Skeptic Project

<--------yeah that wiki edit originated from. :-)

I did a whole blog about it as well.

Buckminster Fullers work is pretty much the entire proposition of Frescos if you read into his inventions and work.

Marcuse was certainly the philosophical forerunner, and for that matter was much more highly respected and known. Jacque gives no credit to Marcuse whatsoever, not even mentioning him in his booklist of what to read. Thats because if you read 'one dimensional man' it reads like jacque Fresco would if he knew what he was talking about and had some formal education.

The only thing Fresco potentially 'invented' is the concept of cities being circular, but even that in itself is a vague and useless claim because no doubt somewhere in artists dreamscapes there will be sci fi artists who have designed similar things.

All his other designs of buildings are straight out of the mind of Gerry Anderson.

The whole calling the guy a genius is no more than going around pissing on the graves of all the amazing minds who did all the thinking for him. Hes just grabbed everyones ideas and bundled them up and made it appear as his new unique concept. When in fact none of its new not even the important things he claims like a resource based economy, he's just taken the words as his but the concept has been discussed about in one dimensional man with post scarcity/scarcity/planned obsolescence/automisation of essential needs.

good point Edward yes the Atlantis myth is purportedly a round city, so even thats a plagiarised concept.

haha man just hearing the name of that woman makes me cringe.

Fresco didn't invent circular cities. Canberra was designed to be one.

Did anyone else play the old SimCity games back in the day? If you put all of the residents in one cluster and all of the city services in another cluster and all of the recreation areas somewhere else, it is a bad design because people have to travel across the city to do anything instead of having local services to use. Fresco wants to do the same thing, he describes the food, shopping, medical ect all being at the center of the circle, with the houses being located further out and a recreation belt beyond that, so everyone is traveling all the way in to the same city center to use these services. Even worse, the roads (or monorail tracks or whatever they are) all run closer together as they reach the center area, so the center is going to turn into one clusterfuck of traffic. And I'm sure that people won't have trouble finding their houses with every street/path/monorail track/whatever looking exactly the same and mostly forming dizzying circles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6FCLIZXVIM

I won't argue with the idea that you "can learn everything on the computer." Yeah, you can, but it takes years. What I've seen from most anti-credentialism types is they read a few pages of a PDF about engineering and watch some YouTube videos and they're an expert, and anyone else who "seems to know what they're talking about" or "has written a really fucking long e-book" must also be an expert too.

If there are no standards to hold people to, then why not just be a primitivist and suggest going back to hunter gatherer society? That's going to be the result if you really believe that experts are bad and you can use Wikipedia to learn anything (haha, I can be alarmist too) -- except what disproves your conspiracy beliefs, those articles are flawed since anyone can edit Wikipedia, but the things I like are 100% factual.

Yes sky i pulled him up on that.

I do wish he would quit bragging about his virtual PhD's and shit, and instead of glorifying himself just get on with his critiques.

And what Edward said is spot on.

The Ayn Rand cultist Frederick Cookinham writes about Objectivist utopian cities in his book The Age of Rand: Imagining an Objectivist Future World (2005):

http://books.google.com/books?id=XG2v6VRRItIC&lpg=PP1&dq=age%20of%20rand&pg=PA347#v=onepage&q=quebec&f=false

@ Captain Ferseus:

What I've seen from most anti-credentialism types is they read a few pages of a PDF about engineering and watch some YouTube videos and they're an expert, and anyone else who "seems to know what they're talking about" or "has written a really fucking long e-book" must also be an expert too.

Malcolm Gladwell claims that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become proficient at something. I question that for all areas, because I've read that airlines will hire pilots with 1,500 hours' flight experience who also meet other requirements. The armed forces probably put newly trained pilots to work with even fewer hours' experience.

I also think a lot of dentists become competent well before they've spent 10,000 hours performing root canals.

Nonetheless, Gladwell's figure does suggest the level of effort required to become an expert in a practical field like engineering.

I like what you said Edward:

If there are no standards to hold people to, then why not just be a primitivist and suggest going back to hunter gatherer society?

I was thinking about this exact same topic a few days ago, and I came to the thought that one of the most important functions of a society with credentialism is to provide a means by which the 'uneducated' (or under-educated) 'classes' can discern who to trust and who not to on various matters.

In other words, credentialism is a handy way for people to validate the trustworthiness of something someone claims.

"I have some DVDs in my trunk that you should see."

Is that like the candy in the van? If so I don't want any!

@ Brenton:

In other words, credentialism is a handy way for people to validate the trustworthiness of something someone claims.

Unfortunately there exists a measurable cognitive defect identified by Dunning and Kruger in their famous experiments about people's competence-blindness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/04/unified_theory_of_the_crank.php</p>

That apparently explains why incompetent people often draw together several crank beliefs into one world view. For example, I know someone who combines LaRouchism, moon landing denialism, rabid opposition to circumcision and a weakness for fraudulent investment schemes, like the StockGeneration scam in the late 1990's:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.09/stock_pr.html

20 PhDs? You must be talking about prometheuspan. *Looks it up* Yep, it's him. Didn't think he was still around. He was on the ZM forums for a while but got banned. Also started a ruckus on the NET forums and got berated off. Wonder how he found your blog.

Circular cities: UC Irvine had a circular layout and it was not fun to navigate...

Is it even possible to legitimately earn 20 real Ph.D's?

Perhaps if you've actually been around for as long as Fresco.....

Prometheuspan is a freakin' nut.