Gil- Your point is well taken. I recently read a fine quote from Noam Chomsky about how mathematicians listen to him and consider his arguments, whereas political experts on the Middle East attack his lack of credentials. I suppose I should have noted that those self-proclaimed traffic experts didn't have a clue, and through their efforts they made the streets of the city where I worked both more clogged and more dangerous (especially for children). I would guess that at least 90% of the amateur traffic analysis in the city was dead wrong. Indeed, one way to get a citizen to quit complaining about the speeding on his street is to loan him a radar gun and let him find out for himself that a stationary observer is a notoriously bad judge of automobile speed. Since alternative medicine doesn't have double-blind research backing it up, my opinion of it tends to be similarly dismal. And so on.
That's not to say that self-educated or insightful amateurs cannot be informed and informative. I'd say the contrary is true; they can be very informed. However, Feinman's admonition for viewers of his lectures "The Character of Physical Law" not to send in letters suggesting methods of solving the puzzles of modern physics makes me wonder about the ratio of the "good" amateurs to the "bad" amateurs. For traffic in northern Michigan, I'd say the ratio is roughly 1:9. Best wishes, jsh __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
