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                                             November 6, 2015
                                             
                                             CREDENTIALS
                                                                                       

There's other stuff I could say about this stuff-- I never run
out, as you may have noticed.

Mostly I'm talking about the reputation of individuals here,
though I included one section on an organization, the IPCC. Our
judgment about organizations is also of critical importance,
and in fact you could argue it's *more fundamental* than judging
an individual, at least as far as things like educational
background goes. A degree-- honorary or not-- in physics *means
more* to us if it's from an MIT or a Princeton than if it's from
Some State U... though arguably, this difference means too much
to us, because I've done both and I can tell you that a Big Name
school will typically have some advantages over a State School,
but we exaggerated those advantages quite a bit, and we also
ignore the fact that those State Schools have some advantages,
too (like, for example, a faculty that's not too full of
themselves to take teaching students seriously).

I don't doubt that James Hansen learned a few things at U of
Iowa. None of us are going "damn, too bad Hansen didn't get to
go to Harvard, then he really might've amounted to something".

For that matter, when we talk about earned degrees we typically
only care about "accredited institutions": so there's another
social process of accreditation that's in play, and myself, I'd
like to learn more about how that works if only to think about
stealing some of those ideas in other contexts.

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