Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Another excerpt from my forthcoming review: Another form of metric fixation that appears in higher education is the desire to have some sort of "measurement" for all aspects of student learning. Courses should set out a variety of goals, and have a numeric score for how far the course went in meeting the goal. These "measurements" are then compiled, averaged, their spread measured, and so on. The joke here is that the numbers used as input are not measurements at all: professors are simply asked to pick a number between one and five, or one and ten, as to how close the class came to achieving the goal. Rather than being an actual measurement, the "score" is simply whatever number the professor being asked wishes to pick! It as though quantum physics were done by asking a bunch of physicists "How highly would you rate the attraction of leptons?" and then running calculations based on the results. In fact, what usually happens is that everyone...

"The core of managerial expertise was now defined as a distinct set of skills and techniques, focused upon a mastery of quantitative methodologies. Decisions based on sleep numbers were viewed as scientific, since numbers were thought to imply objectivity and accuracy... "Before that, 'expertise' meant the career long accumulation of knowledge of a specific field, as one progressed from rung to rung within the same institution or business... Auto executives were 'car guys' -- men who had spent much of their professional life in the automotive industry. They were increasingly replaced by McNamara-like 'bean counters,' adept at calculating costs and profit margins. "[This trend] morphed into the gospel of managerialism. The role of judgment grounded in experience and a deep knowledge of context was downplayed. The premise of managerialism is that the differences among organizations -- including private corporations, government agencies, and uni...

"Taylorism was based on trying to replace the implicit knowledge of the workmen with mass production methods developed, planned, monitored, and controlled by managers. 'Under scientific management,' [Taylor] wrote, 'the managers assume... the burden of gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae... Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the laws of science.' -- Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, pp.32-33.

Well, now I have a problem: when I agreed to review Kirzner, I thought the book would be new material. No, it is good material, but 80% of it I had read before. So I am not plowing through it at the speed I thought I would be moving at. And meanwhile, Jerry Muller's excellent book, The Tyranny of Metrics , which I also am slated to review, arrived in the mail. So, I guess I am going to review Muller first... well, except I also just got asked to review a paper on WebAssembly , so... I don't know: maybe I should write a joint review, interspersing my take on all three together? In any case, let's start in on Muller: this book has a target, which Muller calls "metric fixation." Muller's critique of metric fixation overlaps my work on rationalism, as shown by his statement of one of the "key components" of metric fixation: "the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numer...