PBS America

He is a lot of things, but idiot is not one of them. The guy has been able to fool a lot of people into thinking he can run the country and keep his many campaign promises. Those people are pretty gullible but even that is not the same thing as being stupid.

Trump certainly does a lot of things that will make you want to say, "That guy's an idiot", but the reality is he is *not* an idiot. He has a differe nt way of thinking about how to manipulate people and often it appears to b e stupid, but he has gotten a number of things he wanted. Look at the tax breaks he managed to get Congress to pass. A village idiot could not have pulled that off.

Rick C.

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ch in a week as I got in a year.

I think the "hard work" ethic is a bit over rated. I spent a lot of time w orking hard and it didn't get me anything I couldn't have gotten with a lot less work. In the end I did what I always do which is to apply my intelli gence and eventually it paid off big time.

I think kids should be taught the maxim, "work smarter, not harder".

Rick C.

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frst time is fine?

'Usually right' is so commonplace, in fact,

The problem is that in many important fields, the experts are mostly wrong.

Economic crashes, epidemics, addiction, nations in poverty, hunger, wars, and death have come to my attention.

and not in reality experts.

and endless sucky UIs.

NT

ause

rt,

John Larkin thinks that the experts are wrong in certain important fields ( which he can't be bothered to specify). In reality, John Larkin is a gullib le twit who has been suckered by a bunch of experts who are good at mislead ing gullible twits.

me

on.

If Dubbya had listened to the experts who suggested that the US was having a house price bubble, the wolrd might not have been stuck with the global f inancial crisis.

"As early as 2006, top advisers to Bush dismissed warnings from people insi de and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Bush an d his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn. As recently as February, for example, Bush was still calling it a "rough patch."

We haven't had any decent sized epidemics recently - the experts have manag ed to contain them before they can run away.

The experts advise "harm reduction" while the religious right insists on a "war on drugs" which they evidently aren't winning.

Getting nations out of poverty doesn't need much expertise, but it does nee d resources, which do tend to get stolen if the aid-providers arren't exper t at their job.

Hunger is being dealt with - quite effectively - by improvements in agricul tural technique. Where there's a war going on, the agricultural experts don 't get much of chance to apply their expertise.

We have lots of experts on fighting wars and ending them quickly. Trump doe sn't seem to want to listen to any of them.

Experts are quite good at delaying death, and getting better at it all the time, but human beings weren't designed at all, and the process of evolutio n concentrates on keeping organisms alive until they can reproduce, so any immediate expectation to be able to modify the human organism so that it ca n keep on working forever would be a non-expert's delusion.

JL seems to be an expert on this.

Like NT, John Larkin does seem to chose to get his world view from people who are expert on implanting a particular worldview in people who are gullible enough to be suckered by it.

This does involve making the gullible suckers distrustful of people who actually know what they are talking about, so that the gullible suckers will keep on putting money into the pockets of the people who sucker them.

John Larkin doesn't believe in climate change, and the people who want to keep on digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel want him (and a whole lot of other gullible suckers) to keep on thinking that way.

Europeans love to make standards. Why isn't there an EU standard for UIs? We have all sorts of gadgets that nobody can figure how to operate.

My job is easy. I only have to design electronics that works.

because

xpert,

some

ntion.

The IEEE loves to make standards. The real problem with user interfaces is finding the people willing to operate them for long enough to find out whet her they are user friendly, and paying them enough to keep them doing it, a nd manufacturers who are interested enough to pay them to do it.

I know at least one psychologist who did a lot of work on human factors (an d wrote a paper on engineers doing it badly which we were never able to tra ck down when I finally talked to him about it).

He's famous (and a fellow of the UK Royal Society) for rather different wor k.

Urinary infections? I'm pretty sure a massive, bloated burocracy like the EU would have specs for that and just about everything else as well.

There's an art to being "usually right." What you have to do is give two contradictory opinions at different times.

Then if one of them turns out to be correct you just deny you ever said the thing that wasn't.

It also helps if you can destroy the evidence you did, somehow, either through burying it in a mass of other Schroedinger-prognostications and random streams-of-consciousness, or, when you can get away with it, outright deletion.

User Interfaces. I suppose that Cursitor Doom is too totally hardware orien ted to know about them. The example that came out of the paper I liked was the left-handed Marconi engineer who developed a signal generator that work ed fine, but was hard for right-handed people to use, which is the kind of problem that Cursitor Doom might have been able to recognise - if he was ri ght-handed, and if he thought hard enough about what he was doing to recogn ise the nature of the awkwardness.

As stated before, I don't understand why you think that. Name two fields, and tell us who you consider 'experts', and why they're wrong.

Expert drivers, for instance, rarely get lost or go the wrong way on a one-way street.

Economic crashes, epidemics, addiction, nations in poverty, hunger, wars, and death have come to my attention.

Death is not an error, it is an eternal principle. Hunger is a sensation, poverty is defined on a population distribution wealth curve, wars are criminal behavior practiced by entities 'above the law'.... none of that has anything to do with expertise. Economic crashes (and booms) are hyperbole for broad financial swings.

Epidemics are the success of disease organisms, addiction is an excursion into behavior instability... certainly those aren't experts' doing!

Logic is not so loose that the existence of death supports a claim that 'experts are mostly ' where that 'x' can be any word you please.

psychology, climate change, perhaps politics

A huge number of deaths are caused by failure of expertise

A billion people in poverty /hungry are partly down to political shortcomings

by governments mostly

failure to prevent them is often a human failure

failed treatment methods are

NT

Economics, Nobel Prize winners get everything wrong.

Nutrition, where the theories swig wildly.

Some people, like drivers and engineers, get fast feedback if we are wrong, so we learn or find another job. Some areas of study have no useful feedback and are dominated by academic group-think.

Name one.

Nutrition - or the sort you read about in the publications you read - isn't a science but a mode of marketing.

No useful feedback that John Larkin understands.

Paleontology gets its feedback from digging up new fossils (or sticking old fossils in tomographic scanners that exploit what used to be the Standford Linear Accelerator to generate X-rays hard enough to get through rock).

The academic group-think there is pretty useful, even if it doesn't suite the creationists that John Larkin seem to favour (though he may not realise that they are creationists).