Angry: That awkward moment when you get exactly what you voted for. "You are the DUMBEST smart person I have ever met"

[NNadir]

51. I love your last line. As a person living in a world...

...populated almost entirely by people with Ph.D.s I am no longer surprised to encounter stupidity among the highly educated.

The degree in fact requires a rather narrow focus for a period of time.

I once sat a few hours with the great scientist Freeman Dyson at the Institute of Advanced Study and chatted about his life. He famously refused to get a Ph.D. One of the things that amazed me about the conversation was that there was no subject I could raise - and trust me I ended up trying to be obscure as a challenge to see if I could stump him - that he could not field with brilliance. The only thing he wouldn't discuss was some issues with nuclear weapons physics, obviously with good reason. I raised the point innocently, veering from a discussion of his work on the Triga reactor, but he cut me off.

If you read some of his books, you see he understood the world outside of science very well.

For him declining to get a Ph.D. (he was working under Hans Bethe as a young man) may account for his breadth of vision.

I still advised my son to get one, but not at the sacrifice of developing wisdom.