Society

Knowledge vs Knowingness

by

Lead and Gold excerpted a very interesting article by Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor who was killed during the early days of the Iraq war. In the article, published in February of 2002, Kelly draws a distinction between knowledge and knowingness;:

Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.

(go read the entire excerpt)

It strikes me that many trends in today’s society–especially in academia but by no means limited to it–are at least partly about enabling the attitude of knowingness.

Read more

Again

by

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The truck was parked at the loading dock, directly under the day care center. My daughter, three years old at the time, was in the day care center on the first floor of the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. It is next to the loading dock. My wife was working on the 19th floor. When I returned to work the next day, someone in the elevator joked that it was too bad the bomb hadn’t taken out the IRS. The ride was short, and I was able to stay still.

Read more

Quote of the Day

by

What we currently call the poverty line is so high that only the top 6 percent or 7 percent of the people who were alive in 1900 would be above it.

Robert Fogel (Via Arnold Kling). RTWT.

Quote of the Day

by

The trucking groups don’t seem to realize that the leasing of a few high-profile toll roads is just a small part of a much larger and more important phenomenon: the infusion of global capital into a capital-starved U.S. highway system. The multi-billion-dollar new toll road projects that keep being announced in Texas are a foretaste of what we can look forward to if we create a comparably friendly investment climate in other states.

-Robert Poole (in Surface Transportation Innovations, Issue No. 40, February 2007)

The Left Tail of the Distribution

by

Ginny’s post got me to thinking about a topic I muse over every once in a while. I have two firm beliefs about scientists. One is that they do not need to be as much of a bunch of egotistical buggers as they tend to be. (I have devoted multiple posts on my blog to that effect.) The other is that the natural political state of the scientist (and of most engineers) should be libertarian / conservative, because the core non-technical skill required for scientific work above the B.Sc. level is the ready acceptance of personal responsibility.

Read more