The article is actually not about why anti-intellectualism exists. It is about resolving the following paradox: all people are curious, but most are anti-intellectual. His resolution is that the premise is false: most people, in fact, are not curious (as he establishes by redefining curiosity.)
One thing that strikes me about most of the comments here on HN is that they don't address the meat of the argument, which is that people are anti-curiosity. It is very possible that anti-intellectualism is motivated by all sorts of proximal causes, but the author's argument would still be valid if people, by nature, just weren't curious.
Of course, addressing the author's argument is hard, because it is based on a redefinition, and a fuzzy one at that. He wants curiosity to be something above the sort of "tinkering" that children do to find out about their world. He never sets any metrics, or really gives any examples, to show the difference between the two.
> His resolution is that the premise is false: most people, in fact, are not curious (as he establishes by redefining curiosity.)
Thus demonstrating that he's making an "intellectual argument".
People are curious, they're just not curious in the way that he thinks that they should be, which makes them, in his eyes, inferior. The article is his "proof" of their inferiority.
One thing that strikes me about most of the comments here on HN is that they don't address the meat of the argument, which is that people are anti-curiosity. It is very possible that anti-intellectualism is motivated by all sorts of proximal causes, but the author's argument would still be valid if people, by nature, just weren't curious.
Of course, addressing the author's argument is hard, because it is based on a redefinition, and a fuzzy one at that. He wants curiosity to be something above the sort of "tinkering" that children do to find out about their world. He never sets any metrics, or really gives any examples, to show the difference between the two.