25 Jul 2016

Fed Up With Humanities-Trained “Experts”

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NeilArmstrong

Michael Ginsberg is fed up with experts trained neither in facts or real skills, but in the Humanities-style “How to Think in General” kind of elite education.

I trained to be an engineer in college and graduate school. When I went to college, I viewed it as job training. School had a purpose, and I had a mission: prepare myself for the working world by developing skills and a vocation. It was hard work: hours upon hours in labs, in libraries working on problem sets, or studying in my dorm room. It wasn’t easy, but I kept going because I believed engineering was one of the most essential disciplines to Americans’ quality of life and the defense of the nation.

Yet throughout my time in school, it always gnawed at me that my fellow classmates in other disciplines—the students of government, political science, and policy, masters of words, theories, and rules—were going to graduate, occupy positions of power, and determine how I would be able to live my life and run my career. Never mind that many of them started their weekends on Thursdays and probably never took a class in the hard sciences while I was sweating away night and day in the engineering library. They were going to grow up and make decisions that would control my life.

I went to an Ivy League school, and the piece of parchment with the school name was going to open the doors to the gilded life that would allow them to, as one of my schoolmates put it, “rule the world.” Use the school name to get the right internships and make the right connections, and the world would open up for them. (Instead, I repeatedly had job interviewers tell me, “I didn’t know your Ivy League school had engineering.”) I resented it deeply.

That resentment dissipated over time, but never quite went away. …

My resentment, long in remission, came back and crystallized in the following thought: Americans are governed by politicians who see fit to reimagine entire sectors of our economy and, indeed, our lives despite having little, if any, experience in the areas of life they seek to reform wholesale. This means Americans, seeing the failures of government from Obamacare to the Veterans Affairs, from the Environmental Protection Agency dumping toxic materials into a Colorado river to the Dodd-Frank regulations strangling local community banks, have had just about enough of their credentialed but utterly inexperienced supposed betters reordering their lives and livelihoods.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

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2 Feedbacks on "Fed Up With Humanities-Trained “Experts”"

Hrefn

As a general surgeon, who had 13 years of post-secondary education before he could enter practice, and is now increasingly micromanaged by the federal government, I feel your pain. I hope you are correct that Americans are approaching the point beyond which this will no longer be tolerated. But too much of the electorate benefits from Big Government. In medicine, the number of physicians has increased by less than 100% since 1970. The number of health care administrators is up 3000%. A less regulated system is not in the latter’s interest. They consume an ever-increasing portion of the health care dollar. We spend more on health care administration than we spent on health care in toto twenty years ago.
Whence comes the impetus for change? I doubt it can be achieved via the ballot box.
My bet is a catastrophic systems failure will be required.



fjord

They (the meddlers, the otherwise unemployable as I refer to them) are doing it to every industry.

Recently talking to my large animal vet, she was relaying the hoops that we are going to have to jump through in order to get the drugs to treat our own livestock when they get sick. Supposedly it’s to combat the resistant bacteria types, but what it’s going to do is increase antibiotic use in livestock, as well as cause small operators to just drop out of producing because of frustration and cost.

My vet has been hearing belly-aching from some of her customers about it, and they are blaming HER. As if she (and other vets) are the ones who want massive amounts of paperwork, the idea of audit looming over their heads and just general bullcrap that benefits paperpushers.
All caused by people who have never produced anything beneficial in their own lives.

In our garage business, we are bear the brunt of it with most problems being related to the emissions systems in cars (in order to combat the non existent global warming) or the fact that there’s water in the fuel system (ethanol). Also the quality control of replacement parts that are produced overseas.

As usual, the businessowner is blamed for all the mandates that come down from above.



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