Not a Real Science! Headline

But I wish it were:

Qatar Climate Summit Menu to Feature Polar Bear, Sea Turtle

Doha, Qatar: Organizers for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in this Persian Gulf city have announced that the menu for the 17,000 plus attendees will prominently feature polar bear and sea turtle, two species threatened by rising global temperatures.

“We believe we should do everything in our power to make this event as memorable as possible to our guests,” Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiya, former Qatari energy minister and president of the Conference of Parties told a news agency on Monday. “Polar bear and sea turtle can be prepared in any number of delicious ways the conference attendees will not soon forget.”

Hamad al-Attiya answered critics who wondered if it doesn’t send a mixed message for a UN conference to eat endangered species that they are supposedly working to save: “Oh, come now. It’s only a few hundred bears and turtles, hardly a material difference to their overall populations. Besides, all these dedicated advocates have traveled from great distances at great expense to come to Qatar when they could have just used WebEx, frankly. After burning all that jet fuel, we’re going to bicker about a few bears and turtles? These people are trying to save the world! They deserve a little something special, and we will provide it.”

In related news, Qatar’s petroleum-powered water desalinization plants, which provide 99% of the fresh water in Doha, will be working around the clock at max capacity to ensure full swimming pools in this desert country, and that the conference attendees can take all the hot showers they want.

Ishmael Alighieri

Global Warming News: Putting on My Marketing Guy Hat…

I ponder the message contained in the first sentence of a Science! article from the LA Times titled “Climate talks buffeted by the force of Superstorm Sandy“:

More than 17,000 people have converged on the Qatari capital for the latest U.N. climate talks

I imagine myself offering the following professional advise:

“Fellah, fellas, please. This global warming stuff – good product, excellent sales upside, and despite the beating we’ve taken over the last decade or so, we still have major mind share and positives. Hell, we should, what with the push my department has made.

“But enough about me – can we talk about these huge meetings in exotic places where nobody lives? Look, I like a good boondoggle as much as the next guy – hey, I work in marketing – but could we show an eensy teensy bit of awareness of the message we’re sending here? Do I have to spell it out? OK:

“See, what we’re looking for here are vast draconian powers to command the economic activity of the entire world, backed by a well-funded global apparatus to enforce our rules, which will lower the standard of living of many people – not that we’re saying that in the brochures, but that’s what ‘taking effective steps to combat global climate change’ means in reality. This, to put it bluntly, is a tough sell, even in the current environment. So we downplay this aspect. To sum up: Huge storms & starving polar bears = good message; vast bureaucracies and unemployment lines = not so good message.

Now, a few people have, despite our best efforts, noticed this – there’s always gotta be naysayers no matter how good the pitch. Even though we’ve got the celebrity endorsements and have bought way more air time, these jokers do have a good message that might just get through to people.

“Speaking professionally, we’ve benefited greatly from our competitors focusing on facts – like you can sell something that takes pages of 10-point type to explain! – and on the uncertainty inherent in any studies or models of something as complex as climate. I’m not seeing the sexy, here – people won’t read much past the first couple words, so those words better be ‘hope’ and ‘change’. But despite their failure to employ any high-end marketing talent (*ahem*) we can’t seem to loose them.

“So – follow me here – we have to work together not to give our opponents a stick to beat us with. We’ve successfully painted our competitors as loonies and stooges. We’ve managed to whistle past a decade and a half during which weather was distressingly normal and temperatures didn’t rise. Then we get Sandy like a freaking gift from Heaven – and you guys gotta follow that up with FLEETS OF AIRCRAFT FLYING 17,000 PEOPLE FROM AROUND THE WORLD TO QATAR!?! FOR A &%$#@ MEETING!?!

“Sorry. Anyway, you get the point here? No? We’re trying to keep a lid on this whole ‘power grab by a bunch of bureaucrats’ message our competitors occasionally put out, see, because that just might be a winner for them, and then you guys immediately do something that’s EXACTLY WHAT A BUNCH OF OUT OF TOUCH BUREAUCRATS would do. Not to mention BURNING A BAZILLION GALLONS OF FOSSIL FUEL to do it.

“Again, I apologize. But you guys heard of email? Skype? WebEx? The freaking *telephone*? Until we get this thing sold and funded, can you PLEASE just NOT have gigantic meetings in exotic locations you have to burn unimaginable quantities of fossil fuel to get to? People just might get the idea that all this belt-tightening and lifestyle downgrading we’re trying to sell only applies to little people,  not to you.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do something about people posting videos of the 1938 Long Island Express – now, THAT was a hurricane!”

Lying with Rhetoric

Here’s a post-election quote from a Rachel Maddow, a woman I know not from Eve, but with whom  I seem to agree on at least one point: Romney was an appalling and pathetic candidate for President. However, the truth that underlies our agreement does not forgive the very subtle, almost brilliant, lying contained in the following post election quote. Only someone who is both an accomplished rhetorician and a craven partisan liar could have constructed this statement:

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States. Again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing! And Benghazi was an attack ON us, it was not a scandal BY us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism.

The particular rhetorical trick here is to create a list of things that, by the very nature of being in the same list, are asserted  to be alike, to all go together. This construction attempts to assign to each item in the list whatever characteristics are most exhibited by most, and especially the first, items in the list – in this case, imagine a big circle containing all these items labeled TRVTH.

The beliefs dismissed by the  earliest items, and most items, are things that might be best classified as along a Wishful Thinking/Delusional axis. The rhetorical trick is to stick in a few things that reasonable people could actually consider, preferably using words designed to portray that consideration as delusional – thereby saving much time that might otherwise be spent in contemplation of one’s own positions or – heaven forbid – reasonable assessment of opposed positions. In other words, for example, the rhetorical trick is to paint any questions about what happened in Benghazi as being the equivalent of doubting the moon landing. This is designed precisely to end discussion (within the tribe) about what actually happened by presumptively dismissing any questioner as a quack.

This is not playing nice. This is not playing fair. This is, in fact, simply a relatively sophisticated way lying. And Maddow is easily smart enough to know it.

For, of course, in the real world, each pare of assertions from the list cannot be represented truthfully in one circle – each would have its own Venn diagrams. Some could represent beliefs of voters – how much, for example, do Birthers overlap with people who observe that the deficit is still growing out of control? Some might focus on merely Romney voters – how many Romney voters believe Obama’s a Kenyan? And so on – how many people who question the moon landing also dispute that Obama’s craven pandering to Wall Street can  be reasonably described as ‘moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry’?

Imagined as a messy set of Venn diagrams, rather than a tidy list, makes it clear that any unity between these ideas is merely in Ms. Maddow’s head. Other than the big lie of putting all these things in one list, there’s the other trick of simply describing issues in a shorthand meant to trigger a Pavlovian agreement in the target audience without running the risk of triggering any actual thought:

“Evolution is a thing” – sure is!

“Global warming is real” – yep, at least since the last ice age. It’s the ’caused by man and requiring immediate massive government intervention’ part that’s mostly in dispute.

“And taxes have not gone up.” – yep, as measured in immediate dollars taken from paychecks terms. However, measured in assumed liability terms – deficits are just borrowing based on the government’s ability to tax us –  they have skyrocketed and merely been deferred to our grand kids.  Or, more accurately, deferred until we face the music and default.

“And the deficit is dropping, actually” – um, no. The *annual* deficit is smaller, but the *total* deficit is still growing unimaginably, and shows every sign of continuing to grow until we finally max our credit and go into a Wiemar-style financial melt-down. But kudos for finding comfort in us *only* going another trillion or so in debt over the next year or two, rather than 2 or 3 trillion like before.

I gather Ms. Maddow is a star of the left. I get the same reaction to her (based on this small sample) as I got to both presidential candidates: this is the best we can do? We are so doomed.

Grad degrees and Voting Blue

Just to keep everything on this particular topic together here, here’s part of a comment I made over on the inestimable Mike Flynn‘s blog. Go there and read his thoughts, as he knows math, stat and stuff, while I merely dabble:

Dug a little deeper – according to the CNN exit polls (buyer beware: self reporting caveats apply), the pattern for 2012 was that HS drop outs voted markedly blue, with a steadily increasing propensity for voting red as educational level increased, until people with college degrees voted Romney 51% to 47%.

BUT, most interesting, people with graduate degrees – 18% of voters (doesn’t that seem kind of high? Are there really that many graduate degree holders out there? How does anything get done?) tended to vote strongly for Obama.

So increasing education seems to correspond to greater likelihood of voting red until grad school. But here’s the kicker: my unscientific survey of the fields graduate degrees are awarded in show a full 60% of people getting graduate degrees are doing so to advance in public sector careers – education accounts for over 25% of graduate degrees, with Public Admin, various law enforcement and social service degrees making up the rest. (Business & engineering I assumed to be private sector leaning, while health and sociology neutral to public? – the data’s probably out there, maybe I’ll look it us sometime.) So, it’s a little surprising that grad degree holders don’t lean even farther left than they do.

Maybe I should track this issue all the way down as an illustration of my You Can Figure This Stuff Out for Yourself campaign? Sort of like Gusteau’s ‘anyone can cook’. Hey, maybe doing just a little research and subjecting it the the review of intelligent readers is like what Chesterton said about love letters and blowing your nose – no matter how bad you are at it, you still have to do it yourself.

Think of the salubrious effects on public discourse if everyone, rather than simply swallowing tribal pieties whole and unchewed, actually tried to look stuff up from recognized and acknowledged sources, and then ran their thoughts past people who also did a little research on their own? Why,

– arguments would slow way down. Way, way down. You can yell a lot more talking points at each other per minute than you can talk about real issues and actual sources with friends and respected acquaintances;

– there’s a slight chance that some factual issues might get settled, such as there’s no way pharmaceutical company profits will cover the cost of health coverage for 30 million additional people, or that increasing the cost of doing business doesn’t tend to drive people out of that business, or that the deficit is still growing alarmingly with no end in sight (note: the contrary to these statements are all claims I’ve heard or read from presumably intelligent people);

– we might get to know each other as human beings, maybe stop hating and caricaturing each other, thereby putting millions of straw men out of work.

Gotta dream big!

 

Samwise Gamgee: The Model of an Educated Man

Not kidding. Here’s what we know of Sam’s education:

– knows all the stories and songs of the Shire;

– knows how to cook;

– knows how to carefully work his way through difficult tactical and moral decisions.

The results of Sam’s education:

– not easily led astray. From all those stories and songs, Sam knows what heroes and heroines do. He knows what is honorable and dishonorable. He measures his own actions by those standards.

– Further, he knows how villains lie and mislead and justify their actions to themselves, and how people fail to do the right thing sometimes out of weakness and fear.

– Life isn’t fair. You find yourself in a story not of your choosing. You just have to play your part as well as you can.

– How to be gracious. Sam is deceptively sophisticated – he is humble, but always knows the proper thing to do, whether it’s playing his own minor role at a court or cooking up a brace of conies.

Now, with this education, Sam would make an excellent subject for a good king – or a excellent citizen in a democracy. And he would see that neither of these things – being subject or being a citizen – mean diddly if you are not a loyal friend, faithful son, and solid neighbor.

Compare and contrast: the modern product of what we call education knows none of the stories and songs of his own culture. (Always thought the concept of multiculturalism was amusing – Where do you get the skills and sympathy to absorb a second culture if you have failed to absorb your own?) They judge without any context, especially without a moral context within which any judgement might be considered ‘good’. Thus the characteristic poor judgement of your typical academic and academic sycophant.

The modern graduate knows nothing of how to think his way through difficult moral questions, even ones putatively ‘scholarly’ – like how to assess source materials and the credibility of speakers. Examples abound. Reading about Hypatia, there are those who cite contemporary source documents describing what happened and evidencing an actual understanding of the contemporary society, and there is Gibbon’s unsourced account. It’s flabbergasting that anyone claiming to be educated could side with Gibbons. To put it bluntly: it is irresponsible and dishonest for an educated person to hold Gibbon’s position.

And Hypatia’s story is a trivial example, with clear sources a simple review of which gives the lie to Gibbon’s account. What about slightly more complex situations? Sam would have no trouble assessing Islam – he’d know all the stories and songs about the conquest of North Africa and Spain, the battle of Tours, the sieges of Constantinople and Vienna, the battle of Laponto, and the Crusades. Even though a more sublime scholar than Sam would be able to point out inconsistencies and out and out falsehoods in some of the stories (Roland was picked off by Basque highwaymen, for example) that same scholar would confirm the grand sweep of what Sam knew from songs: that Islam had ridden out from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century and conquered half of the land area of Christendom within a hundred years, slaughtering and enslaving thousands upon thousands of Christians in the process, and that Christendom’s efforts to recapture these lost lands had largely met with defeat.

And so on. Sam wouldn’t fall for Marx or Freud. Sam wouldn’t vote for people advocating intrinsic evil. Sam would invite anyone civil enough to behave themselves over for dinner.

Sam Gamgee: Education for the Modern Man.

 

Music at Mass Review: Sunday, November 18th 2012

With the family in SoCal, attended Mass at a nice little church right on the beach. Before we get to the music, must mention that the Crescat’s head would explode if she ever attended mass at a SoCal beach community Catholic church – while, it being November and all, I didn’t see anyone showing a little navel for the Lord this time, did catch plenty of bare backs, leggings and short outfits, and a few of the ubiquitous dudes in jams, t-shirts flip flops. I’m a local – these are my people. I’m of the ‘hey, at least they are at Mass’ crowd – instead, I whine about the music, which means I’m not of the ‘hey, at least they’re fidgeting while the wanna-be rock band in the sanctuary plays ditties that aspires to sound like what Joni Mitchell might write if she were 1/10th as talented and a lapsed member of the Church of Christ’ crowd. Or something.

On the plus side: the choir performed in the choir loft – one can only imagine the paperwork required to get the special papal dispensation from the iron-fisted LAW of the Spirit of Vatican II recorded nowhere that REQUIRES poor musicians to perform bad music no one can or is willing to sing from right there in the sanctuary, where our BFF Jesus intended. But they did it! Huzzah! Also, the piano player had a very good gospel touch, and the singers could actually sing. And, really, the music wasn’t as bad as all that – I was just on a good roll, there, and kinda vented.

People at the church were very nice. The homily was good, and the Sacrament efficacious as always.

Now for the ditties: we started with vague, infantile lyrics wedded to a preschool-level tune: the execrable Song of the Body of Christ. Well, then, now that we’ve got *that* song, why sing anything else? I mean, what else is there?  Or maybe he didn’t mean *the* song of the Body of Christ – perhaps he really just meant *a* song, allowing for some other ditties to be sung? Because who could be that hubris-drenched and unconscious?

Science! Headlines

Let’s get back to the fun stuff! We’ll keep it light…

Astronomers Discover Little Rogue Planet Floating Aimlessly in Space

It just about brings a tear to me one good eye. Until I start thinking about all those other planets, purposely marching through space, evidently following orders…

Ecuador drops poison on Galápagos Islands in attempt to eradicate rats

Half expected to read how billions of rats were being flown in, to make sure they got ’em all.

Tiny insect’s ears, located on its hind legs, work just like ours 

What? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Hold on a minute – let me take off my pants and hold my leg up to your mouth.

Some Political Comments

Asking a logical, informed person with any sense of history to choose between the Dems and the GOP is like asking a condemned prisoner to choose between scaphism and crucifixion – it’s not going to be pretty, either way. The deciding factor in both cases is time: It usually takes a few days to die from crucifixion; death via scaphism can take more than two weeks. Similarly, the strongest argument for the GOP is that it will take longer to reach the full flowering of the current Dark Age under their policies than the Democrats’. Maybe. Note that this is based on what the parties do, not on what the parties say.

Lately, it may appear that I’ve been harder on Democrats than on Republicans. This is true, to an extent, but it is due mostly to the Democrats holding power at the moment. When the GOP regains the Presidency, I’ll turn the heavy artillery back on them.

Another cause of my focusing on the shortcomings of Democrats and the Democratic Party is geography: I live in California. For the last 30 years, I’ve lived in the Bay Area, including stints in San Francisco and Berkeley. Prior to that, in SoCal. As a result of this, the majority of my friends, acquaintances and coworkers are liberal democrats or farther left. Out and out Socialists, Communists and Anarchists outnumber real right-wingers among the people I hang out with.  So let’s just say I’m familiar with the species in its fullest expression.

There are particular recurring themes in this crowd. First, the combination of an absolute certainty of their own personal moral and intellectual superiority coupled with a truly awe-inspiring degree of cluelessness, as exemplified in the charts I’ve lately excoriated. The same people unable or unwilling to understand the basic math problems presented in these charts are claiming superior intelligence – that galls me. The same people who will call somebody a stupid git for not grasping the awesomeness of Obama are unwilling or unable to follow the most basic logical construct (such as: if there is no truth, there’s nothing much to talk about ). This is not always true – but my 30 years of experience indicate that it is almost always true.

Next, a lot of my personal interactions here are with families at school, which is a Sudbury school. All kinds of parents bring their kids to the school for all kinds of reasons. Some of those people are almost cartoonishly liberal, but some are also Libertarians and Randians. Many times over the years I’ve seen shock on the face of a  Liberal when they discover that not everyone at the school is a lefty – they can’t even imagine that the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals of the Right would turn their kids over to such an obviously ‘progressive’ school. Meanwhile, the right-wingers just sigh and take a ‘stopped clock is right twice a day’ attitude about the Liberals at the school, all the while seeing the individualism, boot-strap mentality and town hall democracy of the school as about as conservative and American as you can get.

Finally, my sense of irony and mockery is triggered by the control freak aspect of Liberals who, at one the same time, talk freedom and rights but seek absolute control over others. This is most apparent with their own children. Many a Berkeley mom and dad have left interviews at our school shocked (or  pulled their kids once it became obvious)  that we really, truly meant to let their kids do whatever they wanted to do all day long so long as they respected the school rules and the rights of others. Sure, they wanted freedom for their kids – in fact, *their* kids have total freedom – to do exactly what mom & dad want them to do, and are shamed & browbeaten into line by relentless and remorseless psychological pressure if they don’t.

When asked what he thought of a third party, Will Rogers replied that he’d be satisfied with a second party.  Now Republicans really are the party of the rich, and really do make sure that the laws don’t touch their sugar daddies. However, ever since the Democrats abandoned private sector Labor with NAFTA under Clinton and  government unions* have grown dominant, it’s pretty much a chocolate or vanilla choice on this point.  Key Treasury and market regulatory functions are staffed via a revolving door with Goldman Sachs – under both parties.

And so on down the line.  The only functional difference is merely which interest groups each party has chosen to pander to.  They tend to do as little as possible for those groups – just ask the Pro-Life people – but sometimes they do if it serves a bigger goal, such as using gay rights as a tool with which to punish churches.

France seems to be the mid-term goal of the Dems; the Roman Empire is more like it for the GOP. France is circling the drain; the Roman empire lasted about 300 years in the West before getting routinely overrun by barbarians and entering the Dark Ages – we should be so lucky.

*Why go to all the trouble negotiating with – and possibly ticking off – Big Business for those small and shrinking private sector union workers when you can negotiate with your self for the benefit of public sector unions? That way, you can shake down BOTH workers AND Big Business!

Follow Up: College Education and Voting

The basic problem with the chart in the last post is that it tells you nothing about how college educated voters actually voted, but invites the viewer to infer college-educated voter behavior anyway – which just isn’t possible with the given information.  Word Problem: If 35% of a state’s potential voters are college educated, and Obama collected 55% of the actual vote in that state, how many college educated  voters in that state voted for Obama? As is most ofter the case in real science, the correct answer is: we don’t know. Obama could have received 55% of the vote without getting any votes at all from college educated voters. Or Obama might have gotten all the college educated votes. There’s not enough information to say – not that it’s stopping people.

So, the question remains: Which presidential candidate got the most votes from voters with college degrees? One problem is that articles addressing this question rarely just give you the raw numbers. One is tempted to say they are pre-spun for our enjoyment. Be that as it may, here in this NYT article,  we see a decent summary of the history of college educated voters from the 80s until now. Basically, back in the 1980s, college educated voters went overwhelmingly to Reagan and Republicans in general, and have since then, as the American educational system has cratered,  slowly slid towards Democrats. (That was a joke! At least mostly!).  So now, it’s about even or even a little Dem-leaning. But the idea that a college degree = a strong Dem leaning is false, even today.

But you’d absolutely be unable to tell any of that from the data in the chart.  The needed information just isn’t there.

For the current election, all I’ve been able to dig up is some exit poll data, which is suspect on a number of levels*, but probably OK for this purpose:

The main thing to note is that there is no strong relationship between college education and voting Democrat or Republican, except among the 18% of voters with postgraduate degrees – and there are plenty of snarky comments about *that* that shall not escape the barrier of my keyboard.  For now.

Bottom line: even granting the highly dubious claim that college education = smart, no college = dumb, it’s simple not true that smart people generally voted for Obama, while it IS true that the most of the 24% with a high school educations or less DID vote for Obama.

* Exit polls are systemically challenged. Among other issues:

– self reporting – all you get is what people want to tell you with no way to objectively back it up. If I tell you I’m a rocket scientist and voted for Obama, that’s what the poll shows, even if I’m a ditch digger who voted Larouche. Don’t know about you, but if some earnest youngster with a clipboard asked me a bunch of questions about how I voted as I walked to my car, Porky Pig and an advanced degree in bovine scatology management would figure prominently in the answers;

– unclear questions, with no time to clarify them: is a certificate from a barber college a college degree? Does an online class in how to draw scantily clad Elvin princesses count as ‘some college’?

Chart Demonstrating Self-Identified Smart People Can’t Read Charts

Here’s another interesting graphic from people I’ve never heard of, that found its way to me via some social media, posted by one of the more intelligent people I know:

The claim is “Apparently this election was not only divided along racial and financial lines, but on intelligence lines as well.” Question for us sports fans – does this graphic actually show that smart people voted for Obama, while dumb people voted for Romney? Let’s assume all the number are accurate. Here’s a few issues.

1. Judging from the popularity of this and similar graphics, the major issue, of course, is that many people who think they are intelligent look at stuff like this and pat themselves on the back and forward it to their friends, all the while sure that they’ve been shown to be part of the cool kids club. No thought is wasted on whether this graphic says what it pretends to say. “Critical thinking” is a particularly Orwellian euphemism, since it seems to mean nothing more than ‘get in line for a 2 minute hate’;

2. States don’t vote – the people in them do. Looking at the numbers, in each state a huge majority of people over 25 do not have college degrees. So it is possible, based solely on the evidence presented, that *all* the college educated people voted for Romney, yet the state still went to Obama. Based on the evidence presented, there’s no reason to suppose college educated people supported Obama at all;

3. Similarly, based on the numbers, at the very least, many ‘stupid’ people had to have voted for Obama (assuming college educated people vote in something remotely like the same percentage as everybody else – but we’re not told that piece of information);

4. It is assumed “college educated” = “smart”, a mistake only someone from, say, the education or sociology department could  make (OK, that was just catty, but couldn’t resist). Seriously, my trade-school educated car mechanic is ‘smarter’ by just about any practical measure than most of the people I went to college with, including the professors – he runs his own successful business, which entails math & finance, marketing, a bit of psychology in addition to knowing how to fix hundreds of different makes and models of cars.  Why assume he’s somehow dumber than some yahoo with an education degree?

5. Which brings me to the next point: why assume ‘college education’ is some sort of homogenous whole, rather than, as any college student or employer of college grads knows, a totally mixed bag. The typical kid with a degree in physics, biology, math, engineering, computer science and the like at least had to go through some level of rigorous thinking to get that degree.  Plus, there are real-world answers and consequences to many of the questions these disciplines raise: does the experiment work? Does the animal die? Does the building fall down? Does the company stay in business? The student of these disciplines is aware that what he’s learning about has to work in the real world. The kid with the degree in education, sociology, psychology, women studies, and so on – not so much. They get their degrees by regurgitation. There are no objective criteria by which it is evident that you’ve done it right. Is Freud or modern pedagogy or the feminine mystique ‘right’? How would you know? And, if you were honest, and figured they were wrong, would you still get the particular degree? Of course, there are brilliant sociologists and stupid engineers, but that seems to be the exception.

And so on. Bottom line is that graphics such as these should only appear as cautionary tales for education of the young. No adult, especially someone with pretensions at intelligence and educational achievement, should take them seriously for more than a couple seconds.

But people do take them seriously, pat themselves on the back about how smart they are – and vote.

Minor Update: From the site linked to above, “Our favorite thing about this graphic is that the data Kenny used came from Fox Business, so if you’re a Romney voter, this is basically Neil Cavuto accidentally calling you an idiot.”  My favorite thing about this quote is that the author accidentally called the majority of Obama voters idiots by the same exact logic.  But the point here is Obama voters feeling good about themselves because they are smart and Romney voters are dumb, and it would be mean-spirited to complicate those good feelings with logic or math, especially when they lead people to vote correctly. Let’s not bicker about who killed who. This is a happy occasion!