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Category: Commentary

“If You Can’t Control What’s Important, You Make Important What You Can Control”

More surprisingly, Posner spends significant firepower assailing
“The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.” This compendium (The Chicago Manual of Style for lawyers) might seem an unworthy target. Yet he is excoriating not just the Bluebook, but also the substitution of style over substance it represents. When created in 1926, supposedly by the great appellate judge Henry Friendly, the manual was 26 pages. A recent edition spans 511 pages. Posner appears to believe that following the Bluebook is about as bad as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic — and by reverse order of manufacture, no less. He casts the Bluebook as a neurotic reaction to external complexity; if you cannot control what is important, you make important what you can control.

From a New York Times review of Richard Posner’s new book, Reflections on Judging. I emphasized the last part because it was oddly reminiscent of a disturbing trend in my own discipline.

Bette Midler, the Jenny McCarthy of Food Policy?

BetteMidlerActress Jenny McCarthy is well-known for opposing vaccines, because they “cause autism.” Never mind the fact that there is an overwhelming body of research that shows that vaccines do not cause autism, Jenny McCarthy just knows. Because Jenny McCarthy is a celebrity, she commands much more attention than her knowledge of medicine would normally command.

Likewise with Bette Midler, who has taken to pontificating about genetically modified organisms in the tweet above (and probably elsewhere; I didn’t want to look…)

Really, is it be too much to ask from celebrities that they stick to what they know?

(ht: David Rieff, via Twitter.)

More on What You Won’t Get Out of a MOOC

My post on massive open online courses (MOOCs) generated a bit of commentary. Since I am busy with travel, a grant proposal, and a commissioned article on top of the usual research and committee work these days (I don’t teach in the fall), I thought I would summarize that commentary in lieu of a proper Monday post.

First came a post by Aine Seitz McCarthy, one of our PhD students whose blog also focuses on development. Aine (“pronounced like An-ya”) sees MOOCs as a threat to her future employment: