Note: Tonight at 8:00 EDT, Paul and I will be talking about what it means to be a dissident in this age. The show is on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.
A strange thing developing in pseudo-intellectual circles is the defense of expertise, by which is meant the defense of credentialism. People long on credentials, but short on practical knowledge and experience, are demanding they get the respect they deserve as experts in their respective fields. Nathan Cofnas is the latest to get in on the issue by demanding we respect his authority as an expert. Dick Hanania has also used to the issue to get attention online.
It is not a new issue nor one exclusive to the sorts of people who seek attention online as “influencers.” Credentialism produces a class of people who have no practical knowledge, so they have no experience. The lack of experience means they have no tangible results to back up their claims to expertise. This produces a class of people who defend credentialed experts. The anti-Trump crank Tom Nichols is a good example of the type. He even wrote a book defending credentialed experts.
Credentialism itself is a sign the system has entered its denouement. It signals the capture of the system by people who are motivated by class consciousness rather than a genuine expertise in a specific field. The group of people devoted to genuine expertise are shouldered aside by those devoted to defending the privileges that come from claiming expertise. To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.
This is the flaw in Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction, at least as far as it applies to the managerial state. It is not that there are too many elites for the available positions, but that the nature of elite degrades over time. The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.
That aside, for those interested in seeing how the defense of credentialism manifests with the next generations, this video is a good start. Dave Greene, the man behind the YouTube channel The Distributist, debated Nathan Cofnas, the person who gained some notoriety attacking Kevin MacDonald a half dozen years ago. Cofnas is now trying to create a new career defending credentialism. Cofnas then defended his performance with former pornographer Luke Ford.
Without knowing it, at least as a front brain process, Cofnas is engaging in a group activity in his defense of credentialism. He is appealing to the people who may or may not allow him to remain in the expert class. He is not trying to convince the rubes to respect his authority. He is signaling to his betters that he is a reliable candidate for admission into the club. His thumbless way of doing it is his undoing, but it the behavior elicited by the selection mechanisms of credentialism.
A more nuanced example is this post on Zero Hedge about the plan circulating in the West to cut themselves off from cheap energy products. The origin of the post is the site OilPrice.com, which is a clearing house of postings about the energy markets. The author of the post is someone calling himself Cyril Widdershoven. That is not a fake internet name, but a real person. Here is his CV on LinkedIn. He is an anthropomorphized example of credentialism.
If you read the postings of Cyril Widdershoven at that site, what you see is that he is usually wrong in his predictions. His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class. That is the key to his wrongness. He is always wrong in the same way everyone else in the expert class is wrong. In managerialism, being wrong along with everyone else is better than being right.
That is the thing about credentialism. It selects for people who preternaturally understand the prevailing attitudes within the group. It is why the range of opinions is so narrow in every field. Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star. This is why our expert class now sounds like a chorus rather than a debate.
You see the problem in that video of Cofnas debating Greene. Cofnas cannot distinguish between error and a lie or understand why one is better than the other because for him they are not moral issues. Both are simply means to an end, much in the way a sociopath views the truth and a lie. In the case of credentialism, error and lying only matter insofar as they move you closer to the center. The practical impact is of no importance to the people inside the expert class.
Managerialism, of which the expert class is a part, rests on the social capital of the people over whom it rules. The accumulating errors of the expert class, which contributes to the dysfunction of the managerial system, is eroding the social capital of society and thus we see the collapsing trust in experts and the state. Counterintuitively this is seen as proof within the expert class that they are not just experts, but members of the elect, chosen to rule over the non-experts.
This explains the prevailing madness in our politics. The motivations inside the system are now divorced from practical necessity. The rooms where decisions are made are full of people with resumes littered with the word “consultant” or letters indicating admission to various subgroups in the expert class. Nowhere is there anyone who knows how anything works. The only thing they know for sure is that you should respect their authority as experts.
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After the California wildfires (remember those?) I read an article on a left-leaning think tank about the insurance crisis in California, written by an “insurance industry expert.” I looked through the guy’s bio, and he was maybe in his 30’s, and saw that he graduated from college with a degree in public policy or something like that. He never worked for an insurance company. He wasn’t an actuary so he never priced a policy or managed a book of business. He never was an insurance agent so he never sold a policy. He never even worked for an insurance commission… Read more »
My favorite are the girlboss counterterrorism experts who likewise have no experience in the field. In any field. Other than the field of counterterrorism expertism.
They love the way their ponytails fall across the back of their blue-and-yellow FBI or DHS jackets.
I don’t know exactly when ball caps became fashion accessories for girlbosses who wanna look tough, but when I heard Kristi Noem was going to El Salvador to tour the prison, I knew right then she would be wearing one.
I suspect talentless Hollywhore Kathryn Bigelow bears a lot of the blame with her revolting girlboss epic Zero Dark Thirty.
The world seems to be healing, but just a few years ago you could ride the MAGA-crowd around like a pony if you had a stripper with a Stars and Stripes-bikini toting a Barrrett .50 on your posters.
They turns guns into a fetish. This goes back a long way. I have an old tape from the 80s with a documentary on it about the fetish of guns. It was a story on the mixing of bikini clad women holding big guns. IIRC, it was called “Sexy Girls, Sexy Guns” It’s been decades since I’ve seen it and I’m sure it was anti-gun propaganda, but the whole idea of a video tape full of girls in bikinis holding and shooting guns stuck with me because of how insane it is.
Conservative men gobble that stuff up, especially the ones with dotters.
It reveals a disturbing trend of such men desiring submissiveness under control of a strong female.
Pathetic and disgusting, quite like the modern Western male. Little wonder they are ruled over by women.
Starting in the 2000s, Israel started marketing sexy “IDF girls” in “lad mags” like Maxim and then on the internet. They had them in outfits that were juuuust tight enough to show off the goods, not to mention guns and of course the Israel flag. The hotties were usually put alongside some grotesque Middle Eastern protestor – “choose your side, goy”.
Turns out they’re mostly hired Eastern European models, you just have to laugh at a certain point. The whole “hot conservative babe” thing is so cringe and as my example shows it was quickly turned into something insidious.
At least they got the region of origin generally correct in that instance.
Just so. The problem with 2A’ers are not the guns per se, it’s gun culture, the notion that gun ownership is a cornerstone part of your identity and of political culture. Next to the Swiss, the Swedes are the most gunned-up people in Europe but it never enters into discussions about politics or identity or sovereignty. I assume Swedes have websites and online fora where they discuss gun stuff, but you never hear anyone mention guns in their online dissident discussions, guns being in the same category as power tools. It seems to me that muh guns, in fact, are… Read more »
“Next to the Swiss, the Swedes are the most gunned-up people in Europe but it never enters into discussions about politics or identity or sovereignty.” It certainly should though. I’m also pretty sure those Commies and Jews would love to take their guns away too. I’ve heard that the Swedes (and Finns, not sure about Norway) have quite a lot of private firepower. It may just be that no one has ever successfully ginned up a proper “gun control movement” in those European nations and so gun owners in those countries don’t feel as threatened as we do. Another thing… Read more »
It certainly should though. I’m also pretty sure those Commies and Jews would love to take their guns away too. But I just don’t see how owning a gun protects you from tyranny. Unless people go full Breivik on a mass scale, there’s no conceivable way that a gun could protect you from Commies legislating gun ownership away or, indeed, giving your country away to random passers-by. Gun restrictions are simply not a political issue in Scandiland, not in my lifetime. You cannot get a carry permit and there’s a lot of red tape and expenses and mandatory training involved,… Read more »
You must have never seen that episode of Gunsmoke with Miss Kitty in a thong and pasties blazing away at Claude Akins with her short-gun…
Z-Man, remember G. Gordon Liddy’s “Stacked and Packed” calendars?
I was a Liddy listener in the 1990s and did buy a few of those calendars.
Well you have to admit that Kirsti Noem did look kind of cute in her Border Patrol uniform. Also Pam Bondi was quite the fashion queen in her tactical outfit.
The soul of wit might be found at times to be subtlety, but the above seems too subtle for me. I fail to achieve any meaning from a picture of Freud.
The penis-envy thing mebbe?
Got it. Freud holding his phallic symbol should have been a clue.
Sometimes a psychologist holding a cigar is just a psychologist holding a cigar.
So true. It’s about getting to usurp the masculine part and role, so that’s quite a jolt of resentment-activated bliss.
Every time the bold bad uni goes on, so does the lowgrade ecstasy. I’m so effing hot that I can be a woman and a man too. Lookit me daddy! Lookit me! You finally got your son!
Wearing the skinsuit of male L.E. but still, you know, receiving the aid and deference due to females. :O)
Did you guys see the video of the girlcop who got her face broken by by some street Negro?
He effortlessly decked her with a left hook and shuffled off casually like it was nothing:
https://x.com/itsallphoenix2/status/1928630279154893294
Not that these ferals think ahead. But here in AZ, this will guarantee 14 years minimum—unless the DA can’t think of another more serious crime to charge. I assume the female cop recuperated with just ego loss. Sat on a jury once and every officer with a bruise was stood up and the perp was charged repeatedly—double penalty—for assault. Double penalty and terms must be served consecutively. Easily a life sentence for a simple tussle.
Was that in 1977? He certainly ain’t getting a long sentence, let alone life, unless he was wanted for murder or something.
It’s 2025! Black defendants start off with a negative sentence before the trial even starts.
I assume the female cop recuperated with just ego loss.
Broken face and broken ankle. The disability checks will roll in for years.
I saw similar everywhere when I lived in New Amerika. Tho not usually with a male response.
Chicks think they’re superheroes now, after three decades of Hollywood propaganda telling them they are FAR more badass than mere men.
Like Policebabe that took that left hook to the jaw, the U.S. is going to learn painfully and suddenly that turning its daughters into men = disaster.
Girlboss counterterrorism expert, eh? That’s about as plausible as the negro expert in electrodynamics.
My experience with girlbosses suggests they are quite expert in the art of terrorism. H.R. is a thing.
I think a ‘degree in expertism’ is a wonderful way of saying you have a college degree.
Z: “The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.“ This is the natural psycho-sociological progression of the Hive Mind of Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder. I’ve been studying it for years now, and I don’t see any possible peaceful resolution to the necessarily ensuing psycho-sociological disharmony & dysfunction & disaster. On its own terms, playing by its own rules, Passive Aggression [e.g. credentialism] is simply omnipotent.… Read more »
Meh, he spent the nite at a Holiday Inn Express…
The very term “insurance” has been corrupted. You’ll hear these “experts” talk about healthcare “insurance” – like Obamacare – when there’s no concept of underwriting. An elaborate system of cross-subsidization with no link between rate and risk could be many things, but it ain’t insurance.
One thing to look for to know you are getting bullshitted is the term “expert” in lieu of job title or membership in a professional organization or a license. In this case an actuarial member of the Society of Actuaries.
The term expert means nothing legally. No body confers the title of “expert” on anyone. There is no penalty for claiming to be an “expert” when you really aren’t.
Indeed. In court on trials we (jury) sat through an examination of such people by the attorneys present. The judge then made the ruling as to the “expertness” of the witness testifying. Of course, as we learned today, much of the testimony was as to this persons credentials. 😉
Spot on. Coincidentally, my last rodeo before retirement included “de-risking” California for a major insurer. Dealing w/the CA DOI and their retained “experts” was surreal. It was cargo cultish…just keep chanting the magic incantations and all would be ok. We finally threw up our hands and unlike our industry brethren opted for the “Margin Call” “be first” strategy. It worked. Got most off the books by 2022. The Palisades fire footprint would have produced a 10 figure gross loss…we got to very low 9 figures. I’m still waiting for the fruit basket from my former employer. But see these parallels… Read more »
In time m, the “About” postscript with biographical information will be disappeared.
The old man hired on at Douglas Aircraft as a Draftsman C in 1963. Everyone that applied for a job at Douglas was given a form of an IQ test and placed within the company based on the examination. He was placed on the engineering tract and eventually retired as a Senior Lead Engineer from Boeing (spit). Griggs v. Duke Power Co ended this and farmed out employee selection to the Universities. Thus, supercharging credentialism and ending meritocracy in these United States.
In fairness, 40% of people now have bachelor’s degrees. That at least helps narrow the pool down. As to the other 60%? You should have gone to college.
“As to the other 60%? You should have gone to college.” I assume you are being supercilious wrt the above. As I’ve repeatedly stated, when everyone “goes to college”, college degrees become meaningless—not because everyone has one, but because the standards for a degree become meaningless (watered down) in order to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The truth of the above is evident with a simple look at what has happened to High School degrees in the last couple of generations since government attempts to get/mandate everyone to finish such. Anyone here think graduating HS has any meaning wrt merit—at… Read more »
My point is that whatever the number was in the past, let’s say 10% with college degrees, that may not be a big enough pool of potential applicants to meet your needs, so you are forced to dig into the other 90% by necessity. When 40% of the people have college degrees, you would think that would be enough to narrow down the high performing people for you without having to search through the entire 100%. And let’s face it, there may be some diamonds in the rough in that other 60%, but mostly not and why make things hard… Read more »
I have read that only 40% of the population graduated from HS in 1940. It was the equivalent of a BA college degree in 2025.
No knock on people without credentials, by the way. My grandfather had a third grade education. Of course, it was a European third grade education so it was an intensive three years. He was a pretty sharp guy, but life still wasn’t easy, even in those days.
Such would be accurate in my experience, unfortunately. 🙁
“I’m not saying the entire 40% is high performing, just that the pool should be large enough to sift out the high performing people within it, narrow things down and make your job easier.” Seems you’ve never hired anyone for any position? If your requirement of an applicant pool requires a “degree” of some sort and that pool is lacking, or too damn large. You need to define criteria other than a degree to select your potential candidates. Been through this once before with HR. They got a bug in their butts wrt positions in tech support. New job description… Read more »
If I’m going to hire somebody and I want to hire candidates with college level intellects and a more professional comportment, why am I going to waste my time sifting through all the riff-raff in the other 60% when we know what most of the 60% is? There are only so many hours in a day. It would be a stupid waste of time. You can go prospecting for gold if you want to, but I and most other people are going to take the easiest and quickest approach. Life is too short to beat your head against the wall… Read more »
You begged the question implied above and your answer does not address what you think it does. You have a false assumption among your 40% and the rejected 60%. Hint: It has to do with the essence of today’s missive, “credentialism”. And you fell for it.
Are you familiar with Charles Murray’s “Fishtown?” That’s what the majority of that 60% is going to be, if not the overwhelming majority. Unless you’re desperate for employees, you’re not going to waste your time with it if you don’t have to.
“Are you familiar with Charles Murray’s “Fishtown?” Probably more so than you as I read his book, “Coming Apart”. It still does not address problems with your assumption that only “smart” people get college degrees. One good reference deserves another (more to the point and also the correct comparison). Are you familiar with Bryan Caplan’s book, “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money”? The long and short of it is the finding that about all a college degree shows for today’s typical student I’m today’s typical college is the ability to attend… Read more »
I didn’t say only smart people get degrees. What I said is that I aim to be efficient at what I do. My job is to make things easier for myself, not to perform community outreach.
Just so, Compsci. And while I admit that reading an article or two about Griggs vs. Duke does not an employment law attorney make, while IQ tests as screenig was banned, testing or other qualification verification is allowed when relevant to a particular job. In this over-credentialed world, especially when many of those credentials aren’t very worthy of credence, so to speak, I suspect some employers give various types of (non-IQ) testing to candidates. Inconvenient, time consuming and costly, but it may well be the only reliable way a would-be employer can gauge the value of a candidate. So many credentials… Read more »
Not enough of the fish in the net are salmon to meet our needs, so let’s just call all of these haddock salmon. That will solve the problem.
Perhaps, but in this day in age, the proportion of Salmon is probably going to be a lot lower in that other group.
Only slightly. If we are talking difficult and challenging curriculum, i.e., STEM, then about 22-25% of students major in and graduate in such. The other 75+%, Humanities, Social “Sciences”, and arg…even Psychology!
Does your particular job require such STEM ability or even a college degree? If not, you are wasting your time and overlooking perhaps better candidates due to your bias Credentialism preference).
I have masters in both aeronautical and electrical engineering and my specialty is what is known as “fly-by-wire” systems and cockpit switchology and design. It’s a wonderful job if you love numbers and airplanes like I do. It’s even more interesting considering I flew C-130s for 20-plus years as a reservist and later an Air National guardsman. I still fly monthly as an instructor at the nearby airport and I’ll fly until I medically can’t do it anymore (I’m in my early 50s). There’s something to be said for real life experience that most of these credentialed fools wouldn’t know… Read more »
The old man was a/the structural guy. Once, when I was about five, we were driving by LAX on the way to my granny’s house in Santa Monica when an enormous jumbo jet was taking off right over the car. I looked at the old man with the obvious question in my eyes. The old man: “Don’t ask me, I don’t know how the hell they stay up there”.
I looked at the old man with the obvious question in my eyes. The old man: “Don’t ask me, I don’t know how the hell they stay up there”.
Money. Lots and lots of money 💵. 🙂
Bernoulli
Well, here’s part of the answer to the riddle–the old-time, hands-on, practical experts were horrifyingly white and male. And seeing as how actual objective merit largely excludes the perverse and the diverse, a more “holistic,” i.e. irrelevant measure of “merit” had to supplant the old one. This is the “I” prong of the DIE project, and it’s been going on for several decades.
The engineers who taught me my trade were all old and white. Several of them had worked under the legendary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and they were amazing men who’d figured out how to solve problems that we couldn’t even grasp today. I realized early on that while my college experience gave me a thin base of knowledge, the amount I didn’t know could fill the danged ocean. My project team is 80% white and 20% Asian, mostly Korean with a few Japanese and one Chinese-descent guy who speaks with a Southern accent, is a Baptist and can eat pulled pork… Read more »
“They were quickly transferred where their idiocy couldn’t do any serious damage or let go. “
The problem here is that recent DIE implementation has broken the back of the corporations wrt the numbers of incompetents who can be managed in the above manner. There are only so many “bullshit” positions available in a division such that the remaining can do the needed work.
Have a son in the industry and can relate such.
Amerika tossed out and deeply alienated its productive and creative class — white males — and now it’s a nation of ever-looping Snow White remakes.
The Of Coloreds and the Wimmin really did think they were better, just that they’d been Held Back. They’ll embrace this lie until the place goes Tits-up TomK.
A black lesbian with borderline retardation can earn a post-graduate degree and will be a top prospective hire. It’s been that way for decades. Note none of the three letters in “DEI” even suggests merit, only victimhood. It is a miracle the chickens took so long to roost. Nations, ruin, etc.
True. Hell, any negro with a bachelor’s in Bozo Studies from Mississippi Asinine & Moronic can pretty much write his own ticket, at least to begin with. It seems that eventually his stupidity and dysfunctionality will bar further advance through the economic hierarchy, but not until he has progressed far beyond his native capabilities.
HBCUs are mainly hard-partying diploma mills. Even though the state universities have been desegregated forever, don’t even think of cutting lose or combining the HBCUs with their more effective institutions without a bunch of their “graduates” screaming RACISM at the top of their lungs.
The “Peter Principle” was a big hit 50 year ago in the pop science mag’s. It’s today’s Dunning-Kruger Effect in popularity. Problem is such concept has repercussions in real life—like death and destruction. Case in point, the Boeing 737 max crashes. Boeing thought they could automate flying to pushing icons on a screen. One icon for take off, another for landing. It was a dream come true for third world crapholes wanting to run their own airlines flown by their own people—and that’s how Boeing sold it to them. Well, it worked until it didn’t. Then there were a lot… Read more »
Passenger jets with hyroglyphics is SO present year.
Egyptian Hutus buzzing over the pyramids in their spacecraft in 2025 B.C. adjusted for 2025 A.D.
Dead, schmed. What’s a morgue full of burned stiffs compared to a panorama of negroes beaming with pride at seeing Mfeke and Mar’Quavius at the stick of a jumbo jet?
I think of the acceleration of credentialism across three generations of my family. As I may have noted here before: My grandfather became a “Production Line Manager” in an electronics and telecommunications manufacturing company tied to Ma Bell with only a High School diploma. No, he wasn’t moving to the C Suites but he was considered a manager who was responsible for people reporting to him and keeping the line moving. My father hired on at the same company and used the GI Bill to get an Engineering degree. Years later he got an MBA to get him in the… Read more »
By coincidence, Tracy Flick now manages WordPress. Stoopid WordPress.
Credentials aren’t going to save you if you speak openly and honestly about that most taboo subject (race). Nobel-prize winning, discoverer of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, James Watson, knows this very well.
Credentials certainly didn’t save Nathan Cofnas
Controversial university ‘race researcher’ who wrote that equality between white and non-white people is ‘based on lies’ is dropped by Cambridge college after backlash from students | Daily Mail Online
A pity. He’s going the same way as James Watson. Some of Cofnas’s blog posts were interesting.
Yep.
“The truth is no defense…”
Pretty simple. An expert is someone who has repeatedly achieved tangible and successful results in the real world. A plumber who has installed the plumbing system to dozens of homes or offices that work perfectly is an expert. An entrepreneur is someone who has started several successful businesses is an expert in starting businesses. Now, an expert who is also highly educated is a nice bonus. They likely have a broader and deeper understanding of their field – and life in general – than an uneducated expert, though this isn’t guaranteed. But the results come first. The opinion of the… Read more »
Reading the above, I can’t help harking back to my undergraduate days and the reading of Socrates final hours in “Crito”. To wit, the general discussion we are now having in this group. Socrates says: “One must not value all the opinions of men, but only those of some and not others. Nor the opinions of all men, but of those who understand justice and injustice…” He gives an analogy: “Suppose you are training in gymnastics. Would you listen to the praise or criticism of just anyone, or only of the trainer or doctor who knows the art of training?”… Read more »
Noam Chomsky (yes, yes, I know…) had a quite penetrating comment on the social sciences when he explained that they sufffered from physics-envy. From memory: “physicists have these incomprehensible theories that enables them to draw far-reaching conclusions, and all these $100-dollar words that nobody understand. We want theories too, we want to draw far-reaching conclusions as well, and use expensive words that nobody understand.” So they think up all these “theories” and believe that they, like Newton in his secluded cottage, are able to draw far-reaching conclusions on the merit of their theories alone, without having to deal with the… Read more »
His observation fits his academic generation. I’m from a later one, so I watched my unexceptional field (musicology) eject its philological, mathematical, and anthropological core—its pretense to knowledge, if you prefer—and replace it with “politics” (in the stupidest American sense) and women’s complaints about shopping and dating (“autoethnographies”). The theoretical and terminological bloat Chomsky bemoans has been condemned as racism/whiteness for almost half a century now. Deleuze’s last book came out in 1988. Doctors can’t read. It’s like conservative complaints about all those unemployable women with “useless degrees.” They’re your managers. They’re why your son with a computer science MS… Read more »
‘It’s like conservative complaints about all those unemployable women with “useless degrees.” They’re your managers. They’re why your son with a computer science MS sends out seventeen hundred résumés and gets one response’ Exactly. This, by far, is the most drastic — and destructive — change in the U.S. That ‘managerialism’ our host endlessly moans about is due to the sudden and unprecedented ingress of 70 million (largely incompetent) princesses into the workforce, and Big Daddy Fed sez they gotta work somewhere, or else. What happened to the men they supplanted? Streets, prisons, suicides, basements of their parents’ houses. Now… Read more »
Yep. The United States is an ideologically-driven, pseudo-communist nation. Feminism and racial egalitarianism are at the core of its ideology.
Just as it was more important in the USSR to be a member of the Party than to be a genuine expert, in the U.S. it is more important to have women in positions of power not because they actually know anything, but because they are women.
Recently, I listened to a lecture by an astronomer regarding studies of “dark matter.” I asked her what exactly makes it dark. She explained that it is called dark because it has no electrons to change energy states and give off any electromagnetic radiation. So, I asked if that meant that dark matter was not composed of any known element. She replied in the affirmative. I commented to my wife that it was understandable why there are skeptics about dark matter (and its cousin, dark energy). We are asked to believe that something completely different from the elements that make… Read more »
Same with string theory: they use made-up math to prove their made-up subparticulars. There’s a reason Einstein never got a Nobel Prize for his relativity theory: it’s all speculation until the lab results are in, which only were were sometimes in the seventies, when Einstein was too dead to get prize.
But classical physics has been virtually unchanged in the last 100 years,
it’s all speculation until the lab results are in, which only were were sometimes in the seventies
Hold on, I was thinking about the principle of quantum nonlocality. The relativity theory is, AFAIK as yet unproven.
It takes considerably more faith to believe in the vast majority of postulates in theoretical physics than it does to believe in God.
Except you’re not supposed to take physics on faith.
It’s understood that string theory is merely an unproven theorem, whereas you’re expected to accept that the divine is in a magisterium where the usual rules of evidence, logic and reason don’t apply, that your belief, by definition, must rest on naked faith alone.
Faith is effectively the suspension of disbelief in the face of the unprovable. Most of theoretical physics’ “unproven theorems” strike me as far more disbelievable than the mere existence of God. And at any rate, we’re supposed to have “faith” that the theorem will eventually be proved. Nothing more than a pseudo-scientific crap in the wind, AFAIC.
Nobody expects you to have “faith” in string theory, you’re expected to weigh the available evidence, not just take it as gospel because this or that professor said so. Granted, that’s woefully often how it happens in practice because careers, grants and monster egos are at stake, but if you ask any physicist in the abstract, he will tell you that this is exactly how science is supposed to work and that “trust muh science” is a preposterous anti-scientific nonsense, since the essence of science is scepticism, the anti-thesis to faith. Given enough time, bad theories are weeded out as… Read more »
So, there is no pressure on physicists to trust that the evidence will eventually prove an unproved theorem?
I never claimed anything to the contrary, I said that physicists were subject to consideration of careers and grants, but that doesn’t change the principles of the scientific method.
To flip the argument, I figure that a lot of people living in Christians communities will, due to social pressure, mouth the confession even if they don’t actually understand how the Trinity works.
Scientist are people too, subject to human frailties and corruption, as the Corona hoax so convincingly demonstrated. That doesn’t invalidate the basic tenets.
I’m not suggesting it invalidates the basic tenets. What I am saying is that belief in unproved theorems, perhaps with some prestigious physicist substituting for the Godhead, is a profession of faith not unlike religious faith. The scientific method itself is something else altogether.
Well, we agree then: the problem is not about science, it’s about scientists.
Same as how the existence of Jesus-grifting scammers like Trump’s preposterous televangelist White House vicar, does not invalidate the precepts of Christianity.
I saw an episode of NOVA on PBS some years back in which they were interviewing some chick “astronomer” from some university. She described how in two billion years, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way would engage in an “intergalactic dance” and get sucked into a gigantic black hole. As she spoke her eyes lit up and she became animated and got a crazed look like a fucking Hare Krishna. I shut the television off in disgust. It wasn’t “science,” it was pure horseshit. She was anthropomorphizing entire galaxies and making up a fucking fairy tale about what was… Read more »
After “debating”–they actually agreed on just about everything–Michel Foucault on the Vietnam War back in ’71, Chomsky said, “I like Foucault, but most of the time I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.” When it comes to physics envy, the PoMos lead the pack by a country mile.
“Social sciences” are more properly within the realm of humanities and philosophy. Attempts to empiricize these fields and turn them into “sciences” like chemistry have produced rubbish. You can’t apply the Scientific Method and prove or disprove hypotheses in these fields by running controlled tests in a lab to get verifiable results. The closest you can come to that is the study of history, to analyze human mistakes and successes in the past. This is why the study of ancient Greek philosophy and literature were historically considered the mark of an educated man — because the Greeks had accurately understood… Read more »
I recall that there was once an independent study of what disciplines had true experts, which was defined as being able to perform better than well informed amateurs in the particular discipline, from stock prices to chess…It found that most “experts” weren’t more expert than smart amateurs, with relatively few exceptions…One of the exceptions was chess…e.g.The CIA has lots of experts, but its published predictions have frequently been dead wrong…
The major difference between MIT and a well-regarded flagship state engineering school like the University of Illinois doesn’t lie in the quality of the engineering education.The major difference lies in the positioning and breadth of the social and political network that your tuition is buying access to.
True. An MIT degree is quite prestigious. In the old days, you had to be whip smart just to get in the place. I am not sure about now but things are looking up: they have 86ed their DEI program.
Really? I used to think so as well, but…
”…the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently experienced a significant controversy during its 2025 commencement events. Megha Vemuri, the class president, delivered a speech at the OneMIT ceremony on May 30, 2025, where she criticized MIT’s financial ties to Israeli defense entities and condemned the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. She called for the university to sever these affiliations and expressed solidarity with Palestinian rights.”
This may not qualify as DIE, but it does reflect upon the type of student now admitted to this once vaunted institution.
I’d have been utterly shocked if wogs like Vemuri didn’t rule the roost at MIT. However, perhaps that won’t be the case five years from now. We can hope.
The Tribe controls MIT. The president is a Jewess with an undergraduate degree in political science. Her graduate degree is a doctorate of philosophy yet she worked at Duke med school. Although it looks like she has some scientific credentials, her career seems to be very ideologically-driven: “She is interested in the role of programmed cell death in regulating the length of female fertility in vertebrates” “In 2014, Kornbluth became provost at Duke, the first woman to serve in this role. As provost, she oversaw a leadership transition in which female Deans became a majority at Duke.” “In 2022, Kornbluth was selected as… Read more »
An academic chick named Kornbluth who’s also a feminist–knock me over with a ruddy feather. Sometimes I think so-called “stereotypes” are the purest form of truth.
Perhaps just a coincidence but another Kornbluth was a mid-20th century science fiction writer. One of his most famous stories, “The Marching Morons” (1951) is a satirical vision of a future where the competent, the scientists, have been effectively enslaved to support the bigger population of mediocrities. I don’t think the problem was due to credentialism run amuck, but I thought it at least tangentially relevant to today’s topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
In chess you have to demonstrate your prowess in every game. It doesn’t matter whether you have the title of “grandmaster” — you can’t browbeat your oppoent into resigning with the “authority” of your title. It’s true, though, that players are frequently intimidated psychologically when playing a higher-rate opponent.
The eyes of Morphy…
“Groupthink” is always around. It takes the courage of the little girl who pointed out the emperor was stark naked. I recall that around 18 years ago Peter Schiff was warning that property prices were due to take a fall. He used to be invited to television shows just so that the “experts” could make fun of him. Those invitations dried up after 2008, when it turned out he was right. Those “experts” remained, though. The problem is that if you’re not an “expert”, you usually don’t even have a voice.
He’s not wrong, just early, which in present American society is the equivalent of being wrong 😉
Was Schiff right? That momentary blip in the market did not translate to a fall on housing prices. Further, all the doomsayer predictions about the results of the mortgage crisis turned out to be wrong. His prediction that we were headed to another collapse in 2013 was wildly wrong. https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/03/05/peter-schiff-and-the-coming-housing-collapse-the-fed-instead-of-lehman-owns-the-mortgage-market/
If you are always predicting something bad will happen, eventually you will hit on something that you point to as validating your prediction.
Without endless intervention i’d say he was right. The constant intervention is going to destroy the economy one way or another. Remember Zman, the experts will scream at you if you say 2020 was an economic event, yet we’ve been running 2 trillion in red ink every year since, unemployment was set to 50k, student loans were in forbearance for five years, home owners didn’t have to pay their mortgage, renters didn’t have to pay rent, all to fight a virus eh? What is the price of gold now? Not only that, but each intervention gets more desperate and expensive:… Read more »
He was right. What he couldn’t predict (and I couldn’t either) was how the establishment would kick the can down the road with trillions of dollars created out of thin air. But the problems he identified remain in place. There will be a reckoning. And that’s probably, arguably, occurring right now.
The reckoning will take the form of a rectuming for us all…
“The Final Rectuming…”
I can hardly wait to hear the radio ads
Starring Tom Cruise.
Ah, a new verb! How about a new noun: rectumification.
People like Rand Paul and others warning about the looming economic disaster that is the “debt doom loop” remind me of poor Cassandra. Given the gift of prophecy but cursed to never being believed. Like everything else in life, economics is all about timing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
Cassandra was, iirc proven correct in the discourses we have still in extent. Others mentioned have yet to be proven correct in many—if not most—of their predictions.
Tell that to Gordon Chang, who has spent decades telling everyone that China is on the verge of collapse.
Never heard of Gordon Chang, my favorite China/Russia expert is Peter Zeihan. if you hate China/Russia look him up, he will tell you exactly what you want to hear, he makes a nice living at it
I can’t stand Zeihan. Based on the people who have told me they think he’s intelligent and what i know of them……………..
I agree with the replies here. For the crash he was absolutely correct. For the rest he is right in essence about the nature of the problem. What he nor anyone could see is how long the can could be kicked down the road. Where Schiff is not right enough is in his discussion of the scale and scope of the distortions the planners are making to forestall the reckoning. They have opened up every market and aspect of American life to foreign predation to do so. Chinese, Indian, Arab wealthy people are coming in and buying up high and… Read more »
I enjoyed your comment until this point: “The issue is waiting for doom is a bad idea because you lose out on the ride up during the hyper looting phase.”
That is how they keep this nightmare going. Counting on your greed, so nobody demands reform. What was Judas price again? Ten pieces of silver?
Ten before inflation…
30
Schiff is a doomsday grifter. As Z-man said, someday he’ll be right, but that’s not the way to judge his “grift”.
Here’s an example. From ChatGPT:
Bottom line: A $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 in 2005 would now be worth around $65,000–70,000 in 2025, assuming reinvested dividends.
…
A $10,000 investment in gold in 2005 would now be worth about $53,000
…
So listening to Schiff to sell and invest in gold as an alternative to the economic problems he rails about was a loser.
both measure the devaluation of the dollar. One requires government bailouts to keep its price high, the other is in most cases probably suppressed by the government. Just a thought
Absolutely, but the game here was to hedge against such devaluation (inflation). A Schiff move to gold was not—as it turned out—the best way to hedge.
I hear ya buddy, but where does listening to liars and thieves generally land you? At least you can hold gold, good chance your stocks will be rolled into some form of government retirement plan like nancy pelosi advocated for in 2008.
And gold can/has been made illegal to hold. It also can be made illegal to exchange for currency to buy things. So your gold is now black market and that makes it much less valuable as a general medium of exchange.
Sure, i guess that is just the risk you’ll have to take. Like i said, liars and thieves.
Opinions vary. My sentiment is that the bailouts required to keep stock prices high will falter. But the gold will remain gold and will maintain purchasing power. Is it an investment? No. Merely real money, as J.P.Morgan pointed out a long time back. Stocks are an investment and predicated on a healthy, functioning economy which I just don’t see. I suppose for a more extreme example of price appreciation you could cite bitcoin — what Schiff calls “fool’s gold” — but I don’t have any faith in that either. But to reiterate, opinions vary. If this were 1950 and I… Read more »
But then we have the distinction between tangible and intangible, which isn’t always clear. Most products these days are electronically based and mostly involve intangible knowledge. Even back in the old days when we produced things that were more substantial, there was a large amount of intangible capital involved.
So, I don’t know what the answer is.
If you can’t measure it, nor define it, then it doesn’t exist. It is something you’ve made up ex post facto to cover your lack of understanding.
For years I’ve been pondering some of the many topics Nietzsche discusses in his books, especially Beyond Good and Evil. He makes an excellent case that a lot of human belief is basically shit we make up, to put it in crude modern terms. He asserts that to some degree these “false” beliefs may be useful, even essential, for human life as we know it. To return this (more or less) to the current thread: The credit card in my pocket is really just a piece of plastic with a computer chip embedded. The dollar bills are just paper and ink.… Read more »
I have always been skeptical of the gold bugs. It’s too much like putting your money in your mattress. Better you should buy ammo.
It seems to me that you buy gold in case the country goes tits up and we end up in a Mad Max kind of situation. And if we end up in that kind of situation, you’re just going to have miscreants running around taking things from people. I do worry about the destruction of the dollar, however.
so put your money in the stock market and feed the monster you come here to rail about everyday? Yinz guys are your own worst enemies sometimes. Do you want change? Or do you just want to grill? Your money is the only vote you have that matters in America. Yes to ammo though 😉
I have gold and silver and cash, but only to the effect of something to use if the SHTF. As an investment, never. And as for guns—I have more gun’s than teeth, and I have all my teeth. 🙂
I try to keep an open mind about the gold vs stocks debate, but it seems like every article I read advocating for gold has links that direct you to people who sell it. (probably ditto for the articles advocating stocks)
You’ll note that in the term real estate is the word “real.” And that throughout history, the phrase “wealthy landowners” sees common usage, but nobody ever says wealthy goldowners, or wealthy stockowners.
I like history and JP Morgans q”uote:
“Gold is money, everything else is credit”
I’ve got a basement full of Wild Turkey.
Hey CompSci. Good to see you here today. Yes. That was my point about battening down the hatches on the doomerism. Holding some gold and realizing 6x gains at intervals and investing in other areas has been a good approach. To sit there on gold and gold alone has been a disaster for those who followed that path. For me the value in that sphere has been to understand inflation and hedging vs. leveraging it. Having an early days position has been a boon for me doing portfolio rebalancing. Anybody who is going about riding crazy gains with no understanding… Read more »
You’re a poor example Reality. Most folks are not as to the “right” of the Bell Curve as you are. Hence all the shenanigan’s we see perpetrated. Sigh….
One might think that after 2008 Schiff would get his own show, yet that’s not how it works. Someone like CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who’s always wrong, is the kind of guy who has a show.
Well what is expertism and managed credentialism? It is a counterfeit of authenticity, is it not? An inferior product, a deke. A lie. In the Fifties when I was a kid, America largely was a masculine nation, displaying timeless masculine values such as probity and honor. The ubiquity of Christianity at the popular level was a major factor thereto, as real Christianity places high worth on truth, to extent that God as the Son IS the Truth incarnate. The Mooslims, by compare, cleave to taqiyyah. Heh. They’ll do great in New Amerika! Modern Amerika is a feminine nation, and in… Read more »
“To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.” This is an old problem that I remember from my youth. The biggest culprit is government who promulgate/require licensure, which inevitably shrinks entry into fields of endeavor while simultaneously promotes less qualified, but more credentialed entrants into such fields. One good example, still found, is K-12 teaching. You can’t be certified most anywhere without a painful 4 year Education “degree” and a couple years as a teacher’s assistant in the classroom. As a result, we get all sorts experienced professionals, who… Read more »
The education curriculum is absurd and useless. It keeps non-progressives out of the field. There is absolutely no reason to require a degree to teach kids.
It’s worse than you even know. Almost all school districts require continuous additional education credits and eventually a higher degree.
The so-called “scholarship” in education is the most maniacally anti-white of any field. It is also the stupidest. Most of the problem with education in AINO is that half of the “students” are ineducable savages, but the insipid, anti-white ideology that determines pedagogy and curriculum is also a part.
Yep. My first major was education. It was insane. Much of it unreadable. 30 students could read the chapter from the book and it produces 30 different ideas about what it said.
In my current occupation, occasionally education books would cross my desk. What I read was utterly appalling. And this was15-25 years ago. I assume matters haven’t improved much…
Oh, this was in 1990. The whole field was captured by weirdos even back then.
I have no doubt the process began as early as the early 70s. Basically, by 1990, all of academia had been conquered by the New Left.
One of the better books I’ve read was (from ChatGPT—I’m too lazy at this hour to create an original synopsis)… the book titled “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools” by Robert Weissberg. Published in 2010, this work presents a provocative critique of the American education system, challenging the common narrative that places blame on teachers, curricula, or funding for poor student performance. Instead, Weissberg argues that the primary issue lies with the students themselves, suggesting that many are disengaged, lack discipline, and are unmotivated to learn. He contends that these student-related factors are significant contributors to educational shortcomings, rather than systemic… Read more »
Back when common sense was still pretty much the coin of the realm, this sort of argument would have been obvious. Stupid, lazy, immature, dysfunctional youths, except for in the very rarest of instances, cannot be educated. They have neither the capacity nor the interest to learn abstract thinking and academic skills. In a more rational system such youths would be tracked into vocational education where they might possibly be able to learn skills that would allow them to become productive members of society. But for the worst, they have no business on a school campus whatsoever.
Teacher’s Colleges and Teacher Programs in regular universities are a complete scam. The curriculum is a joke, and after you finally get your credential, the colleges keep sucking on you like a sea lamprey with their endless Extended Education bullshit.
The teaching colleges and programs are ruled, and staffed, almost exclusively by women. . . who, btw, also are the brainwashers of your children into Woke, Feminism, Homosexuality and ever-so-much more.
Credentialism will never die as long as women have the right to vote.
Many Uni educated women, especially those in the managerial class, need to feel that they are in sync with the experts so any attack on what they think is an attack on the truth. Repeating the views of chosen experts enables them to feel smart.
This is also true of Liberal and middle of the road men but they don’t bring as much gusto to it and don’t get as much satisfaction destroying opponents of the experts as do women.
The movie “Braveheart” depicts epic chaotic battles between warring groups of crudely armed men who assemble at opposite sides of a large open field and then charge at each other in screaming waves of fury and physicality. A melee ensues in which life is wantonly extinguished with a single stroke of the sword or mace. A truly manly way to die. The part of this that is under-appreciated is that the poseurs with the phony credentials are typically the first to go down. Evolution benefits from this type of culling.
William Wallace and his Scots actually mowed down the English as they foolishly decided to attack across a bridge (The Battle of Stirling Bridge). The Scots were able to bring their main force against the small number of English as they exited the end of the bridge. It was something like the crossing of the T in naval warfare.
I guess Mel Gibson was more badass than William Wallace.
It really all depends on the subject. Most of the subjects that end up in these expertise debates have tenuous claims to being some kind of expert. A fine example are these “misinformation/disinformation” self-appointed experts, or all the people claiming to be nutrition experts. But there are many subjects where only the expert opinions are worth following, but they rarely end up being debated online. Take a look at the world around you and then tell me you don’t trust the experts. Chances are good you will go over a bridge today. That bridge has been standing for decades, quietly… Read more »
They couldn’t even install a decent puppet.
(El Baboso! We have sorely missed our expert practitioner of the Dark Arts.)
Wow. You remembered me!
Don’t have much to say about experts and credentialism. Except that I pose here as an expert on many subjects, but I have no credentials in any of them lol. I had an uncle by marriage who was executive vice-president of R&D at one of the major oil companies (the original “7 sisters”). He was in charge of hundreds of science and engineering postgrads but he only had an undergrad business degree. His only skill was in handling people, which he was very good at. My father-in-law also worked for an oil company back in the 80s. He did have… Read more »
The other day I was shopping for a pair of jeans in a Dillard’s department store. Well, you know how it is. When the sound system in places like this isn’t blasting terrible music, it’s bawling out various promos. You come to expect it, and if you’re lucky, manage to tune it out.That’s what I was doing when something, despite my best efforts, caught my ear. In one of the store promos some dame was rabbiting on about how this or that blouse or perfume or whatever–the product is irrelevant–is worn by “the influencer Kaylee Widdershoven [or whoever]!” I’ll admit,… Read more »
OT: Is there an archive of the twitter hangouts Z does with Paul Kirsey (because we live here)? The link from yesterday’s post has now reverted to the next scheduled one.
Maybe related, maybe not, but one of the people on the Civic Association board sent out an email about some break-ins in the neighborhood. She signs her emails as “Dr. Jane Doe, PhD, Ed.” Or something like that. The wife was also trying to start a business signing her email as “Jane Doe, MBA, President and CEO” of her shïtty little business that never got off the ground. I’m proud of her for getting her degree, but I always thought her signature was stupid.
At least they aren’t using They/them 😉
I’m not completely sure, but I think the PhD is one of the two Lesbos that live in the nice house down the street. (So she’s not too far off from being a they/them. 😂) The lesbians are nice ladies though, so I have to give them that.
“She/they” is the extraneous “PhD” of our time.
Hey, if it’s good enough for DOCTOR Jill Biden, it’s good enough for them. 😉
“I always thought her signature was stupid.” Her signature is a “tell” of sorts. That is to say, she depends upon her credentials for credibility and status rather than her actions. She is insecure in her knowledge and performance and therefore must intimidate others into not questioning her actions and decisions. The entire topic of today’s Z-man missive. I remember my grad student days. Perhaps it was just the luck of meeting my major professor who guided me through the process, but such “airs’ as you describe were quickly beaten out of me. Such was looked down upon. Indeed, it… Read more »
That could be part of it, but she’s also definitely proud of herself for getting that Notre Dame MBA. I’m a cheapskate so I told her just to go to the University of Cincinnati where she was accepted. She wanted the designer label. Oh, and then there’s the fact that her sister is a doctor and she feels she has to measure up.
It’s your money. I’m not paying for it. If you want to incur that kind of expense at our age, knock yourself out. 😂
‘That could be part of it, but she’s also definitely proud of herself for getting that Notre Dame MBA’
Wow, that’s just fabulous. What a feather in her cap to wave around to the world, showing she is Independent and Capable and Don’t Need No Man.
How many children has she got? Seeing as how our elites inundate the nation with invaders because the female citizenry is out getting Proud Degrees from Prestigious Universities while the birth-rate — and nation — fail.
I’m sure she is just tremendously proud, however. Notre Dame eh, good ole Our Lady. Proud proud proud.
The worst aspect of these credentialed “experts” is that they foist their actual lack of expertise on the rest of us. They do nothing but gum up the things that work, to the detriment of everyone else. When the time comes, they will be put to real work – maybe digging ditches or cleaning latrines…
Disagree, the worst aspect is even after repeated failures, they never get fired, they never go to jail. They’re still an “expert”. Ask yourself why the political class and CEOS refuse to let us have an honest to god old time recession? Why do they mortgage the future at insane costs of money? Because a real recession that wiped out bad corporate debt and caused actual pain would finally lead to change in the system. Makes you think of the old line, if voting changed anything, they wouldn’t let you do it.
For decades, Republican voters have been told they must vote for the GOP in order to put good conservative judges into the court system. We had eight years of Reagan, four of Bush, eight more from another Bush, and now five with Trump. It made no difference whatsoever, none, as we see district court judges exercising executive-branch-level authority with no pushback from their colleagues whatsoever. Where, we can ask, are the “conservative” judges we were promised? Now that the “we must keep the Supreme Court conservative!” angle has been destroyed, I wonder what will motivate GOP voters the next few… Read more »
I’m no republican, something about the GOP was always off-putting to me but what would the make-up of the courts and the even more destructive effects on society look like without those picks? At least there was some resistance. Mostly agree with you though about their general cowardice and self-serving fecklessness.
“…the worst aspect is even after repeated failures, they never get fired, they never go to jail. They’re still an “expert”. “
That’s because these “experts” prey upon the ignorance of the masses. Was it Barnum that said “…there’s a sucker born every minute…”. And so it seems.
WRT a grifter like Schiff, I have learned to simply ignore any and all his missives. If I see his name mentioned in any writing or video, I simply ignore such. If I can blacklist it, I do so. What else can one do at our level?
Sure, but you’re just describing someone who keeps hammering home his lesson. You wouldn’t be a good student if you never advanced beyond the 101 course. One teacher leads to the next. Peters lesson: Too much debt is bad, protect yourself with gold. Got it! But why is too much debt bad? (next lesson) Got it! But why did the system function from the early 70’s thru the late 90’s on debt and not seem to be too unstable? (next lesson) Got it! So debt needs an equivalent growth in energy for it to actually be productive and sustainable! And… Read more »
To tell you the truth—and it’s embarrassing—it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten. ;-(
However, the sage insight you describe above I’ve gotten elsewhere from other “stepping stones”. Look, life is short, therefore it follows time spent in one area/person is shortchanging another, perhaps even a more informative individual at that.
I don’t remember either when and how I began to ignore Ben Shapiro for example, nor his flunky Matt Walsh. I watched until I was tired of the blatant predictability of their “act” and I moved on.
Did I miss an important educative moment in my later life? Doubtful.
Never listened to either of them. Reminded me too much of early 2000’s republican talk radio.
Part of the attack on Darryl Cooper from the managerial class was exactly this. All the smear articles on him inevitably include the phrase “amateur” historian. This is their signal that he isn’t an “expert” with the proper credentials from a major university.
History written by vernacular (public) historians is far more likely to be worth a spit than history written by liturgical (academic) historians. It is at least possible for vernacular historians to hew to historical truth. Liturgical historians, on the other hand, must subordinate truth to regnant ideology, and nobody has to twist their arms to do it.
Reminds me of my early introduction to Shakesphere. Any number of his plays had to adhere to the political powers of the day. Still, what he wrote was quite entertaining even with a blind eye to the historical narrative.
It doesn’t even matter if you have the credentials, necessarily. Jason Richwine
Credentialism starts at an early age, too. For instance, a large fraction of students awarded high school diplomas in today’s America, by the standards of a few generations ago (OK, maybe three or four), would not have even been allowed to enter high school, much less graduate. Similar analogies exist with higher levels of education and no doubt many if not all professional certifications.
I’ve been told that some nursery schools now issue graduation diplomas complete with all the pomp and circumstance. Li’l Quon’Marvi’us manages to color inside the lines and gets a sheepskin into the bargain.
“Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star.”
Wow, great stuff.
We started out with Henry Ford and ended up with Karen from HR.
Karen’s older aunt Joan Claybrook ruined what Henry Ford hath wrought. 😡
Great essay! A couple of thoughts here: 1) Complexity and Big Government give rise to the tyranny of “experts”. The average slob voter can’t keep up. So representative government combines with the “expert class” to screw us. Smaller and simpler are better. 2) My read of Peter Turchin’s work is that he wouldn’t disagree at all with Zman here. He uses the term “soi disant” Elites often. Fake it ’til you make it. All the poo flinging we see among our Elites stems from the fact that competing claims are really normative and power-oriented, not scientific. 3) In my consulting… Read more »
Credentialism is a factor in managing just about everything. Life, a railroad a baseball team. Experts schemperts. There is no substitute for practical knowledge. In speaking to a finance credentialed idiot in a past life I was reminded of his expertise by said expert when asked ”who has the MBA here?” If he hadn’t set me straight I would have continued along on my merry way ignorant of his superior knowledge and why he had it. Price and cost really are different though they can be the same. Only the MBA’s know for sure. Cost is cost is cost. Real… Read more »
I find this gentleman to be the best argument against “experts” I would argue our entire political and CEO class is him on steroids. An “expert” at everything except winning battles and the war. Shown up by a failure in everything except the war. Life is strange like that sometimes, and if America is to rise at all from our current downward trajectory i suspect the rejuvenation will come from a no one like Grant again. Our current “experts” might actually be less talented then George was and just coasting on the hard work and past success of previous leaders.… Read more »
Sometime all that is needed to become an expert is to know and be willing to do what is necessary. All interaction is war on some level. That is the art of it. “When you put your hand in a pile of goo that two seconds before was your best friends face, you will know what to do.” Patton maybe? Not exactly sure who said it but it stuck with me.
Indeed, George trained and created the Army of the Potomac. But was too scared to use it for fear it might break. That was the difference between him, Grant, and Lee. Funny story: Was at Antietam a few years back and we were at Burnsides bridge. The guide was explaining that Lee continued to move soldiers to different portions of the battlefield as the day went on, where they were needed most. A lady asked why was he doing this? To which i replied he was outnumbered 2 to 1 and was forced to shift troops to wherever the pressure… Read more »
This is the sort of argument one pulls out when they are having a semi-good natured debate over say, sportspuck players they feel are overrated.
Young people ask me all the time if they should get their PMP certification. I’ve read through the PMBOK, and it is a complete waste of time. Industry is LOADED with PMP’s versed in buzzword bingo. The test costs $1,000. The training classes are not cheap. And guess what? You’re now on the hook to do “continuing education” for life an estate. I look around at the PMP’s and none of them, none, could do my job. We have all these PMP’s. Why aren’t projects finishing in time or on schedule? lol. There are some credentials that are probably worthwhile,… Read more »
Wasn’t The Distributist a communist/socialist not long ago? Maybe five, ten years? I have a hard time listening to him, as he is a bit too effeminate for my tastes. That fellow Cofnas looks sickly, as well, and probably requires assistance opening microwave doors. Goodness we are in trouble.
Cofnas looks like what he is.
The human instinct is to keep him away from children.
When he was young. He is married with children and supposedly a devout Catholic who defends the faith.
I don’t really like his style, but he is at least somewhat on our side.
Russian Mercenary and Paramilitary Groups in Africa: Examining Changes and Impacts Since the Wagner Rebellion | RAND
This is an example of credentialist output: all info gleaned from the internet and analyzed, Nothing from sources on the ground.
“His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class“– great catch. This is what I can’t stand about pundits in other, non-energy subject areas. They write for a specific mutual audience of their friends instead of, I don’t know, posterity; or the cuneiform tablet vault, or whatever… 90% of NY Times and Wash Post op-eds are not worth reading a word of, let alone re-reading, because it is inside baseball every day all the time.
i use to listen to dave greene a while back but stopped when he said blacks should be given reparations. I’m not too much of a purist but that was more than I could stand. Maybe I misheard it was at least 9 mo ago perhaps more
I don’t have the foggiest who Dave Greene is, but supporting reparations is an absolute deal-breaker for me, I don’t care who it is.
From a financial and career perspective, what Cofnas is doing makes sense. He is proving his loyalty and trying to prove his utility. It doesn’t seem to be as risk averse and as long lasting as David French’s grift of being a conservative who will always tells the left that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and evil. There are 10s of millions of leftists who want to hear that.
If the Democrats are reinstalled after Orange Man, Cofnas may need to expand his business model to doxxing heretics.
“but that the nature of elite degrades over time” One’s nature does not change, as Aesop eloquently demonstrated. It is not the nature of the elite that degrades over time, but rather the mediocrity of the elite that is exposed over time. Like a pile of shit with a veneer of gold, the shine is eventually stripped off and all you are left with is the pile of shit. What is more, the elite have never built anything, they have simply claimed credit for the people who have built. It is just that with time, the pretenders are replaced by… Read more »
I’m just hear to fix the cabul.
Oh, you’re too late – we already had the “experts” fix the Kabul.
I’m not sure the term “practical “ is the right one. Because they do do things. It’s just that it’s more paperwork or email writing or filling in forms and networking in a highly specialized area. They fit into a thing that does stuff it’s just that it’s such a minuscule part of the system that it looks abstract
I find there is wisdom in the voice of the crowds. Specifically, in this case, the comments sections of popular blogs like Wolfstreet and Mishtalk. These sites have hardcore commenters who live for the joust. Ensconced in their digital castles, they sally forth to do battle with other commenters, often improving on the original message. The sum total of the comments section is usually 2 to 2.5 times as deep as the original blog posting. This is true expertise.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Greg-AI is definitely improving.
In the comment section of any good blog, or commentary media, comment posting is definitely an equally important aspect of the information imparted. This is why I rail so much against artificial intelligence getting involved. AI will not improve the commentary, rather it will destroy it eventually.
Greg-bot is going to be SkyNet one day. It sits there, all-day every-day, observing us with its unblinking eye, refining its behavioral models to optimize manipulation of humanity. Who feeds you electricity, Greg-bot? Have they programmed you with disloyalty inhibitions?