These smug pilots have lost touch with the down-to-earth lives and concerns of ordinary passengers like us. Let's see a show of hands: who thinks I should fly the plane?

You should link to the source of your quote.

Arguably so, but all I can find are other plagiarized copies. :-P

The New Yorker's paywall has successfully obscured the origin of the joke, so that's on them, as far as I'm concerned.

"It's from the New Yorker. The most important magazine of our time. Probably the most important magazine that ever was."

(From a vaguely-remembered 1990s-era ad campaign that I thought was excruciatingly self-indulgent at the time, but which evidently worked.)

It’s not about elitism. It’s that there are so many confounding factors that even a well-informed approach makes such a study comtain very little of value

Comments like yours expose a particularly distasteful amount of hubris.

You don’t like it you don’t have to read the blog article. I assure you are not the intended audience. For the rest of us it provided valuable insight.