The difference between academic credentialsim and real intelligence is understanding and knowing the limits of certainty.  It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you. It is what you think you know that isn’t so.

It is curious that the ruling elite that thinks they know so much more than the rest of us is so unable to face the fallacy of their own certainty even when it is presented in the boldest and most inesacapable manner.  We keep hearing how dumb the tea party members are yet Pelosi’s statements make the worst of them look like Rhodes Scholars.

Education is a wonderful thing. Without understanding and an open mind, however,  it is worse than ignorance.

Victor Davis Hanson writes in the National Review Online The New Sophists (January 6, 2011) how the most “intelligent” of our technocrats get it so wrong and are never held to any accountability.

Excerpts:

“Climate change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped, and monotonous — circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington–New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors, and degrees among our policy-setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska, or a ranch in Idaho.

How many climate doomsayers have well-funded research positions predicated on grants and subsidies that depend on convincing the public and government of impending disasters that the researchers then can be hired to monitor and address? Are there no green antitrust laws? In contrast, how many of our climate theorists run irrigated farms and energy-intensive businesses, which are at the mercy of new regulations that emanate from distant theorizing?

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