Quote from: macsga on December 04, 2013, 09:13:03 PM

Quote from: Rassah on December 04, 2013, 07:54:46 PM

Quote from: AnonyMint on December 04, 2013, 05:57:53 PM

rpietila, we can't give away knowledge. I have tried to give away my knowledge and I can't even force it down the readers' throats. Knowledge is impossible to bottle up and distribute. Knowledge is dynamic, diverse, spawns from fitness as motivated by the diverse situations that humans encounter.

Did you just claim that all schools, universities, and technical books have zero effect on teaching people?

If you can't teach someone something you are supposed to know, it's not usually his fault, it's yours; for lacking the ability to actually KNOW the subject good enough.

I hope you realize how incredibly socialist and anti-capitalism and eugenics directed your illogical position is. You wish to make others responsible for the initiative and effort of others. Hey I grew up in all black schools in the slums of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but that did not stop me from learning, because I was eager to learn. I would learn more at home in my room with all my books and gadgets or in the back yard digging up bugs and studying behavior than I did in school sometimes. I regret the internet was not available when I was 5 years old. I can only imagine, as I can see my (and I am sure your) ability to generate knowledge accelerated upon the network effects of the internet.

Education and rote learning is not knowledge because it is in the past. Knowledge is created by the ability to think and react to new scenarios. Autodidactism is the future because it is both more efficient and it generates the initiative to create knowledge.

Edumaction

Quote

Thinking like this can be dangerous, I warn you in advance. As long as you don't remain in denial, the trouble with right thinking is that once it gets into your brain, you can't erase it. And it will swim around in your brain until eventually, you might start to accept it, until it will come out of your mouth and that's when it might get you into trouble.

How so? In many cases, people are not allowed to think for themselves like I do, but rather, they must do as their bosses tell them to do, or what the "culture" says is "politically correct". It's like this for teachers, for journalists, and for brokers. They are all employed to push an agenda. Teachers push liberalism in social studies, journalists push what their global media masters demand, and brokers push the stocks on the books of their investment houses. I suppose many other professions are like this, from the police, to lawyers, and perhaps most union jobs, politicians, and I'm sure I'm missing other good examples.

Hey, it's even dangerous for me, because I may alienate my customers, so even I have to be careful.

I want to limit my discussion to government education in today's letter, otherwise there is just too much to cover.

I have two examples from school I'd like to share. In my High School Junior English class back in 1987, I was getting discouraged. I kept getting B's on my essays, despite my best efforts at analyzing the literature up for discussion. I didn't know what else to do, and one day I just gave up. Instead of analysis, I simply said how great the literature was, and I parroted back the same exact analysis that was discussed in class with absolutely zero new insights. To hide the lack of real discussion and analysis in my essay, I enlarged my handwriting to fill the page. I was expecting a D minus, or even an F. I was almost ashamed of myself.

Some of you might guess what happened next. I got an A. My first A. I was simply astounded. Flabbergasted. Surprised beyond belief. I could not believe it. I seriously wondered why. I went to the teacher. I explained myself. I admitted there was no analysis. She rebuked me. Of course there was analysis; the same one we discussed in class, she said. Exactly, I said. Exactly, she said. What? I don't get it, don't you want us to analyse it? But you did, she said. And you kept it short, simple, to the point, and you were exactly on point, and understood the class discussion exactly, she said. But I felt I didn't analyse anything; I felt like a tape recorder with zero brain activity or real analysis. I brought no new insights to the table, nothing original, no indication that I was thinking about what we read. But I showed I was paying attention in class, she said. That's thinking about it. Wow. I don't know if the goal of my teacher was an intent to crush my spirit, but wow.

Young People Should Work for Free

Student Loans, The Next Bubble?

Student Loans, the Next Debt Bubble

P.S. A high school track & field sports friend of mine ~~[name redacted as it violates privacy]~~, who ended up as an adjunct professor at Georgetown and a head of an R&D department at SAIC (unfortunately that means filing patents), said I was the one who caused him to grasp university Physics (we ended up at the same university). I remember studying with him for roughly 1 hour one day. That is effective! Because I cut directly the generative essence of the matter and provided the insight for how to think for oneself on the subject matter.