Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Even some of the best researchers make terrible blunders. Here is my email to Jared Diamond: It's a fascinating book [ Guns, Germs and Steel ] and I salute you for your approach and research. I am on p. 216 (1999 edition.) of your book. I was struck by this statement: "For example, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?" The CIA World Factbook ( quoted by wikipedia ) estimates that in 2000 the adult literacy rate in Iraq was 84 percent for males and 64 percent for females, with UN figures suggesting a small fall in literacy of Iraqis aged 15–24 between 2000 and 2008, from 84.8% to 82.4. That despite the sactions and the invasion and its consequences. Under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi education system was one of the best if not the best among the Arab countries.

"Thus, increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.   All of this is very unfortunate. Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading. What a waste." Academics writes rubbish nobody reads Or Prof, nobody is reading you