Intellectual Obesity

Ted Rall has put up his latest cartoon Intellectual Obesity. My posted comment follows below the fold:

So, according to the last panel, I must be a liberal because I am not an American. Therefore 95% of humanity must be liberals as well as a consequence of being non-Americans. Thereby making Liberalism the overwhelming predominant philosophy of humanity, and relegating Consevatism to the fringe.

Or, as Mark Twain once said, "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Enough of my demonstrations of intellectual obesity!

What are the economic drivers for intellectual obesity? One would have thought that a Capitalist economy would perform far better with workers who are intellectual fit (to prolong the metaphor).

In my own "profession" of computing, we hold up bad examples to ridicule at sites such as Worse Than Failure. However, "professional" computer societies promote intellectual obesity through examples such as IEEE Ready Notes, or through cookbook approaches such as Design Patterns.

The cost of labour reproduction (cf "Capital" by K.Marx) is far higher for an intellectually fit worker than for an intellectually obese one. The latter can probably do hundreds of Google searches in the time it takes the former to understand the problem.

Hence the need for the pundit class of "experts". They provide solutions to classes of problems. Everyone else just Googles them and reproduces the results. This is far cheaper and thus creates more output than the master craftspeople.

You are not going to change the culture of intellectual obesity by individual examples any more than a gourmet restaurant has of putting MacDonald's out of business. This is how the economic system works.