patrick.net

At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.

This shift in priorities compromises the educational system at a very basic level. Classroom instruction is now much less about teaching students how to think and how to do things, and far more concerned with ensuring they become appropriately enthusiastic about what they’re supposed to feel1. This is true at every level in the system, right on through post-graduate education.

Since those being advanced through the system are being evaluated not on their intellectual ability so much as their emotional docility, the overall level of competence declines. Dull minds have a harder time mastering difficult material; therefore, the rigour of the curriculum is reduced.

The result is the incompetocracy: a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them. ...

Therefore, we need to break the monopoly of the universities.

Since the universities don’t sell education, but credentials, we need a new system of credentialing. ...

There’s a market opportunity there. Listen up, Peter Thiel: whoever does this right won’t just make a lot of money, they’ll blow a hole below the waterline in the ruling class’ legitimacy.

One very obvious answer is standardized testing. We’ve already got that, of course: SATs at the end of high school, GREs for grad school, LSATs for law school, and so on. Standardized testing could be taken a lot further than it is, however. It could made a lot more granular and precise, to the point where classroom grades become entirely irrelevant.

Instead of having one big test at the end of school, tests could be provided on a subject-by-subject basis: Algebra I, Algebra II, Algebra and Geometry, Single-variable Calculus, Multi-variable Calculus, and so on. Students could take the test whenever they feel ready, after studying the material in whichever fashion they feel most comfortable, whether alone, or with the assistance of a tutor, or at a more traditional school.

Rather than having the tests be written at an appointed time and physical location, the tests could be taken at home, with screen-sharing and cameras ensuring no cheating was taking place. Randomization algorithms – changing the numerical answers to mathematical questions, switching the order of multiple-choice questions, and so on – could be used to ensure that each test was functionally equivalent but unique in its particulars, making cheating yet more difficult. Since the speed with which a student completes the test is easily recorded, and since it is generally the case that mastery correlates with speed on a test, whereas cheating usually slows things down, making speed a factor would also discourage cheating. “Oh, you scored a 95% on Calc II in 75% of the average time,” sounds a lot better than, “Huh, you got a 60% and took 1.3x as long as average.”

Such a system could easily be employed from elementary through post-graduate levels of education. It could furthermore be made granular not just at the level of individual subjects, but at the level of individual topics within a subject – replacing mid-terms, quizzes, and homework assignments.

There’s no reason that such a system should require an expensive, unwieldy government bureaucracy to support. In fact it’s best if it’s done outside of the state. The system would support itself with user fees. Rather than students paying to sit in class, they would pay the standardized testing corporation to take the test. If they want a better grade, they can take the test again; thus providing an incentive to do it right the first time. By building it in the private sector, it can be started more or less immediately, without waiting for anyone’s permission. Furthermore, as a private entity, it can easily be exported around the world, thereby providing an objective evaluation of student ability everywhere.

For employers, it would remove a great deal of ambiguity: rather than shrugging their shoulders and hoping that a diploma from Wherever U meant something, they could review a potential employee’s educational records in detail, gaining immediate knowledge of what they know, how well they know it, and how that compares to other applicants.

Interim Harvard President Makes Almost $1M a Year From Drug Companies in Addition to His $946K Salary

Interim Harvard President Makes Almost $1M a Year From Drug Companies in Addition to His $946K Salary

Once meaning has been unmoored from linguistic signifiers, over time, signified meanings become modular and can be swapped in and out at will by the Party. The short-term results are described above, but it must be stressed that the long-term result of this willful corruption and control of language is far more catastrophic. It is nothing short of the complete intellectual collapse of the Indoctrinated to the point where they are incapable of understanding or discussing even the most basic concepts independently, degenerating to a state of utter reliance on the Party to provide, literally, meaning to their lives.

But there’s no escaping the fact that, before the pandemic Gay and Magill would have gotten away Scott-free with their arrogant refusals to give straight answers to the questions from dull, non-PhD-having Congresspeople. Instead, they pranced prettily into the propeller blades because credentialed experts have no trust residual to draw on anymore. Nobody likes them. Nobody trusts them. They were wrong about everything.

In other words, everyone is fed up with academic experts who think they are better than everybody else just because the media fawned over their every word during the pandemic. They are now experiencing a rude awakening.

I can offer no more recent evidence of the tsunami of reckoning washing away the edifice of fake expertise than yesterday’s Harvard Crimson story headlined, “Top Harvard Medical School Neuroscientist Accused of Research Misconduct.” It’s bad. A Harvard darling, a so-called expert and top medical science research professor, now stands credibly accused of having falsified (Portlanders: that means made up) his data and having plagiarized other people’s images and illustrations, in over 20 of his papers during a twenty-year period. Over once a year on average. ...

The Crimson story suggests the doctor may have taken a few shortcuts, you know, to make sure his papers popped and so that he would get the “right” answer.

Who knows how much the alleged cheating contributed to Shah’s meteoric career? While other academics toiled away, following the rules, not obtaining the astounding pro-pharma results like the not-so-brilliant Dr. Shah did? Real science is a lot harder.

Shah’s deceit was discovered by data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik. Ms. Bik is every woke academician’s worst nightmare. She is a “real” expert with a talent and a passion for sniffing out academic fakesters. Nowadays Elisabeth uses A.I. and reverse image searching to help, but she’s written guides explaining how you too can help expose fraudulent Harvard doctors. According to Liz’s bio, her exposé work has resulted in 1,069 Retractions, 149 Expressions of Concern, and 1,008 Corrections (as of last November).

If you’re a science type, here’s a link to Elisabeth’s blog post on her investigation of Dr. Shah’s ‘work,’ if you can call it that.

For everybody else, according to the Crimson, Bik found 44 different examples of made-up data in Dr. Shah’s papers between 2001 and 2023. But the “most damning” problems were from Shah’s 2022 paper in Nature Communications (it had 32 other authors, but Shah was the lead author). Bik said Shah’s 2022 paper contained figures and images stolen from seven other papers (written by other scientists) plus some images copied straight off the websites of two scientific product vendors.

For instance, one of Shah’s pinched pictures came from an online catalog by R&D Systems, which makes scientific research antibodies. Shah did not give credit to R&D Systems for using its image in his 2022 article. Instead, Dr. Shah claimed the image was from his own work and — get this — he edited the picture’s labels to show a completely different antibody than the original.

Totally fake. Fake, fake, fake fake fake.

“This is a really unusual sort of thing that I cannot imagine how this happens by accident,” drily noted an independent professor who reviewed Bik’s findings for the Crimson.

Harvard again! What is obvious beyond denial is the bigger movement afoot: the anti-expert movement. Ms. Bik’s helpful labors are but one small special forces unit in the army of discontent that Peter Hotez can see coming through his smudgy, pie-shaped eyeglasses. Mark my words. Their downfall will be so complete that before this is over, they’ll be claiming they were set up.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvards-plagiarism-problem-multiplies

If Stormy Daniels actually looked like that, she wouldn't have to be trying to extort Trump

Check out the reactions to Harvard Med School's 2024 class music video: "I would remove my own spleen before I allowed one of these people to touch me"

Guys, I think I'm getting just a little worried about the next generation of doctors.

A music video put together by the Harvard Med School class of 2024 is going viral. I think it's a parody of Cardi B's WAP (DO NOT LOOK THAT UP) and it's even more cringe.

Watch this and I promise you you'll start taking better care of yourself.

Imagine that. All those lost slots for highly qualified doctors.

It's terrifying that Medical Students have time to make these videos.