Translated material
Alexey Chadayev. Ready-made sensation
On the eve of the end of summer, an event occurred that was offensive to literally everyone. On the novopol website, on behalf of an initiative group with a previously unknown name, a list of “socio-humanitarian thinkers” was published - that is, those who create a “semantic field” in our country. Evaluation list - with numbers on the left and right; Moreover, the number on the right reflects the thinker’s weight calculated according to some parameters, and the number on the left is the most important - the serial number in the list. The list, to top off the scandal, is called by its authors a rating.
The attitude towards ratings in Russia has been extremely painful for some time now; We still remember that two years ago the Putin regime was universally called a ratingocracy. Therefore, the publication of any rating of this kind, especially in an area where no ratings have been done before, is always a provocation. It’s hard to imagine the best way to create instant news coverage and scandal; Even if you pour mayonnaise on Putin’s jacket, the effect is unlikely to be stronger. All those who got in, as well as those who didn’t get in and those who sympathized, immediately began arguing until they were hoarse about how fair the arrangement of places was and why on earth it turned out that way. Those who get caught will happily fuss: here I am, look at me ! Those who don’t get in are sincerely indignant, forgetting that just yesterday they didn’t even think about getting somewhere. Even those who are relatively uninterested will probably go and have a look.
Of course, if all you want is fame for fame's sake, this is a win-win move. But creating ratings is a very risky way to achieve popularity. The Hamburg score begins not when you publish the rating, but when the mechanism for its formation becomes the subject of discussion . And if this mechanism does not withstand even the most superficial criticism, you risk greatly disgracing yourself.
The authors of the “Novopolovsky” rating proposed it for publication in the “Russian Journal”. The editors rejected this publication. The point is not that in any publication the publication of a rating of thinkers, where the editor-in-chief of the publication is listed as number one, and the author of the rating itself is number three, would look like a very strange claim. And the fact is that the ranking mechanism presented by the compilers of the rating turned out, in our opinion, to be extremely unconvincing.
Experts from the Public Opinion Foundation, to whom we showed a description of the methodology for this rating, were more lenient. These kinds of surveys, they said, are quite interesting and should be published. Another thing is that we need to call a spade a spade. This is not about a rating or even a representative expert survey. Such things should be called something like this: “A table of twelve people’s ideas about who and how much thinks and suffers in modern Russia.”
Based on common sense, one cannot but agree with this point of view. Yes, indeed, the first pancake that came out lumpy does not relieve the severity of the problem, and the authors of the rating put it generally correctly. Without a clear, transparent system for assessing merit, “ranks and titles” in the sphere of idea production, there will always be coterie and infighting. And every time a discussion about the state of things in the current intellectual environment will have to be conducted in the genre of “Briand is the head”, or “If an elephant fits on a whale, then who will collect whom?”
The authors of the rating system were let down by an acute shortage of assessment methodology. A compote of Yulia Latynina, Boris Berezovsky, Maxim Sokolov, Alexander Prokhanov and Yegor Kholmogorov, no matter how you rank it by serial numbers, will be perceived as a compote. In this sense, no rating - even one compiled using a much more verified methodology - is most likely unable to give an adequate idea of who and how in modern Russia “thinks and suffers.”
Instead of a rating, it would be much more interesting to see something like a map, which would give a clear idea of whose position is in relation to the main problems of our time, even among those included in the list published on Novopol. Such a tool, if it were professionally implemented, would make it possible to quickly and clearly explain to an interested person who is who among the “ideologists” today. It is clear that it is simply impossible to solve this problem through comparative measurements of skulls or other parts of the body.