Harvard Medical School dean George Daley has come out in favor of editing genes, and Steve Sailer notes that no child will be left behind without the Harvard grad glibness & self-confidence gene, as he shares this excerpt from A Private Universe:
Definitely watch the video.
(I’ll wait.)
Sailer’s point:
Both sets of people come up with the same wrong answer — because the earth’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular and so we are further from the sun in winter — but the townies are obviously ashamed that that’s the best answer they can come up with, while the Harvard grads are completely self-assured in their wrongness.
I’m sure there were some Harvard grads who gave the right answer and ended up on the cutting room floor, but they will probably end up working for the Harvard grads who were technically wrong but winningly self-confident.
The video actually has some interesting comments on Y
That people who graduated from high school let alone Harvard do not know the cause of the seasons is astonishing. Presumably they are unaware that when it’s winter in the US it’s summer in Argentina.
And yet they say that 85 IQ hunter-gatherers the world over, formidably armed with wood and stone tools, loincloths, warpaint, and the odd penis sheath, observed precession.
@CVLR
I don’t get it. Was that directed at stupid grads or stupid anthropologists?
We are further from the sun in winter?!
No we are nearer – in Northern Hemisphere – but the sun ray direction is more slanted.
It is true that in Southern hemisphere the winter is when we are further…
Dear sweet baby Jesus…
How many people slept through elementary school?
Axial tilt and precession were explained pretty well to me, back when… The explanation that I remember, and just confirmed again, was that winter happens because the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun during winter, making the the distance traveled for light a bit further, and letting it strike obliquely, lessening the delivered energy than during summer or at the Equator. Southern Hemisphere is the opposite, so they have summer while we have winter, up here. Right?
Baffling. The more I encounter of the products of the current education establishment, the less respect I have for them. Most people I’ve run into with Ivy League degrees really ought to go ask for their money back, because outside of whatever narrow specialty they pursued, their education is actually near non-existent.
Never going to forget having to explain to a guy who’d gone to Princeton (and, more’s the pity, graduated…) what the hell my reference to Sisyphus meant, in the context of what we were doing due to his intrinsic incompetence at planning. Nothing like delivering an erudite and pithy insult, and then having to explain to the subject precisely why it was an insult… Dude still didn’t get it, after I explained it–Heard him tell another Lieutenant that he’d been compared to a Greek hero!
Ah, well… Just another sign, like that Occasional-Cortex chick, that we live in a sadly diminished age. It’s like there’s only so much real intelligence to go around, and we’re spreading it thinner and thinner…
People learn, but many do not give meaning to what they learn. It seems the most important objective of learning for people is to be known that they got a learning.
Kirk,
The difference in distance between the Earth’s surface and the Sun because of the tilt of Earth’s axis is trivial. The Sun is about 93 million miles away. The tilt of the Earth rotational axis causes the length of time when the Sun is above the horizon to vary during the year. At the poles the Sun is not visible for six months of the year. The obliqueness of the ray to the Earth’s surface does spread solar radiation over a larger area and during winter the sun’s rays travel a greater distance through the atmosphere before striking the ground. At the poles even during summer the Sun never rises more than 20 something degrees( the tilt of the Earth’s axis) above the horizon. If the axis of the Earth were not tilted the Sun at the poles would always be circling around at the horizon.
CVLR,
Hunter-gatherers noticed the precession of the equinoxes? Utter nonsense.
“I don’t get it. Was that directed at stupid grads or stupid anthropologists?”
Stupid archaeologists, more like.
Jim: “Hunter-gatherers noticed the precession of the equinoxes? Utter nonsense.”
I agree, but academia doesn’t. Oh well. The Younger Dryas apocalypse is coming whether they like it or not,