Are they always right?

After our class discussion on Monday and discussing the various attacks of Posner on other public intellectuals, I began to ask myself why he's so critical of other public intellectuals. He wrote his book as if he's never made a mistake in his life and he certainly isn't the least bit forgiving of those that have made mistakes that he's found. Instead of criticizing everyone for there mistakes, I began to think that we might want to be thanking them in some ways. When someone makes a claim or prediction or puts out an experiment that doesn't pan out to be perfect or correct, don't we get something out of that? I think we do. I believe that it's just as important to make mistakes as it is to learn from them. By those public intellectuals calling attention to social issues that concern us, albeit mistakes are and will be made, it forces us as a society to move our knowledge base forward and to ask more questions. IF an error is found, to me that would motivate others to spending the time and effort into correcting it, there by learning even more in the process.

No public intellectual will ever be perfect or mistake free, but isn't that the fun of listening to them and following them? It's what make them real and relate able to the general public that is listening or reading their work. It's how we know that they are human and not some super-genius figure that assumes they know everything there is to know. It's those mistakes that call for correction and further research to be done and it's those mistakes that drive us to obtain a higher education so that maybe one day, we can help be part of the solution to some of these issues instead of part of the problem.