In my last post, I mentioned losing respect for a whole bunch of professions:
I got a response to this saying:
“It's challenging to imagine that a single individual has enough information and experience with each field listed that the person has the expertise to judge them all and deem the professionals in these fields as bad.”
I feel like this is a reasonable response, so some elaboration is in order.
(rant warning)
I have extensive first hand experience with school teachers, college professors, doctors, and scientists; second hand experience with dietitians and psychiatrists, and as far as the journalists, historians, and economists go, we don't have to wonder, because regularly publishing their work is their job.
Journalists, first of all, have zero integrity. They suppress stories they don't like, the stories they do tell get corrupted to fit their narrative, they're all in bed with the politicians and other powerful people they depend on for scoops, which colors their narrative even more, and they have generally abysmal knowledge on the topics they write about anyway. Not to mention they have a huge incentive to push sensationalist nonsense all the time (hence the 24h news cycle) since their advertisement based revenue model depends on an audience that's constantly watching. It's a joke.
Scientists are pretentious cowards, who've been trained their whole life to conform to peer pressure and groupthink through the peer review process. One of them even admitted to me personally that they feel like they're the b*tch of the scientific journals they need to get published in to keep their jobs. They're also beholden to the money that funds their research in the first place, which will dry up if studies don't show results that are "interesting" in the right way. The whole system filters out contrarians while pretending to be the independent voices of reason in society. It's disgusting.
Economists are in essence a subset of scientists. They are hugely incentivized to research and teach stuff that gives politicians tools to intervene in the economy, even if the reality is that those interventions always backfire. After all, if an economist preaches non-intervention, why would you hire them at a high position in government? So economists focus on things like the IS-LM model, to model the economy, even though it's complete BS. Economics has turned into applied math, despite all these models that supposedly would tell us how the economy will behave fail every time – kind of reminiscent of climate science. Keynes has been disproven time and time again, yet Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman still reign supreme. One wonders why... 🙄
Historians are a mix breed of journalists and scientists. It takes a special kind of pretense to publish blatant propaganda, a severely colored narrative about the past, and present it as The Science™, the haughty Truth with capital T that is somehow above reproach, to be taught as the only narrative in school, simply because it was written by the credentialed high priests of academia.
Dietitians are simple minds, who follow nutrition science from decades ago uncritically like it's the gospel, without bothering to research conflicting studies, or even attempting to stay up to date on the latest research. So they still recommend things like using seed oils, and limiting saturated fat to lower cholesterol. One of them even recommended to my mother that she should choose the high sugar dessert over the one with more whipping cream, because it would be better for her cholesterol. 🙈
Doctors, similar to economists, have a huge incentive to propose interventions, rather than prevention, because treatment is how the industry makes money. They're trained to diagnose illnesses in order to match them to the proper treatment. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern doctor is a glorified drug dealer; and a sales person for medical interventions, posing as a health advocate.
Psychiatrists are a subset of doctors, that have ventured into the realm of the mind in order to sell even more pills. It's pretty impressive how they got half the nation hooked on anti-depressants rather than getting them to lose some weight, build some muscle, go for a walk, get some sunlight, quit their soul-sucking job, and find some purpose in their lives.
Finally, teachers are part of a centuries-old system that was literally designed around conformity. Schools are awful, prison-like, soul-sucking places of cinder blocks and fluorescent lights, walls and fences, where the lessons themselves, as well as mounting piles of homework, revolve almost entirely around testing your ability to regurgitate trivial facts and singular, government approved narratives; training you to trust and follow authority without question; and where the few moments of respite and recess are rife with bullying and even violence if you're unlucky.
Yet all the teachers and their unions are interested in is job security, higher pay, and increasing the ever-expanding school budgets. Similar to other government organizations, they even use the ever-falling performance scores as constant leverage to get more funding, giving themselves a disincentive to improve, and literally sacrificing the students’ well-being for their own benefit. Not to mention that lots of teachers abuse their position as single-source-of-truth to push their own narrative and agenda on their defenseless students.
College professors are everything that’s wrong with teachers and scientists in one package, so they don’t require further elaboration.
I hope this clears things up a bit. 😏