“Presumably at another point during Tarantola’s “chain of events” something will occur to convert all of us into promiscuous gay men.”
h/t JMH
“Presumably at another point during Tarantola’s “chain of events” something will occur to convert all of us into promiscuous gay men.”
h/t JMH
Well several things, about that article, are probably correct.
The arrogance which generally comes with a higher education…..makes one wonder about these folks who require 4 more years of education in order to deal with the world.
Perhaps part of this is the isolation of academia from reality—-infecting the graduates—with goofy ideas.
I have noticed a reactionary tendency with the graduates. They emerge full of piss and vinegar to implement the ideas they absorbed but then are cases of arrested developement.
My dad was an early adopter all his life but my sibling was a reactionary…..unless re-exposed to that atmosphere.
That bit about automobile fuel efficiency is very likely accurate. Except for that insane period in the early 70’s when cars couldn’t pass a gas station…due to emmissions junk.
Cars are really not more fuel efficient—they are simply lighter. Cars in the 60’s seldom weighed less than a coupla tons….today’s are half that.
The strides in fuel efficieny are the preserve of the big bore road diesels. Computer engine controls and improved injection systems have had more impact there than on the sedans.
That trend is evident in agricultural fuel efficiency—-same engines mostly….big bore black-boxed.
The widespread adoption of turbo-fans has had a massive impact upon aviation….but then in my view turbo fans are a turbo-prop/turbo-jet hybred.
The brilliance of some university bug doctors like Zooki Fruitfly is self evident. Homes here and there, tour bus and money flowing into their foundations.
The latest? Two bug nuts who are studying CRICKETS in HAWAII. We have crickets in Canada.. eh?
Findings: A strain of crickets lost chirp noise ability in favour of flat lying wings. This in order to avoid the fly that lays eggs on cricket backs and their larvae that eat the crickets from inside out.
Without the ability to chirp, these crickets can not shout down ‘bully’ crickets. Are they now gay?
What forcast, like these gems…..
[Quote]
“CIVILISATION will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” (Harvard biologist George Wald, 1970.);
THE world will be “11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age”. (University of California ecologist Kenneth Watt, 1970.);
[/Quote]
……… will these extra bright bug nuts who study in the trenches of Hawaii on our tax dime, come up with?
Economist, Kenneth Gailbraithe admitted that every forecast he made was entirely off the mark. Didn’t affect his income at all.
Poor bugger. How could he forecast anything while attending gala dinners with presidents and world leaders every night?
Stop it Kay, you’re making us crazy with all your promiscuous gay predictions.
Our beloved academic types are useless by definition.
Academic: hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to produce an immediate or practical result.
As has been said many times, not all degrees are worthless. The degrees that lead to practical work are quite useful – medicine, engineering, teaching (at least until it veered sharply left), etc. But if all of the various studies programs shut down for a decade no one would notice a difference. In fact, the diverted students would likely train for more useful careers and alleviate upcoming labor shortages.
As a side note, I always thought engineers were the most anal retentive/arrogant bunch but graduates from the x-studies and social sciences have them beat.
Engineering graduates have to sober up and join the real world of industry where they interact with others. Tradesmen and technicians tend to question, argue and openly mock arrogance. Eventually engineers become grounded and when questioned they’ll spend a few minutes or hours explaining the issue.
Academics, graduates from social sciences, university researchers and journalists, OTOH, remain stuck in the know-it-all mode. Every criticism provokes a narrow response range that goes from “You’re an idiot and it’s too complicated to explain” to “Shut up, you have no right to question me” to “You’re all a bunch of anti-intellectual knuckle-draggers”. I suspect they just know they are full of it and (like Gore) prefer to avoid debate unless it involves academic peers who adhere to the rules.
So human civilization didn’t end then?
Just wondering, from what I’ve been seeing on TV since 9-11-2001, I thought maybe it had.
I thought George Wald was smarter than that. I heard him give the Massey Lecture on CBC radio in the early 70s. “Therefore Choose Life” he called it. I was struck with his final conclusion. “I believe” he said, “that matter will organize itself into sufficiently complex forms that it can contemplate itself everywhere in the universe that it can.” It was at a time in my life when I had become an apostate Christian and was looking for something else. Wald’s comment set me on the road to enlightenment fundamentalism.
My nephew is attending an un named university and he cant believe how stupid some of the proffs and instructors are.Without a degree he thinks that most would be emloyed at a fast food outlet.
The CBC uses Gynn Dyer as a military expert.He has never been right.
And of course, Paul Ehrlich. For the love of God don’t ever forget Paul Ehrlich (Biology prof. at Stanford). You know, the man who demanded that everyone PANIC! in the 1970s because of the upcoming Global Cooling.
Have his peers laughed him out of the Academy? No. Oddly.
I benefited from university – I received an engineering degree which has kept me gainfully employed ever since. However I have serious doubts of whether or not to send my own son there. Common sense seems to be in short supply in most institutions of higher learning. And I wouldn’t want him to get slimed by the BS that runs high and deep in most colleges.
“Academic Joseph Froomkin was honoured by Time magazine in 1965 with the publication of his prediction that computers would bring a 20-hour work week and a mass leisure class.”
Don’t know if computers are entirely to blame, but you must admit that this Froomkin guy pretty well nailed today’s public service managers (see Ontario’s sunshine list).
And as for AGW causing increasing sexual promiscuity, perversions, and the spread of AIDS, I think it’s already happening. How else would you explain all these greenie-weenies who are attracted to Michael Moore or Elizabeth May?
“CIVILISATION will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” (Harvard biologist George Wald, 1970.);”
We shouldn’t criticize Wald for being off by a few years.
The action we should have taken back in the 70’s was to ostracize or lynch every “chicken little” the minute they started “running in circles,screaming and shouting”.
Trouble is, none of us thought they’d ever be taken seriously, and we didn’t anticipate their influence on politicians.
I remember my older brother telling me in about 1975,”if you give these people any power,the day will come they’ll ban your backyard barbecue”.
At the time,I thought he was being extreme, turns out to have been prophetic.
My dear old Uncle, long deceased, with two university degrees, was singularly unimpressed by academics, many of whom,Phd. level,worked for him. He once said, ” a smart man with an education is a wonderful thing, but a stupid man with an education will still be stupid”.
At the time,I didn’t fully understand what he meant, now I do.
Medical doctors, medical researchers, engineers who design bridges and sanitation infrastructure, etc etc do practical, absolutely critical real-world work. Ironically, it’s the practitioners in the other academic fields, where the issues are entirely, erm, academic, who are the most prone to making hard predictions and demanding that the world change its behavior. The guy who announced to the press that “Climate change will trigger a chain of events which is likely to increase the stress on society and result in higher vulnerability to diseases including HIV” is a professor of health and human rights; the guy who averred that the entire world, excepting Europe, North America and Australia, would be in famine by the year 2000, was a Professor of Environmental Philosophy.
Sometimes, of course, the predictions are made by people with advanced degrees in the more practical fields of study who simply overstep the bounds of their field of expertise. An engineer designing a bridge knows what limits are, in the most manifest sense, but if said engineer tried to transfer the credibility provided by his degree into the area of, say, neuro-philosophy, he’d be putting himself at risk of looking like a pompous ass. Similarly, when a Harvard biologist like George Wald uses phrases like “problems facing mankind,” “civilization will end” and “immediate action,” he’s clearly taking his advanced degree and running off-campus with it….stark naked.
This arrogant tendency to assume- to wish, to demand – that one’s talents in a particular field translates automatically into some other realm – or in some cases, seemingly, to all other realms – is part of the ancient, toddler-brain desire to appoint oneself ruler and have others recognize you as such. It’s just human nature. We see it in celebrities and musicians – Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Sting, Bono – who believe that the adoration they receive seamlessly confers credibility upon them in entirely non-related areas.
These “oversteppers”, including egregious king-of-the-world academics like Suzuki, can generally be identified by the fact that they are perpetually angry that others don’t ‘get it.’
In the immortal words of Sebastien Persnick-Twee, MFA, LHD, MCRP, BIArch, MLS, BFD, OCD:
“Some men see things we actually know and say ‘let’s stick with that.’ I see things which I know very little about and say ‘you idiots, you don’t get how important are my pronouncements thereof.‘”
“Trouble is, none of us thought they’d ever be taken seriously, and we didn’t anticipate their influence on politicians.”
Exactly !! The key ingredient we missed ?? A clueless media.
LC Bennett
[……As a side note, I always thought engineers were the most anal retentive/arrogant bunch but graduates from the x-studies and social sciences have them beat.]
I would agree. Engineers are the guys that actually are supposed to make an inspiration into a workable concept.
But then, the local Drainage Commisioner, commisitioned me, mindful that in practice an X artillery officer is a surveyor, to review engineers reports on municipal drains. With embarrassing frequency, I discovered they were attempting to run water uphill…..thus my raison d’etre.
What I want to know is, where are the robots who do housework? Right now, it’s up to me.
Oh, okay, NOW I get it.
EBD, your post is exactly what Sowell wrote in “Intellectuals and Society.” Great book about the guys you described. He calls them the anointed ones, focused only on ideas, primarily in academia where they can pontificate yet be protected and not responsible when their ideas crash sometimes at horrendous cost to society. The Regina 16 are a perfect example, not a real degree in the whole marxist group.
As you pointed out when those who have great skill in their area of expertise step outside it they can fall on their face.
Most of the predictions that have proven to be so spectacularly wrong were simple linear extrapolations of trends that took no account of new discoveries or new ways of doing things that might affect the outcome — the classic example of this is the prediction that the streets of New York would soon be 3′ deep in horse manure if nothing was done to curb the carriage traffic which was steadily increasing. Didn’t take into account Ford’s mechanical tinkering that solved the problem rather quickly (and created new ones for which the same dire predictions exist).
Having worked in academia for a while I’ve seen many people who are experts in their field and assume that expertise applies to any other field. Usually they’re spectacularly wrong in such cases. Also, people have a hard time letting go of theories that have made them known in the scientific community hence the aphorism that the only way for science to advance is to wait for the old scientists to die off.
Doctors are particularly bad at assuming that they’re experts in everything, and hence any pronouncements by physicians on non-medical topics should be assumed to be suspect unless the physician making those statements has actually done some work in the non-medical area in question.
sasquatch,
I agree, P.Eng’s have their share of airheads. Another tendency is for them to make access ports far too small. It’s like they don’t notice that most tradesmen rapidly expand around the middle making it impossible for them to squeeze into confined spaces without the aid of a shoehorn and industrial oil.
it was pointed out to me long ago that engineers have more to do with our longevity than doctors. clean water and sanitary sewers have added more years than vaccinations.
From the article: “Academic Joseph Froomkin was honoured by Time magazine in 1965 with the publication of his prediction that computers would bring a 20-hour work week and a mass leisure class.”
This was an excellent, logical prediction. It would have come true had the governments of the day not started expanding the welfare state and eating up capital. Hence stagnating wages and precarious standards of living.
Tax-and-spend killed the leisure class.