I'm just saying -- devaluing "experts"

So here I go again, off on a tear after a skeet from an academic who is blinded by the light and tries to present all experts as equal, hoping to elevate liberal arts experts to the same level with STEM and trying to scare us into supporting them by scolding us for devaluing “experts”.

Well, if you’ve been reading my blog, you know what I’ve said about experts. This is a long post but it summarizes a couple dozen of other posts.

There is a Supreme Court definition of expertise.

a/ If you have published papers in periodicals for peer review, had your approved dissertation published as a book, if you do basic or advanced research, or teach or advise in an accredited university (some colleges and universities are not accredited), and have been involved in your field for some time post-doctorate, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

b/ If you have worked for years in a field with a recognized professional structure, especially if it has things like CEU requirements, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

All others who testify must have their testimony supported by data from, you guessed it, expert witnesses.

The problem is the path to expertise.

With b, there is a clear path. If you work continuously in the field you gain expertise. If you get all your CEUs as prescribed by your profession, you get exposed to the latest information. If you don’t get fired, you probably know what you’re doing on the job.

For a, it’s more of a problem.

STEM has a clear progression of training, publication, and involvement in the field that creates, maintains and increases expertise. This includes fields usually listed in the liberal arts department that draw heavily on STEM data, such as archaeology, psychology, and sociology.

The rest of you, I don’t want to hear any complaints about getting devalued.

Your professors and advisors have exposed you to things that detract from your expertise. They may not take you seriously if you don’t follow along with what they say, a clear authoritarian situation. This includes teaching you jargon and making you use it in your papers to prove that you run with the in crowd.

Another facet is pipelining. I’ve talked about this many times and identified papers that produced nonsense conclusions due to lack of a 360 degree perspective on the subject.

Pipelining has another problem. It steers academics into ignoring important issues and writing what I think one writer long ago called “the 350^th abridgement of English history”. I’ll give you a for-instance. One author in England in the 70s gained notice for writing about feminism. But before twenty years passed, she transitioned to writing about the same old white male power brokers everybody had been writing about for 200 years. It’s the same thing as people continuing to write about the Kennedys when every last thing that could be said has been said, and somebody had to defend against a plagiarism accusation because there are literally no more new phrases that a writer can use on this subject.

If you are in these liberal arts fields, when was the last time your advisor or peer review said rewrite your paper because you use Fallacy X? How do you know your paper doesn’t use Fallacy X? Or Y? or whatever? On my blog I blast a paper that uses four different fallacies, and then I give the punchline that the author has a university job teaching. If your peers let you get away with using fallacies, then you have no business claiming expertise because your peer reviews are worthless.

But I have other provocations, as Elizabeth Bennet told Mr Darcy, you know I do. Or at least you know if you’ve been reading this blog.

Academics who have no STEM content in their work may fail in epistemology. Not only are they supposed to use the correct jargon, they are supposed to use the correct sources. I mean academically correct, not necessarily factually correct. When was the last time your advisor told you to do a review of the literature with an eye to publishing about the debunking of past publications in your field?

Anything can be debunked at any time after publication. If you do not check into the debunking of books or their sources, you risk your reputation as an expert on using bad data.

If your advisor or department is pushing you to use AI, PUSH BACK. In the last couple of months two reports exposed that in both science and law, use of AI to write papers has put out false results. Tens of thousands of papers and legal documents published in the last two years have been retracted not just because of bad data, but also because of mythical sources. Lawyers have been disciplined by the American Bar for failing in their duty of care. Reputations have rightly been ruined.

You cannot follow the fashion without risking your reputation for expertise, and AI is one more fashion you cannot afford to follow.

And then there’s my own field, languages, especially ancient languages. As I wrote on my Greek thread, every grammar of Classical Greek is worthless. I won’t repeat the details.

It’s also true of Biblical Hebrew. The only existing text that uses Dr. Cook’s dissertation as a basis, is worthless because the authors made it “non-confessional”. That means they violated the First Law of Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory by stripping out every piece of information which ties the language to the culture. It’s bowdlerization, and so I told the author who posted on Researchgate.

And I’m finding the same thing for Arabic. In my Greek blog I used the term Grenglish for trying to force Classical Greek into the mold of English, the way Dionysius Thrax forced it into the mold of Latin 2000 years ago. Haywood and his admirer Price did the same thing and I call it Arglish in my draft write-up of what I’ve learned. William Wright from the 1800s is the only author to admit that Arabic is an aspectual language like all the ancient Semitic languages. But all of them are stuck on morphology and fail to use context to explain meaning. Which is what my write-up is trying to correct as far as I can tell what the meaning is.

But it’s not just the ancients. I tried to find decent grammars of Slavic languages like Polish and Czech, and they all falsely describe the languages in terms of tense, not aspect. Yet the grammar of Russian I used 50 years ago in my first class accurately explains aspect. The people writing about world languages do not know what they’re doing and have no claim to be called experts.

You cannot beatify somebody as an expert just because they are part of academe. Their work has to be re-evaluated against relevant new information. A philology (feh) paper on the Indo-European languages from a few decades back claimed that they originated in the Middle East. How many people in language departments rewrote their work on the history of the people who used specific languages when the Human Genome Project revealed the truth – that the Indic languages developed in and around northeast Anatolia, near but not in the Caucasus Mountains? How many historians have done it?

Your body of work stands only as long as new data, perhaps from outside your field, does not debunk it. If you say “I don’t understand that stuff”, I have two answers for you.

You are dooming yourself to being debunked. It’s like that movie The Perfect Storm when George Clooney turned off all the technical inputs about the danger he was in, because Michael Ironside hurt his masculine fee fees. By the end of the movie I had no respect for that character and you will not earn my respect by following suit.

You are rejecting life-long learning, a preventative of dementia. So not only will you wind up debunked, you will wind up senile.

And yet STEM has its own problems. The number of posts or skeets I’ve seen about how to rehabilitate science with the public all betray a total ignorance of reality. I’ve written about this too, but basically it has two factors.

a/ The Enlightenment Era myth that because you expose people to information, they will not only learn it but also remember it and shape their lives around it. There are people closely related to me who went to the same schools who prove that this is laughably incorrect.

b/ The fundamental blindness to the change of influences on youth after elementary school. Parents do affect their children’s schooling after elementary, discouraging them from taking STEM and also from pursuing lifelong learning. Even parents in STEM do the latter, as if their need to pursue CEUs has nothing to do with their children.

If you were taught, or are teaching your kids, that once you’re done with formal education you’re done, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

And it’s so easy with the Internet that it’s literally a shame how many people literally haven’t learned anything since they left formal schooling.

Where are the polymaths of yesteryear? Where are the polymaths of tomorrow? Shit, where are the polymaths of today who can tell AI to go fuck itself because it’s wrong or uses mythical sources?

They’re not in academe, not even in STEM. Otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing these mass retractions.

So don’t ask me to rely on academics as experts. They are mortals, they are subject to a thousand conflicting influences, and way too many of them aren’t capable of good epistemology.

I’m just saying….

Knitting -- Euroflax

Most of the linen tops I have now, I knitted from Knitpicks Cotlin, a blend. It's actually a fine tape and you knit normally.

But I splurged on some Euroflax #2/Sport yarn, which you can get in hanks or cones. And it's pure linen and works differently.

I started out knitting normally and realized that what I was making was see-through like fishnet stockings. Uh-uh. I didn't want to have to put a tank top under it.

Then I seemed to remember working with Euroflax before, using a pattern they sold or gave free with the yarn. And I thought they had you do KTBL.

So I tried that and it comes out much better.

So do your swatch to see if you need extra yarn. I bought three hanks and I think I'll need three more to finish this top.

Once you do your hem, which I did in seed stitch, do a round of KTBL. If you're knitting in the flat, do the first row as KTBL.

Working in the round, knit the second round plain. Working in the flat, purl the wrong side row.

Alternate KTBL with a knit or purl row, and bob's your uncle.

By the way, I also bought up some of the last Jaggerspun 2/8 yarn in existence. The company went under in 2024. I have a white sweater, what I call a creamsicle top, a jumper in color #480 which I call gentian with gentians worked on a white background under the neck, a purple top with white edelweiss worked under the neck, tops in pewter, graphite, slate, curry and navy, and sweaters in the last four colors. The gentian is spectacular, in some lights it looks rich blue and in others rich purple. But it's out of production now.

I'm just saying --- videos

Here are some pro tips for doing videos to post on the web, say on Youtube.

NO TTS. If you are too fing lazy to do the voiceover yourself, after learning how to say foreign names or phrases right, we don't owe you our time.

NO urban legends. If you are too fing lazy to do the homework and avoid the lies, we don't owe you our time.

Repetition is not detail. If you don't have enough facts to fill out two hours, tell them only once unless you need them to bolster other facts, or only do a one hour video. We don't owe it to you to sit through a repetition of the same info or phrases every ten minutes.

GRAPHICS. If you can't find enough relevant graphics to match your text, draw them yourself. Also, I don't want to see somebody wearing a Jacobean collar when you're talking about some period before the death of Elizabeth I. That means you think we're too stupid to tell the difference. We don't owe it to you to let you insult our intelligence.

The same thing goes for repeatedly showing the same graphics as for repeating the same phrase in your text.

AI. Read the terms and conditions of your AI app carefully. I've heard announcements that when you take advantage of the AI in your app, the company that made the app claims copyrights. 

Besides, AI is an idiot child. It doesn't know a valid source from something that has been debunked. It lies sometimes. It contradicts itself. AI does not make you smarter. 

And finally, pick your subject properly. The only people watching your Kennedy videos are stans or people who literally never heard the name before. But the videos on the Bantu expansion are few, and have the faults I list above, and yet this was one of the major population movements in the world, which played out for thousands of years of world history.

I am no hypocrite. Every post on my blog, I wrote myself, after years of research. One string of 50 posts was 40 years in the making, because I wanted a solid string of facts, not just he said/he said, and some of the best facts I used only showed up on Internet Archive in 2014. If you're not even going to try to do some percentage of the work I did, * shrug * you're wasting my time.

I'm just saying...

21st Century Classical Greek -- it's not accusative

I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative".

As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature.

The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..."

Wait a minute.

In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative.

But the case used in Arabic is the same as for Scripture, which we WOULD call accusative, since it's the direct object.

Welp in LSJ a bunch of entries have the note "c. acc. pers. et rei." One example is lissomai, which has this notation in meaning 2. And it means pray to a god (the pers.) about something.

And we would expect the god to be in dative as well. Classical Greek did have a dative (modern Greek does not), but it's not used here.

Also liteuo has the same note, but the pers. is somebody you entreat, and the rei is what you entreat on behalf of. And that is "for" which usually takes the dative in Greek.

I said all through my Greek thread that using case names turns out to be confusing because we keep thinking in Grenglish and Greek doesn't work that way. It turns out Arabic has the identical issue, only Quranic Arabic has already dropped the dative that Classical Greek kept.

I may do an Arabic thread to give examples of all the problems as well as give citations. You can read my Biblical Hebrew and Greek threads for a sneak peak at the kind of things grammarians have been screwing up for 25 centuries.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- maybe it's just me

When you use a verb that needs a preposition, do you struggle with where the preposition goes relative to the predicate?

The farther you put the preposition from the verb, the harder it is for your reader to know what you meant. 

But sometimes it is uncomfortable to put the preposition between the verb and predicate.

Maybe it's just me. I grew up west of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and had schoolmates who were Mennonite or at least "plain". I was used to phrases like the classic "throw the cow over the fence some hay". (tossed plenty of hay in my time too)

In that case the syntax should be "throw some hay over the fence to the cow", because "over" is part of a prepositional phrase, not a complement to the verb. In German, "to the cow" would be in dative and "some hay" would be accusative and there would be no doubt what you were throwing.

Even if you grew up immersed in the language you write in, you can make mistakes. I'm working on Arabic for a project on Samaritan scripture, and James Price assures us that kids are prone to a specific mistake if they grow up with parents who speak Arabic, but the kids don't. (Had to edit that one a couple of times)

So cut yourself some slack, but EDIT EDIT EDIT.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- that stranger

This is another in my looong series of pointing out that unless the person posting is a Jew, they should not be posting.

It's this mistranslating "ger" as "stranger".

A ger is somebody who has agreed to take on Jewish observance. A ger toshav does everything but get circumcised. A ger tsedeq gets circumcised in addition to doing everything else.

So what does it mean ger b'erets nakhri?

Well, a nakhri is always a non-Jew, a non-Hebrew, somebody not descended from our patriarchs.

So the phrase is about living in a land of people who are not Hebrews, not Israelites.

The whole phrase means living by Gd's law even if all around you are nakhriim. The citation is Exodus 2:22.

In Genesis 23:4 Avraham says "I have been a ger and a toshav with you." That means he has been living by Gd's law while he resided at Chevron -- where everybody else was a nakhri.

So all you Jews who fell for the mistranslation, stop doing that. Learn Biblical Hebrew so you can understand your own scripture -- and catch out all the people trying to lie to you.

I'm just saying -- the tragedy of string theory

 I watched the Stanford videos of Dr. Leonard Susskind discussing physics from the standpoint he uses in his series, Theoretical Minimum. Luckily I have some math and science background that let me follow what he said.

Dr. Susskind is one of the founders of string theory, back in 1969, but now he's sounding an alarm, and the interviewer here didn't seem to get it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_Hlm6aCok

Some of you scientists help me out. What I think Dr. Susskind was saying is:

1/ We have a beautiful and mathematically correct formulation of string theory.

2/ It supports de Sitter space, with its boundary, but we do not live in a bounded universe.

3/ We have a "visual" boundary, a horizon, beyond which we do not have the instruments to make observations. The universe goes way beyond that.

4/ If there is physical confirmation of the current string theory, the evidence lies in the part of the universe that lies beyond our horizon. Since we can't access it, we can't adopt string theory as superior to what we already have -- all the more so as it is inconsistent with the actual conditions of our universe.

The part that the interviewer struggled with was #4. He wanted Susskind to admit that there might be solutions beyond the horizon and so we can't rule out string theory. Susskind's point was that it doesn't matter if they are out there, we can't access them. It's the old invisible purple hippo of quantum mechanics. You can't prove that the hippo is purple because it's invisible.

If Susskind is right and string theory can't get along without a boundary, then it can't be right. The mathematicians need to sharpen their pencils and find a formulation that does not require a boundary.

And then Susskind points out the real tragedy. The young physicists of today don't want to do the work. They can't pick a problem independently and do the work without input from an advisor, professor, or other authority figure. If you tell them they're wrong it hurts their fee-fees. They refuse to consider taking up work that doesn't have a salary attached to it. They are into physics for the money, not out of curiosity. (These are not his words, he is much more diplomatic about it, but that's what it comes down to.)

When was the last time YOU studied something that wasn't job related, that wasn't involved in your CEUs or keeping your license as a professional? Yet the Internet has troves of college textbooks, and yesterday I found like 400 Schaum Outline texts on Internet Archive. If you complain about education in the US but you're not volunteering to improve your own education, setting an example for others, you're a hypocrite -- and before you turn that back on me, just wander for a while through my whole blog. All of that comes from self-education in the 21st century.

I'm just saying....