DavidGelernter

Quora Answer : What are your thoughts about David Gelernter being Trump's Science advisor?

Jan 24, 2017

Huh? EricRaymond wasn't available?

Look, there's always a few computer geeks that fall down the right-wing rabbit hole despite being pretty smart in other ways. I haven't been following David Gelernter so I wasn't aware he was one. But a quick glance at his bio suggests he is.

The quote about beauty is spot on. And he's basically right that higher education is going to be severely challenged and need to be rethought in the next century. OTOH, he seems to be conflating that with his own prejudice and a sense of schadenfreude that all those humanist academics will soon be out of a job.

At best, you might expect a bit of extra funding to go to some good "hard-science" type projects. Not a bad thing in itself. But simply attacking and talking down the institutions of public learning rather than sympathetically helping them adapt to the new environment isn't going to do much for American science or intellectual life in general.

Update : the question now contains a video. It's worth watching. Gelernter is in many ways a smart guy. His crusade against hierarchical file-systems in favour of time-lines has been vindicated as people switch to using, and become dependent on, their Facebook and chat-app feeds for managing almost everything.