Most job applicants suck. That's true with techies, with salesmen, with everything I've ever hired for. I'll happily concede that small businesses often have trouble hiring outside their founders' core competencies just because it's hard for a CS geek to vet a CMO or VP of Sales unless they get some serious assistance with the candidate selection, but that really has nothing to do with MBAs being unusually bad.
"My god, he decided to supplement his education by learning the basics of accounting, finance, marketing, and a bunch of electives! Fear him!"
In case you didn't notice (which you apparently didn't), my post was satire. Of course incremental progress has value, and even failure has value. (particularly if the failure occurs publicly.)
I'd never look down on an academic because he'd documented 100 ways not to do something, nor because he operated in an obscure corner of an obscure field with no obvious and immediate utility to society.
The world changes too often and too unpredictably for me to guess what will end up being important for society in the long haul.
You see this all the time with professors. So many of them sit in their offices and for years at a time create essentially nothing of value for months or years at a time. They go down paths that seem doomed to fail in an attempt to learn something or create something. But most of what they make is minutia, interesting only to their colleagues and even then, it's not very interesting at all.
Most of them would be thrilled if they did just one groundbreaking thing in their entire careers.
Clearly their work is totally useless. Clearly they should be ignored. Clearly the process has no value.
And worst of all, many of them will, when this is pointed out to them, tell you that their work is incredibly important even if it has only made a minor iterative change to some obscure corner of the world, recognizable only by fellow experts in their field.
I make maple syrup by hand. It requires a huge amount of physical labor, as well as a fairly expensive evaporator and as well as a small building devoted to that single purpose.
The product tastes the same as the stuff I can buy from my neighbor's maple stand for a fraction of the cost and effort. It's wholly irrational.
And I'll do it again next year.
Sometimes the joy comes from doing it the hard way.
When you don't understand a piece of art, do you say that you don't understand that the artist was trying to say... or do you say "I look down upon the artist."
I'm guessing you're a reasonable person and just say 'I don't get it, and don't care.' As opposed to the utterly unreasonable opinion espoused by the OP, in which instead of not caring, he looks down upon the artist.
Calling somebody an asshole isn't a positional declaration. It does not say you are better or worse than them, just that they are an asshole. Presumably you have flaws as well. Everyone does.
Saying you look down on them, on the other hand, is a direct claim to superiority.
Only a supremely self-involved, judgmental, narcissistic asshole would think it's appropriate to look down on others for having different ideas about how they want to spend the short time we get on this planet.
Truly, it's hard to imagine how badly one's parents would have to fuck up to raise a child that thought that such sentiments were appropriate.
Those who might look down upon others for engaging in an inefficient activity are not just hypocrites, they are arrogant fools. They are asserting that they know the best way for every person to spend their life.
It is sad that HN appears to support such thoughtless, worthless, bigoted, narcissistic behavior.
You can look at a piece of art and determine that nobody anywhere will ever gain anything from it's existence.
<sigh>