EH8 - Waste

YoThis article by Gary North has me thinking. North is an economist realist, he often strikes me with ideas that have parallels in science. As a chemist, i value decay process - one person's waste is another person's fertilizer - could there be value in mining exotic archaic wastes of prior time? North uses a Pauling tale - 'Decades ago, Linus Pauling told his assistant Art Robinson that there is value in reading widely and trying to remember seemingly unrelated facts. Pauling said that the mind will sometimes come up with links to memories that will prove useful.' The rest of the comment has little to do with the article, but i feel my horizon broadened.
YoThe problem as i see it seems to be the dichotomy of specialized knowledge vs. general knowledge. In a studied field, the person is expert (ex - former, spurt - well you know what a spurt is) in a narrow area where the information passed along appears logical to the uninitiated. The understanding of complexity that went into that field is never questioned, because most people have no willingness to develop their own capacity to the point where they comprehend - they take the expert at his word, if he has the credentials to be an expert (tho too many people fail to validate the credentials of their expert).
YoOn the other hand - everybody is a generalist and knows a little bit about a lot of things. Most people think they know just as much as anybody else. So nobody is given credit for being an expert in the area where they live and work, because everybody around assumes equivalent expertise. The funny thing (not good) is that they are correct - everybody pretty much knows the same stuff - because group think via a controlled media has narrowed the error bars (tolerance) while visually widening the spectrum (mainstream) and reducing the vetting. An example is when the media includes a few exotic types of thinking (usually expressed with large amounts of money), then claims diversity and attacks all non-mainstream thought. After several cycles where the loudest screamers have been brought into the fold and given 'say', the problem is falsely solved and the intolerance continues.
YoRepeating the same mantra and expecting something to be different is as futile as climbing a down escalator. Break a pattern today. I will - every moment of time is productive in its own sense - i will no longer care when other people think i waste my time.