Title as a Form of Intimidation
I like to read history, and when I saw “Indoctrinate U” I could help but establish a paradigm. Maybe it’s a pattern-seeking mania, but I thought this:
The Universities epitomize “institutional thought”. Through license, the state limits entry into television and radio, and so television and radio can be considered the “institutional media”. Almost everyone in the institutional media has gone through the universities. And high academics at universities are in turn often cited by the institutional media.
Then there are the lower level education camps which everyone is required to attend for 10 to 12 years. In these camps, it is often stated that the “.edu” and “.gov” are reliable sources, as are stories from the news media.
There are many easy ways to educate people: books, audio tapes, an online course with “gateway” tests where students can progress at their own pace - and if they cheat that’s fine, it’s their money. If all one paid for was the salary of the instructor, for only the classes they need, and the building to have classes, teaching would be cheap and efficient.
An institution with fraternities, “undergraduate” classes, tenure, sabbaticals, sports teams, various ceremonies, seems to be about as interested in truth as churches are. And before someone says this comparison is posh, modern churches encourage people to explore scientific and intellectual concepts. It’s only when you start questioning the sacred cows that the fangs come out. The most obvious difference between churches and universities is that universities control much more of an individual’s daily life, that is the level of control the university has is much deeper than modern churches have, and I would posit that universities limit thought more than churches.
But my point: people in debates will invoke a long list of academics with many letters after their names as a way to intimidate their opponents. A title such as doctor or PhD is something that members of universities confer upon each other. I view it like “Reverend”. And many universities started with a very explicitly religious agenda.
Now Reverends can be very intelligent people in their own right. They could predict economic events very well, explain political economy in a way that coheres better than anything prior, or invent something and be a great technician in some way. But that wouldn’t come from his status as a reverend.
I’m speculating, but most people know very little, their egos are not defined by their economic acumen and thus are willing to learn. People who go to universities tend to have “anti-knowlege” on economics, that is they believe lots of things that are false and very strongly. As a result, these people are not only less intelligent than the average person (the average person has zero economic knowledge, while the average university student has -100 economic knowledge), but are more arrogant and less willing to change.
And since university students tend to have high IQs, this leads to the curious result of people with less “brainpower” actually being more intelligent than people with more “brainpower” on economic matters in a systematic fashion. And so we have the hilarious result of the lower-brainpower people resisting the economic fallacies of the institutional media, the universities and the higher brainpower people.
Unfortunately because they have lower brainpower and less institutions to fund research, free marketers are much more reliant on grassroots and low-level propagation of ideas, like this blog here!
The Universities epitomize “institutional thought”. Through license, the state limits entry into television and radio, and so television and radio can be considered the “institutional media”. Almost everyone in the institutional media has gone through the universities. And high academics at universities are in turn often cited by the institutional media.
Then there are the lower level education camps which everyone is required to attend for 10 to 12 years. In these camps, it is often stated that the “.edu” and “.gov” are reliable sources, as are stories from the news media.
There are many easy ways to educate people: books, audio tapes, an online course with “gateway” tests where students can progress at their own pace - and if they cheat that’s fine, it’s their money. If all one paid for was the salary of the instructor, for only the classes they need, and the building to have classes, teaching would be cheap and efficient.
An institution with fraternities, “undergraduate” classes, tenure, sabbaticals, sports teams, various ceremonies, seems to be about as interested in truth as churches are. And before someone says this comparison is posh, modern churches encourage people to explore scientific and intellectual concepts. It’s only when you start questioning the sacred cows that the fangs come out. The most obvious difference between churches and universities is that universities control much more of an individual’s daily life, that is the level of control the university has is much deeper than modern churches have, and I would posit that universities limit thought more than churches.
But my point: people in debates will invoke a long list of academics with many letters after their names as a way to intimidate their opponents. A title such as doctor or PhD is something that members of universities confer upon each other. I view it like “Reverend”. And many universities started with a very explicitly religious agenda.
Now Reverends can be very intelligent people in their own right. They could predict economic events very well, explain political economy in a way that coheres better than anything prior, or invent something and be a great technician in some way. But that wouldn’t come from his status as a reverend.
I’m speculating, but most people know very little, their egos are not defined by their economic acumen and thus are willing to learn. People who go to universities tend to have “anti-knowlege” on economics, that is they believe lots of things that are false and very strongly. As a result, these people are not only less intelligent than the average person (the average person has zero economic knowledge, while the average university student has -100 economic knowledge), but are more arrogant and less willing to change.
And since university students tend to have high IQs, this leads to the curious result of people with less “brainpower” actually being more intelligent than people with more “brainpower” on economic matters in a systematic fashion. And so we have the hilarious result of the lower-brainpower people resisting the economic fallacies of the institutional media, the universities and the higher brainpower people.
Unfortunately because they have lower brainpower and less institutions to fund research, free marketers are much more reliant on grassroots and low-level propagation of ideas, like this blog here!
15年前
