Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "Pissing off progressives isn’t intellectual progress. Conventional wisdom says that if a staff writer for The New York Times wants to feature you in a story about brave intellectuals, you reply, 'Yes, please!'... But every time that Times writer, Bari Weiss, called to talk with me about the 'Intellectual Dark Web' and my supposed membership in it, I just started laughing.... Why was I laughing? The idea that I was part of a cool group made me think there was at least some kind of major attribution error going on.... I’m all for bringing intellectualism to the masses, but like a lot of academics, I value ambivalence itself, along with intellectual humility. Yet these values seem in direct opposition to the kind of cocksure strutting that is the favored dance move of the IDW.... Professors, listen to me: You don’t want to be in this dark-web thing, even if it comes with an awesome trading-card photo. You are in the right place. Carry on...
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