Knight Of The Road
I readily admit that I found their position surprising (given their other postings), but that is more or less what they were at pains to try to claim.
Here's Brimstone with a painfully unjustified buttertion:
"There is a need for useful intelligence in most manual jobs ... a much narrower range of skills and applications are needed to acquire a doctorate or any other academic qualification."
Fw: 2m has gone to the dogs....... 765JNugent .....continue, with the relevent part, the reference to the person I know who is a fruitcake and a PhD. No. Don't attribute that to me, it's your interpretation...
I accept that NM didn't make such direct silly claims, but he did say he agreed with other equally-wild buttertions, and he responded to this:
"You cannot get a doctorate (a legitimate one, that is) without being VERY bright (much brighter than you need to be to be a policeman, a journalist, a politician... or a truck driver)"
...with...
"That's not true"
...which amounts to very much the same as "truck-drivers, coal-miners, burger-flippers and sweeper-uppers are, per se, more intelligent than Doctors of Philosophy" - doesn't it?
OK, it's not quite the same, but it's not far off. I was exaggerating to make the point clearer - a valid debating point.
BTW - and this is important: I am not saying, claiming, or butterting that lorry-drivers are necessarily stupid, unintelligent or uneducated. That's because I have *direct knowledge to the contrary*. I have known several lorry-drivers with university degrees who did not feel compelled to seek or take up other work. My father was a lorry-driver. Had he been born a generation later, he'd have become a graduate. That was life in those decades.
However, none of that can be taken as a claim - or to support a claim - that one has to be intelligent (in everyday terms) to be a lorry-driver, because that would be equally untrue. There are some very intelligent lorry-drivers. But not all of them are. They don't have to be.
OTOH, except for the marginal effects of error to be found in any human system, you will not find a Doctor of Philosophy who is not very intelligent. Contriving made-up definitions of "intelligent" in order to try to "prove" the opposite (which is what Brim and NM were trying to do), really isn't very impressive, is it?
