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To Leo and Brianna’s point about political advertising via mass media, it is truly a huge part of the business model in traditional broadcasting.
The ABC TV station in Atlanta, made over $1 million in revenue in one week from the two candidates campaign committees alone in 2022, and the political action committees made that even bigger. $1 million, one city, one week. Pretty wild.
I would love to know if anyone could find the research that Leo is talking about where people prefer common sense over expertise.
It’s a great question. I’ve tried to find it but cannot. I probably saw it on MSNBC, but there are so many damn polls now I can’t seem to find it.
Perhaps I was remembering this book from a few years ago:
Of course, one doesn’t need a poll (which are increasingly suspect anyway) to know that Americans have always valued “common sense” over degrees and credentials. But please, if I ever need surgery, give me someone who has spent some years in medical school!
It does amuse me how any publication can claim to be non-biased. I think the best you can claim is not being consciously biased. I can’t help feeling that having a fragmented social media landscape lends itself more to misinformation than having one Twitter where everyone can get their news.
As for valuing expertise gained through a degree, just because someone has a degree doesn’t necessarily mean they know more about what they’re talking about than someone who may not have a degree but has studied the topic intensely and can follow the data.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t trust anyone with a degree, simply that, as two “experts” might reach different conclusions, it comes down to critically analyzing multiple sources to decide what information you want to trust.
I think this is the crux of the current problem with society. Masses of the unwashed (and poorly educated) think it’s okay to trust a person just because they claim they’re an expert. They have no means to objectively verify if the person is actually knowledgeable and no skills to do the analysis anyway, so they fall to a cult of personality. How else can you explain how Frump became president.
I want my doctor to have all 10+ years of schooling and interning. I want my mechanic to have gone on training by the manufacturer on how the car works and how it’s supposed to be maintained. I want my electrician or plumber to have apprenticed under a master electrician/plumber for at least 10 years before they’re running their own business. I want my software architect to have an undergraduate degree in computer science followed by 10 years of experience working in the field and building the necessary knowledge and experience to be a good designer, planner and scheduler. I don’t want to drive on roads build by a civil engineer on their first day after graduation… they need to have worked with someone more experienced who can help them to understand that knowledge is important, but so is experience.
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I know what you mean, it’s conforting to know the person monkeying about with your brain is properly quallified to operate on you… and then not show you that they are looking it up on Google
I do think there is a certain amount of snobbery aimed at people who don’t have degrees. If you had two software architects, both have ten years of experience, the difference is that one had a degree, and the other had been through a couple of coding bootcamps, and then done a couple of certifications. Would you be able to spot the difference? Put another way, let’s say you have a chemist who has not done anything to do with chemistry in years, not even worked in your local pharmacy in 30 years, would you still consider them an expert?
Some of my colleagues in local government didn’t have IT degrees, and I wouldn’t say their expertise is any less valid than mine.
The problem is Twitter and it‘s ilk. They allow everybody with a conspiracy theory to have their say and no vetting of the information, no pushing it through editors or lawyers, to see if it is sensible or even legal and wouldn’t land a normal publisher in front of the beak.
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Quite often, yes. In the attitude.
I did a sandwich course in the 1980s, instead of going to University and getting a degree. I got my first job, because I was cheap, but proved my value on my first project and had received a 100% payrise after 6 months!
A lot of any skill is aptitude, not jut knowledge. I’ve had graduates come and work for me and they didn’t know what a loop was, let alone more important constructs. On the other hand, I’ve had people without degrees come in with the same level or less knowledge as well. A general degree is mainly a piece of paper that says you know how to learn. More practical degrees, like medicine require longer study and also long practical periods, where they learn on the job and put into practice what they have already learnt.
Computing is such a fast paced landscape, that it is constantly changing. When I started programming, back in the early 80s, there was a saying, “everything you learn today will be obsolete in 6 months”. It was a bit of an exageration, but a pinch of truth in it as well. The basics remain the same, a loop is a loop, a decision block is a decision block, the wording and syntax might change, often dramatically, but the concept remains the same. If you learn one language, and are open to it, you can learn another.
I started with BASIC and Machine Code, went through Assembler and BCPL to Pascal and COBOL, REXX, bash, C/C++, 4th Dimension, SQL, VisualBasic, VBA, C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript and a plethora of other languages.
I got a job writing websites in PHP by boning up the night before the interview and knocking up a quick test site to make sure I knew the basics. It took about half a day of studying the existing code on the project to work out how they were implementing things.
What really saved my bacon was that I had learnt how a computer worked and I had read how MySQL works. The company had a massive problem, when the system was under load, the query to load the menus on the site (which were dynamic and changed regularly depending on what sales etc. were going on) would drop off on performance, often taking over a minute to run and requiring the DB admin to reset the server every few minutes during the promotion.
I looked at the queries they had built. I wasn’t a MySQL expert, but I did know enough to research where in the documentation to look for optimisation. The devs - a mix of graduates and apprenticed programmers - had no SQL training and no idea about optimisation, both had been taught to produce human readable code first and foremost. Good for me, picking it up, bad for MySQL, which had to process it!
Turning the WHERE clause on its head - they had written it to be how it was described to them - you start with mens clothes, for example, then exclude this, then exclude that, narrowing down the search, to build up your menu. The computer needed to start at the other end, the exclusions were “small” and quick to execute, once you had them, you could go to the main dataset and extract just what you need, that was much quicker than writing it to work like a human would tackle the problem - it was also still clearly readable). When the next sale came along, the query was taking under 250ms, instead of over 1 minute. Instead of 4 over worked front end servers and database server, none of the servers was under much stress.
That is something you can only get with experience - and a lot of it is an experience both trained and graduate programmers lack today, in my experience. There are still some programmers who “hit the metal” and learn how a computer really works and how you can optimise code for it, but that isn’t a given any more.
In Germany, there are graduate computer scientists and there are apprentices who learn administration, programming and other things on the job, with 2 days of school per week. Both are respected and, at the end of the training, both are probably about as useful as each other, just the graduates tend to have a higher opinion of themselves.
In the UK, it was especially bad, I worked for a large multi-national consultancy and we had a graduate intake program. One of the graduates I had to look after was really bad and they were on the verge of throwing him out, after 6 months, he still couldn’t understand what loops or decision statements were or how they worked!
He had a history degree and wanted to work in marketing, but IT paid more money in the first few years! I managed to get him re-assigned to HQ to work on a couple of marketing projects and he excelled in that area, his appraisals were much better. But, because he was employed as a “programmer”, when the project came to an end, he went back to programming tasks and his appraisal grades fell as expected. There was nothing more I could do for him, the programming division wasn’t happy with him and the marketing division didn’t want him, because he was a programmer… He had made a poor decision and he and the company were suffering because of it as the company wasn’t flexible enough (and didn’t have a permanent opening in Marketing).
and it’s this that supports the independent media’s claim that mainstream media are suppressing stories. They probably aren’t, but they have rules to follow around checking and corroborating a story that independents can ignore.
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That’s a fair question, however my life experience is probably different than yours. I was a team leader and a mentor, and I could most definitely tell the difference between self-taught, practical taught (or say someone from a 2 year or less technology school) and a university grad. Those that don’t get a broader education, don’t get exposed to things like compiler construction or numerical methods, and generally seem to learn one technique, and then try to apply it to every situation. (i.e. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)