The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

4/2/2026 at 6:37:35 AM

This article is extremely low quality and I would classify it as woke slop.

It takes the most uncharitable interpretation of every single person listed here. This person has also listed Thiel as an anti intellectual.

The whole world uses the products made by Silicon Valley elites. I don’t think the author wants to come to term with what this really means.

by simianwords

4/1/2026 at 10:14:17 PM

I looked up anti-intellectualism and here is the definition:

>Anti-intellectualism is a profound skepticism or hostility toward science, higher education, and critical thought, often viewing intellectuals as detached elites . Driven by populist politics, religious dogma, and economic anxiety, it manifests as rejection of evidence and scientific consensus. It undermines democratic decision-making by prioritizing emotional narratives over expert analysis

I would say that there is another possibility to this. Experts and Expert opinions are susceptible to the same problem of social media echo-chambers[0].

Where new ideas and thought tend to be rejected because experts tend to rely too strongly in positions established over the course of a carrier.

So the concept of anti-intellectualism is not solely based on emotional responses. But also based on this concept of creating too much absolute certainty about a situation that doesn't always exist. People have a tendency to reject scientific basis of some information because of this echo-chamber as this dilemma tends to ignore other factors that are not well known. Also scientific pursuits have the possibility of being game by bad actors.

[0]: https://truenorthoutreach.com/the-science-of-echo-chambers-h...

by trinsic2

4/2/2026 at 6:14:01 AM

> ...It undermines democratic decision-making...

You can tell an intellectual came up with that definition.

by dalmo3

4/1/2026 at 11:58:25 PM

The difference between science and this random shower thought you decided to grace this thread with is that science has some sound epistemological basis, typically evidence, whereas you have nothing.

by voxl

4/2/2026 at 12:13:03 AM

> The difference between science and this random shower thought you decided to grace this thread with is that science has some sound epistemological basis

Science can have sound epistemological basis, but many times overspecialization can force confidence in areas where there is none and its echo-chambered by people in the field to keep the sense of authority on a subject going.

by trinsic2

4/2/2026 at 4:23:44 AM

[flagged]

by Starman_Jones

4/2/2026 at 4:45:39 AM

A weird claim when science is littered with a history of poor, insane explanations for phenomena.

People play back the “Greatest Hits” without really going into the historical misses. The reality is that the quality and predictive power of science is covariate with culture.

There are a lot of good reasons to think that academic culture right now has a groupthink problem, mostly because the group is so much larger. Alternative theories typically have to wait for an incumbent group of thinkers to die. But if the gradient of thought is more continuous then do bad ideas become more sticky?

by nostrebored

4/2/2026 at 6:21:36 AM

>that science has some sound epistemological basis

"Epistemological basis" the "intellectual" chortled moments before unironically claiming men can become pregnant and math is racist.

by throwawaypath

4/1/2026 at 11:39:42 PM

[dead]

by tug2024

4/1/2026 at 10:59:30 PM

This seems to miss the plot on so, so many points. Not worth a read if you came to the comment section first.

Doesn't even discuss open-source when a key point its making is "tech is built on the backs of others".

by tevon

4/2/2026 at 1:25:19 AM

Tech here can refer to many things. Given the context stated in the article (and literally the title) I think it’s clear the author is talking about SV elites which by definition excludes most of the open source community. And no, a tech company releasing open source code doesn’t amount to much in the face of the firehouse of cash they print. But you should just stick your head back in the sand, it’ll feel better.

by therobots927

4/2/2026 at 6:46:10 AM

> They pay lip service to innovation but hate the deep mental work and creativity that produces novelty and original thought. They care about such things only if they can be turned into a $20-a-month subscription service and then parlayed into mission-critical enterprise software.

What a deeply anti intellectual person herself. This person thinks their slop that is automated with a 20 dollar subscription is deep mental work. We have AI helping us solve open problems in mathematics but sure. A woke journalist has decried that LLMs deprive us of creativity so we must bow down to her and accept this. Thankfully a critical mass of people are noticing the latent elitism and hollowness of leftist elites and they are rejecting this rhetoric.

by simianwords

4/2/2026 at 7:17:23 AM

You doth protest too much! It’s clear that things can still be “inexpensive” but require deep mental work - taking a course to understand Calculus is work, and it could all be done with a $100 calculator. To minimize you, personally, working at it so you understand the very movements of the Spheres in Heaven, simply because it can be done on a cheap calculator, is the deep anti-intellectualism.

The knowledge has worth; we should be cheering that it is cheap so that we can all partake in it, like the Gutenberg press made having our very own copy of Thucydides a simple thing. We should demand more of the deep well of culture and thought to which we are heirs, because its transmission and reproduction is so cheap! Not less.

It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.

Bleats the sheep: “woke, woke.”

by analognoise

4/2/2026 at 7:23:05 AM

> It is embarrassing to want less understanding, less learning, and less depth, because you do not understand the value of what you can learn. It indicates a deep personal failing, and no short-circuit of “woke” will assuage it.

? It’s the Silicon Valley that made LLMs that are now used to create more understanding. You wrote a lot of words with close to nothing to say.

by simianwords

4/2/2026 at 8:41:08 AM

The stock egg photo was deep. It made me thing of eggs. I like eggs. I often make eggs into scrambled eggs and sometimes as sunny side up, not to mention soft boiled, which are probably the best. I assume Peter Thiel is bad guy who does not like eggs?

by mieses

4/2/2026 at 7:07:10 AM

Wonderful article.

The coddled naïveté that allowed the “right wing” movement to thrive in Silicon Valley circles; the kind of embarrassing thinking that led to Trump and people who unironically call things “woke” derisively.

Watching people so stiff about “western culture” to lay claim to the fruits of the enlightenment for a bunch of embarrassing tech bros in Silicon Valley has been wildly disappointing.

“Toss an insult on the ground and the owner will pick it up”, as they say; watching the comments devolve, with skin so thin, “woke woke woke” - simply because they’ve been undressed so completely.

Good stuff.

by analognoise

4/1/2026 at 11:25:25 PM

[dead]

by tug2024

4/1/2026 at 8:56:15 PM

[dead]

by mountlatmus

4/1/2026 at 9:04:25 PM

[flagged]

by uduni

4/2/2026 at 12:29:23 AM

Account is days old, zero karma, comment history is 100% simping for AI.

by nativeit

4/2/2026 at 6:01:08 AM

And? I just joined HN and I like coding with AI. Is it a problem to have a different opinion from you?

by uduni

4/2/2026 at 12:55:13 AM

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Hacker News Elites.

AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.

by Viliam1234

4/1/2026 at 10:40:37 PM

[flagged]

by sQL_inject

4/1/2026 at 11:08:19 PM

Not about the specific piece, however, which was good enough to sprout accounts to denounce it.

by replooda

4/2/2026 at 5:24:23 AM

Gotcha so no real ability to recall this is the same outlet that worked hard to reveal private details about the lives of people it is also now calling anti-intellectualism.

The article is just a regurgitation of the zeitgeist including the vague notion of hating successful rich people without real criticism of the actions they've taken.

by sQL_inject

4/2/2026 at 10:03:34 AM

I apologize for failing to patronize your intelligence so you wouldn't read in my message what I didn't write.

A regurgitation of the zeitgeist can be a useful sample of the zeitgeist, leading to insights perhaps completely different of anything the author might have meant to convey; accounts coming out of nowhere to criticize or defend it may be a random occurrence, but also indicative of something special — by which I do not mean quality or uniqueness — about or within a piece to override a default stance of ignoring related output — something I do whenever Altman et caterva open their mouths, for example, and would have done about the piece we're discussing, for the very reason you pointed out, if not for the reactions, including your own, which came across as emotional, an impression now corroborated by your reply — and perusing a text of the Gawker-level quality your contribution implied hers would be is too easily and quickly done that it becomes, at its worse outcome (no value accrued), just as valuable as your own, implied, approach, but with a chance to provide some value — here, now, thanks to you, for example, I've learned a little more about Hacker News.

In short, I couldn't care less about Spiers, she can take a one-way trip to Mars with Bezzos for all I care, but I do care about reactions such as yours – and whatever it is that triggered about my reply, you put it there yourself.

by replooda

4/1/2026 at 11:14:37 PM

[dead]

by 56745742597

4/1/2026 at 9:28:28 PM

Good choice of a day to publish this meme article

by selfunaware9

4/2/2026 at 12:33:42 AM

Good choice of a day to spawn this meme account.

by nativeit

4/2/2026 at 1:30:20 AM

I keep saying this and you can check my comment history to verify - HN is botted to an extreme degree. There’s absolutely no restrictions on spinning up additional accounts and any hacker worth their salt could easily spin up an LLM to set up apparent opposition to a linked idea. It’s clear HN has absolutely no problem with this.

What is inexcusable is the large fraction of the community that sees the logic behind the article but avoids getting involved for fear of irritating some future employer, or just because they want to avoid confrontation here. We’re watching tech billionaires usher in a dystopian society in real time. And we want to talk about what exactly? Apparently anything but the Peter Thiel shaped elephant in the room.

by therobots927

4/2/2026 at 1:59:33 AM

Seems like HN is doing something to combat this, considering how many [dead] comments I see in every post (which you can enable by setting `showdead` in your user profile).

I've only recently enabled it so I don't know how frequent dead comments were before the LLM era.

by nsingh2

4/2/2026 at 2:08:51 AM

Fair enough. I actually noticed that right after I posted this comment.

by therobots927