The first ten on today’s playlist:

This is great example of why you absolutely cannot trust experts.

This guy is using his expertise to obfuscate and to walk right up to the line of prevarication without quite crossing it. He claims the automated Boeing MCAS system just modifies pitch trim. But this if the system is working as expected (no sensor failure). This is where the dissimulating begins and it doesn’t stop there.

The point about “triply redundant” is another attempt (in an article full of examples) to use expertise to mislead. The system is not triply redundant as most would define that. It can behave unpredictably with only one sensor failure. Even Boeing has acknowledged this fact, and that pilots were not trained on the new system behavior.

I suspect this article was sponsored by Boeing. A long-time airline and aircraft manufacturer strategy has been to blame pilots for system failures. I said when the Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed that is what would happen, and here you can see it. Even if the article wasn’t directly sponsored by some Boeing entity, you can bet this dude is expecting (and will get) some sort of quid pro quo for this attempt to resuscitate the image of a badly-designed and dangerous system.

This is why I 100% do not trust experts.

Glad this admissions scandal has got people talking about the mediocrity of the ruling class, but…uh, you could have just looked around.

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) March 12, 2019

The first time I was around more than a few Ivy League types, I was excited! I thought, Finally, around my people…smart people who can hold a conversation about anything.

I was so, so wrong. So very wrong. I thought most Ivy Leaguers, in my ignorance, would be like Will Hunting. They were more like a Will Ferrell character. Not all of them, to be sure. A few had little sputtering candles of intelligence, though no what I now call systems thinking abilities to speak of.

But I was so disappointed. Truly I was. This was when I was 24 or so and working at a company with a bunch of highfalutin types. I didn’t really have any idea then that the Ivy League and its near-proxies consisted primarily of three classes: 1) legacy mediocrities; 2) those who were good at memorizing textbooks with loads of ambition and no lives who only knew what was in those textbooks; 3) near-autistic STEM types who were ridiculously talented at one tiny area but could otherwise not tie their own shoes.

I should have guessed from my experiences in so-called gifted classes, but as I said, like Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe.