I skimmed your article and I'm now convinced that Albert Burneko is a mean person. That was about 3479 words of ad hominem. I have to respect such persistence.

But I have no opinion on David Brooks.

I don't think it's entirely ad-hominem. This is actually a fairly accurate description of his output:

"...He has been a reliable producer of out-of-touch, tissue-thin pronouncements on the perils of our secularized, technologized 21st century lives, virtually all of which rightly can be interpreted as passive-aggressive nostalgia for what Family Circus comics told him “outdoors” might have been like when he was a kid. You could just about set your calendar by it: In a month of Brooks, you’d get the call to begin or continue a war with Iraq or Iran, the grasping attempt to paint some cretinous Senator or presidential hopeful as the intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, and then, at last, the decline-and-fall column. You’d see a headline like “The Slow Virtues” or “The Hollow Century” or “Why the Teens Are Despicable,” and you’d know ol’ Dave’s coffee shop was out of plain croissants a week ago and the barista had a nose-ring and he’d decided he’d witnessed the death of the Western moral tradition."

There are few things as satisfying to read as a witty denouncement. Sometimes the accuracy (which I have no knowledge of) can rightly take a backseat to the theater, as long as you remember to not take it too seriously.

This is a sentiment that makes no sense to me. Instead of remembering to not take it too seriously and enjoying the theater (regardless of accuracy), why not remember that the target of such articles is a real person and not an abstract object to be harmlessly ridiculed. Why celebrate meanness?

> Why celebrate meanness?

Because meanness stands at the basis of our Western civilization, of which this website is more or less a part of. Think of Cicero's "Catiline Orations", which was an ad-hominem attack through and through, Aristophanes's plays, Lucian of Samosata's works, almost everything written by Swift, Shakespeare's Marcus Antonius's speech, which is another much celebrated ad-hominem, and the list goes on and on. Adversity helps us move forward.

Is the target a person? I'm pretty sure it was a person't public product. In this case, their public words, opinions and critiques. If your job is to produce works for public consumption and you can't stand a critique of your work, you should find another career.

To clarify my earlier point, there are few things as satisfying to read as a witty evisceration of an argument or stance. For a public persona, I don't see much problem with applying it to their wider body of work as long as you think the criticism applies well overall. My earlier statement was fairly ambiguous in this respect.

This case was based on: "We should pity David Brooks, because he is not getting laid. And he is slowly losing his sanity."

The author is free to write that. But I'm not going to spread the link.

Ah, well I was commenting on the portion shown above. Taken in your expanded context, it's not something I would endorse. That said, I still stand by my (revised) point, regardless of whether it was brought about by a poor example, which is that a witty evisceration of an argument or point of view can be very satisfying.

The thread starter's point (which I tend to agree with) was specifically that this particular article was ad-hominem and mean.

But my comment wasn't meant to be a continuation of that discussion, but a digression. A poor choice for one though, as is obvious now.

Ah, I see. Fair enough! I agree that witty arguments are enjoyable to read, I just don't like take-downs so much.

Shall we create a safespace for beigeist conservative think pieces?

He also describes himself as a third wave feminist, and was an early advocate of the conservative argument for gay marriage.

Indeed. Here's a Radio Yerevan take on Brooks' writings, from Language Log:

> Question to Language Log: Is it correct that if you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing, while if you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim?

> Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, it wasn't a representative sample of Americans, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at the University of Michigan; and second, it wasn't Chinese, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at Kyoto University in Japan; and third, it wasn't a fish tank, it was 10 20-second animated vignettes of underwater scenes; and fourth, the Americans didn't mention the "focal fish" more often than the Japanese, they mentioned them less often.

From: Reality v. Brooks - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=19531

That's a pretty lame critique. It seems they're purposefully reading the wrong study, since there is another study that focuses on Chinese students and backs up Brooks' article.

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1995-...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/n/x/nxy906/COMPS/CLT/cul... (full text)

The critique is of how Brooks handles reporting facts in general. The joke I quoted is based on a specific example Brooks gave, which is traced to its original source (Brooks mentioned one of the authors, Nisbett - see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=478).

I linked to the other page because it contains links to about a dozen other posts looking into Brooks' writing.

There might be other evidence supporting his general point, but then he should be citing that evidence, not twisting the facts or making things up.

Read the column. He's very obviously talking about multiple studies. The Nisbett study was about farm animals, not fish.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12brooks.html

> When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow.

That one also appears in the llog posts if you follow the links: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=478

As far as I can tell, their critique is correct in that the research Brooks cites isn't enough to support the claims that he wants to make.

I meant that Nisbett's name was mentioned in the column (regarding the farm animals, yes), and that this allowed the study with underwater scenes to be found, namely http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11708567.

Besides other responses, language log is not a reliable source. I stopped reading when I got bored of the intentional misreading and mockery they use to position themselves as smarter than everyone.

I wouldn't be so sure about "purposefully": they are reading the same book (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=478, the book is https://books.google.ca/books?id=525HX623L_cC), but it seems on page 90 instead of 116. Brooks doesn't link to the study itself, not mentioning authors' names, so I think they made a guess about which study he meant.

I agree that that "other study" looks at Chinese rather than Japanese students, and it's high school + grad students rather than undergrads; but, still, let's compare what Brooks says with the reality.

Brooks: "If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim."

The study: (1) Not a real fish tank but short animated vignettes. (2) All the fish were the same size, so anything Brooks says about "the biggest fish" can't possibly apply. (3) The only "context within which the fish swim" was provided by the other fish. (4) The experimental subjects were not "asked to describe a fish tank". They were asked specific questions like "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by the other fish?". (5) The differences were not about whether experimental subjects described one particular fish or the context in which the fish swim. (6) The differences found were far smaller than "Americans usually do X, Chinese people usually do Y".

Here's the biggest effect they found: they asked "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by internal factors?" and took answers on a scale from 1 to 5: 1 = hardly at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = greatly, 5 = almost entirely. In one category of cartoons, which the experimenters term "compulsion", American high-schoolers gave an average answer of 3.17 and Chinese high-schoolers an average answer of 2.56. Second-biggest effect: same cartoons, but now asking "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by the other fish?". American: 3.27. Chinese: 3.61.

These, I repeat, were much the largest effects found by the study among the several cases into which they subdivided their findings. For grad students looking at the same category of cartoons, the answers were 3.07 for the Americans and 3.00 for the Chinese (first question) and 3.77/3.82 (second question). Most of the differences they found were of this sort of size, and some of them were in the "wrong" direction.

If you think this study supports Brooks's statement about what happens when Chinese and American people look at fish tanks ... well, I really don't know what to say. It's not even addressing the right question to support (or refute) Brooks's statement, and in any case the results are far weaker than Brooks implies.

I don't know anything about this guy or what he advocates, but what was David Brooks message or point in his apparently mostly made-up comparison between American and Chinese students observation habits?

You can find his article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12brooks.html

I'd summarize it something like this. "Americans are individualists and Chinese are collectivists. No one knows exactly why. Individualist nations have been more successful economically, but looking at China's recent success perhaps that will change. The idea of a harmonious collective might prove attractive, since our relationships are so central to our well-being."

... Except that he adds this snarky last line: "It's certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats." Which seems like it ought to be accompanied by some sort of discussion of what he's afraid of, what might be done to stave off the danger, etc., etc., etc. -- but no, he just stops there.

I haven't read much of his writings, but recurring themes are "youth today" (e.g. people used to be more humble than they are today), or how western culture is doomed.

He seems to be very careless with how he handles the facts from studies he references.

Amen on David Brooks -- I feel like I am losing my mind when he pops up with his morality expertise in the media. I regularly re-read this 2004 line-by-line analysis of his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise[0]; his writing is littered with incorrect generalizations that makes me question everything he has to say on principle.

[0] http://www.phillymag.com/articles/david-brooks-booboos-in-pa...

His strength is in political philosophy/history. There was a point when he strayed into pop-science-type inquiries about human behavior, that relied a lot on generous leaps of logic. I think that was where he got the most of his bad reputation.

But, his writings on conservative political philosophy is insightful, if not original (not something I care about personally). His old-school Burkean conservatism gives him an internally consistent, rational framework from which to critique or support the current GOP, from the center-right. It doesn't always work, but worth the read nonetheless, imo.

And, like Gates, I like his extension of that political framework as a critique of our current ideals and values.

The following are three of his less partisan articles and their top-voted comment, plucked from Brooks' most recent articles [1]

Communities of Character

"Pop sociologist Professor Brooks is at it again...."

Tales of the Super Survivors

"It certainly does, Lord Brooks..."

The Evolution of Simplicity

"If only excessive materialism and manifold opportunities were the problem in this country. I think Mr. Brooks tends to project his own affluent angst on society at large..."

This is the force, imposed by readers, to homogenize ideologically. The deluge of criticism is to be expected when a high delta exists between a columnist's ideology and their platform's. In an ideological battleground, where vilification trumps truth, I think the burden of assessing quality lies on the reader.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/column/david-brooks

I don't think that having badly photoshopped image of an opponent really prepares the reader for constructive critique of anyone's character.

Amen.

I ran the hub for a BBS network. We had the best offline mail readers back then. The best feature being "twit filters". God I miss twit filters.

If I ever figure out a way to add a twit filter feature to my web consumption, David Brooks will be the very first pundit added to the list.

Eli Pariser alerted us to the dangers of The Filter Bubble. I wish we lived in a world without trolls and useful idiots. Until then, I agreed with Clay Shirky: we need better filters.

Ah yes, David Brooks, who once complained about an extravagant around-the-world trip because he couldn't stop to stare at a painting for four hours like another famous person once did. He's the worst kind of middlebrow writer.

That article is brutal--thanks for the laugh and the book recommendations!

Germany redux? US dropped more bombs in Korea.

David Brooks is the 'intellectual' for conservative rich white new yorkers who want to feel cultured and insightful but lack any self-critical impulse. The New York Times version of "kids today..."