I've made some allusions to how embarrassingly smug and lazy Kyle "I went to Yale" Smith's series is. We're two (short) posts in and it's still difficult to find substantive criticisms underneath an onslaught of purple prose and obvious contempt for community colleges.

The main allegations of his post are that Dr. Biden isn't a great writer and that she didn't do what Smith considers an adequate amount of work to justify her degree. It isn't shocking that he'd avoid substantive critique, as he lacks the expertise to make it.
In the paragraph below 👇, Smith takes Biden's citation pattern – for a potted, perfunctory history of community colleges (which isn't intended to be anything else) – as evidence that she couldn't be bothered to do the reading.
Did he bother to look at the books? At least check their tables of contents? One can find some basic information online. Cohen & Brawer (2003) appears to be a standard textbook on community colleges (cited 5400+ times). The page ranges reflect... relevant parts of the text.
I couldn't find a TOC with pagination for Witt et al., but here's a summary of the contents 👇. Again, given the substance the page ranges aren't terribly surprising, especially since she cites a different source for her *two sentences* on the pre-crash 1920s.
Now, most academics would probably cite multiple works for the same piece of basic knowledge, but Biden mostly sticks to one source in each in-line citation. Which is... fine. She's rotating sources.
If you don't know why I'm so annoyed by this... well.. Smith claims that Biden doesn't deserve the title as she received a professional Ed.D.
He thinks that he's scoring points by arguing out that her "dissertation/executive position paper" (h/t @bparsia) doesn't look like what he expects from a PhD – and that somehow his BA (ICYMI, from Yale) entitles him to set standards for who gets to call themselves a "Dr."
It sure as hell feels like he's trying to imitate those of us who went over Dr. Gorka's credentials with a fine-tooth comb (and here he is 👉https://t.co/GuDVDP4XiZ quoting both me and @reynolds in a piece about Gorka's descent into peddling fish oil).
But we did our homework. We checked his citations. Most importantly, we held the dissertation to *the standards of our shared discipline*.
Gorka's insistence on being called "Dr." mattered only insofar as it was part of his intellectual grift: of pretending he had genuine expertise on terrorism...... something actual experts on terrorism made clear wasn't true.
Biden, OTOH, has an extensive background in educational practice, doesn't make outsized claims about her expertise, & isn't in contention for a policy position (although, FWIW, she's easily more qualified than DeVos).
Indeed, I ruled out a deep dive into Page's reputedly awful thesis, noting that "The abysmal quality of Gorka’s dissertation was directly relevant to his claims of expertise and his [WH] position. Besides, he used it as a cudgel against his detractors." https://t.co/iuoanFVkBV
That is all.

More from Society

global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R

You May Also Like