I know I’m supposed to be some kind of impressed with your college degree from Flyover Directional State University, but there must be something wrong with me. I’m not. It’s nothing personal. I don’t have a college degree. Feel free to look down your nose at me, if you can see past your nose ring. Me? I try to take people as I find them.
I guess I should qualify that opening remark a little. I assume there are still future thoracic surgeons floating around out there. People are still graduating with degrees in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, or computer science, aerospace engineering, or something similar. They make things like that tractor in the video and the satellites it’s talking to. But we’ve recently seen exactly how superfluous a PHD at the end of your name is in the soft sciences, never mind a BA. And yet, there’s a pandemic of snootiness from college grads towards guys like you see in the video. Ick. His hands are dirty. He can’t be too bright.
Listen to how intelligent, productive, and articulate this farmer is. He never hesitates, never stumbles, never mumbles. He understands everything going on in that cab, and outside it, too. He is feeding thousands of people with his efforts. He even tracks the decreased yield per acre when the seed placement goes out of tolerance. The video is a 19-minute soliloquy of resourceful, worthwhile activity.
There’s an old joke in Caddyshack, I think, a movie I’ve never seen. A nasty person makes a cutting remark to an average guy, “That’s OK, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” I’ve heard it spoken many, many times. Each and every time I’ve heard it, my eye twitched, because I’ve worked cheek by jowl with plenty of ditch diggers. Even twenty years ago, they were laying out those ditches using a satellite and lasers. I can assure you that no person I’ve heard repeat that remark would be remotely qualified to be a ditch digger, because they weren’t smart enough to start with, never mind physically and mentally tough enough.
People should have some respect for things they don’t understand. The modern college education makes damn sure you don’t understand damn near everything. The fellow in the video might even have a college degree, who knows? If so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him any.
9 Responses
You ever try welding something in stainless steel? That stuff has so much thermal expansion that if you don’t do appropriate tack welds, and do plenty of starts and stops you’re gonna end up with a humongous gap at the end of whatever you were trying to put together.
As a (carrying a degree) mechanical engineer I’ve done plenty of design work requiring skilled craftsmen (and women) to put it together. And welding stainless is right there at the top of the list requiring skill, including skills I DON’T have. When I’ve tried it the weld beads look like a sick caterpillar vomited its way across the work piece. But I’ve seen folks of every color, gender and creed make weld seams that look like perfection, and been amazed at the skill.
Admittedly my college education was from the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I was probably the last generation able to pay for my own schooling, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t decrease my appreciation for skilled work. I grew up half in the city and half in the country, and I have enormous respect for anybody who knows what they’re doing.
Sorry to have to disagree with you on this one. I may be an a$$hole, but not all engineers are. And yes, I’ve dug ditches and stumped trees, and mucked out barns…that’s why I went to school, so I didn’t have to do it anymore.
You can delete this comment, or send me an e-mail asking me not to post anything on your site again. It just hit me wrong.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Why would I erase your comment? Hell, ain’t we friends at this point? That’s what comments are for. I really think you should read the whole thing again, though. We’re not in disagreement in the slightest.
And yes, because you asked, I have welded stainless steel, every day, for a year or so. In the desert. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not too bright, and that proves it.
I’d forgotten that post about welding (and learning to weld) in the desert.
I guess I’m just sensitive when people denigrate “book learnin'” as though practical training and experience is the only thing that counts. The opposite side of that is when idiots think that book learning (and weirder, credentialing) are the only important things.
Heck, yeah, you’re a friend I just haven’t met yet. Sometimes the parallels in our experiences are a little startling.
The year is 1980. I am a young guy with a degree in Computer Science from a good school. I decide to quit my job and start a consulting company with a partner.
Our first big contract is with a dry-land wheat farmer in Eastern Washington. He farms a large farm, a few thousand acres. Lots of hired help, lots of contracted chemical application, lots of equipment. He’s developed a sophisticated cost accounting system on paper, and it takes him 6 weeks full-time every year to do all his computing. He wants it on a computer to save time and so he can spend more time in the tractor. So we bid him a project, based on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 computer.
Our meetings with him were in his (nice) home. He was barefooted and wore ragged overalls.
It took us a few months to get it coded and tested, and after we trained him how to use it, he approved of the software and paid us.
At that point, I was finally comfortable asking him how he came to develop such a detailed and sophistated accounting system. That’s when he told me about his Finance degree from Stanford…
His motivation was this: When a chemical salesman says “This chemical will reduce the number of passes you need to make over your field, and save you big money”, he knows, to about a dollar, how much a pass over his field costs, in fuel, labor, and equipment depreciation. Most farmers don’t.
Don’t underestimate farmers.
A Tandy! Awesome.
How long before AI does all of this?
Timely rain though, would still seem to be a key. No doubt they’re working on that as well. Your essay – “They Run and Hide Their Heads” from “The Devils’ in the Cows” comes to mind.
My Uncles on the farms in Kansas had 1930s and 40s generation Blue and Gray Fords (in the 60s – probably bought used for a few hundred $$) — The pull-down lever behind the steering wheel was the accelerator …… no foot pedals for speed…..great summer fun in a simpler time.
https://fordtractorcollectors.com/identify-my-tractor/tractor-id-history/
Hi Harry- Thanks for reading and commenting and remembering my story.
The one thing any form of AI doesn’t have, and probably can never have is judgment. Farmers have lots of it, or they don’t farm for very long.
The “AI” being so loudly touted are not artificial intelligence, and don’t do any “thinking” at all. They are Large Language Models (LLMs), and simply use a sophisticated predicative algorithm (think “complex math”) to guess, yes, guess, what word comes next in a sentence the LLM is trying to write in response to a question.
Training an LLM consists of shoving massive amounts of written text into the the algorithm, which notices which words tend to occur near other words. When you ask it a question, it simply looks at lots of words related to the words in the question and then tries to guess what the answer is. It’s amazing that it works at all, but whenever you read “AI” just remember the old programmer slogan: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). A LLM is only as good as the garbage fend into it. The popular LLMs like ChatGPT get most of their “knowledge” from texts found on Web sites, and we all know how reliable Internet information is.
Hi Andrew- Thanks for reading and leaving incisive comments.
Of course I know how reliable internet information is, because I think I wrote most of it, and I’m an imbecile.