[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for sharing this story with me. My wife was an RN for all of her adult life. She left hospitals because of their intellectual yet idiot RNs who told the RNs what to do. She spent the last 35 years of her nursing life as the head RN for a large family practice group. She was a real nurse who helped to care for 30 to 40 patients a day. Reality and knowledge of her patients were her world, where she learned and applied new skills with her old ones.

Her theory of how to handle these people Intellectual Yet Idiot nurses, was that they had to work at least 2 days a week as a floor nurse or critical care nurse under their edicts. Then, they could see how good or how bad their edicts/advise was.

Nassim Taleb is a great story teller. I once travelled two hours to New Jersey to hear him speak.

He told the story of the old Babylonians.

They had a way of setting responsibility in the old Hammerabi law.

Whenever an architect built a bridge, he and his family were required to live under that bridge. So if it ever came crashing down, he and family would be the first to die.

It occurs to me that Trump living in his own Tower in New York is an example of that law.

More than that. If a big fire or any major structural flaw was discovered in a Trump building, the Trump empire might just come crashing down. Thus a man like Trump learned to be quite careful in his work. So when you think Trump is acting or saying something rashly, he’s probably not.

You need to be a very calculating and careful person to be in the Skyscraper business... and the Deep State demolition business as well :- )

[poconopundit]

Good story about your wife, the RN. In the software business, they call it "eating your dog food". Let me excerpt some choice words from Vox Populi, an essay by H. L. Mencken that presages Trump (and Taleb) and that I condensed into a vanity on FR last year.

The Progress of Enlightenment Doesn't Reach the Great Masses of People

• Enlightenment is a matter which concerns exclusively a small minority of men. The size of that minority is always grossly overestimated.
  
  
• Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent — that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.
  
  
• I do not here argue, of course, that the intelligence of a man is to be determined by subjected him to an examination like that recently proposed by Thomas A. Edison. Edison himself, indeed, though he could pass his own examination, must be thick-witted at bottom, for when he goes on a holiday he chooses such men as Harding and Henry Ford as his companions.
  
  
• But what I do argue is that no man can be said to share fully in the progress of human knowledge who is ignorant of any of its basic facts — for example, the facts that ghosts do not actually haunt graveyards, that printing money cannot make a nation rich, and that men cannot be made virtuous by law.