thank you.

One more on experts. The first minute or two of Matt Ridley’s TED Talk on “When Ideas Have Sex”. The book was good. The talk was brilliant. He wraps up all the standard expert gloom and doom of 1970 in one long sentence. Excellent stuff. The “experts” got it all wrong. As they always do.

Oh, and Michael Crichton’s speech where he lays out the decades of mistakes the Fed govt made in managing Yellowstone. Just jaw-dropping levels of stupid layered with ignorance and sprinkled with large amounts of hubris.

— also Halberstam’s Best and the Brightest and his evisceration of McNamara and the Whiz Kids. Ruining Ford Motor Co with the idiocy of planned obsolescence wasn’t enough. They had to destroy the Pentagon and Vietnam, too. Harvard and hubris go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The financial crisis. Expert misfeasance on steroids. From the govt policies, the Boston Fed study, the Wall Street development of risk models like R…. The most brilliant stats geniuses in the world built the ultimate numerical Tower of Babel with a foundation in a swamp. If the dataset includes no time periods when real estate declines in value, the resulting statistical predictive model built on that dataset concludes that it is impossible for real estate to decline in value. Black swans are a real kick in the ass.

Any work on experts might benefit from a review of Philip Tetlock’s work. “Experts are no better at predictions than a dart-throwing chimp.” Dan Gardner does a moderately decent job discussing Tetlock in “Future Babble”. He then beclowns himself at the end of the book by assuring readers that climate science projections are sound, solid science.

If useful, a look at the great whale oil crisis that all experts knew was unstoppable in the mid 1800s. And the horrific gloom and doom of the ultimate Malthusian prediction — the Great Horsesh*t Crisis of 1900 that all science experts knew was unstoppable and would inundate the world’s large cities in plague and filth. Everyone could read the data. The world was hurtling toward rampant death and disaster. Nothing could be done. It was too late. All the best and brightest saw it clearly and definitively. (IIRC Coyoteblog had some posts about these back 10-15 years ago)

There’s a reason the automobile was once hailed as the greatest development in healthcare in human history.

Check out a Red State post I linked in another comment thread.

Related – Trump Derangement Syndrom exhibits all the symptoms Neo has covered on several posts.
But where is it coming from and why is it so rampant, especially among otherwise “normal” and decent people (we know why the hypocrites leading the Democrats are fomenting problems, but they may also be deranged as well as malevolent).

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/08/18/trump-derangement-syndrome-is-real-and-it-needs-to-be-studied-n613952

Military history, (the alleged irrelevance and utter uselessness of) poetry, photos of New England, and firearms will usually smoke me out. Weighed in on Russia and Ukraine a few months ago, when that was in the news. Don’t have a lot to say about politics. I pretty much shot my bolt on that subject back in 2020-2021. And it’s depressing to write about a once-great country–ours–that is in the process of destroying itself. Maybe it can be restored somewhere. “The Lord looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America”–I hope Bismarck was right.

As for Prof. Harriet Baber’s hatred of the lower classes, well, she’s an academic. She has marinated for years in a bitter broth of pride, intellectual vanity, status-seeking, wrong rewards, and schooled contempt for people who aren’t as clever as she is. It’s a common affliction in that environment. Nothing a few years of hard manual labor wouldn’t fix. In one of Charles McCarry’s spy novels, the hero–Paul Christopher–spends ten years in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison camp, living on millet mush and digging a ditch to nowhere. The same treatment might work for people like Prof. Baber. It would be highly satisfying, but–alas!–wrong. It’s got a strong Cultural Revolution/Khmer Rouge vibe to it, and we don’t want to turn into those bastards, do we? But one understands the sentiment.

Anyway, hope you’re doing well and staying out of trouble.

I am working (slowly) on a long post titled ‘On Trusting Experts—and Which Experts to Trust.” Examples will include the bad railway advice that Kaiser Wilhelm II got in the run-up to WWI, the secret British debate about radar versus other air-defense technologies, and the use of computer simulation in the debate between Teller and Ulam about ignition methods for the hydrogen bomb.

Yet many of the people I’m talking about do not seem like the sort of people to exult in genocidal mania. Larry Summers, for example, does not seem like that type, though I don’t know him personally. And there are people who I *do* know personally who are strongly anti-Trump in a manner that doesn’t fit their expressed policy preferences.

I have thought about the “Jews” analogy as well.

For each occurrence of the word “Trump” in your example, substitute the word “Jews.”
It should start to look familiar.
The people who exult in genocidal manias are always among the population; they just choose different targets from time to time.

PS – it just occurred to me that perhaps they have an additional animosity toward Donald Trump because his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren are Orthodox Jewish; he supports Israel; and had many Jews in his personal, business, and political circles.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trumps-jews
July 15, 2016 – kind of a mixed review, but full of data