Not necessarily. I'm characterizing the orientation in intensional terms via definitional behavioral constituents such as curiosity which others have pointed out. "Intellectuals are curious" like "water is wet". They try things. They forgo immediate reward. etc etc.
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A "pop intellectual" might be viewed as one who expresses what a) the crowd knows but cannot express b) is in the blind spot of institutional intellectuals c) gets at interesting truth rather than merely pandering. A metis miner so to speak. Who makes the illegible legible.
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To do a bothsidesism take here. Institutional intellectuals pander to each other's vanities just as cravenly as the worst populist intellectuals do to the crowd's vanities. Prima facie, no particular reason to favor one as fundamentally better.
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I think any definition which does not explicitly contemplate the intellectual’s audience isn’t apt.
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This is Corey Robin's definition of an intellectual: as someone who creates a "public". I think it's a good one. The difference between a mob and a public is the presence of legitimated spokespersons who turn crowd sentiment into arguments suitable for institutional contention
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is a poor person’s idea of a rich person)