Posted on 03/02/2023 3:49:30 AM PST by CFW
If you value truth, ignore the "experts." Most aren't really expert at much. They prefer titles to original thoughts — and the more titles they insist on announcing, the more likely they seek nobility, not knowledge. They could more accurately be called "opinion connoisseurs." They are experts in fashionable opinion and possess an insatiable need to tell everyone else just what the very best people are supposed to believe.
The "experts" told us that COVID came from a wet market, that two weeks of isolation would flatten the curve, that lockdowns posed few health risks, that closed schools posed few developmental harms, that masks prevented transmission, that natural immunity provided no protection, that "vaccines" provided total protection, and that those same untested and experimental injections caused no serious side effects. The "experts" were wrong, but they held the most fashionable opinions.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I've lost the link to the blogger who first posted this, but it needs repeating.
There's a thin veneer of hyper-competent professionals who keep the lights on and the water drinkable. Replace them with the incompetent and the water turns brown and the lights go out.
Trouble comes when people who are not arrogate the mantle for themselves and insist that we kow-tow to them.
More or less the plot of "Atlas Shrugged". If the hyper-competent people decide that they are being abused (they are) and then choose to walk away, everything collapses.
My dad used to say “everybody wants to be an expert, but nobody wants to put the time into it”.
I see what is going on in the world today characterized as less a death of expertise, than a death of competency. (I regard “competency” as being significantly broader than “expertise”)
I am seeing things fail that I have never seen in my life before, at many levels. And it is a failure of competency. Ranging from having the trash picked up at your house, to running the water filtration plants, to coding software.
It concerns me. But it is clearly an offshoot of valuing people’s feelings and sensitivies more than their competence at things.
Something I heard last night that boiled it down to brass tacks for me:
Say “yes” to God and “no” to everything else.
What you describe is the Pareto distribution and it is a well know probability distribution. J Peterson has spoken much about it.
Couple that with the Dunning–Kruger effect and much of what we see today is easily predicted and the outcome unfortunate easily prophesied.
Add to the the spiritual blindness now evident on our culture and a knowing person should be well and truly fearful, to the point of knee dropping prayer. We are in a unique and perilous time.
Opinion monitors at FR are stingy with hall passes. Things are getting “confining” from a free speech perspective. As in, less free.
I do not follow your post comment at all, can you explain further?
I just read an article about what Karl Rove thinks...What a coincidence!
We need a huge revival.
Re: Pareto and also Dunning-Kruger —
Although these seem inherent in human nature, in the past they were somewhat mitigated by the ability to tell people, “You’re a dumbass” or for employers to just hire and promote people on merit, or to give IQ tests and act upon the verified results.
Nowadays we can’t do that. There is no mitigation allowed for problems which are right in front of us and which everyone sees clearly. Just have to be politically correct and pretend it’s not there, or else be cancelled.
I believe it was Mark Twain who defined an expert as, “some guy from out of town, with a briefcase.”
A consultant (Anderson, Kinsey etc.).
A friend and I were discussing that just last night. When we run out of competence, the world simply fails.
We’re very close to that in many areas. Skilled trades being a big one.
I can’t help thinking this applies to EVs.
Keep hearing that the ICE is dead and EVs are the future. We’re going to ban fossil fuel vehicles by the end of this decade.
Yet I don’t see new power plants being built. I don’t see new transmission lines being installed or upgraded. I don’t see transformer factories coming online. Vast swaths of the country have no public charging infrastructure.
2030 is 7 years away.
Add to that banning NG stoves, forcing people to cook with electric - that alone would seem to require a capacity increase that pales in comparison to that which EVs will need.
I don’t know if they’re unserious, woefully incompetent, or just hellbent on crashing our society. I think it may be a combination.
Yet go just about anywhere on social media and there are legions of minions parroting this “wisdom”.
In the last three months, I have ordered six things from Amazon.
Four of them were flat out wrong orders. One was a camera to monitor my 3D printing, and they sent me a USB cable. One was a Blue Ray player that we not only a bogus piece of equipment, but not even close to what I ordered.
I have three items at home I am going to bring to UPS. I want to ask them if they have seen a plethora of returns lately.
And that is just one thing.
One of the great things about this country, and it has been recognized by immigrants for decades, if not centuries, is that in this grand (or formerly grand) country of ours...
Things.
Just.
Work.
Everything from clean, potable water out of a faucet, to a ferry that doesn’t sink or a bridge that doesn’t collapse.
That seems to be changing right in front of my eyes.
Been saying this for years. Should put it on a bumper sticker, or a billboard.
Nah, everyone needs to go to college. They don’t want to get dirty and sweaty. Work with my hands! That’s just crazy talking
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