This video by Peter Schiff shows just why we should be skeptical of experts. Much of academia has become unmoored from reality and lives in its own world by its own rules unrelated to the real world.
For example:
-Architects get the highest award for designing incredibly ugly buildings that no one likes.
-Humanities departments (including sociology) in universities have largely been hijacked by radical ideological Marxists and politically correct types, who say things like “Blacks are incapable of being racist” or “there is no physical or biological basis for a differentiation between the races. All racial differences are entirely environmental.” Or “feminism is about equality.”.
-Climate science has become hijacked to ideology and to never ending scare tactics in order to receive continuing funding.
-Medical research has become entirely compromised due to massive conflicts of interest at every level within the research community.
-Medicine in general has become focused more on profit and medical dependency, than it is on actually curing and preventing illness.
-Theoretical physics has spent decades lost in the wilderness theorizing to the nth degree without being able to do empirical experiments to see if their abstract theories actually have any basis in reality.
-Finally we have economics which pass become enamored with dense and confusing mathematical models that seem to have often little relationship to reality, and ignore common sense. There’s also the problem that many economic departments have been taken over by Keynesian nonsense. The much prized big brained mathematicians that financial institutions hired were completely unable to see the financial and economic crisis coming, despite their mathematical wizardry.
The video below, presented by Schiff, is really quite amazing. First of all it shows how a couple of experts, who have received the highest award possible in their fields, are not even able to explain basic economics. Apparently these two gentlemen are wizards at dense complex mathematical models, and yet they can’t even comment on the state of the economy. To me it’s a fitting testament to the lack of common sense and not being in reality of today’s academics. Not only do the two economists look stupid, but the Nobel committee also looks idiotic for giving these two men such a high award.
Of course for years now I’ve had a rather jaded perspective on the judgment ability of the vaunted Nobel committee. They gave Arafat, a committed terrorists until the day he died, a Noble peace prize. Al Gore got one for his climate change demagoguery. And, finally Barack Obama got a Noble peace prize for essentially doing nothing… all while real heroes were too often overlooked. Maybe the Noble peace prize should be renamed “the politically correct popularity prize”.
In sum, the Emperor has no clothes.
This video by Peter Schiff is also quite amazing. In it and Greenspan is abdicating that we should destroy houses, in order to revive the market, and presumably to help the economy. This idea so stupid that hardly know where to begin. First of all destroying perfectly good assets, such as housing, is not going to help the economy improve. If done radically enough it might cause housing prices to increase, which was simply make housing that much more unaffordable. The end result is that property owners might make more money from their investment, but everyone else would see a reduction in the quality of life, simply because we would all have to live in smaller houses, or share houses, or simply have to cut back on other expenses in order to afford the rent and mortgage. In other words, the property owners would get richer, and everyone else would suffer. It sounds like a great recipe to make the country better.
The fact that Alan Greenspan was once lauded as an economic genius, and still has some residual respect to certain quarters is quite amazing.
The conclusion that we can come to for all of this is that we should not trust experts implicitly. Experts can often be right… and they can also often be wrong. Instead of accepting them as quasi divine individuals, we need to listen very carefully to what they say, and if it doesn’t pass the Occam’s razor test, we should start becoming very skeptical very quickly. In other words, we need to hold up the theories and conclusions of the experts to the light of common sense. If we start seeing red flags and BS wafting up from their proclamations, we need to call it for what it is. Too many people implicitly accept experts as infallible, and this needs to stop.
This is one of the major problems with the proponents of the global warming theory. Their main argument is that the experts have declared it thus and so they cannot be wrong. They have this naïve belief that science is infallible. While it is true that the scientific method, when followed correctly and honestly is generally the best method that we have to discover the truth, the reality is that science can be corrupted just like religion, academia, charities and politics. Scientific proclamations need to be examined with the same skepticism and scrutiny as everything else.
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