A Cartoon about Boredom

How Expert Are the Experts?

By Alan Caruba

We live in a society that apparently has experts on everything stacked ten deep. You cannot turn on the television without being introduced to experts of every description about everything.

That being the case, why is the nation on the brink of insolvency despite the fact that I can order a product, receive email confirmation, and a tracking notice of its shipment without once having to talk to a living person?

That, I submit, is pure genius, whereas creating programs for the wasteful redistribution of wealth, mine and yours, is my definition of really, really stupid.

Why stupid? Because communism and/or socialism, sooner or later always fails. Why? Because banishing the ownership of private property—this is MY stuff, not yours—runs counter to everything we humans strive to achieve and because people don’t want to interact with the government in some fashion every damned day, unless it’s the postman.

As Thomas Paine put it, “that government is best which governs least”, calling it a necessary evil.

I go to wondering how many PhDs there are in the United States and, it only took a bit of Googling to conclude there is a huge glut of PhDs, not just here, but worldwide. Considering that it takes from 7.5 to 10 years to nail the diploma to the wall that is a lot of time acquiring something that often does not kick open the door to prosperity, although it does look good on your resume.

Let us grant that we want our physicians, Doctors of Medicine, to have spent a good stretch of time learning how not to to kill us in the process of curing us. Other fields critical to our well being include engineers who build bridges and such. We want smart people to ensure that the vast preponderance of dumb people don’t kill us prematurely.

Anyone who has spent any time around PhDs or, in my case, answering their emails, soon concludes that many of them are just nitwits. The greatest drawback of being a PhD is, apparently, concluding that you are smarter than everyone else and then wanting to make that point on an hourly basis, particularly with strangers.

So, forgive me if I have grown old and skeptical listening to or reading PhDs and the views of experts, people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

Permit me to cite just a few examples.

“So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance on September 25, 1954.

“Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product.” – Joe Keenan, president of Atari, responding to Steve Job’s offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak had developed, 1976.

“There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Dr. Albert Einstein, 1932. (PS. He changed his mind).

In 1984, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, had their book, “The Experts Speak” published by Random House. Minus source notes and an index, it ran 345 pages of quotes on the wide range of human experience, all by experts, all of whom were wrong.

Let me close this observation on expertise or the lack of it, by noting that all politicians lie. The best and most noble of them lie on occasion and the rest of them lie all the time. Our current President has managed to lie ceaselessly, with or without the aid of a TelePrompter. He is not to be trusted.

Likewise, far too many scientists have taken to lying a great deal as well and this has been particularly obvious as regards all those telling us that global warming is real, carbon dioxide is a lethal pollutant, and just about anything involving the use of a chemical is suicide.

In Proverbs 9:10 it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Let me amend that by suggesting that wisdom includes regarding all those experts on the television, radio and print media with great skepticism. This is another way of saying take the time to do your own research. If your findings defy history and logic, you’re wrong.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Institute Noted in Chronicle of Higher Education Article

Peter Wood recently had a commentary published in the Chronicle of Higher Education; he is a member of the National Scholars Association. It took note of The Boring Institute and its founder, Alan Caruba.. Our thanks to Mr. Wood.

Boring
January 06, 2011 By Peter Wood
This article was originally published on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Innovations blog.


I am among the fortunate—at least we think we are fortunate—who find lots of things interesting. People, ideas, places, objects, books (especially), history, coincidences, clouds, robots, speech, movement, things I understand, things I don’t. It is not that I flit from one to another in a whirl of distraction. Rather, I sink into whatever has caught my attention and have to be pried loose.  

This is not to say I am immune to boredom. I have high resistance to the big B, a threshold that allows me to look with rapt admiration alike on rooftop water towers and roadside cows. I once bought a book titled Boring Postcards, but felt taken. The picture of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in its youth, for example, radiates an innocent optimism.

But there are certain anti-stimuli that overwhelm even my well-honed capacity for fascination. PowerPoint, for instance. The instant a speaker commences to talk his way through bulleted slides, my eyelids feel the tug of gravity. Space-time wells up in an irresistible tide that draws me out beyond the shores of consciousness. Who invented this elixir of tedium?


At times I suspect it is an alien technology sent to Earth to prepare the way for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And who are these academics who willingly trade in their birthrights as people with something to say for the mess of pottage of nothing worth looking at?

PowerPoint by all rights should have been center stage at Boring 2010, the international conference held a few weeks ago in London. Indeed, it sounds as though many of the speakers were on top of their game. The Wall Street Journal reports that conference organizer James Ward gave the opening presentation about his collection of neckties, “accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation.” I, for one, would have been at risk of taking a lively interest in his cravats, and it is nice to know that Mr. Ward took the precaution of adding some anesthetizing technology to prevent errant enthusiasm from breaking out.

Staving off such enthusiasm can be a challenge. In 2008, Alan Caruba, founder of the Boring Institute, announced that after more than two decades of work, he was closing it down. The problem? Way too much interest. Caruba explained, “at the height of the Institute’s fame, I averaged a thousand radio interviews a year, all clustered around the various events, and even did some television appearances. I talked with radio hosts from Australia to England, New Zealand to Germany, and everywhere in America.” Caruba was not initially averse to the attention. He is, rather, like me, a natural taker-of-interest:

I am possessed of a mind that endlessly entertains me. I make myself laugh. I don’t know if others do this, but I find my thoughts either astonishingly profound or amusingly idiotic. Either way, I am always surprised.

But Caruba got tired of the game.

Or maybe not. Somehow his interest revived and the Boring Institute came roaring back. Caruba’s brand of cultural commentary is now attracting considerable attention and The Wall Street Journal article on the London conference is, of course, feeding the fascination.

Caruba dates the genesis of the Boring Institute to his watching a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. My epiphany of boredom has always been New Year’s Eve, which as a child I experienced as an eternity of dumb television shows leading up the spectacularly empty moment of Guy Lombardo’s band, the Royal Canadians, playing Auld Lang Syne, as a ball full of light bulbs descended in Times Square. My life has been shaped by the need to escape that moment.

Does higher education have a boredom problem? Caruba argues that it does. “Americans at almost every age level sit through countless boring hours in school rooms, in college, attending endless business meetings, and at any one of the thousands of conferences held throughout the year.” The college part of that concerns me most.  I fear he is right.


College ought to be among the places where Boredom can’t find an inch of space to land and fold her matted wings. But the combination of mass production, doctrinaire teaching, careerist ambition, competition from the ersatz excitement of popular culture, and higher ed’s own addiction to deadening technology have welcomed her in.

Of course, we stave off the boredom of New Year’s by making resolutions. One of mine is to get invited to Boring 2011 to lecture (with PowerPoint!) on the need for Auld Lang
Syne studies in the core curriculum.

(c) Peter Wood