tomo,
Indeed, bureaucrats love credentials, it gives them more stuff to have rules about.

I only gave half the case for credentialism the other day. Finger pointing is the reason for someone to *require* credentials. For the people *with* the credentials, credentialism is very nice too, because it keeps out the "unqualified" (there are cities in the USA that require formal qualifications to set up shop as a beautician).

It would be a tremendous advance if universities returned to being places where boffins indulged their special curiosities. That particular Nirvana seems a long way away. Skipped a show on telly last night, but not before doing a double-take that Dr Alice Roberts has had a promotion: she's now Professor Alice Roberts. Our Nirvana appears to be filling up with photogenic professors.

The AI stuff is becoming a haven for finger-pointers too. Wrong answer. Ok. Was it the programming? Was it the training? Kind of fun that, when they do go rogue, they get sent off to re-education camps.

Thanks for the reminder of the Star Trek movie — easily the best of them, and that was one of its best moments.

On the pi quiz, the follow-up question should have been Tell me the next 10 digits of pi.

Evidently ChatGPT needs a course in transcendental meditation.

ChatGPT

tomo,
Perhaps the most insidious incarnation is Frank Spencer the software developer. Now you can have a perfectly competent crane operator or airline pilot, whose skills are completely nullified by the well-meaning halfwit's efforts. The reflex big government response is that we only allow accredited software developers. Of course. Now what do you do about the Frank Spencers working for the accreditors?

We've seen this play out with the credentialism and burgeoning money-tree in the universities over the last couple of decades. It has only made things worse. Credentials seem to me mostly to serve finger-pointers: Oh yes, he works for me, but he has a certificate, so talk to the people who gave him that, but the certifiers have their own underlying disclaimers and eventually you end up blaming his mother for not buying him a sled when he was four. Just stop it at the "but". He works for you: *you* put him in the plane or crane or handed him the scalpel, so it's on *you* to answer for his incompetence.

A nice side-effect of that outlook is to put the universities back where they belong. Rather than He's got a PhD, therefore my arse is covered, it's He's got a PhD, but is he any good?

Mailman,
It is a cruel thing that something like that wrong-way switch would present no great bother to someone like me, unfamiliar with the plane, but a great problem to someone so familiar with it she has it more or less in "muscle memory". Too competent (kind of).

A less dangerous case was my company's Spanish distributors back in the mid-'80s. They had taken delivery of their new Sun workstation, with snazzy optical mouse. When they stuck it on the table, the mouse happened to be back-to-front. This was before mice were terribly common, and they got used to using it that way round: clicking buttons with the thumb and movement all inverted compared to what we are used to. Worked fine for them, but strange for our guy when he went to give them a hand.

I think the obstinate Mann isn't a mindset thing. As you say, prestige and money. I was going to throw in that he has a preferred political outcome too, but on second thoughts, I don't think he's that principled. Change the prestige and money and his politics would change accordingly.

Also powerful enough to make grown adult scientists dig their heals in deeper and deeper when it comes to the cult of the catastrophilia of Mann Made Global Warming (tm)....although that could be more about money and prestige than being right or wrong.

Robbo, Tommo,

A friend of mine was involved in a plane crash a number of years ago and the cause was attributed to two things, engine anti-ice switch installed upside down (so on was off and off was on) and pilot mindset (where she put the switch in the on position, which was off, and even though she could see the switch light not on...didnt change the switch position because her mindset wouldn't allow her to).

Damn powerful thing mind set! Powerful enough to have killed very experienced pilots over the years.

tomo,
Yes, they must have a good time setting up simulator situations. People say that the benefits of simulation runs are in preparing pilots to go into some sort of automatic emergency mode. There's probably some of that, but I suspect the larger part is simply in shaking up complacency. A bit like car drivers get when they drive past a bad accident, except the pilots aren't just imagining what happened, they were in the driving seat (albeit virtually). Would incline you to take the safety procedures seriously at least for a while. The attitude you saw at Bailbrook College fits that pretty well.

IMO you've put your finger on the next big step in airline safety as well as medicine: weeding out the weak ones. Emergency check-lists must be getting near their limit for existing planes, and they can only go so far lifting mediocre pilots. When both engines are out shortly after take-off, it's down to initiative and skill to pull off a "We'll be in the Hudson".

As you say, there's no enthusiasm for rejecting weak candidates in universities. The good news is that real world employers are realising that a university degree is no longer much of a gauge of anything. The bad news is that it'll take a while for that scepticism to trickle through to the NHS.

FWIW, this is the flight that continued without a generator. It includes a transcript from the voice recorder which shared the same battery, so gave out before the crash (probably not long before). Gives me some idea of how much of the TV show was conjecture.

Econtalk interview with Yossi Klein on the Israel/Gaza war. Somewhat partisan, but got more pushback in the comments than I expected. It is a sad thing how many innocent people have to die in the name of someone's quest for justice. A little mathematical induction makes the futility clear (at least to me):

If n wrongs don't make a right, n+1 wrongs don't make a right
1 wrong doesn't make a right