Probably just the world over now.
Hmm - really? China? Japan? A bit nearer home, Germany? Certainly our German friends have a lot more respect for STEM subjects than we do.
I wasn't referring to just that. But all of it. The bit about star appeal and the insane money china and places in the middle east are paying footballers etc. Many countries are courting celebrity and the likes.
Such has been the way for decades.
Very few people know that I have a degree, I don't tell them (but now I just did
). I certainly never told any of the handful of GFs I had before I married in case they assumed I was a nerdy and limp-wristed stereotype. Having a degree was not as common then, before Tony Blair decided that everyone should have one. After going out with one GF for a few months she suddenly said "You're brainy, aren't you" : she was not very bright herself and it felt like an accusation rather than a compliment, like "What are we doing together?".
That's easy to say when you've been brought up with technology. People who are 10 years older than me will not have had computers at school and it's quite possible that some will have gone through life without having to use one. Even if they did use one in a work situation, it's likely that it was simply used as a tool for a specific purpose.
I’m not sure how old you are
but hence why I said an “excuse” not to have learned. A 60-70 year old today would have been 40-50 when modern computing and the Internet was clearly the way everything was moving, with likely impending decline and retirement of manual methods. Not learning technology whilst able would have been a big mistake, IMO.It started a couple of decades ago with the rise of "reality TV". Remember after the first series of Big Brother, Jade Goody going on the Graham Norton show and displaying how stupid and thick she was to laughter and applause. Particular segment where she was stood in front of a map and asked to mark where various places were, and it was apparently hilarious and something to be celebrated that she didn't know.
I feel as though the "we've had enough of experts" line is totally misunderstood by most who seem to think it is some kind of brag of wilful ignorance. Quite the opposite, it is a frustration from those who seek the truth that they are told to believe an 'expert' simply because they are decreed as an expert, regardless of the logical sense of the argument they are making or their track record of actually being wrong or right. It is not that people are sick of the truth, which one would think a genuine expert would be more likely to provide than your average Joe.
The reaction to that speech, whether in a gleeful media or in the reactions of many people at the time, hinted at an essential truth, that people generally do not trust experts because of their status or learning, but more because their views accord with their own. Confirmation bias trumps fact, in other words. Welcome to the post-truth age.
People don't like experts when they say uncomfortable truths which conflict with what they want to believe (e,g, anything to do with anthropogenic climate change or health). We live in a world where inventing a fluffy feeling version of the truth is an acceptable alternative to dealing with the real truth, and this is what often causes very bad decision making. Humans are irrational, emotion trumps logic, gut feeling and so-called common sense (ugh!) trumps objective analysis.
He was referring to organisations such as the IMF making economic predictions. Given how bad macro-economic forecasting is, (see how often the figures have to be revised), it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a healthy scepticism in that area.
Remember that if it was solely up to the "boffins" and "experts", we'd probably still be in lockdown.
