One easy trick to make yourself smarter.
You can just ignore the bad pundits. You don’t have to read them. You can just carry right on with your life.
Instead of doing that, you are free not to do it.
“Ugh, the New York Times opinion page is so awful!” Don’t read it then. “I can’t stand the bullshit that Bret Stephens wrote!” Don’t read it then. “I hate the sanctimony of David Brooks! I hate the smugness of Matt Yglesias! I hate the fascists at the Wall Street Journal, the bootlickers at the Washington Post, and the clowns at the Free Press!”
Don’t read them then. Problem solved.
You may interpret this as me telling you to shelter yourself from challenging opinions. Not at all. I encourage everyone to read widely and freely. When you read widely and freely, you are able to familiarize yourself with the work of many people. What you will come to realize is that many or even most of those people are not worth reading. Some because they don’t have much to say, and others because they are consistently wrong in a way that, once you figure it out, allows you to project their opinions into the future without needing to constantly check in on them. You can move on. You gave them their audition, and they didn’t pass. Not many will! This is all as it should be. You have a limited amount of time to read and most of that time should be spent reading books and the second most time should be spent reading facts, such as news. Opinion writing that does not prove its value is crowding out other things that have a much higher chance of being worthwhile.
Why does this seem so hard for so many of us in practice? Because we are all haunted by the demons of prestige. Prestige, a false god, tells us that a person’s work is valuable because of their position, their title, rather than because of the work itself. In the case of certain powerful people, this may be true. (It’s worth knowing what Elon Musk and Donald Trump think because it may directly affect many lives, notwithstanding the fact that they are morons.) In the case of writers, however, this is always false. Good work is valuable and bad work is not. The understandable tendency of many people to use prestige as a heuristic to guide their reading often leads them down a dead end road of frustration. [...]
Writers must be taken seriously if the quality of their work demands it and if not, not. That’s it! There are many ways to be a worthwhile pundit. Some are experts on specific subjects, and some get access to very important people’s thoughts, and some are gifted at distilling many disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and some are funny, a quality which justifies itself. My point is not that famous pundits are never worth reading, but rather that they are never worth reading just because of who they are. Look at this transcript of Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discussing their own careers. One thing you may notice is that both of these people have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but sitting at a computer blogging. Does that mean that they don’t know anything? Not at all. Then again, does it mean they do know anything? Also no. “Winning the pundit lottery with a New York Times gig” tells you nothing about whether these people are worthy of your attention. They must earn your respect, and their right to your time, solely with the quality of their work. That’s all they have! And you can judge that for yourself. Any further temptation to check for them because of the positions they hold is an error of judgment, by you. [...]
The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse, as you would expect. This is bad enough when it’s, you know, Matt Yglesias morphing into a Democratic Party power broker; it is even worse when it is a calculated political effort, of the sort that Rahm Emanuel is trying to pull off now by parlaying his stint as a monotonous Wall Street Journal columnist into a presidential campaign.
James Carville is a wheezing old coot. Why is he influential? Because we all pay attention to him! Also, Donald Trump. Think about it. Depriving this sort of person of the material benefits of having a large audience is a patriotic act.
If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it. But if you are a regular person who finds yourself continually getting mad at the idiot pundits you continue to read—stop!
The idea that if you want to be a well informed person you are obligated to read all the stuff that certain prestigious writers and outlets publish is not much different from the idea that since McDonald’s is very popular, you are obligated to stop there and eat a Big Mac every day. To keep your finger on the pulse. This, just like the belief that you must read every Jonathan Chait story, will eventually give you a heart attack. Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; and, Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses (HTW):]***
"If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that? [...]America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.
The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed."
