Quote:
Originally Posted by Orruar
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Not everyone cares about qualifications. It's the ideas that matter. Qualifications are a tool for confusing people who don't know how to judge the ideas.
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Not necessarily. They can offer a bit of consistency through being an information shortcut. While yes, you should always temper someone's qualifications with critical thinking about what the person says, if a person has a PhD, there is a level of prestige that comes along with that in terms of whether that person knows what they are talking about in relation to that field. It doesn't make them infallible, but I'd rather ask Dr. Lijphart about democratic institutional arrangements than a random individual on the street with no PhD in comparative institutions.
But, I think the essence is that you should always temper qualifications with logic. If a PhD starts saying absolutely fucking idiotic stuff that you can't find anywhere else, and there is no logic to what is said, totally disregard them. In that way, yeah, totally right. The ideas matter.