The essence of the very thing in which so many people place such confidence and from which they derive so much self-worth is fundamentally rotten:
Credentialism, like so much rot, has precedent in academia. Consider peer review. Peer review ostensibly improves the credibility of scientific works and helps to prevent fraud while keeping the standards of published research in different fields appropriately high. But it does no such thing; it amounts to little more than an expensive attempt to make the status and opinions of academics sacrosanct. On its absent benefits, Adam Mastroianni writes:
Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.
It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.
Credentialism is just like peer review: it is a way of laundering the status of the academy to provide assurances. With credentialism, you assure employers, friends, acquaintances, your new mother-in-law, the guy next door, the local HOA, your doctor, your dentist, and your mother’s brother’s high school friend, that you’re the right type of person. But credentialism does this by placing enormous costs on everyone, and because credentialism creates a demand for credentials, it threatens the value of those very credentials by impelling a rat race and generating respected sinecures within credentialing authorities.
Everything about Clown World is a lie. Experts are idiots. Doctors kill people with more ruthless efficiency than soldiers or mercenaries. The media narrative is predictably, observably and reliably false. Schools teach nothing of value. Wealth is comprised of gambling plus debt.
Everything about Clown World is a net negative.