Alberto Díaz Cayeros

This book didn’t really have any important “errors” (of commission) that I could tell, and it did say some things that were both true and good instruction. However, it was written throughout exclusively in a dry, social scientific style unreadable to most people, and about which the few who do read it will probably only say a very few, guarded, dry things. Personally, I think that all technical books meant for specialists should be written in two parts, or rather, styles: the majority, the dry, technical part meant for specialists, and a small part at the end with a summary, wrap-up of the ideas in that section, with perhaps also a small part on those ideas’ general relevance in non-specialist life, and “meaning”, you know—assuming we haven’t morphed into a race of robots—and that wrap-up part should be intelligible to the intelligent general reader.

It wouldn’t negate the difference between specialist knowledge and generalist knowledge, since the specialist wouldn’t look upon you as mind-kin or whatever if you only knew the surface-layer complexity of the text: and really, to be honest specialists only look on you as kin if you have a degree and possibly a job in that field, you know: spending money on their high-priced monographs isn’t really what gets them to “respect” you, you know. (Do specialists respect people?) Although even someone without math-and-caviling skills ~can~ understand something about what the knowledge means and what its purpose is, and there is a sense in which surface level complexity reveals something far beneath the surface on another level of cognition. (And really, if the average person is a useless clod who knows nothing and whose opinion is 100% worthless, we should probably be living in a military-academic dictatorship and not in a democracy. That the academics and militarists don’t see eye to eye always, or at least, that they can’t get over emoting differently, is probably the main reason why we don’t live in a military-academic dictatorship…. Say. We do live in a democracy, right? 🫨).

And you can make the final score a little simpler than it is needed to explain everything to machine specifications, you know. Basically the idea behind this book is that there have to be bureaucratic rules governing poverty alleviation agencies so that the government/political parties can’t just ~~have their way with people~~, and also that there are rules and that the government ~doesn’t~ just “have its way with the people”, or whatever, both basically in the developed countries, and also in some of the developing ones.

Those are meaningful ideas to consider, both for “the left” and “the right”, and there’s no reason—no good reason—why an honest specialist wouldn’t want, and even be able to attempt, to discuss, in broad terms, his or her findings with an honest, intelligent general reader, you know.

But sometimes I wonder if that’s why people really go to school, you know. 🤔….

And really, people cover themselves by saying that they just want “the objective truth” so that people don’t disagree with them, (people aren’t allowed to disagree with you?), and that they just want “objective” things without having to explain why something being “objective” makes them feel the way they do, (because…. (slams fist) dammit, it’s the objective truth! That means I’m right! It just does!), but in the end, a lot of it just has to do with the specialist needing to alienate/dismiss people, yell at them, and then walk away and watch one of those “Doctor Who” actors yelling his head off, basically.

And it’s just so ironic, you know, a book about Mexico and poverty and all that, and not about racism exactly in a specific or explicit way, but supposedly also about representation and diversity and everything like that in a broad sense: and, at the end of the day, it’s Doctor Who’s rules of reality, you know. I mean, they don’t yell at people. But they’re defending turf so that they don’t have to. A specialist only yells at you when one of the yokels wanders off the reservation onto his turf, you know.

And the good white people from Boston or wherever nod and smile and tell them that they’re doing a good job. They’re “being good”.

And anyone who questions that is just really weird—anybody who doesn’t like “education” is “right-wing”; probably can’t speak English, WAY off the reservation, you know….🏂… (mer)