John C. Wright's Journal

Dr. Saifedean Ammous is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University, and author of The Bitcoin Standard.

A wag on Twitter yammerheaded the following tidbit of halfwittery:

“If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.”

In reply to this, Dr. Ammous points out that practical wisdom is born of hands-on experience.

He explains:

The Wright brothers and a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened.

Everything that matters to our modern life was built by engineers and workers who got their hands dirty. Scientists sat in cushy universities writing textbooks after the fact indoctrinating generations to think it was their post-hoc explanations that built things.

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