Educated Phd's

Joe
on September 30, 2013 at 5:36 am said:
“I have always wondered how such a huge body of PhDs as America has could be so stupid, so devoid of knowledge of the most basic realities of life and history, so anti-empirical in a culture that purports to value empiricism and grants the PhD degree in avowed recognition of one’s empirical prowess. ”

Stage hypnotists pre-select those who will end up on stage, and who will then prove susceptible to hypnsosis. This pre-selection is done by asking the audience to do a series of things at the start of the show. These steps show who is susceptible and compliant.

The process of getting a PhD is similar. To be accepted you need a 1st class degree, which already shows you are good at jumping through hoops. You will only be accepted for a PhD by someone whose reputation will be bolstered by the contents of your PhD. If your thesis challenges that person’s work, you will not be accepted. Upon completion, your PhD will have been guided along the path by your supervisor to bolster his/her reputation. Your supervisor will work with you to select a team of examiners who are friends of your supervisor and who are sympathetic to your thesis.

Those who get 1st class degrees and PhDs are amongst the most compliant people in our society. Having a PhD is as much an indicator of compliance and doggedness as it is of intelligence. Dogged compliant people do not rock the boat, and they will doggedly try to stop others rocking the boat.

Radegunda
on September 30, 2013 at 3:11 am said:
I think a sort of intellectual snobbery leads some people to reject what regular folks observe to be manifestly true.
For example, in growing up I somehow knew that communism was oppressive and morally bankrupt, but then I discovered that the smart set tend to say, “No, no, it was a bunch of reactionary rubes who told people that communism was evil; but we know that’s a backward, uneducated way of viewing the world, whereas we’re enlightened and progressive.”

Consider how much effort the deconstructionists and post-structuralists et al. have put into concocting incomprehensible theories in unreadable prose. It isn’t that they’re unintelligent — it’s that they’re trying way too hard to sound much more brilliant than the rest of us.