Dr. Scott Atlas resigns from Trump administration

[NNadir]

58. It sounds like you have direct experience with this institution.

I don't, but no one with a sense of ethics can be unaware of the pernicious nature of the "Hoover Institution" - a cancer on the intelligentsia if ever there was one.

Of course, some great science has come out of the institution, but well, some very dubious behavior - as you rightly point out - has come out of there as well.

My personal disgust with the place is connected with this guy: Mark Z. Jacobson who wrote a rather idiotic paper in PNAS, of all places, claiming that the entire world could be 100% powered by so called "renewable energy."

A consortium of other scientists published a somewhat scathing criticism of that paper in the same journal, PNAS, (Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar Clack et al., PNAS, 2017 114 (26) 6722-6727) whereupon this tenured asshole filed a ten million dollar defamation suit against the journal and all of the authors, as detailed in the link above. (To the credit of Stanford, some of the critics were at that institution, and Stanford Nobel Laureate Burton Richter gently criticized another of this idiot anti-nuke's papers, too gently in my opinion.)

Stupid dogma of the type Jacobson writes actually kills people, and Jacobson, who has modeled deaths from air pollution early in his career is surprisingly unable to do simple math, including the obvious math of lives saved by the use of nuclear energy. (It involves nothing more sophisticated than addition and subtraction.) Either that or he believes that anyone who dies from exposure to radiation is more worthy of consideration than millions of people who die from inhaling dangerous fossil fuel waste. This is the moral attitude of an ethical Lilliputian, and it unsurprising that Stanford, which has a whole institute named for a former President which is sort of a breeding ground for moral Lilliputians, has a fool like this in its civil engineering department.

(I hope I don't get sued for saying this.)

I advised my son to stay away from "Ivy League" universities as an undergraduate, but to consider them for graduate school but I offered the caveat that among Ivy's, Stanford should be excluded. We'll see. He earned a free extra year of post graduate study at the institution he's at now, and I don't know what he'll decide to do thereafter. I don't think that Stanford has anything in which he's interested, which is a good thing.

A school of engineering with a person like Jacobson in it is worthless, clearly.

It looks and sounds like a very ugly place to me, and your comments further that impression.