The NFTC Awards for Epistemic Excellence

As voted on by me.

Photo by Eric Tompkins on Unsplash

I am a bit of an intellectual critic. It’s a big part of what I do here at these Notes from the Circus. Readers who have been with me for some time will know that I have some tortured fondness for deconstructing other public intellectuals on these very pages. But when one has critical opinions, surely there should be another side of the coin, right? Surely, there are other public intellectuals who Mike thinks highly of and experiences their conversational interventions with quiet approbation?

Yes, dear reader, I am glad I asked this question on your behalf. Because the answer to this question is, indeed, yes!

I love public intellectuals. I think they are an indispensable part of the epistemic fabric that makes up liberal democratic life. They are synthesizers of information, that talk across domains of understanding, that organize intellectual cultures, and most importantly, make big ideas approachable to all the curious among us. These are people who love to teach. It’s in their bones. They want you to know what’s true. It’s a beautiful thing, that human culture produces the public intellectual. And I adore them. So here, I shall light some praise for figures—some who I’ve spoken to privately, most not—that are a gigantic influence on me whether they know it or not! So let’s get started.

An NFTC Award for Epistemic Excellence is given to people who in the opinion of the NFTC Award Selection Committee (which comprises exactly me), has determined the person to be a major positive contribution to the ancient Socratic tradition of public philosophy. Of using approachable language, and relatable concepts to bridge understanding from mundane concepts into larger, bigger, more generative cognitive territory. It’s a skill. Not everyone can do it. The people who are good at it, genuinely want to help other people understand the frontiers of human knowledge. They think it’s important. Because they care. Because our collective human knowledge belongs to us all, and public intellectuals act as town criers at the edges of elite intellectual pursuits to keep the public informed about what latest dispatches there is from the edge of reasoned and scientific inquiry.

It is a noble calling, and so my hat goes off to all of you. Whether I name you here today or not, if this is your calling, then all I have to say is: thank you, for what you do.

I am going to start with three awards today. Just three. But I will give out more of these awards in the future. There are literally dozens of people I’d like to recognize, but I can’t do that in one sitting!

… so we will now open the first envelope …

1. Physics: Anton Petrov

The first NFTC Award for Epistemic Excellence goes to… Anton Petrov.

It might surprise some of my readers that I am into bleeding-edge science—oh but I am—and Anton Petrov has established himself as perhaps the most comprehensive and reliable public commentator on all the latest research in the physical sciences.

Anton reads physics, astronomy, and cosmology papers so you don’t have to. And when he does, he doesn’t fall victim to the pathologies of science writers—which often deeply misrepresent the nuances to the general public.

Often results are preliminary and need verification—something a lot of science communicators use as a territory of grift. Research studies that have statistically-significant findings at low P-values—a signal that you should do more experiments because there could be something there—are often dramatized into game-changing breakthroughs, apocalypse fear-mongering, etc.

Anton is very careful to guard his readers away from these flights of fancy. He is epistemically responsible! And for this, he is my first recipient of the NFTC Award for Epistemic Excellence in Science.

2. ????: Hank Green

Guys, I need you to meet—if you already haven’t—Hank Green.

I don’t even know what to say. I’ve never met Hank. Have no idea if he knows who I am, but I had to create a category to place him into, because the epistemologist in me could not produce a proper category for him. So he exists in a category made up of exactly four question marks. These question marks indicate the site in my brain where a category should appear to place Hank into some general ontology, but yet he sits there, floating in some higher spacial dimension. I have chosen to represent this singularity of sorts with four question marks.

This a guy who knows a lot of stuff. And when I say that, I don’t just mean that he has rote understanding of a lot of things. No, he has a fully synthesized and integrating understanding about a lot of things. I am literally in awe at the man’s synthetic thinking skills.

Hank is able to break down science concepts, economic concepts, history, politics, you name it. And he makes it fun and engaging to learn it. Even when Hank’s and my epistemic domains overlap, where I know all the same source material that he does, listening to how he explains it, in his own way, makes me better at explaining to other people. Hank is a master explainer. It’s incredible. He’s America’s teacher, as far as I’m concerned.

So he is the first recipient of the NFTC Award for Epistemic Excellence in ????

3. Public Philosophy: Vlad Vexler

I need you now, dear reader, to meet the conscience of the Western democratic political tradition, the one and only, Vlad Vexler.

I have an intellectual hero, and he is Vlad. Yes, I said it. Hero. Not guru—don’t worry, Vlad, I have shadows of disagreement with you. But they’re …usually shadows. Differences in intuition about how certain factors may play out given our intuitions informed by our worldviews. This is actually a generative intellectual territory.

Vlad was born in the Soviet Union but moved to the United Kingdom and became a British citizen. Vlad’s body is menaced by an unforgiving illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is sometimes more commonly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome”. His health was also damaged further by the scourge of a COVID-19 infection, which has left him with microvascular damage and now, Vlad is unable to walk on his own two feet.

This is the site of my hero worship—which Vlad may cast off as flattery. But even here, in this place he finds himself, Vlad is ever the optimist. He is missioned towards his goal of giving moral reasoning skills to people of democratic sensibility in a wary Western world, living through an age, as Vexler describes aptly as … democratic decline.

As a matter of some normative importance, a sense for knowing what’s important about the common good, Vlad provides perhaps the most vivid and rich psycho-political perspective into the power relationships in the Western world, with the emergency of a vodka-soaked pugilistic, Putinist Russia, not-so-gently trying to knock down Europe’s eastern door, being of particular interest to Vlad and his audience, by extension of the fact they subscribe to him.

Vlad operates a “Main” YouTube channel where he publishes professionally produced exposés aimed at a more general—if learned—audience on interpreting geopolitical events from his vantage. I happen to think some of Vlad’s pieces here, are some of the most gripping examples of contemporary public philosophy in multi-media form.

He also operates a second channel, Vlad Vexler Chat where he gives more real-time commentary on major events, hosts live streams and Q&As with his subscriber community, where he generously practices the ancient tradition of an engaged public philosopher helping people to learn to reason together about what is happening in their world.

I hope Vlad doesn’t mind me calling him a friend, and for me, Vlad Vexler, is the first recipient of NFTC Award for Epistemic Excellence for Public Philosophy.

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These are my three awards today. As I said in the beginning, I have dozens of other people I could have given awards to today, and it was painful battling it out in my head who the first three would be. These were the three who I wanted to recognize for bringing some intellectual joy to my life. So thank you.

Remember what’s real.

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