In an interview[1] he lays out his argument, roughly, as:
> Right. So, the first story is called human capital, and just says that people with more education earn more money because they have been trained effectively for the jobs they are going to do. So, school--you go to school, and it gives you more skills; you make more money. Nice simple story.
> The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling. This says that, yes, going to school does cause your earnings to go up; but, the reason isn't so much that you are learning useful skills as that you are getting certified. You are getting a stamp on your forehead saying, 'Great; hey, premium worker. Hire this person.'
> And then, the last story is called ability bias. This one just says that it's just coincidental that people who have more education make more money; and rather, what's going on is it's the kind of thing that wealthy people--the people who are going to be wealthy--rather do.
[1]: https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...
I saw this idea a lot in other various threads. As the average HN poster is probably well educated, I wonder if it’s a biais coming from software engineering where most of the skill set is learnt by experience.
Anyway, I have a long list of university degree, and I can tell there are indeed differences with autodidacts that learnt the same general fields. The fundamental difference is that university forces one to learn the unfunny parts. For computer science it means for example functional programming, database normal forms, language theory, anything with mathematics inside, etc. Of course, university classes alone are not enough and much like an autodidact much study have to be done alone, which might lead one to conclude that university is not required. But I don’t think it the case.
Studying computer science to become a software engineer is probably wrong, or at least not the most efficient choice. The study of computer science primarily sets you up to become a _computer scientist_.
The "problems" people face with universities are probably more about incorrect expectations of the students rather than false promises by the universities.
Yeah, I agree totally, the difference is fundamental and really worrying. To think that the university managed to even convince you, that there are "unfunny" parts in programming! Pretty sad if you ask me...
> But I don’t think it the case.
Well, of course. You invested so much time and (if you're unlucky enough to be living in such places) money into it, it's obvious that you will defend it, consciously or not.
In reality, a university is just a place that provides a set of services to the populace. Like all such places, it comes with a set of rules. And that's it - if you can find a replacement for the services you need, then it really "is not required" to get them specifically from the university. It may be hard to replace the "signaling" part of it, but it doesn't seem impossible - there are at least many well-documented examples of it being possible - while almost all the other services are already cheaply available online and in hackerspaces. With the added bonus that in the latter you interact with people genuinely interested in the subject, not people who came to pay their way to a "good education", who find said subject... unfunny.
For the record, Bryan Caplan is an economist.
I know skilled C++ programmers that pull in compensation packages of a million dollars a year. It's not because of signalling or certification. It's because a very competent programmer can save or make the employer a great deal of money.
For more conventional skills, you'll never make much money as an engineer if you skip the math classes. It's obvious which ones can't do the math on the job, and they're not going to get the kind of assignments that lead to promotions.
No, they don't. Very few people are able to juggle 8 pins, but my earnings will not go up if I acquire that skill.
Your earnings go up when you acquire a job skill that people are willing to pay a lot of money for.
> For more conventional skills, you'll never make much money as an engineer if you skip the math classes. I
Define 'much money'.
You can easily make 400K/year at FANG, without having the foggiest idea of how to do linear algebra, calculus, arithmetic, statistics, or really anything but interview O(N) analysis.
I wish people would be more specific - it's not that education in of itself is bad, it's that the way it is currently implemented in this specific society has these specific flaws. I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. It rules out potential solutions simply because they are associated with ones that failed, when the differences between them could result in success.
Not saying that's what's in the video - I get the impression that they are in fact talking about specifically the implementation and not ripping on education itself, but I've seen and heard stuff like this used as the foundation not only of attacks on being educated but also on anything else where some implementations of an ideal failed and so the ideal and all possible solutions stemming from that ideal are dismissed as unworkable. And it bothers me a bit how that approach is popular among many sides of many arguments that I have seen. I would in fact suggest that it is in fact a marker of a failed education - using an example of a failed implementation to argue that the concept itself is inherently flawed is itself an example of a failure in critical thinking.
What are these problems and why are they inevitable?
Mass education in the USA is public education, and if the USA had a good national curriculum and accompanying system of teaching why would it necessarily produce indoctrination?
If you're conflating the necessary standardisation of mass education with indoctrination well that's just wrong. Having a shared epistemic foundation is the basis for a free democratic society not the undermining of it. The English language is itself a shared epistemic foundation and yet mass literacy campaigns are obviously not a tool of indoctrination. They are tools of freedom and empowerment.
Modern education also enforces 'scale': "We have been educated in the worship of the bulk, of the large, of the universal, of the colossal, and have come away from the minuscule, the completeness and universality on the smallest scale the individual, which is the protoplasm of all social life."
The Lesson to Unlearn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619
Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211
I don't think all individuals should become a 100% creative/original person. That would make the society very unstable. So we need some (actually, a lot of) obedient people that makes the society keep going, in this regard that I think the current education is useful. On the other hand, there's always a rebel no matter how hard we try to cast people into a form. The question is that the society needs a good mixture of creative and boring people and I don't know how we can achieve that. My theory right now is the society is somehow auto-adjusting itself - like the brain auto-adjusting itself in the above article - to have its "critical" state, i.e. having the right mixture of people: not too boring but not too revolutionary. Of course, the society is much bigger and more complex than a single brain, so its adjustment is slow and inefficient. But it's interesting how it's still functioning while its education system is so broken.
That seems very questionable at best, in particular the "unstable" part. An obedient population is extremely vulnerable to authority figures. The whole point of democracy is to create stability by removing that single point of failure, by involving so many people in everything that crazy or malicious individuals can not easily gain excessive power, and democracy is under no circumstances compatible with obedience: Either you think critically and vote in your own interest, or you are obedient and vote how the dictator tells you to. It's impossible to have a population that critically evaluates candidates and selects the best one and that also follows orders without regard to their own evaluation of that order.
At such a zoomed-out level, one can make an argument for any grand theory, I guess -- they're too vague to pin down specifically. Still fun to occasionally think about, though. It's the "use sparingly" peak of the nutrition pyramid for thought.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
It's a problem when some people think they have to always be creative, otherwise they're "boring."
The biggest disparity seems to be between sensing and intuition, where sensing relies more on experience to make inferences, while intuition relies more on abstraction to make inferences.
Whether this is evolutionarily optimal or just a side effect of other forces I don't know.
True. But, our society optimizes for economic output, and writes off any anomalies as "stupid". Scientists are pushing us forward into more complex life and societies, but it seems we don't have a similarly sophisticated balancing discipline that ensures we can handle this pace of change.
Even worse, the consensus seems to be that we don't even need to think about such things, and any suggestion otherwise is interpreted as hostile.
2. A master follows the rules because he understands the rules.
3. A guru transcends the rules because he understands they don't apply.
You can't skip steps.
You can look at countries without high levels or any education in existence today. They are far more Indoctrinated. They are far less free thinking.
Even in a strict religious school I would say every year of education makes a person less indoctrinated. The things you have to learn like science outweigh that years negatives whatever that maybe.
Could you improve the education system.... yes... we all know that. But are not sure how.
The idea about Japan not being scientific is however very interesting for 1989. The meme they are technologically advanced isn't really correct, it's almost a racist mythology.
Has it for download
The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.
> The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties
You just can't do this properly without a shitload of core domain knowledge in philosophy, politics, media, history and also whatever specific domain knowledge pertinent.
You can't "question narratives" you see in the newspaper if you don't have a good theory of media like what's provided in Manufacturing Consent and even with that you can't "question [the] narrative" of some specific economics thought-piece in the Financial Times if you don't have the relevant domain knowledge in economics.
If you think of the people you'd regard as excellent critical thinkers, wouldn't these all be people with deep knowledge of their domain(s)? Chomsky was never formally schooled in "critical thinking". He just went through normal, rigorous education, reading stacks of books and newspapers along the way.
source: Why Knowledge Matters, by E.D Hirsch
If someone says "Interest rates are negatively correlated to GDP growth" then sure, I guess you need some knowledge of economics to asses the validity of such claim.
On the other hand, if someone makes a moral assessment such as "every human being should dedicate 40% of their time to helping other people, otherwise they're a horrible person" I think you can assess its moral validity from first principles. You only need to live on earth and understand the language in which the claim is made. If you apply logic correctly and have some fundamental moral axioms (which can be inducted by experience and logic), you'll arrive at a conclusion that respects your axioms.
Narratives put forth by the media, government, etc. are usually of the second kind, i.e. moral ideas. If there are facts, they're important only to the extent that they support the moral idea at hand. I think this "moral" critical thinking is much more important than domain knowledge.
You might not be able to definitively state that the author is being disingenuous, or is a shill, but you can learn to explicitly state where certain narratives are weakly supported. Most people can’t do this. They tend to accept all texts as authoritative.
To use the economics example, you can think things like 'well hang on, how did they measure that'; 'is that really related to or indicative of that'; 'this author has a lot of similar things to say on this topic, some other motive perhaps'.
Answering those questions may require more reading, acquiring some domain knowledge, but you don't need already to have domain knowledge on every subject that you want to read about thoughtfully.
I've found history to be hepful for better understanding what makes good and bad ways of knowing things.
Unfortunately our public school system wastes its history curriculum on spinning fairy tales. It took years of reading serious history books to deprogram myself. I see the same thing being done to my kid.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with you, but does epistemology not cover like 90% of it? We're told so many things, if people could learn to just say "oh, let's see the proof and then I'll decide", rather than the pure narrative nature of the news today, wouldn't that go a long way to freeing us from this quagmire?
People at times erroneously try to liken us to an "honors program", but that's very wrong: in an honors program, you are given special sections and harder challenges (maybe replacement assignments), but the structure is largely the same; with CCS, the structure is removed: you are given an advisor who works with you to figure out the extent to which you might just skip years of prerequisites you might not need (or can quickly learn yourself with a book). Sometimes, we are considered "a graduate program for undergraduates" (which is quite true of a lot of the paperwork structure and respect afforded students, but I think is a description that misses a lot of the fundamental differences between graduate and undergraduate education with respect to failure modes; that is, however, a digression).
This program was created at the very end of the 60s, and had only seven majors--Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Literature, Art, and Music Composition (later, Computer Science and some kind of BioChem major were added)--chosen to be majors where an undergraduate could "push the state of the art" by the time they left. Students are treated as "peers in the educational process", and were essentially encouraged to teach their own class in an area where they had become an expert by the time they graduated (at least this used to be the case; there were some unfortunate policy decisions that happened a decade ago that have never really been fixed, as it damaged a culture).
The person who created this institution--Marvin Mudrick--became the first Provost, and largely ran the major of Literature; notably, he was somewhat despised by the L&S English department (for occasionally quite good reason). My understanding (which might be wrong) is that he reveled in the idea that students might get to learn from people who had very different opinions, and was happy to have people teach classes with whom he disagreed strongly (though, probably not from L&S English ;P).
And now, the reason I provide this context for the point I want to make: students at CCS have to choose a major, and are expected to go super deep; you can't come in "undeclared", nor is the program really "interdisciplinary" (though we are so small we definitely have classes that sometimes make it feel that way, and sometimes people are so motivated that they double major). In fact, as part of the paperwork and prerequisite reduction mechanisms, a lot of the "general education" work that people are usually expected to take--structured work in various programs from lists of requirements--is just scrapped and replaced by a "breadth requirement" to take "eight courses, widely distributed, outside of your major, and another two that are different, but related".
Marvin Mudrick, who got to do all of this because he was a friend of the Chancellor at the time, had an idea for a different college called the College of General Studies, which would be the epitome of a "liberal arts" education, focussing on nothing and attempting to learn everything. It was never created. Now, I know it was also his idea, and it has been a long time since I read works by and about him, but I also remember something very key he described about the College of Creative Studies, and which might be what led him to decide to not continue to pursue his other idea.
In the book I had once read about Marvin Mudrick, a quote--which I am going to paraphrase and butcher from memory--that stood out the most to me was "it doesn't matter what someone learns, as long as they learn it deeply, as then the student can appreciate what it really means to know something and will never henceforth believe that they know something when they actually know almost nothing". I truly believe that, and I thereby not only agree that it seems almost impossible for someone to have "critical thinking skills" if they never really studied any topics to have any depth, but will say that you have to go further: we need to take each student (whether through a structure like college or just by working within society so people have the free time and public resources to study their own interests), help them find their passion and enable them to push the boundaries of their knowledge into a topic far enough to be forced to apply critical thinking deeply enough that they can appreciate the limits of their own, and thereby others', knowledge.
To engage the human mind (and the human heart) one needs something positive to aim for. That's why I think that the best approach is not to pick and choose among ideas and then make certain subjects compulsory (as in a curriculum). Rather find something that interests a child and then figure out how to do more of it. But this is best pursued outside the school system.
Agreed...
Another tendency is to insist on "either this or that" binary where in reality is a lot of complex nuance and middle ground.
And lastly, practically, I work as programmer and I swear to got that good mouth and confidence and right look takes you really far away with other programmers. It wont save someone completely incapable, but many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled.
>Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
I disagree. Assumptions, groupthink and consensus are more a consequence of a social hierarchy. Social offense is the feeling one experiences when that hierarchy is challenged. It's a feeling that probably evolved with our pack animal ancestors.
And while social offense is something your brain invents like any other feeling, it's not something you can simply ignore; analogously, the feeling of cold is in your head, but ignoring it can lead to hypothermia. We're still social creatures, our careers and relationships are directly linked to our reputations. We can't simply ignore someone (potentially) assaulting our reputation because it has real world impacts.
To make critical thinking work requires social mechanisms that protect the reputation of the person who is found to be wrong. That's a large part of the reason for the scientific method, for the scholarly tone in academic journals, for professionalism in business, etc.
Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-t...
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107319110426325...
Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago!
>Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well.
I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
That's because low-level philosophy courses are taught as history courses. Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format.
Statistics is taught as an arithmetic course. You are given four numbers, figure out which formula you should use to transform them into an answer.
Unsurprisingly, neither of them develops critical thinking skills.
This is so important. I couldn’t care less if my daughters learn about evolution of relativity in high school. What possible use do those have unless they become a biologist or physicist? (I’m the latter)
Even programming is an edge case. I’d much rather they learn logic, more mathematics (more depth and breath) and philosophy.
Assuming 'critical' thinking can be taught (I do not think so, though teachers/parents can be catalysts. There is an IQ barrier to contend with). What exactly do you propose for children of parents who themselves are not thinking 'critically' be taught? This constitutes the vast majority of deluded masses.
I have put 'critical' thinking in quotes, because if you ask a person who is not a critical thinker (in your opinion) if he/she is a critical thinker, you are most likely to get a response that he/she is indeed one.
I'm not saying that verifiable truths do not exist but people disagree on what the truth is while each vehemently believing that their version of the truth is the right one. Rarely will they progress to a point where there empirically verify if the view they hold is correct.
thats an oxymoron
People should be able to see the world with their own eyes, instead of with the eyes of culture or other socially transmitted concepts.
If you listen to kids they will tell you their take on the environment, consumption, worthy causes, etc. I’m quite sure they’re not thinking about these things themselves.
So yeah, teachers indoctrinate students with their biases. Some kids seek out their own information as they grow up, many don’t question it.
So we end up in places where nuclear power was bad, for example, or banning straws (when there are much bigger issues with plastics) and detrimental things like everyone is special and unique and the future is yours to conquer (and of course this leads to disappointment when due to outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas they end up working at dead end minimum wage jobs).
Some of these ideas are stupid, and I agree, but there is always going to be a lag time between primary/secondary education and the real world. Stuff that we know to be true now, that we teach kids and get into a curriculum, end up being false or not useful purely because the world has shifted beneath our feet.
Then we must adjust the curriculum, which takes way too long due to bureaucratic nonsense / indoctrination in the previous generation, and then we teach that (which is another form of lag), and etc, etc.
When education is bureaucratically controlled from the national perspective (and to a lesser extent, at the state level), the lag time gets worse and worse.
He'd often have students come up to him and say they had no idea there was even a case for free markets. All they'd ever heard in school was how awful they were. They'd thank him for opening their eyes.
At one time, the other staff (all socialists) invited him to participate in a debate about free markets in front of the students, and warned my father that they were going to take him apart. He happily agreed.
They wound up rather sorry they'd done that. My father was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of economics and history. He shredded them :-) and some had the class to come up later and thank him for opening their eyes as well, as they hadn't believed there was a case for free markets either.
That would actually support the case that "education is a system of indoctrination", academic inquiry and critical appraisal of research is very much a different thing from competitive debating.
Was that your intent? To point out that whether it's Your Father's U or U of Chicago the importance of hearing the dissenting opinion remains the same?
Your story, juxtaposed against the grandparent complaint, suggests that your father was somehow challenging an ambient air of socialist ideology amongst academics. However, your father was head of the department, making the point somewhat incoherent. He just as easily could have been policing his juniors to try to suppress any views which he did not approve, and embarrassing them in front of their students as a power play.
For example a few years ago Colorado proposed to educate High Schoolers using a textbook that highlights morally questionable aspects of American history from the perspective of "The Left" (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"), it was rejected by the courts on the grounds it would not accomplish the required purpose of creating nationally aligned citizens, crucially NOT because it wasn't a good textbook for teaching history.
I've noticed, with much of the public, if democracy is criticized the response is usually akin to "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" more often in the form of "well what do you think is better" followed by the bad sides of that system. It doesnt actually address the argument.
That single catch phrase became a way to shut down critical thinking before it began. "Nope I have the ultimate rebuttal, I wont even entertain other premises, even hypothetically." People were taught that, despite its flaws, its best, and dont question that it might not be the best.
To question democracy itself, as not superior to everything else, is painful and frightening to many, as it fractures their worldview and lenses theyve built with which they understand the world. Defense of democracy feels more like fanaticism, the way people choose a sports team and then never question it. (Lions fans may question their allegiance, but thats a different story.)
It becomes a bit recursive, as democracy is powered by and predicated on an educated electorate.
What's truly frightening are the conclusions that follow this realization: most people do not think about their beliefs and straight up hate you if you question them; it's useless to debate those people since that brings only suffering and persecution; better to somehow seize power and impose one's world view on them.
The captions are GoogleYoutube automatic captioning of a 30 years old low-fi, badly clipped, slightly mumbled recording. Frequent errors are to be expected. You can turn them off by clicking the little "CC" button on the bottom right of the player because the captions are not actually part of the video. Safe to say Chomsky isn't reviewing or approving any of it.
That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.
Tests have correct answers. It's simple to ask a question about any controversial subject and mark the answer supported by the current narrative as correct. This forces students to not only consider the issue but also to answer "correctly".
I've had to answer many such questions and the intent behind them was clear. It's usually disguised as a "human rights" question and is nothing but a mechanism to get students to agree with some left-leaning ideas.
There's more than one "system" out there. Millions of children attend schools where they prioritize dimensions other than simplistic mass testing (eg extra-curricular activities, sport, artistic, community service, compassion, spirituality).
How do you verify that the students learned anything without some sort of tests?
“Some sort” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Some kind of assessment - yes, of course. But for example, consider a portfolio of work & a written evaluation vs a multiple choice exam. The latter is definitely easier, faster, and gives you a metric to print, but which is more valuable for the student? Which better demonstrates what you’ve learned?
NB: obviously this is to an extent domain specific. I’m not talking about med school, and I don’t care about your evolving perspective on whether 2+2 equals 4, I just need to know whether you can add.
Of course, this is not conducive to mass education programs with many tens if not hundreds of students per classroom.
I am still wondering if someone had a hand in that.
You can just as easily say "countries spend more on education as they become richer". The correlation goes both ways (and thats all it is, a correlation. Beware those who assume causation!).
I think its a little absurd to think that teaching geometry and Shakespeare to kids somehow will magically lift them all out of poverty.
Most people are mired in ignorance and believing in myths, despite having educational systems.
> Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty.
No, that was education. Also, yes, maybe at some point school was useful, however a lot has changed since then however school really hasn't kept up.
I wonder what a society would look like, where each of us had not been exposed to over a decade of this in our most impressionable years.
E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job?
Another example is socio-economic system classification: capitalist vs socialist vs fascist vs monarchy etc. Why does it have to be so clean-cut categories? Like if you're not in one camp then you have to be in another. Just another divisive tool.
So they do want to create the work force but they also want to prevent any sort of revolt and thus plant psychological leverages in peoples' heads. It is a science of social engineering that they don't teach in schools.
I don't think you could have even a basic understanding of history without understanding what ethnicities are and some details about the historical experiences of at least a few of these groups.
But let's buy in to the premise, for a second, that schools should only teach you things you need to get a job (which ignores how important a well educated population is to democracy). Historical discrimination and the current disadvantage of several ethnic groups directly informs the hiring policies of many major companies (in the US). So ethnic groups may directly impact you getting a job.
My post reads:
In my view schools/universities are institutions for mass indoctrination. Noam Chomsky has said something along similar lines. I borrowed the words from him.
A bunch of my other observations:
https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world
Historiography (like most of "humanities") is almost entirely based upon ideology to write a story around certain "facts". The practitioners might call that it is a "science" to satisfy their Physics envy, but the intent in these fields is more about molding the world more than it is about modeling it.
You can never be proven wrong by writing the future. Orwell was right. Chomsky has no alternative other than pushing another imperial narrative, like his liberal counterparts during the British Empire.
> I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society.
-- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) https://chomsky.info/197305__/
Leaving aside how unoriginal and trite the things he is saying actually are (I imagine it's what Trump would sound like if he had a wider vocabulary), just consider his smear of Bloom and his book. It's amazing. Here's a very serious book that tries to address the problems he just presented, and all he's got is something worse than a straw man. Suggesting that the classics have a place in the curriculum is 'a couple of smart guys deciding what the great thoughts are' and paramount to imposing authority and trashing everything else. He even manages to sandwich it into 'turning the schools into marine corps'. I think only two conclusions are possible - either he had not read the book in question, or he is willfully lying about it (and not very convincingly).
As someone who disagrees a lot with the views of Noam Chomsky, I must say that you can never call him pseudointellectual.
Chomsky is an intellectual in the truest sense of the word. Academically he has contributed into linguistics and theoretical computer science. As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well.
This is true, but
>As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well.
is something people keep saying, but which I have never seen substantiated. I've read many of his pieces and wasted hours listening to his blabbing. None of it is profound, and a lot of it is quite the opposite (the video linked being one of the most egregious examples). Perhaps he can be admired for being a good con man, though - somehow his rhetoric manages to fool a lot of people.
