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September 26, 2006

Wondering about the source of the meme

First off, I genuinely want to make sure Ashley receives her credit for pointing this out to me, for I had never seen this before:

Dilbert's "Salary Theorem" states that "Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives, sales people, accountants and especially liberal arts majors." This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two well known postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power. Postulate 2: Time is Money. As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time.

Since: Knowledge = Power, then Knowledge = Work / Time, and Time = Money, then Knowledge = Work / Money.

Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge.

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done.

This is certifiably TRUE. Anybody who has spent any length of time in an underfunded laboratory at a major research university can attest to this, and further, they can attest to this with no small measure of bitterness.

Of course, I can't leave well enough alone. It was quite clearly a quote, but unattributed. I started wondering where the heck this came from.

Because it refers to Dilbert's Salary Theorem, I had to hit up Scott Adams' blog to see if he'd written that recently. No dice.

Well, who HAS used that phrase? The list is HUGE. Darn near every instance of the derivation that I can see is uncited in any way, shape, or form - it seems like it's something that's been sent to inboxes for years, and appeared on blogs, without anybody ever thinking about who wrote it first. Click and Clack credit it to a Mike Yost, but I've not seen any other evidence around the web for his name attached to that proof, so I don't know where they got it from.

Because I am stubborn (especially when I have plenty of other work to do), I click through SEVERAL search pages and wind up finding a hit to a quick-hit article in from The Motley Fool dated July, 1997, attributed to some Robert Sheard. It (re?)states the proof, not from a scientist or engineer's viewpoint, but from an investor's viewpoint. Which also makes sense if you're a Wall Street investor, and again an embittered Wall Street investor at that. So maybe that's the original author.

I believe that until I see the .sig of this confocal microscopy listserv post - from 1996.

Blast.

Well, it's at least a 10-year-old proof, but I'm no closer to knowing who originally wrote it, and I just trashed a perfectly good academic hour looking. Yay me. If you have any clue, feel free to drop me an e-mail.

(And if you don't know what replaces "stuff" in my e-mail address, you're a bot who doesn't need to be e-mailing me anyway.)

Posted by Chuck at September 26, 2006 09:29 AM

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