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June 08, 2007
Advice to Aspiring Pundits
Study philosophy. I agree with Matt that it's far and away the most useful discipline for this business. I was a poli-sci major, and I acutely regret it. The fluency with logic and argument that philosophy confers really does offer an advantage to its adherents. Blogging is hugely reliant on the ability to accurately and critically assess arguments and correctly comprehend their weaknesses, and philosophy is the best training for that. If you simply hate the word "ontological" and are desperate for a knowledge base, you can go history. But really: Don't do poli-sci. Read the newspaper instead.
June 8, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Couldn't the same be said of people who study Sciences? I'm thinking mostly of Mathematics and to a lesser extent, Physics. Logical argumentations are hardly exclusive to Pholosophy. Philosophy majors do end up usually with a fancier vocabulary and better literary knowledge, which I guess earns you "street cred" in the interwebs.
Posted by: Chuck | Jun 8, 2007 3:04:49 PM
Didn't you have any methodology classes in your poli sci major? That should have covered a lot of key points about the validity of certain arguments and models, and the reliability and proper use (or misuse) of data.
Plus of course you are saying this now having already gotten the benefit of your poli sci training. If you'd gone through philosophy you might know a lot less about the actors that shape politics, and how they fit together to create policy. I mean no matter what major someone chooses inevitably there are going to be holes in what it provides. But I'm not sure that being a generalist, someone who can carefully employ logic, but who doesn't know much about how the NSC functions, the structure of the government of Iran, or the reinforcing connections between big business and the federal government, is really all that preferable to the alternative.
Posted by: Armand | Jun 8, 2007 3:07:15 PM
Study statistics/economic modeling. Two or three semesters of a stats/methods sequence makes it far easier to actually understand and explain research results.
Posted by: SamChevre | Jun 8, 2007 3:12:03 PM
"If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics." - George Santanaya
Now I need something about Math & Logic from Frege, or something about dialectic, Socratic not Hegelian. Then a quote from Hesse on the Glass Bead Game, to show the sterility of manipulating tokens. Finally, maybe a little Nietzsche, then something about Rhetoric, like:
"If you have them by the genitals, their hearts and minds will follow."
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jun 8, 2007 3:24:35 PM
Philosophical training is good for practice in argument and thinking rigorously and in new ways, but I wouldn't place that above actually knowing stuff. If you want to be a pundit, you should study what you want to pundize about, and just practice being careful with your arguments on your own, I think. I think personal traits and habits, such as taking the views of other smart, serious people seriously enough to understand them (to whatever extent they're important views--it can take a lot of work), are more important in good argument than philosophical training. Take philosophy classes too, if you want to get some of that in. But studying the fields you want to comment on is probably best all around. (As pointed out above, you do get a certain amount of philosophy in poli sci anyway, though probably taught somewhat differently.)
I should add that philosophical training also comes with the natural danger that you'll start to be enchanted by its star theories and believe them in ways you probably shouldn't. That risk also applies in other fields, but the theories in philosophy can be particularly unconnected to reality at times. A strong skeptical streak is helpful to get through it without becoming needlessly weird.
Maybe Neil will stick up for the field as training for punditry more enthusiastically than I would.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jun 8, 2007 3:25:48 PM
I majored in both, Ezra, and I could not agree more. My poli sci degree -- outside of the statistical aspects of it -- earned me largely nothing. My philosophy degree earned me the art of thinking well.
Posted by: jhupp | Jun 8, 2007 3:27:24 PM
I'm coming at it from the other side. I majored in physics, and while I developed some strong quantitative skills, I don't actually know very much about anything. And I certainly wouldn't call it good preparation for journalism, since even physics professors, chosen from the brightest physics majors, tend to be poor writers.
I've never bought the "teach you how to think" line that folks who write undergraduate majors manuals like to pull about certain fields - usually ones that reputably don't teach you anything else of practicle value. Rather, I think it's true, but I think it's equally true about studying most subjects seriously and deeply.
Physics and Philosophy students both tend to do very well on the GRE and LSAT, which probably aren't bad proxies for "knowing how to think," but it's not at all clear that this has much to do with the training they receive. Yglesias and Sanchez would have done well as Poli Sci majors, too.
Posted by: Andrew Myers | Jun 8, 2007 3:35:30 PM
I agree that it's important to know something about the subject matter upon which one is expounding, but yay Ezra for recognizing the value of a good education in philosophy!!
nolo, MA Phil
Posted by: nolo | Jun 8, 2007 3:37:12 PM
Hey, some historians actually like the word "ontological"!
Posted by: inkybrain | Jun 8, 2007 3:45:39 PM
"but who doesn't know much about how the NSC functions, the structure of the government of Iran, or the reinforcing connections between big business and the federal government, is really all that preferable to the alternative."
All of that is within philosophy. It was Aristotle who started collecting constitutions from a wide variety of states. Xenophon and Plato both discuss defense policy extensively (Xenophon was a leading and successful general, so he knew this topic as well as almost anyone else in ancient Greece) as does Machiavelli (Machiavelli was in charge of the Florentine civil militia, so this wasn't idle theoretical bs on his part, either). Clausewitz studied philosophy at the Prussian Military Academy. The reinforcing connections between big business and the federal government? Nobody has done deeper work on that than Ranciere or Baudrillard or Debord or Badiou.
Posted by: burritoboy | Jun 8, 2007 3:46:05 PM
One thing I'm sort of curious about is what Ezra takes as examples of good work by Matt or Julian or anybody else that display the skills they learned by studying philosophy.
There are a lot of little ways I see it in how Matt and Julian write -- when they're giving an argument, they often take special effort to make it clear exactly how the structure of the argument goes. And there are a bunch of times when I read them and I happily get the sense that this is something written by someone who was trained in philosophy, but I can't put my finger on exactly what about their posts is making me think that.
Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf | Jun 8, 2007 3:47:31 PM
I suspect the thing one should study is writing.
The question of how to construct and argument in an understandable way, with the logic that backs you up,comes from working at non-fiction essay writing. At least that's what I found. It's interesting, because I've written this bite-sized essayish form forever; now it turns out that it is well suited for blogging. And I have to say, I've really enjoyed it. The philosophy courses I took (on women's issues and social ethics) were immensely helpful, but most of my college courses were, in that my professors were rigorous with us about making us think, and expressing ourselves through writing. Learning to write well, that strikes me as the thing at the heart of blogging.
Posted by: weboy | Jun 8, 2007 3:49:17 PM
I figured out pretty quickly in college that while I enjoyed Poli Sci, it was fairly easy to bullshit my way through it. So I switched to economics and ended up studying heterodox theory as much as possible. If I could do it all over again, I'd supplement my econ degree with sociology... but I am of the opinion that economic theory is useless for solving real-world problems without cultural context.
Posted by: senior | Jun 8, 2007 4:02:06 PM
Ditto to nolo's comment. :-)
Cernig, B.A. (Hons) Philosophy.
Posted by: Cernig | Jun 8, 2007 4:11:30 PM
Ezra, you should have taken PS 10 and then concentration I, political theory, for the best of both worlds. I didn't, but this quarter got to take a class about political violence under concentration I. Best class of my three years here and far and away the best professor i've ever had.
Posted by: UCLA Polisci Student | Jun 8, 2007 4:42:34 PM
Actually, in defense of history, I would say that the best history involves skills very similar to what Ezra is describing. Basically what you're supposed to do in assessing work is zero in on the critical flaws and analytic gaps in any given argument (and not just that Professor Hotshot neglected to look in box F17 of the National Flugelhorn Archive or something). You might not need to know the Peano notation explicitly or anything; but an understanding of logic in general is crucial to producing history that doesn't totally suck. Then again, maybe I'm just trying to defend my chosen (and oft-misbegotten) discipline here.
Posted by: inkybrain | Jun 8, 2007 4:43:46 PM
"I'm coming at it from the other side. I majored in physics, and while I developed some strong quantitative skills, I don't actually know very much about anything."
Yeah, but you could wing it as a software engineer if need be to keep the wolf from the door. The physical sciences, and the applied end of the life sciences, might not train one for rigorous blogging or scintillating cocktail party banter, but they at least put bread on the table. [OK, not as much bread compared to the JDs, MDs, and MBAs, but still.]
And at least there's some thought about methods.
Mind you, Engineering, with its focus on "what do I have to assume to make this problem tractable" is probably a Really Bad training for making rigorous arguments. And I can cite as data the fact that the fallicious-but-technical-sounding pro-Creationism and anti-Anthropogenic Global Warming screeds ones finds on the intertubes tend to have engineers as authors.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | Jun 8, 2007 4:51:09 PM
Kinda reminds me of the British Civil Service, who used to prefer people who'd studied Classics 'cos it was viewed as not coloring their judgement on current events.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | Jun 8, 2007 5:02:08 PM
I double-majored in history and politics, and although I work in politics now, I'm certainly not working on the same kinds of things I primarily studied. Learning about how Marx diverged from Feuerbach is nice, but fairly unrelated to win numbers and outreach strategies.
I think the real takeaway from any college course of study is much less the actual knowledge played with, and more the art of playing with knowledge. Facts are easy to come by; the ability to spot the connections and make them into an argument is more important, and takes practice. To that extent, I guess since philosophy is all about playing with knowledge, it's a useful field, but you can acquire the same sorts of meta-skills (reading comprehension, writing, bullshit detection, comparing and contrasting) no matter the meat of what you're studying.
Posted by: SDM | Jun 8, 2007 5:04:55 PM
Even though I'm a math geek, I'd say that a bachelor's in math would be less useful in this gig than a bachelor's in philosophy. The thinking skills are the same, and I think ultimately math is clearer and more demanding, but not until the theorem/proof part really starts kicking in.
Which is usually the first year of grad school. If you make it through that, and pass your qualifying exams, you can probably think your way through just about anything.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist (formerly RT) | Jun 8, 2007 5:30:22 PM
I'm with SDM (on the art of playing with knowledge), largely because I attended a smallish (2500) university with a strong liberal arts tradition, and I took just enough Pol Sc. (theory and international affairs) and History to get a major/minor, and then took as much in other disciplines as I could. Interdisiplinary seminars taught by more than one prof with lots of reading, discussion, and writing is a good basis for being an informed public citizen - which is the real basis for commenting in public on affairs of state and society.
I think most undergraduates get too deeply into one discipline - a specialists knowledge is for grad school.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jun 8, 2007 5:43:22 PM
Didn't you take any political theory courses?
You probably just take for granted what you know because you know it so well--it happens to all of us. What makes your blog so interesting is that you have a such a firm grasp of policy issues. Since you are fresh out of college I've been very envious of your education and figured that UCLA must be doing something right because you have such reasoned and informed opinions. Your knowledge goes far beyond what is found in even top newspapers. If you had majored in phil you probably wouldn't have the interest or the capability to write so well about politics, and would be in law school or a grad program. A year and a half of reading Kripke and Strawson would probably dilute or eclipse your interest in the grubby world of health policy.
I only took a few phil courses and didn't get much out of them, though I only really learned to argue after spending time with three people who had philosophy degrees or backgrounds, so I am convinced that it is a great way to learn how to argue but it's not a master narrative. You need "on the ground" knowledge as well.
Posted by: Steve | Jun 8, 2007 5:46:09 PM
Bah.
I still say it's really the Trivium that Ezra and Matt found useful, rather than philosophy, in its substance as the history and development of ideas.
Grammar,Logic/Dialectic,Rhetoric
Inventio,Disposito, etc. The tropes. Essays. Bacon. Montaigne. Nietzsche for epigrams. Wittgenstein in the PI.
Now why the trivium is no longer the center of every education is interesting. It was for millenia. I would guess real education disappeared around the time of Diderot's Encyclopedia and Johnson's dictionary. Facts became privileged, and evidence became the end rather than the means.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jun 8, 2007 5:52:50 PM
Warning: This advice doesn't apply if you want financial success as a pundit. Just if you want to be good.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Jun 8, 2007 6:25:59 PM
I'd have to agree with Erza about poli-sci, although that was my major as well. Thing is, as a political junkie there was no other major I wanted to take. Toward the end of my senior year, viewing the dismal prospects of a graduate government degree at the height of the Reagan administration, I chose law school instead (at a "progressive" law school).
And there, I was taught to think critically. IMHO, no better education exists to teach you to think.
Posted by: djn | Jun 8, 2007 6:52:25 PM
A philosophy minor will get the job done just fine.
Posted by: Kimmitt | Jun 8, 2007 7:28:40 PM
Amanda: I once actually did talk my way into a job via my (complete on-the-spot bullshitting) answer to the question, why should we hire a philosophy major?
It was a computer job, and I said: as far as I can tell, the biggest problem in writing computer code is that computers are really, really stupid. You don't notice the move from X to Y, since it's so obvious that in this context Xs are Ys that you don't so much as notice that there's a gap there at all, and then the computer, being even dumber than an imbecile (though capable of doing many more dumb tasks at great speed) falls into the gap you left, and your program dies. Well, I said, this is the same thing that kills philosophical arguments, and philosophical training is largely about teaching you to spot and avoid the assumptions you don't even notice you're making.
This was in 1981. I got the job. In an alternate universe, in which I took not just that job, but one of the jobs I was offered at Intel a few months later, I am a lot wealthier (nut less happy.) Admittedly, it's not being rich as a pundit, but still.
;)
Posted by: hilzoy | Jun 8, 2007 8:44:25 PM
That's really smooth, hilzoy.
Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf | Jun 8, 2007 8:50:26 PM
advice to an aspiring pundit
live in a rainy climate.
it is hard to read "being and nothingness" when the sun is shining.
Posted by: jacqueline | Jun 8, 2007 9:03:24 PM
I'm going to stick up for Poltics which is what it was called at my college. (No pretense to being scientific and no quantitative nonsense.) I did a lot of comparative politics dealing with other parts of the world and in conjunction with a fair amount of history learned a thing or two about other places and broadened my view of the world in the process. I think there is a lot of value in this. I would also recommend reading broadly in contemporary literature. Some of the best thinking I've ever seen is contained in novels.
Posted by: Klein's tiny left nut | Jun 8, 2007 9:33:43 PM
And next on the Magic Bullet ride to sucess- "how you to can suceed if you find out The Secret . . ." Thinking isn't a matter of degrees or which degree. It's complex soup of things. I have a law degree, a degree in Biology and a degree in Politics with considerable toppings of economics, history, logic, ethics, theology and other crap. I say crap lovingly because the truth is I didn't really learn how to "think" by taking courses. Thinking is a matter of integration of these concepts into real life context. Did you ever see the movie Good Will Hunting? I love it when the lead picks on the Harvard smartass who thought he was smarter than a guy who hadn't taken courses at Harvard.
Posted by: akaison | Jun 8, 2007 9:53:14 PM
While we are at mentioning courses to take- they should take a course in creative writing-specifically short story or film writing. Both will teaching them more about human nature than a class in philosophy ever will.
Posted by: akaison | Jun 8, 2007 9:56:01 PM
advice to an aspiring pundit
astro-gymnastics
go on a starlit night,
stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
outwards into space
and let the starry firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
your elected base.
feel earth's colossal weight
of ice and granite
of molten magma,
water, iron and lead
and briefly hold
this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
your strangely solid head.
....piet hein
Posted by: jacqueline | Jun 8, 2007 10:04:23 PM
ezra, you have nothing to regret.
oh, i'm not saying you wouldnt have done wonderfully well with a philosophy major.
but you have done wonderfully well as it is, too.
there is never a day that i read your blog and think, 'well, that was okay, but it would have been better if he had had a philosophy degree'.
thing is, your work is unique and irreplaceable.
Posted by: Count Cant | Jun 8, 2007 10:12:39 PM
A very nicely structured column at Comment Is Free, Ezra. It would make a philosophy student proud. Thanks for filling me in on the politics of the immigration bill in such a concise manner.
Posted by: mijnheer | Jun 9, 2007 12:27:34 AM
It seems to me that philosophy has the drawback that its results aren't much tested by reality. Sloppy argument in e.g. physics is quickly punished by experiment, mathematical demonstration that such-and-such violates conservation law x, or a more-detailed Monte Carlo.
Posted by: rilkefan | Jun 9, 2007 1:14:55 AM
I have philosophy envy too Ezra, but really, one reason your commentrary is good is because you are so fluent in economics, politics, and political economy--this reflects, perforce, your education.
Posted by: Castorp | Jun 9, 2007 8:37:34 AM
A dean at the university becomes apoplectic when reviewing next years budget. He storms into the physics department.
"What is it with you physicists? Why do you always need so much money?
Why can't you be more like the math department? All I ever need to give them is money for paper, pens, and trash cans!
Or the philosophy department! All I ever need to give them is money for paper and pens!"
Posted by: John | Jun 9, 2007 8:43:40 AM
A dean at the university becomes apoplectic when reviewing next years budget. He storms into the physics department.
"What is it with you physicists? Why do you always need so much money?
Why can't you be more like the math department? All I ever need to give them is money for paper, pens, and trash cans!
Or the philosophy department! All I ever need to give them is money for paper and pens!"
Posted by: John | Jun 9, 2007 9:17:56 AM
Better yet: don't go to college at all.
Posted by: Garuda | Jun 9, 2007 9:40:10 AM
ezra, if you want to be a good pundit, your advice is well taken.
but if you want to be a successful pundit, study rhetoric, practice outyelling those opposite you in the discussion, and say you're a conservative. the money will flow them.
Posted by: harry near indy | Jun 9, 2007 11:23:41 AM
"One thing I'm sort of curious about is what Ezra takes as examples of good work by Matt or Julian or anybody else that display the skills they learned by studying philosophy."
The philosophy training allows folks to be good generalists.
For example, Matt doesn't actually know much about anything, but his training prepares him to be good at taking apart arguments on subjects that he doesn't know much about.
This is why philosophy or law is excellent training to be a generalist blogger. You just learn how to deal with arguments.
-----
That said, Ezra is wrong in thinking he chose the wrong training.
Ezra is a blogger with specialized expertise in something very, very important - the nexus between progressive policy and progressive politics.
It wouldn't have occurred to a philosophy trained generalist blogger to do a series on health care across the world. That idea occurred to Ezra because his specialized background let him know that health care was the coming Big Thing.
Generalist bloggers are always dispensable. But Ezra is a national treasure.
Posted by: Petey | Jun 9, 2007 1:06:18 PM
As one of Hilzoy's former students (by the way, her classes are quite difficult - do NOT take as guts),
"I still say it's really the Trivium that Ezra and Matt found useful, rather than philosophy, in its substance as the history and development of ideas."
The trivium was concieved as eventually leading to the study of philosophy later in the student's life, at a time when philosophy / theology was the highest of studies and the queen of the sciences. A number of the Platonic dialogues make the point that rhetoric without a knowledge of the good (i.e. philosophy) is dangerous and often even harmful.
"While we are at mentioning courses to take- they should take a course in creative writing-specifically short story or film writing. Both will teaching them more about human nature than a class in philosophy ever will."
I'm sure you realize that a large part of philosophic writing is not in treatise form, but rather in poetry (Lucretius), plays (Machiavelli), novels (Rousseau, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, More's Utopia, Satre), histories (Machiavelli, ibn Khaldun, Max Weber, Xenophon), dialogues (Xenophon, Plato, Cicero, HaLevi's Kuzari, Berkeley, Abelard), letters (Plato, Augustine, Machiavelli, etc), autobiography (Rousseau), epigrammatic writings (Nietzsche, Pascal, Montaigne) and commentaries upon other texts (most medieval philosophers, Machiavelli, Derrida, Heidegger and a huge amount of other commentaries).
Considering that Rousseau's Emile and Julie started the cycle of the romantic novel in Europe, it's really difficult to separate literature from philosophy. Besides that such writers as Proust, Umberto Eco, Robert Musil, Iris Murdoch, Raymond Queneau, Camus and TS Eliot were all philosophy students at university (Eliot finished his doctoral dissertation at Harvard but never defended and actually taught philosophy for a short time).
Posted by: burritoboy | Jun 9, 2007 4:26:10 PM
I think that a lot of the complains registered against political science misidentify the problem which is undergraduate as opposed to graduate education.
Political science in graduate school is as challenging and as educational in terms of playing with knowledge, grasping opposing arguments, finding holes in them and carefully constructing arguments of your own.
I suspect that the school you go to plays a role as well.
Posted by: Nick Kaufman | Jun 10, 2007 11:37:23 AM
So if I was a political science and philosophy double major does that make me an unstoppable force?
Posted by: Jake | Jun 13, 2007 3:22:57 PM
