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A friend forwards me this image:

Mention anything about this and you too can find yourself uninvited from future dinner parties. The chart, by the way, squares with other more detailed studies on the composition of graduate programs and professional schools. Let me just add one caveat, it is certainly not the case that raw intelligence has anything to do with wisdom – indeed, many of our leaders are among the smartest people on Earth.  I’m probably in the bottom 10% of the intelligence distribution among professional economists, for whatever that is worth (not by test score measures, but by other hard to measure notions).

13 Responses to “Things One is Not Permitted to Mention in Polite Company”

  1. Speedmaster says:

    Walter Williams has said for years that on university campuses across the country, the schools of education are the intellectual slums.

  2. […] The Unbroken Window –  Things One is Not Permitted to Mention in Polite Company: “Mention anything about this and you too can find yourself uninvited from future dinner parties. The chart, by the way, squares with other more detailed studies on the composition of graduate programs and professional schools. Let me just add one caveat, it is certainly not the case that raw intelligence has anything to do with wisdom – indeed, many of our leaders are among the smartest people on Earth.” […]

  3. Frmryllwjckt says:

    But rule by smart people can have downsides too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Saved_Lisa%27s_Brain

  4. Harry says:

    The one most surprising is medicine, unless it’s for a PhD in medicine. I thought MD’s take MCATs, not GRE’s.

  5. Pekka Taipale says:

    You won’t find yourself uninvited from future dinner parties if you just make sure you have your dinner parties with physisists.

    And don’t worry about the dinner parties not having enough diversity if you do so. In a tongue-in-cheek research done on a class of 104 physics majors at Helsinki University of Technology, it was discovered that the most common profession among the group was missionary. There were two of them.

  6. Jewel says:

    This explains why they have to resort to cheating on tests, and why they work so hard to teach ‘self esteem’. They can’t help themselves.

  7. […] Found at The Unbroken Window — Things One is Not Permitted to Mention in Polite Company […]

  8. RIT_Rich says:

    To be fair, a lot of the degrees listed here DON’T require a GRE for PhD applications. So we’re not comparing apples to apples.

  9. Rod says:

    The township manager in Upper Hanover has a degree in public administration. Nearly every month, he has a new five-figure spending idea that a majority of the board of supervisors think is just swell. “Where does he come up with this stuff?” I sometimes wonder. Now I know.

  10. SJK says:

    A Ph.D. in medicine? There’s no such thing, at least in the U.S. If a physician has a Ph.D.- and there are ones with dual degrees- the Ph.D. is in a separate discipline, e.g. molecular biology, neuroscience, physiology, etc., but not “medicine”. This physician will have an M.D. and a Ph.D.
    Furthermore, medical school candidates take the MCAT, not the GRE, as Harry correctly noted. Where did these data come from? Something is amiss here.
    (Could they be referring to “History of Medicine”?)

  11. […] I was over here, and they sent me here, to discover this. […]

  12. […] we replaced the worst 8% of teachers and replaced them merely with average teachers (which sounds difficult – but if one simply eliminated teacher licensing requirements or any number of a host of other […]

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