Things That Show That Someone Is Not Being Objective

I was reading some news and got redirected to an article on a blog called The Duck of Minerva, titled, "So, you want a job in policy."

I'm sure the advice was good. I'll assume so, since, as someone with no interest in a job in policy, I really don't care.

The advice in the post is second hand from Katherine Kidder

Katherine Kidder is a Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where she works on the Military, Veterans and Society Program.

Ms. Kidder is a Doctoral Candidate in Security Studies at Kansas State University, where she focused on defense and development policy. She writes extensively on military retention rates, professional military education, defense budgeting, and foreign aid. Prior to coming to CNAS, Ms. Kidder was the Veteran Student Services coordinator at Kansas State University, where she aided veterans through the transition from military life to university life.

Ms. Kidder holds a Bachelor of Science in History with an emphasis on military history and a Master of Arts in Security Studies, both from Kansas State University. She is the spouse of an active duty Army officer, and remains active in the Army community.

What I found interesting were some of the blanket assertions about Washington, D.C. people and the Washington, D.C. community. If you read between the lines, what you learn more than anything is this: these people think really highly of themselves.

Start with this assertion: "All interns in this city are smart. Really. All of them." Fifty years of life have taught me that anytime you get a sufficiently large group of people together, you're going to get some idiots. Take Congress: we've got a sitting congressman who believes that the island of Guam could capsize if too many people are on it.

I have no doubt that Washington policy interns are no different. I mean, some of the people who thought that Iran would join with us to help oppose Syria's use of chemical weapons if we just showed them good enough evidence had to be interns at some point, right? But it's very important to their image that they think of themselves as the "best and brightest." I really doubt it. There are many thousands of very, very bright people who want nothing to do with that life, for sensible reasons, and many thousands of stupid people who go into that life for all the wrong reasons.

This very human tendency to ascribe superior qualities to one's own tribe has a corollary: if your tribe is the best and brightest, other tribes must necessarily be inferior. This explains the natural gravity toward statism in Washington policy and bureaucracy. "We're the brightest, so of course we know best. We know better what they need than they do themselves."

I think an assumption behind this is that all these people come from good schools, they all have M.A.s or Ph.D.s, they must be smart! I've worked with a whole lot of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s over the years and, lord, believe me, they're not all smart. Success in advanced academics selects for a certain set of talents -- the talents of being good at studying, taking tests, writing research papers, and researching deeply into a very narrow academic area. Those skills don't make you a genius. In fact it's a truism that the more advanced the degree the less the person knows in the broader sense.

Once upon a time, we venerated the "Renaissance Man," the sort of man who could paint a masterpiece in the morning and design a new kind of water pump that afternoon. The modern university system is designed -- almost deliberately it would seem -- to ruthlessly weed out that sort of person.

Instead, the typical path is: Get a B.A. or B.S. in some broader but still tightly targeted area, such as Ms. Kidder's history degree, then find a narrower area such as "Security Studies" and pick a thesis in that that hasn't already been done to death by 10,000 other grad students. Then, find an even more esoteric specialization within your doctoral field (in Kidder's case, Security Studies, again) to base your dissertation on, and after many years of study, you are an absolute expert in a very narrow, obscure area of knowledge.

To characterize such a person as "smart" just based on that degree is to demean the notion of what it is to be smart (no offense to Ms. Kidder, I'm just using her academic path as an example). Even worse, it takes genuine smartness and buries it deep in a blinkered academic education.

The university pays lip service to the renaissance ideal by implementing a common core curriculum at the undergraduate level, to supposedly ensure that engineers get some humanities courses and humanities majors have to have some exposure to science and math, but it's widely understood that these core requirements are a joke and that, overall, the system is designed to turn out computer scientists and engineers that know nothing about politics, history and literature, history and English majors who can barely calculate a tip, and economists who have no idea how to run a business.

I work every day with people like this: they are very competent at their jobs. In that respect, I suppose they are smart, but take them outside their comfort zone and they're babes in the woods. Knowing a lot about military retention rates doesn't mean you know a thing about, say, economics. But, my observation of this crew has told me that they simply assume that since they're very well-educated in their areas, they're smart enough to make judgments in many areas where they have towering ignorance. Their culture encourages this.

The strange thing about this town is that what you claim to be an expert on, your [sic] are perceived to be an expert on until proven otherwise (which can be a really good thing or a dangerously bad thing!)

 Hmm. That doesn't sound very smart, does it? In fact, it sounds suspiciously like these highly credentialed people are assuming that credentials equal actual expertise and, even worse, working competence. I suppose that's comforting to them: "I have a Ph.D. This piece of paper means I must be smart!" The assertion that this "can be a really good thing" is never explored or proven. I think the "dangerously bad" part is obvious. It does certainly fit in with the perception of us outsiders that D.C. is filled with charlatans, frauds, sycophants and empty status-seekers.

This is the town that has been trying to sell us on the genius of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Somehow, I'm not convinced.

Just as in Academia, publications carry a lot of weight. But the difference in Washington is that volume kind of counts for more than quality (I know…it makes me shudder).

 Another admission that form is more important than substance.

So start getting your name out there with smaller pieces- op-eds, pieces in smaller publications, etc. Of course, it never hurts to have a piece placed in ForeignPolicy.com or Foreign Affairs- but when in doubt, get something out there. And this is a great way to get an edge on your “expertise.”

It's the unconscious details that mean the most. The "expertise" in scare quotes is particularly telling. Not real expertise, just so-called "expertise."

Do you suppose people like this, a tightly-knit, highly competitive crowd with an inflated sense of their self-worth, an unsubstantiated faith in credentialed academics, and an extreme eagerness to ingratiate itself with senior people in the "really tiny" communities they're competing to be part of  might be susceptible to, oh, group think? Yeah. me too.