Thursday, November 05, 2015

Of M.D.'s and pyramid schemes

I really think the Egyptians were smarter than to think this was an efficient grain storage system.
Then again, I'm not an M.D.

Google "Ben Carson pyramids" and learn all you need to know.  Perhaps future generations will find this story in a footnote on a discarded jump drive and, if they can reconstruct the program needed to read it (and what kind of Rosetta stone will that take?), they may marvel that such people ever had any position of responsibility in our society.*

All I can say is, the M.D. is a professional degree, not an academic one.  That explains quite ably, I think, how a man can succeed through medical school and in a highly specialized field of surgery, and still be bughouse crazy.

*and if you don't find out, the idea of pyramids=Joseph's granaries goes back to at least the 6th century, and was popular in Medieval Europe, where they could see the pyramids, but hadn't yet excavated and opened them to find out what they were for.  So it's not like Dr. Carson made this up out of whole cloth.  Everything old really is new again.

For anybody still interested, Ana Marie Cox has about the best take on this I've found.

3 comments:

  1. It's scary how totally nuts a person can be and still become a prominent doctor who gets to operate on people. I think a lot of the scariness comes from our acculturation into thinking doctors are more than mere human, something that so many doctors and others in the medical profession figure is their due - along with large incomes.

    As you know, I figure the same is true for a lot of scientists such as N DgT who, outside of his narrow range of professional knowledge pulls as many boners as his mentor, Carl Sagan did. Only it is considered unfair for we mere mortals to point out that they're full of baloney.

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  2. An academic degree is no proof against stupidity and ignorance, but it's far harder to be respected for your omni-knowledge than the accord we give professionals, especially doctors.

    M.D.'s are the best example of the dangers of specialization and of believing the hype about how smart you must be, you went to med school. Not as a general rule, but I've know enough M.D.'s who thought their degree made them Faustus, with all knowledge and what they didn't know wasn't worth knowing. Carson fits in that minority. As JMM says, Carson has "smart hands."

    He should be regarded as a very capable mechanic, which is clearly all he really is. Beyond that he's a liar, a fool, a dupe, and full of the most outrageously stupid ignorance. But he's a "Doctor," so he must be "smart".

    Meh. Barbers and surgeons were once on par with each other. Carson is enough to make me think they should be again.

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  3. I *am* God:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqeC3BPYTmE

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