From the examples you’ve given, you show a pretty heavy bias toward “intellectual work as exploration” providing us with things that are more true and useful, and I suppose I don’t doubt you, in that it is “better” to take the approach more likely to give us something true and useful at the end (for which exploration, if not fully optimized, seems better-suited than performance).
That said, if I understand you correctly, it seems as though much exploration involves looking at the “performance” of others, and that performance exists only a as a layer on top of someone’s prior exploration (however distant). Peter Singer sitting and reading and thinking for a long time is important, but Peter Singer giving a TED talk is also important, if we think of “intellectual work” as “have the idea, and make sure others also come to have the idea”.
Thanks, I found this helpful. TED talks are a great example of intellectual performance without a negative connotation.
I’ve realized I’m most interested in the question of which metaphor to be holding while doing intellectual work.
On that, I think it makes sense to be (almost) exclusively using the “exploration” metaphor when doing intellectual work.
Then, it seems good to switch to the “performance” metaphor when it’s time to propagate ideas (or hand off to a partner specialized in intellectual performance).
Open question for me: Is it costly to grow skillful in intellectual performance? Does it make one’s intellectual work worse / less truth-seeking? (My intuition is “yes, it’s costly” but seems plausible that the performance skill could be safely compartmentalized.)
My intuition is that becoming skillful is difficult, as it would be for most performance skills, but that it’s quite possible to do so without getting worse at intellectual work, as long as you continue to value that work and have a social circle that won’t let you slack off on truthseeking. Many intellectual “performers” who get a bit epistemically lazy may have been prevented from doing so if they’d had friends around to check their worst impulses.
From the examples you’ve given, you show a pretty heavy bias toward “intellectual work as exploration” providing us with things that are more true and useful, and I suppose I don’t doubt you, in that it is “better” to take the approach more likely to give us something true and useful at the end (for which exploration, if not fully optimized, seems better-suited than performance).
That said, if I understand you correctly, it seems as though much exploration involves looking at the “performance” of others, and that performance exists only a as a layer on top of someone’s prior exploration (however distant). Peter Singer sitting and reading and thinking for a long time is important, but Peter Singer giving a TED talk is also important, if we think of “intellectual work” as “have the idea, and make sure others also come to have the idea”.
Thanks, I found this helpful. TED talks are a great example of intellectual performance without a negative connotation.
I’ve realized I’m most interested in the question of which metaphor to be holding while doing intellectual work.
On that, I think it makes sense to be (almost) exclusively using the “exploration” metaphor when doing intellectual work.
Then, it seems good to switch to the “performance” metaphor when it’s time to propagate ideas (or hand off to a partner specialized in intellectual performance).
Open question for me: Is it costly to grow skillful in intellectual performance? Does it make one’s intellectual work worse / less truth-seeking? (My intuition is “yes, it’s costly” but seems plausible that the performance skill could be safely compartmentalized.)
My intuition is that becoming skillful is difficult, as it would be for most performance skills, but that it’s quite possible to do so without getting worse at intellectual work, as long as you continue to value that work and have a social circle that won’t let you slack off on truthseeking. Many intellectual “performers” who get a bit epistemically lazy may have been prevented from doing so if they’d had friends around to check their worst impulses.