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Comment by projectramo | Hacker News Reader

Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting?

The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.

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I think one distinction we should try to make is that a "public intellectual" is someone who actively seeks to relate academic/scholarly research and methods to the public in accessible, but not simplified, terms and is open to serious debate. A "thought leader" tends to be associated with little scholarly rigour, a tendency to skirt debate, and over-simplification of complex ideas.

I think the author did have a good distinction as well. A "public intellectual" questions and interrogates, while a "thought leader" seems to inordinately promote and prophesize. (I'm thinking of someone like Ray Kurzweil as a "thought leader" here) That's not perfect, but it seems to serve pretty well.

How are they getting paid a shit professors paycheck or a big fat sponsor check? That's how I would distinguish. Maybe not always right but pretty darn close.

Drezner's proposal is that "thought leaders" are narrow but deep, usually evangelizing one big idea as the solution to our problems and that public intellectuals are broad and that their role is in pulling apart and critiquing the big ideas of thought leaders. As I understand it he believes that big money is putting their thumb on the scale so that we've lost our balance between the two. Lots of bad big ideas floating around with not enough discourse about why they are bad.

There's good and bad to most ideas that apply sometimes and not in others. "The exception that proves the rule" I didn't know there were other reasons to mine coal than just energy. Should we not mine coal for those purposes? Solar panels aren't disposed of properly usually. Should we not use those? The discussion is Coal bad. Solar good. Not well we need some coal for steel production.

Global steel production is dependent on coal. 70% of the steel produced today uses coal. Metallurgical coal – or coking coal – is a vital ingredient in the steel making process. World crude steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes in 2013.

Metallurgical coal - mostly found in Appalachia - is <10% of the 800 million tons of coal mined annually in the USA, and commands higher premiums: about $161/ton versus $53/ton for "thermal" coal. Not trying to correct anything you said, just trying to add to the discussion by providing additional facts.

Subjectivity exists, but surely you aren't going to claim we can't make any distinction whatever that most reasonable people would accept between superficial and deep consideration of something.

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