{"id":3272,"date":"2021-08-18T16:39:29","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T16:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/?p=3272"},"modified":"2021-08-22T15:16:36","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T15:16:36","slug":"incompetent-podheads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/18\/incompetent-podheads\/","title":{"rendered":"Incompetent Podheads"},"content":{"rendered":"\nThomas Sowell’s criticism of intellectuals who are competent in some area of scholarship but who espouse opinions on topics on which they are not competent, made me think of those so-called public personalities who are not competent in any intellectual area at all.

<\/p>\n

\nBy “competent,” I do not mean having a certificate from some academic institution, or having a track record of publications, simply because a person may be self-educated, which probably is a necessary and sufficient condition for being educated at all.<\/p>\n

\nAs a paradigm of this incompetence, I will focus on the interview of Noam Chomsky by Patrick Bet-David, who is an example of the new sophists of the internet — “podheads.” [They are not to be confused with potheads who do not make public appearances as a practice.]\n<\/p>

\nTo make my point I would like to first contrast competent interviews with this incompetent interview.\n<\/p>

\n\nBelow are examples of competent interviews of Noam Chomsky:\n<\/p>

\nBryan Magee, who himself was a philosopher, interviewed other philosophers. A list of some of these available interviews are give here: The Great Philosophers<\/a>. \n\n<\/p>

And here is his interview of Noam Chomsky in 1977:\n<\/p>

\n