making money, and Aristotle’s disdain for the working class is well documented.

So what? Plato and Aristotle are but two philosophers that no one reads. Wrong - Plato and Aristotle’s ideas has infused the intellectual climate for the last two millenia. It’s no accident that democracy only became respectable after the Enlightenment placed such a high value on the quality of the “average” person. The idea that the “average” person was fit to have any say in ruling a nation before then was unheard of.

The underlying fear that the intellectuals had was that the desirous elements of humanity is uncontrollable by reason and that this element is only concerned with pulling value from the world to the individual. As long as people ruled by their desires had power, their greed would continue to pull and pull value from the community such that the community would collapse. Communities require relatively reciprocal flows of value.

So much for the historical background. Trust me, it has a point. Continue reading →

I had a forehead slap moment last Tuesday when I was proofreading a letter my wife had written to a military officer. She’s doing some research on families of Army National Guardsmen who have deployed, and she needed to write a letter to an officer to keep the research on track. She asked me to proofread it because I can put on the military hat and look at her writing through the eyes of the person she was writing for.

So I put on the hat and took a quick look at the message. She wrote it in Mail.app, and all I initially saw was about 10 paragraphs composed of four or five long sentences. No headings, no sub-bullets…just a lot of paragraphs and a lot of big words. The alarms went off, because I knew there was no way in hell that her letter was going to be read thoroughly. It was just too unapproachable for her audience, and furthermore, he likely would have been reading it on a Crackberry.

I begin to restructure the message a bit, and noticed something very interesting: the key point to be gleaned from a paragraph was at the bottom of the paragraph. I thought about it a bit more, and it dawned on me: that’s why people have trouble reading academic writing.

Look at some of the better posts you’ve read online recently and see how they flow. They generally start with a key idea at the head and have a few sentences that flesh that idea out. Lists are paradigmatic of this structure; an item is introduced and qualified, an item is introduced and qualified, rinse and repeat. Slap an introductory paragraph (which starts with the key idea of the post) and a concluding paragraph (which may still start with the key idea of the post) and you have the post structure that makes up 75% of most blogs, this one included.

Academic writing is usually just the opposite of that structure. We’ll start with a transition sentence that gets the reader from the previous paragraph into the one we’re currently on. We’ll spend a few sentences constructing and qualifying the idea and finish the paragraph with the topic sentence. Non-academic paragraph structure descends from key ideas to their supporting ideas, whereas academic paragraph ascends from supporting ideas to the key idea. So, when people feel like they have to wade through an entire paragraph to get a point in academic writing, it’s because, in fact, they do have to wade through the entire paragraph to get to the point.

For a case in point, look at the structure of the following paragraph:

Aquinas?s motivation for advancing the Doctrine of Double Effect comes from his absolutist ethical perspective. One of the counter-intuitive results of absolutist ethical systems, in general, is that they deem as impermissible acts that many reasonable people find intuitively permissible. If one is never allowed to harm another person, then an agent cannot defend herself in cases where she is threatened, despite the folk intuition that people are morally permitted to defend themselves when they are unjustly threatened. Aquinas is attempting to make room for folk intuition while still holding onto the idea that it?s wrong to harm people–so he moves the discussion from what one does to what one intends to do. So, it turns out for Aquinas that the general moral prohibition against harming other people is, at best, misstated; the general moral prohibition should be against intentionally harming other people, and his theory attempts to flesh out conditions for something counting as an intentional harm.

This paragraph is an excerpt from one of my more readable philosophical essays. You can probably figure out that the paragraph before this one talks about Aquinas’s absolutist ethical perspective. The sentences in between are run-ups to the final point that “the general moral prohibition [against harming people] should be against intentionally harming other people.”

I have looked through a few representative samples of academic writing and my writing is not idiosyncratic in structure. It’s a product of the academic culture, and we train people to write this way and reinforce that training through the academic rewards structure.

I worry, though, that we are doing them a disservice, for we are training and rewarding a writing style that doesn’t translate well outside of our ivory towers. Furthermore, we may be doing ourselves a disservice, since we then have to struggle with our own writing once we’re out of the academic bubble.

It took me awhile last week to translate my wife’s letter. (I dropped it into a word processor to save it as a PDF, and it wound up being 2.5 pages, single-spaced). In the end, we compromised and just bolded the key idea, since there was really no way to restructure her letter without a massive rewrite. The ironic thing about the letter was that it was a very, very well written letter…if it were going to an academic audience.

Dustin @Lifehack has pointed out that the model for personal productivity that I proposed yesterday seems to be an academic model. While I see where he’s coming from, I think there’s a much larger question to consider: is the Internet and its knowledgeworking minions killing the role of academia?

(Introductory Sidebar: I will be using “the Internet” as shorthand for all of the stuff that goes on on the Internet. Also, “institution” will be used in the sociological sense, as in “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals” (definition from Wikipedia).)

Perhaps it seems hyperbolic, but I’m starting to think more and more that it’s the case. Think about some of the historical roles of the academic institution in society:

It allowed a place for the free discussion of ideas

The Universities in the past were the one place where scholars could discuss ideas without (too much) fear of State or Church intrusion, coercion, or punishment. Not surprisingly, many of the arguments that were used to advocate freedom of speech and association were arguments started from scholars at Universities who didn’t want State or Church “oversight” into their research.

It allowed a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship.

A heavy portion of the educational model adopted by States focused solely on making competent workers and citizens. What many people don’t realize is that States have done this not for the sake of the citizens being educated, but for the continuance of the State. (I’ll stay away from the rathole of the state of American education today.)

Universities and college’s provided a place where people could go beyond basic arithmetic and writing and learn science, math, literature, and most of the other stuff we still learn today. It’s important to realize the first universities were private, meaning that the State at the time was not in the business of higher education.

It served as society’s evaluator of who had knowledge and who didn’t.

The idea of academic degrees is modeled off the way tradesmen are certified. The main point is that society needed a way to determine and document who had sufficient knowledge to teach or do certain subjects, and Universities leveraged their credibility and evaluated the ability of their students to fulfill those roles.

It employed people whose jobs were not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

The rise of the academic institution created yet another class (the clergy and aristocrats were the others) of people whose role in society excluded them from manual labor. This is a critical function, since you can’t really do a lot of theorizing, writing, and such while you’re out in the fields chasing goats.

The rise of the Internet and knowledgeworkers seriously threatens this historical role. I’ll show this point by point:

It allows a place for the free discussion of ideas.

Free speech is nowhere more prevalent than on the ‘Net (okay, outside of China). Furthermore, the old academic model required people to be in the same spatio-temporal location, whereas the Internet now allows for asynchronous communication, collaberation, and idea dispersal.

It allows a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship

It’s probably not an understatement to say that anyone able to teach themselves can become competent in any body of knowledge if they spent enough time doing research online. This will become even more true as knowledgeworkers continue to create informative, accurate content and as the search engines continually get better at finding that content. This seriously threatens academia, since a) the information is free, and b) the academic institution has claimed a monopoly on knowledge since the Middle Ages. What happens to any institution that attempts to have a monopoly on a resource that people can get elsewhere for free?

It serves as society’s evaluator of who has knowledge and who doesn’t.

The Internet hasn’t quite managed to do this one yet (perhaps because certain institutions want to have a monopoly on that privilege?). Internet experts, however, do currently have the power to be recognized as such, and will often be funded by academic institutions to teach classes in the subjects they are experts in, but there’s simply not much of a model for the Internet that can separate popularity from knowledgeable expertise. (Sidebar:I’d rather have Merlin Mann teach a course in Productivity Theory over most profs I know and have seen anyday; likewise for Steve Pavlina in Internet Commerce)

I think it’ll be a long time for there to be any real advances made here, and if they are they’ll probably piggyback on academic models. Think about how many academic institutions that we currently have that are going the online route and how poorly they are being received as legitimate academic institutions.

It employs people whose jobs are not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

Successful websites and blogs generate enough income that people are now quitting their full-time jobs. If the experts are right that anyone can potentially make money online, then we have another institution and class of people (besides politicians, clergy, and academics) that are exempt from manual (marketplace) labor.

The real question is whether the Internet is competing with the Academic institution or whether it’s simply supplementing or replicating the roles of the academic institution. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s competing, especially as more and more would-be scholars bail from academia to become (you guessed it) knowledgeworkers.

So what?

If I’m anywhere close to right, Dustin’s insight that the model I’ve proposed seems to be an academic model is partially right. But that’s only because many of the same functions of academia are being either replicated or taken over by the Internet. It would be no surprise, then, that knowledgeworkers would need to ask themselves the same types of questions that academics must ask themselves.

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