121–130 of 164 posts
I'm surprised by the reaction -- I thought more people would be in support of this. Since I'm from the U.S., I'm curious what the attitude is around the world. Does the layman have a lot of resentment towards the "expert" in other countries?
I wonder just when there allegedly was a golden age of politics where the issues of the day were discussed politely and with mutual respect.
The barrier to knowledge has gotten much lower, so any would-be expert has to have a ready answer to the question, "why am I listening to you rather than just looking up whatever facts I need from Wikipedia?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you refuse to acknowledge the value of expertise in a field, you are effectively discrediting the entire field. You really think you know just as much as someone who has studied it for their entire adult life? The only way that can possibly be is if there's nothing to be learned about it. You may think you understand a topic, but you really have a narrow view of it. You understand your own point of view, but not…
Well it's possible for people to obtain negative learning, e.g. learning things that are false. I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category. For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences. My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pu…
Further undermining the credibility of econ degrees is an econ professor from my college stating that he believed in the free enterprise system, and the equal distribution of all income. The contradiction didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who studied economics I believed I had well thought out positions before studying and wasn't sure how my opinions were going to change. It turned out all my theories were worthless compared to the combined knowledge of the field and the genius observations over the centuries. So your example of not needing economists is unconvincing. We do need to check up on them frequently though and no one should get a…
>So your example of not needing economists is unconvincing. I don't need to convince anyone of needing economists. Economists need to convince the world of their necessity and have never done so, nor could they ever. Human beings don't need economists to tell them how to live their lives and until economists come up with a good argument for their authority, no one ought to do anything other than listen to what they h…
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go out into the woods and try to kill animals with rocks and pray to the gods for fire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not underestimate the price of taxes to pay for said education. It probably all comes out about the same. This assumes you also work and pay taxes to the entity that provided your education.
Not for an individual as not everyone has the necessary qualifications to study at a university but nevertheless everyone has to pay taxes that finance the education of those that do.
I think what the author misses is the large institutional structure that restricts the supply of experts and (as a result) enhances their prestige. These days, with the growing availability of technical information, existing systems of licensure, credentialing, and professionalization are breeding resentment on both sides of the lectern. The author's focus in the article is on the layman's resentment for the expert.…
Those who forget Rumsfeld's Theory are doomed to be trapped in a local maxima. The value of university is that it exposes you to things you didn't know you didn't know. Doing that without actual people to guide you is 100x times harder. I don't think it can be done efficiently though purely self-directed study. Maybe 1 in 1000 people could manage it.
My lightbulb moment at university was being introduced to linear programming. Wow. A whole new world opened up before me... I wouldn't have even known the right words to use to look this up myself.
The problem with this article is that the author's field is full of experts who have wildly different opinions. There is no way to appeal to expertise in this situation. For example, he says > The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western ci…
What's more, the qualifier that it has to be with a white woman is important. While heterosexual vaginal sex has a lower risk of HIV transmission than anal, it's not low enough to provide useful protection on its own. The main reason sex with white women is safe is because few of them have AIDS, which in turn is partly a result of all the high-risk heterosexual communities being very careful to protect against HIV transmission since very early on. If you look at somewhere like Africa where people weren't taught to take those precautions, the HIV infection rate from heterosexual sex is terrifying. Again, though, this contradicts your agenda of portraying HIV as a gay disease that heterosexuals are only taught to protect against in order to promote gay rights at their expense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Danish university students tend not to have the same weird adversarial relationship with higher education My general impression is that Europeans pay a lot less for their higher education. I suspect that matters a lot.
They do. Here's a chart that compares annual tuition fees at public schools circa 2008: http://imgur.com/EIeOUQJ US tuition was around $6000+, while most of the other Euro countries were well below $2000, with the exception of the UK at ~$4800. source: http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631028.pdf
I think what the author misses is the large institutional structure that restricts the supply of experts and (as a result) enhances their prestige. These days, with the growing availability of technical information, existing systems of licensure, credentialing, and professionalization are breeding resentment on both sides of the lectern. The author's focus in the article is on the layman's resentment for the expert.…
> To take a trivial example, I wear contact lenses. While I agree that an optometrist knows a lot more about vision correction than I do, I resent the fact that I have to pay a lot of money to sit in a chair in a dark room and wait for The Expert to deliver his Opinion about whether I need the -4.5's or -5's. People resent taking their car in for maintenance only to be told that they need to pay $110/hour to fix a pr…