Letters to the Editor
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The Extra Rational
The world is full of shipping clerks who have read the Harvard Classics. Bukowski's intro to a book of poetry merely underscores the point. Economics is only slighty less scientific. If you want to succeed with economic theory, you better find favor with some political group that likes your theory, and get an appointment. My time on the blogs has convinced me that the majority of overeducated and underemployed economists are merely the tip of the blogging world, what I call the extra-rational. The extra-rational will argue the smallest point, they demand facts, and statistics, lots of them, and they break out in hives when no one interprets the facts the way they see them. They see George Bush as an idiot, and they are sure he's going to fail, and they are probably right, the poor so and so went to Yale.
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24x7x365?
Surely that should be 24x7x52, or maybe 23x365.
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24x7x52
you're absolutely right, charlie. serves me right for getting cute.
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Another result?
On the (possible) downside, with all this easier access to research sources by academics at "non-elite" schools, the expectation of publishing, and publishing more and more, will rise. See, now everyone can do it -- even you lowly professor at Middle Tennessee! Getting tenure based more (or, god forbid, solely) on teaching will disappear as administrations push their faculty to lift their national profile with lines on their CVs. A basic core of the college/university -- its undergraduates -- will be shafted in the process, I fear.
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the death of inquiry
All this tells me is that anyone who wants to can peruse any old website, uncritically with no validation and certainly no reinforcement or testing and they can claim they are an expert. If anything we've gone back the middle ages where assertion was the same thing as fact.
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Well, I'll be an uncle's monkey!
"What all this ultimately means is still a puzzle."
Duh! Buy a vowel, Andrew. What's the matter? Did you overdose on Paxil today?
The answer: The dumbing down of our species to the lowest common denominator, a babbling moron.
The word for today is "devolution".
FiveFootPenis thinks that us quasi-autistic "brainiacs" must sever contact from the jug-tooting "jebediahs" and start our own race in seclusion. This is the only way for homo sapiens to move passed total annihilation.