On The Origin Of My Skepticism About The Value Of College Credentialing In The Late 20th And Entire 21st Centuries - Hate Mail

A LOT OF IT CAME from my early blog bawls, such as this one I got into with a Harvard Anthropology prof's ScienceBlogs* community and, eventually, when he entered into it, over my observation that it is impossible to know anything about the origin of life on Earth.   The utter inability of a bunch of what I took to be university level science teachers, students, hangers-on to get the basic points in regard to the complete absence of physical evidence surrounding a unique organism in a theorize origin and line of life on Earth and the impossibility of learning how that one organism which came, not from a living organism, but theoretically proposed to have arisen spontaneously out of non-living matter was a real eye-opener to me about how bad the problem was.   But by then I'd had lots of experience arguing at length with university professors, students, ideological hangers on and idiot sci-rangers to not be entirely shocked by what I found.   I always assumed that Greg Laden was responding to my stating that at another of the ScienceBlogs when he made his list of citations, not one of which was based on any physical evidence of the event. 

I could say the same about any number of other blog brawls I got into among those with college credentials, mostly from the US,  some from Canada, some from Britain, a few for whom English was not their first language.   Whether in science topics, history, philosophy, etc.   Such novel notions as that you need to be able to observe something or to have evidence of something to base claims on seem to have not played a large part in the educations of many who hold even the top levels of academic credentialing.  The extent to which the observation of the common received ideological point of view substitutes for that was one of the greatest shocks of my first months of going online and engaging in discussions on blogs and comment boards.   Eventually I found that many of those who held the highest seats within academia in some of the most revered of universities were as unaware of what they were claiming as the stupidest of those holding and not holding academic credentialing.  Greg Laden who describes himself "Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator," is only typical of that.   I can also say that once I found out he was an anthropologist,  that is a pseudo-scientist,  things were even less shocking to me. 

It was when I went into it with a math prof over a rather simple and plain contradiction of some of the most basic properties of numbers in his defense of an absurd claim by one of the most notorious of such scientific ideologues,  it did rather shock me even after the earlier brawls I got into.  

I could go into other examples, many, many others, even if I only concentrated on the ones I got into with university professors.   That last link, in which the guy with the credentials substituted trash talking and deflecting and insulting for answering the points made is rather typical.   If I went into my disenchantment with lawyers, especially those who taught at Ivy level law schools, that might be at least as long a list. 

*  I think I made a resolution not to ever mention a ScienceBlog without pointing out that Epstein-Maxwell were the money behind the corporation behind them.   If I didn't, I've made it now.