My first reaction to seeing someone point out their credentials at the top of an article is that they are not confident that their writing is strong enough to carry on it’s own.
And when people mention their credentials when it is not relevant to the topic, they come across as extra weak.
Academia is a bit funny. They are impressed with themselves more than warranted. I appreciate scholarship and education, but the fact is you don’t need more than a 120 IQ to get a doctorate, and you don’t need to do much more than parrot existing ideas, especially ones that are fashionable by your peers.
Strong writing needs no credentials. Weak writing needs all the support it can get.
Is it just me, or do others share my opinion that the bulk of holders of doctorate degrees can not think clearly, and are over concerned with credentials?
I’m of the opinion that clear thinking is helped along by education, but not caused by it. A minority of less than 2% of people know how to wield a thought with art and precision.
Degrees are no guarantee of passing a test of fitness. The profs themselves are often unfit, and those that are fit couldn’t hold their students to rigorous standards and still run a profitable school.
JB
I think all one needs to understand on this topic can be summarized by looking at the chart here:
http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/grady/emptypromise.html
The Table is “Mean, range, variance, and standard error of the mean, for 148 Cambridge faculty”
The mean IQ for Social Sciences is 121.8. True autodidactism starts at about 124-125. And this is fucking Cambridge, not Podunk U.
It seems that entire fields of study were created to accomodate unclear thinkers, no?
It’s kind of a racket and a bubble. If it were a stock, I’d be shorting sometime soon.
