I forgot to remind you of this week’s What Are The Chances? video. A truck carrying 216,000 dice spilled onto the highway, and they said the total was exactly 756,000. What are the chances of that?
Many are missing the best part of the story of the Harvard professor whose expertise was academic dishonesty and who herself was busted for academic dishonesty. Admittedly, it’s tough to get past the hilarious irony. Plus, it helps to have been in on an earlier joke.
That knee-slapper is “elite human capital”. These are the folks who score well on IQ Tests, or who are awarded various “degrees” or credentials and who, they insist, because of their academic experience, ought to be deferred to on most or even all matters, that making decisions or doing research without the aid of these able masters is to be deprecated, possibly made illegal in various ways, and that the rest of us should give our betters their due.
This short video from elite Nathan Confas gives you an idea of the attitude. His argument starts well. “For your opinion to have value,” he says, “to be worth paying attention to, you should meet some level of education of the subject, have some knowledge of the subject.” This is so obvious it’s a truism, because whenever you get into a debate with someone over anything they assume their level of knowledge of the subject is sufficient to hold an opinion. Whether they are right or wrong about the opinion, or its effects, is an entirely different matter. Hence the debate. Confast thought some debates were unnecessary: “Ultimately, high quality opinions will come from people who know what they are talking about; i.e., Experts.”
Is that true? Of course: sometimes. Often? Let’s see.
Experts, among them credentialed, high-ranking academics and respected authorities, have decided men are women when the men say they are women, or when other Experts have carved a “front hole” into the men, a hole which, alas, fecal matter is sometimes present. Experts chase after kids to drug them into believing they are the opposite sex.
Experts have decided whites are responsible for all evils of the world, that being white confers an occult power that manifests as “racism“, even when the white is unaware of it and when the white has no power in fact. America, Experts tell us, was founded as a “racist” nation. Experts call whites psychopathic by nature. Experts say all people are equal, except whites, who excel at “racism”.
Experts have decided that any change whatsoever to the earth’s climate, which has never remained still, is evil and your fault. Worse, Experts in every field have proved, to their satisfaction, that every evil in the world will be exacerbated by “climate change”—yes, even “racism“—and that even plants will give up photosynthesis when their primary food (carbon dioxide) becomes plentiful. Experts labeled carbon dioxide a “pollutant.”
Experts want to drug and shrink you and poison the meat so that it loses its savor, in order to “save the planet”. Experts call pregnancy a disease. Experts organize deadly sin of “Pride parades”. Experts declare borders distasteful and asked many to break the law to cross them.
Is it easiest to just write Expert bureaucrats and diplomats? Expert lawyers.
Experts insisted you wear a face talisman to ward off evil air spirits. Experts said those talismans failed in their magic unless everybody had one. Experts, to placate disease demons, made you walk only one way down supermarket aisles. Experts declared that if you strayed within 5′-31/32″ of another person you would die a horrible death. Experts said you must take their drug, which was “safe and effective”, and which perfectly protected you against contracting a disease or passing it on. Experts said the drug only worked if everybody took it. Experts said it was impossible the drug would have any side effects.
Experts declared evidence which contradicted them was Official Disinformation, and made moves to outlaw it.
Experts say computers will come alive and eat you. Experts wave their wee p-values at you and ask you believe their correlation is causation (presumably the shock of seeing these creatures dulls the senses and makes one malleable such that you’re willing to believe anything to make the spectacle go away). Experts wrote mountains of papers with results which were wrong, exaggerated, misleading, or useless, and they made you pay them for it (a real skill).
There are many other items in this list. Perhaps you could mention some in the comments below. But be aware what powers you are going up against! All these Experts have “high IQ” and you and I are only pale imitations of our academic betters.
Worst part of these debates is the preposterous (implicit) idea that high intelligence confers high morality or ethics. Being moral or just or saintly has very little correlation, or none, with intelligence. An intelligent or ignorant man is as likely to be good or evil. Obviously, an intelligent saint is preferable to a modest saint in questions of leadership and such like. But finding the saint ain’t easy. People like Confas do not know that Science Is Not The Answer, that the best or right decisions are not scientific. They are too used to thinking that because they, being intelligent, thought of an answer, it is therefore the best answer in all aspects. And that is stupid.
Confas says the anti-intellectual on-line right insist “that the eggheads don’t understand”, and that, say right wings anons, right wings anons are “really the ones we should be paying attention to.”
But he, Confas, had a much better idea of who should be heeded.
Some guy Confas’s video with a squeaky voice sucks up to Confas at the end, praising Confas’s “high IQ level”, which matched that of Romans (yes), and that men far above us like Confas have had the misfortune that they must struggle to outthink the “low IQ” masses throughout history.
Confas agreed with this high praise, saying, “In the late 1800s, Nietzsche said that the time had come for higher men should make a declaration of war against the lower men. I think that’s a correct thing to call for. Because they [the on-line right] have declared war on the higher men…It would be worse for them if they won over the smart people. They think it’s fun to destroy what the smart people have built.”
It is. And not only that, it’s necessary.
Confas’s mistake is to assume that being Anon means being stupid. That is sometimes true, because some Anons figure if Experts lie on subjects as basic as sex and medicine, they are lying on everything. That mistake is how we get flat earths and moon-landing hoax stories. Which are mostly harmless views. And which we never would have got if it weren’t for the earnest mendacity and outright peer-reviewed stupidity of Experts. Confas also never admits any of the right wing Anons many victories against Experts. Perhaps because of poor memory. But recall: poor memory is not tested for on IQ tests.
Which brings us back to our opening joke. The Harvard (all heads bow) Expert on academic cheating was busted for cheating. Amusing. But—it means that even with her Towering High IQ Expertism she didn’t know how to cheat and get away with it, which a person with genuine expertise would have been able to do! And that is hilarious.
(If you look closely at the image in today’s post, you will see an anon commenter over the top of Confas’s mug with a plea.)
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Of course, experts are only considered experts when they say what you want to hear.
Not sure if relevant, but short personal anecdote. My wife used to work for a pest control company. one time they hired a girl (female, woman, whatever) who had a PhD in Entomology to work in the same office my wife worked in. She was a nice person and she and my wife became friends. She came to our house to visit one day. As we were walking around the yard she saw an ant hill with lots of ants and immediately said we had fire ants (we live in SE Virginia). Well, if you know anything about fire ants and the south, they’re taken very seriously, to the point that at least in VA they’re required to be reported to the state and an inspector has to come out. You’ve probably guessed the punchline. They weren’t fire ants. The “expert” was wrong, but created a needless hassle because of a quick “expert” opinion without actually examining the ants closely.
I learned a lot about the opinon of experts from that.
People are willing to take advice from someone with greater knowledge or understanding, provided that the experts is trustworthy and wants what is actually good. In addition, if the experts see themselves as part of the people, then it isn’t a matter of an expert class telling everyone else what to do, it’s just a specialized job within society as a whole.
But that hasn’t been the case for a long time now.
The other thing that people resent about supposed experts is that they are trying to micromanage every aspect of people’s lives. A medieval peasant would defer to a theologian on questions of theology, but the theologians did not try to tell peasants how to farm and build their houses. Totalitarianism, that is, control over all aspects of people’s lives by the state, is a 20th century invention and not just because technology made it feasible. Along with that was the ideology that things should be that way.
It’s fascinating that Confas thinks himself qualified to opine about, in his words, “the philosophy of biology (very broadly construed),” when his CV contains no math or science degrees. In other words, there is no indication that Confas has the necessary science and math, per his credentials, to author papers such as “Natural Selection Requires No Teleology in Addition to Heritable Variation in Fitness,” or “Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy,” or “How Gene–Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth.”
By his own standards, Confas is a fraud. How can one write about genetics, evolutionary strategies and natural selection without at least basic STEM degrees that would indicate expertise in biology and statistics?
“Confast”.
Yer killin’ me Sarge.
There is a well-known phenomenon in my occupation (engineering), and, I assume, in many other occupations. By nature, engineers love to offer advice and guidance and expert opinions. But this love is tempered by the degree to which they share responsibility for any outcome. Engineers who are uninvolved, and unlikely to become involved, tend to be the freest with advice. More succinctly, they enjoy flexing their intellectual muscles when there is zero threat of accountability for results. If they bear some direct responsibility if the bridge falls down, the helpful casual advice disappears. Perhaps more familiar to most, lawyers tend to be great conservationists with much creative advice and many interesting stories, but pay them to create a legal document for you and it’s 99% boilerplate and 0% creative.
Many a young engineer has received great-sounding advice from uninvolved experienced engineers at a brain-storming session, then spent the next several days discovering that all the ideas were either impractical or foiled by some obscure but insurmountable detail of reality. Productivity is a big deal, and this tail-chasing makes the young engineer look bad, so lessons are learned. The advice I appreciated the most was a pointer to an existing similar design that worked, especially if it was well-documented.
For most academic experts, there is essentially zero accountability for their ideas and prescriptions. And for many in their audience, there is also little or no accountability. In some cases, there is reverse accountability, such as with journalists who report on the academic expert’s ideas.
So, invariably, it all comes down to accountability. I try to follow Thomas Sowell’s advice and pay no attention to any pronouncement from anyone who will pay no price for being wrong. But wait, isn’t Thomas Sowell just another academic expert? You don’t have to read many of his books to see him as a humble man who researches a topic to death and lets the verifiable historical facts guide his (often uncomfortable) conclusions. Then read criticisms of his work and note how the writer comes across as arrogant and defensive, with shallow selective research (at best) to counter Sowell’s. When you endeavor to take on Thomas Sowell, you better spend 98% of your time doing your homework. I’ll also admit to having a strong bias that I can’t justify, which is that the more words it takes to explain a concept, the less likely that concept is to be correct. My advice to writers would be to guide my thinking, but don’t attempt to do my thinking for me.