alt Hacker NewsIf this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them, and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlighte...
The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.