The Intellectual Weakness of The Fourth Estate [CBD]

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is a recurrent theme around these parts, and we all have examples we can trot out to expose the stupidity of the media.

This one might be my favorite though .....Imagine a large industrial corporation that produces hundreds of thousands of relatively expensive products with just 14,000 workers. The market for their products is quite literally the entire United States, and the math --really just arithmetic -- says that those 14,000 workers are a tiny part of the market. Yet the brilliant media accepts unquestioningly the weak-minded analysis that Henry Ford raised his workers' wages so that they could become consumers of his products.

"Henry Ford understood this when he paid his workers high enough wages to buy his cars. Today's titans of the economy appear to have forgotten the lesson."

Math doesn't lie. This is a moronic supposition that should have been rejected after 10 seconds of doodling on a scratch pad.

After thousands of examples of the intellectual flaccidity and inferiority of the journalists in our midst, we have to accept the fact that they are not the best and the brightest. They are, overwhelmingly, college students who couldn't handle college math, couldn't manage to do the work to pass Biology 101 and Chemistry 101, and were daunted by the prospect of reading a bunch of long books with lots of facts in them, so history was not an option either.

So what was left? (fill in the blank)_____ Studies or Journalism.

posted by Open Blogger at 12:50 PM

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