Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #8

Len: 220,926  82.

¶ +2023.12.21. How do I improve my Engish?

Respectfully, there is one good way to do it: practice.

Try to read Englaish language newspapers.

Far more important, **talk with native Enlish speakers as much as you can**. And from the latter you may not just improve your language skill, but also learn some things like about how uncaring some people are who will not take a little patience to help you with a language you are trying to learn while they have not tried to learn your native "tongue".

What's the worst that can happen? People will insult you and otherwise disrespect you – thus showing what **they** are. They don't call us "the ugly Americans" for no good reason, do they?

Where I worked there were some persons who were not native English speakers. I tried to communicate with them even using gestures to help them since they were sincerely looking for help. What I never had time or patience for were "know it alls" who do not ask for help but bark out orders, like one 3rd line manager who, when his team was busting their asses trying to get something done for him working late one night, belched in all too easily understandable English:

"I want to see asses and elbows."

Talking like that in any language "speaks for itself", doesn't it?

¶ +2023.12.21. I have bipolar disorder & architect. I have never been efficient at learning visualization softwares. Should I go for a CS degree to prepare my self for VR and AR ? Or should I switch my field? I am really struggling financially?

Respectfully, if you are bipolar, I would urge you to **think** very carefully about messing with Virtual Reality (VR). You have enough probles dealing with RR (Real Reality). Read the following, which is true, and **THINK**:

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.12.20. Where can I buy customized high quality material wall art?

I've been through this on both sides. Tody I make prints of pictures on th internet and run them off on an ink jet printer and tape them to the wal with transparent tape. Not exactly "high quality" repriductions but what I repoduce is of the highest quality.

One can do all sorts of things. Many years ago I covered my living room wall with the pages of the official Cuban newspaper, "Granma". It looked really good. It did not cost much. I covered maybe 15 feet from floor to ceiling and the rest of hte wll ws my favorite color: white. An architect I knew had a little slogan:

"I like white walls, don't you?"

And today, I put up front pages of The New York Times, for instance the issue wher the front page was entirely covered with a long list of the names of Covid victims, sort of like the Vietnam War Memorial.

Slightly off topic: I don't have much space. One fine morning I wa walking down the street wher I live and as usual lightly snooping theu people's trash. One neighbor had thrown away probably $5,000 of brand new industrial glass tubing – thin rods maybe 4 feet long. But I didn't have the space for them, So I put a sign on them warning the sanitation people about all that glass. I've never met the person but they do know who I am because they stuck my warning sign on the fence of my house. I wanted to keep the sanitarion workers from potentially having flying glass shards in their eyes if this stuff went thru the compactor the wrong way. Obviously the neighbor did not care about the sanitation people, and not that it matters, but neither do I care about him. $5,000 of brand new industrial glass but nowhere to keep it.

¶ +2023.12.20. 1. When and what was the first time you engaged in a public/group oral presentation? 2. What were the different factors that you considered at that time? 3. How challenging it was for you especially when viewed by different kinds of audiences?

Not my first but maybe my last and highly memorble:

My manager at work had given me an assignment that had zero value for the company and which he was sure I could not do well and I had to present it to his group.

Well, I put together a pretty good or at least pretty pretty powerpoint silde set and got up their and methodically repeated what I had written and with much effort drawn (diagrams) on the slides. Nobody said anything. It ended.

A short time after my presentation was over, said manager gave me an option to resign with some valuable benefits or be fired with no benefits and he even graciously gave me a day to think it over. I did not need any time to think it over.

I will never foget his memorable words to me which I have put into a little cartoon:

[ Dog kennel ]

It was a double loser but it was my career so I couldn't be honorable.

I think really only two things are of primary importance in giving a presentation:

(1) Be confident that your audience will perceive what you are going to present to them as valuable to themselves (not just something you think is valuable in general o for yourself). Something your audience will really want to listen to. You are there to serve your audience not the other way around.

(2) MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER. Be preparent for anything, including if somebody in the audience is going to try to make fool of you by asking a tricky question about which they do not care about the answer only about harming you.

If you cannot meet both criteria don't waste your time or thelrs or anybody else's, unless you have a gun to your head (literally or metaphorically).

¶ +2023.12.19. What should we pay attention to in the ongoing debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in major U.S. companies?

DEI brainwashing and loyalty oaths can be expected to drive out persons who have ny sense of self-respect and self-agency.

I was never subjected to this neo-Joe McCarthy witch hunting. But I did see two things one of which I did in reality encounter and the other just watched and was sickened by.

I worked as a computer programmer. There was political correctness for ideology not related to DEI back in 1980: "Improved programming technologies". These included intrusive, humiliating "walkthrus" where people with fake wood top desks ground up underlings who had gray plastic top desks by brutal, humiliating group ideological criticism of the computer code the latter wrote. I overheard one of these things. I was a gray top. It was in IBM Mainframe operating sytem development. I had written some very risky code. My manager said hey were going to have walkthru. I told him that I would accept only specific criticisms but I would not be "ground up". He backed off and cancelled the walkthru and my very risky code shipped unrevieed, which did not happen in IBM but it here did and I kept my self-respect and my employment.

In the early 2010s came along: "scrum" for computer prograemmers: Each morning a North Korea style loyalty meeting. Scum.

DEI is Stalinism and will include "reeducation camps" (Hilary Clinton ha suggested a need for this) if these people gain political power. they are anti-racist neo racists and other crypto bigots. It needs to be stopped. Or not.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.19. How can we develop the sense of sensebility in non-sense students regarding having no interest in study nor accept any inspiration?

True story for which I do not have citation information:

There wa a bunch of education researchers who ha da group of teenage boy who were hopelessly below grade in reading skills and who had zero interest in learning anything.

They got them up to grade level in reading in 6 weeks. How did they do it? The boys were interested in automobiles. The researchers got some broken down cars and tools and gave automobile repair manuals to the boys and the boys ver yquickly learned to read to be abl to fix the cars.

Fix the system not its victims. Look in the mirror. Almost anybody cn be inspired to do what they are passionately interested in.

Imaginary example: Suppose you have some illiterate gang members and you want to teach them to read? How about porn magaines? Or even ghost gun manufacturing instructions? "Oh, dear, that's immorality or illegality!" "Well, what do you want? Virtue or reading skills, dude?" Yeah, try to teach them with Charles paid-on-the-installment-plan Dickens novels, yawn? What the dickens?

¶ +2023.12.19. What are three elements of learning highlighted in its definition? What are two forms of associative learning?

The person asking his question probably has a monkey on his (her, other's ) back: a school ass–-ignment they probbaly don't want to do and maybe even can't figure out how to get rid of. Reality is not divided into enumeratable silos.

Thnk about what you are being subjected to. You may have to do it but you don't have to like it. You may find it easier to pacify the teach if you take a jaded view of the situation and "bite the bullet" and just get on with doing the minimum to get bye the dude. It's like having to undergo surgery: It's good as soon as it's in your rear view mirror.

I tried to avoid courses where I thought the teacher like to hurt studennts ("tough grader", etc.). I always wrote what I believed, and teachers either thought I was great or thought that I didn't belong in the school at all.

Once I was stuck with a course I either didn't understand or didn't want to waste my time trying to understand. The teacher was asn eminent philosophy professor whose surname actually meant that. The only time in my life I ever did such a thing, I wrote a "kiss up" term paper for him. I didn't believe a word of it, but extensively quoted his textbook with full page citations. His TA gave it a 96. He personally changed it to 97. The joke was, of course, on him but I certainly was not going to enlighten him about it. I hae survived him.

Whenonc again, unknowlingly, I did encounter him, on my department examination, I did write what I believed and he wrote one word: "PUERILE". I nonetheless got distunguished honors. I will never know why but I hypothesize it was due to another professor who really liked me saving my ass.

Another course had one of the worst teachers ever. He was not "bad" just his teaching style closely resembled an IBM seletric typewriter. The only time I ever "studied" for a course. I had no choice. But I did have a choice: His lectures were so unenlightening that some students never came to clsass, and probalby they never did the homework either. I accepted the inevitable and tried my best to get whatever I could out of every one of his hopeless lectures. And I tried to do all the homework. It should have been interesting ("Linear algebra") but I didn't understand hardly anything of it. I went to bed early the nite asusual before the final exam and when grades were posted I got a respectable 86 which may have been higher than some more mathematically gifted students who were perhaps less realistic than me.

If you gotta to it, you gotta do it: By any means available just don't get caught. If you think an AI can write your term paper for you, you are probaly going to regret it, unless you actually understand what the AI wrote for you and you rewrite it in your own words and actually understand what you are writing so you can defend it if the teacher calls you out to see if you really did the work. Did you ureally have to take the course?

¶ +2023.12.19. What are some ideas for an interesting presentation? Do you have any idea to make it unforgettable like giving them notes or presents?

Handing out a transcript of your presentation (except, obviously, for anything you will ad lib) is a constructive and respectful thing to do. I once heard the greatest military genius of the 20th century, USAF Colonel John R. Boyd, father of the F-16 Fighting Falcon, lecture at IBM Reseaerch. He lectured all day from early morning to late in the afternoon, obviously breaking for executive lunch. People came and went all day and he just kept saying one brilliant thing after another. At the entrance was a pile of papers over an inch thick for anybody to take covering his whole presentation. I still have my copy. Don't make people distract themselves from what you are telling them by them having to do steno work so as not to forget what they are thus not hearing.

But there is nothing unforgettale about that except that I remember how unusual that was. College professors seem to love to see students in their lecture courses scribling in their notebooks or I guess typing on their laptops today. I used to sit in the otherwise unoccupied front row snd doodle architecture houseplan designe under the teacher's nose.

Here's a way to be memorable after you have been thoughtful by providing thost photocopied notes. Enter the room and just stand there facing everybody in the audience until you have dead silence. Then respectfully bow to them in anticipation of their earning you respect. Wait a little longer and then go up to the podium and do your thing. Reverse this at the end of your lecture although that may be more difficult because often the attendees just want or need to get out and on with the next thing in their [too] busy days.

Following is a picture of a man who made an impression. He was a South Korea Police Chief who had made an innocent mistake that had resulted in the incarceration of an innocent man.

[ Police chief bowing ]

¶ +2023.12.19. How come I cure myself so fast when I am ill? I'm a genius, but I believe that doesn't have any influence upon me whatsoever.

Germs do not respect IQ or credentials.

You can only do the same sensible things as ordinary people can do. Unless you are wealthy and then, again, intelligence is not relvent, only money, which can buy personalized medical care. Unless you apply your genius to negotiating with the medical-industrial complex or can make a "human connection" with somebody inside it who may not be nearly as intelligent than you but knows more about diseases snd/or bureaucracies than you and works there, you are no different than anybody else as far as biochemistry and insurance companies are concerned.

Few people can outwit The Grim Reaper in the end, but he is patient and wonders why many people, some of whom have high IQs or adanced degrees. do "stupid" things to unnecessarily hasten their intake processing by his staff. "Well, Dr. Genius, I see you weren't wearing you seat belt when that idiot ran into your car. You know about Lady Di, don't you, Dr. Genius." "No, Sir, can you explain?" "Sure. She was riding in the back seat of a chauffeured Mercedes Benz when it plowed into a concrete bridge abuttment at 50 miles per hour. Her body guard was in the front passenger seat and was wearing his seat belt and survived. she was not wearing hers and she died even though she was in the back seat. You weren't being very bright were you, Dr. Genius?" "I guess not, Sir." "Well, it's too late for you to get smart now, Dr. Genius. Move along...."

¶ +2023.12.18. What are some alternative ways to show appreciation and recognition besides monetary rewards?

Here's one: respect.

Back in the days when computers were roomsize and ran in secured rooms in corporate headquarters offices, I was the "systems programmer" in a large FDIC bank. Once I needed upper management authorization do something [I forget what]. I went to my manager and told him what I needed.

He asked me one simple question: "Are you sure?" I replied: "Yes" and he was on the elevator up to the executive floor to get it done.

¶ +2023.12.18. Will virtual experiences become so compelling that they eclipse the real world, creating a mass exodus into digital realms?

Watch the old fun but also profound movie: "The Truman Show"

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.12.18. Why is my employee incredibly good at the hard/important tasks but messes up the easy/small tasks all the time? Is it a good idea to keep her around?

Why not just give all the easy/small tasks to someone less valuable to your company and don't waste this person's valuable time on small stuff?

Slightly differeent story: I worked in a company where they had just shipped a [rpdict with so many such bad bugs that upper managment was under the gun. It was all hands on desk and so forth. All we did was fix bugs. They hired a young lady who turned out to be SuperBugFixer. She was amazing. They kept piling more nad more bugs on her. Just a very few weeks later she disappeared. Nobody could figure out why such a SuperStar would leave? I think I knew but I kept my mouth shut: They killed the goose that layed their golden eggs.

¶ +2023.12.18. What are the most pressing and high-potential scientific problems that researchers are currently addressing, and how do these challenges contribute to advancing our understanding of the world?

The most pressing problems are obvious to anybody who is awake (which is vrry different from being "woke"!):

How to prevent the eatth from becoming like the planet Venus due to our insane polluion of the atmosphere. Remember that some decades ago the Soviet Union successfully landed a heavily shielded probe on the surface of our hapless sister planet. The probe send back a few grainy pictures before the conditions on that "globally warmed" planet broke it. Nobody has felt it worthless to go back again. "Lientenant Uhura, do you think we should investigate earth?" "No, Captain, there's no life there and anybody we'd beam down would be icinerated in a few seconds. Captain." "Warp factor 1, Scotty: Let's get outta here!"

Finding a universal vaccine against the next superbug we cook up. Remember that the epidemiologists beat SARS-1 on the early 2000s by throwing a large numbers of "civet cats" (which are not related to your pet Fluffy) alive into vats of acid. But SARS-2 has almost destroyed the world's economy and the next one may be far worse.

What else?

On the other hand, the most intellectually interesting scientific problems are totally incomprehensible to anybody without a PhD in physics. What goes on inside a "black hole"? What are quarks made of? Where did the Big Bang come from? How many dimensions are the universe and is time reversible or are we living in an infinite number of worlds and is Schrodinger's cat alive or dead or both or does the poor kitty just uwant dinner? Meow! (And don't forget about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem!)

Then there is the wrong-headed pseudo problem that simplemined scientists n matter how many degrees and Nobels they have who do not understand the differnce between doing science and being an object of scientific investigation, imagine they can solve: understanding human thinking ("intelligence") and reproducing it in a computer. This is dangerous nonsense which leads some people who know how to do things but now what is good to do to want to do things like implanting networked microchips in people's brains. This too is understansable only by a few persons, in this case philosophers. such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl.

And last but not least, science is only one part of the encompassing "world" of each mortal's daily life (e.g., mine, and maybe yours, too?). Let me state my prejudice here: I am an anti-theist; I think if God exists He (She, Other) is a mentall ill criminal. That said, carefully study the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. ther is much wisdom in it. And science is at best knowledge, not wisdom.

You are going to die one of these days. What do you really want to do with the time you have on this side of hte topsoil? Look up "Rrose Selavy" on Wikipedia and

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.12.17. Is there a connection between people who are great at math and those who are great at physics (or other sciences)?

I am ignorant here.

But my guess is that to be good at quantum physics today you need to be very very good at math, But

At the bleeding edge of both math and physics my guess is that the material is so extremely esoteric that nobody can master both. I can't imagint Niels Bohr coming up with Godel's Incompleteness theorem or Andrew Wiles' solution to Fermat's last theorem or vice versa. The closest you might get might have been John von Neumann but things were simpler back then; I do not think his math was at the level of Godel and Wiles (I may be mistaken, of course).

It would be like a person who was a surgeon who did the original blue baby operations and also to have cooked up polio vaccine. There is at a minimum the problem that no person can really really focus on two different things at once. Multitasking in afast paced environment is not how first rank discoveries are made.

But Both Bohr and Godel probably were equally comfortable with advanced math up to a certain level and maybe the particle physicsts even innovate their own advanced maths but with a difffernce: They re not trying to probe the basis of numbers but particles. If ever Godel's Incompletness Theorem applies to particle physics will be far weirder than Prof Schrodinger;s poor cat.

I alwaysrecall something I read that is tengentially relevant here. People naively talk about computers being "intelligent" (they are neither smart nor stupid, they just compute). Alan Turing once wrote to his mother that if we ever do make a computer that really thinks not jsut computes fast "we shan't understand how it does it."

¶ +2023.12.17. Does it help your creative process to be really angry?

Almost anthing is possible, especially if you don't want it to happen.

But in general,

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

¶ +2023.12.17. If you have to study a subject through a textbook whose language is difficult to understand, do you know a solution to understand its language?

This question may be unclearly stated?

If you have trouble reading a textbook in a forengn language you do not well understand, you just have ot learn the languge better although today Google translate or some other progam may be able to do a good enough mchine translation for you to pass the course?

But there is anothe possibility: Maybe the textbook is difficult to understand even for persons who fluently speak the language and are gifted in the subject, due to the book being poorly written. There is no help for this except to find better educational resources (another textbook? fellow students?) and to complain to the teacher about how bad the textbook is and ask for more help.

Writing a really good math textbook is not easy.

¶ +2023.12.17. Do you think the animation industry will make a breakthrough in creating new voice recordings of dead voice actors and celebrity actors through machine learning (AI)?

Definitely. My guess is that it already is being done and the actors' union's lawyers are already working on this.

¶ +2023.12.17. Joseph Schumpeter introduced the concept of "creative destruction," which refers to the process by which new innovations and technologies replace outdated ones, leading to economic growth and transformation. Is he still relevant?

I am not educated in economics but I think the answer is "Yes".

The only economics book I every read was for a socilolgy course taught by an authentic latter day Wobblie who even had his own radical political party (Robert M. Cook, Yale, 1967): "Monopoly Capital", by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezey (Monthly Review Press). I also read Das Kapital (in English) and have forgotten it all. All I remember rae two key terms: "surplus value" and "reproduction of individual and species life".

Marx is still highly relevant but generations of American economists were ignorant of his work because they of their teachers feared for their jobs (McCarthyism). Check out Prof. Richard Wolff's website: "Democracyatwork.info"

Also, capitalist apologists mock the communist dictum

"From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs."

They tell you that means tha tunder Communism youwould e redced to a chimpanzee and e given a banana to eat. In truth it means that a child who is a music prodigy needs a Steinway concert grans piano and a child who is a brilliant young physicist needs time on the Cern Superconducting Supercollider.

Richard Wolff has the answer and it's neither "capitalism" nor "socialism" but it's possible even in a capitalist economy but capitalists don't push it for the obvious reason.

¶ +2023.12.17. Are you worried about the writers strike or couldn't care less about it?

[ Oldie but goodie, with typos corrected ]

I would like to see all entertainment outlawed. All group activities from MAGA rallies to performances of The New Yokrk Philharmonic banned.

I would like to see a social world in which there were no longer audience for anything. Producer not a consumer society, where each person spend the best hours of the best days of their lives produced things of value to offer others, and then, at day's end, enjoying a quiet meal wtih artisan bread and good wine with the company of 1 to 3 others. Only intimate and close friend relations. No sublunary stars and non-HVAC fans.

Writers strike? Become a writer yourself. Let them eat scripts, and that is not an original idea of mine. In his great silent film "Napoleon", Abel Gance has some clerks in the office of The Terror whose job is to process dossiers for people to go to the guillotine. They save people from being executed by masticating and digesting their dossiers (I have a pet cat that in reality eats toilet paper). They are

"Eaters of documents"

I could go on here but as for these Hollywood white collar workers, "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn." (Gone with the wind, and may they be too)

RYO!

¶ +2023.12.16. How can you tell if you're not meant to write, if you're not very good at it?

I think this question is a bit wrong.

Do you **LIKE** to write?

If you don't LIKE to do something, why waste any more of your time on it than you have to?

If you do like to write, then I think the challenge is: Do you have anything you want to "**say**'? Do you have something you really want to convey to people or even just ot play around with words for yourself?

If not then it's not likely to go well.

If yes then "being good at it" can be dealt with by practice and asking for other persons' sincere advice, by which I mean asking persons you can trust to tell you how awful it is. Analogy: Do you like to speak or sing? Tape record your voice (or on your personal computer) and play it back and listen to it. You may not like what you hear.

I have a perfect example in myself: when I was young my parents were ignorant and my school teahers were mean. I had nothing to live for, and was almost totally ignoranced about everything. Had somebody said: "Here, Brad: do whatever you want." Of course I would have been glad to get the monkeys off my back but I wouldn't likely have been able to write anything.

Fast forward to age 38 years with a lot of life experience and study and I was given exactly that opportunity, twice, and there were not enough hours in each day. I **passionately** wanted to say things I **strongly** felt about, so, given the opportunity I made good use of it.

And as for "writing well", yes I was gifted. But I also had something everybody has now but almost nobody had before about 1990: Basic word processsing on the computer. When I was young and I would write something, if I wanted to **revise** it, it was torture: I had to recopy a lot of unchanged text.

But computerized word processing makes the "clerk work" of editting text painless today, so you can sit there and keep looking: "Gee what can I change to make it even better again?" Even if a rich person had a private secretary they would havto wait for the secretary to prepare revised text, not just type it in and press ENTER.

So: Do you want to write and do you have something to say?

If the answer to #1 is no, then do something else since you will be dead soon enough. If the anser to #2 is no, get some experience, for instance by reflecting on **why** you have nothing to say, which itself is a kind of experience, the kiind I had 18 years of as a young person. So guess what one of subject I have a lot ot write about today is? How ignorant and mean people waste other people's lives. Maybe the first book I ever read and really liked is one that mos "people" find meaningless: "Waiting for Godot" Why did I like it? Because Mr. Godot, could be expected never to show up, unlike my parents and teachers who would never bug off.

Writing shoud be fun!

Finally about "writers block", etc. If you want to write, write **SOMEHTING**. **ANYTHING**. No matter hos stupid you think it is. Just do it. Why? Because anything can be IMPROVED, but nothing comes from nothing. Stupid writeing can be mde less stupid. But a blank sheet of paer remains exactly that: a blank piece of paper. Put some words on it and then get a good nite's sleep and come back and edit the hell out of them. Over and over again....

¶ +2023.12.15. What are the most important skills and qualities needed to succeed in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning?

**The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done.** (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.12.15. What steps can be taken to make workforce development programs more flexible and less bureaucratic?

Please have a look at Professor Richard Wolff's website: democracyatwork.info

¶ +2023.12.15. Do you think that threatening schools is an effective way to disrupt peace and harmony?

Why do people ask pseudo-questions? Nobody does anything except for some reason.

Following is a non-answer to this non-question but it may be relevant to the kind of person who does such things:

No one should expect an honest answer to a question which no one is entitled to ask.... In this instance, a lot of things matter more than the truth. (Matt Miller (Senior Writer, U.S. News and World Report), National Public Radio Morning Edition (31Jul98), "Halting the Lewinsky Madness".)

¶ +2023.12.15. Is Architecture a solid job? I'm asking this as a 16 year old, I'm curious to know if this is a good choice to make.

Yes it is a solid job. Bu ttoday architects need to face up to their ethical responsibilities to promote the enlightenment of humanity, especially of "the masses". Or to sell out to fop fashion kitsch: postomdernism.

Louis Kahn or Robert Venturi?

Read (free on the internet) Adolf Loos's classic essay: "Ornament and crime".

Read John Lobell's book: "Between silence and light: Spirit in the architecture of Louis I. Kahn"

Read Robert Venturi's two books: "Complexity and contradiction in architecture" (I think this is on the Internet) and "Learning from Las Vegas"

And for all I know there may be woke architecture today, too.

Or if you just want to earna living, don't worry about it. Ther will always be need for putting up new buildings and remodelling old ones. But if you want to play in the big league, the choice is between perpetuating the darkness and dullness of people's daily life or raising up their cultural level.

Pretty buildings in which people live out banal lives: lipstick on pigs, or bildings which will inspiret them to youously create in the arts and sciences? Actually there is another choice since people re not always healthy: Buildings for them to suffer and die in that do nothing to relieve their suffering or buildings that will help assuage their suffering with the light of humanistic learning?

You need to to design for Rrose Selavy (look that up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it") and also for "It's over, Debbie" (essay free on the Internet), or jt intellectually masturbate and produce stuff like Squirrel Hill:

Or just collect a paycheck. What do you aspire to in your life? Las Vegas (ref.: Robert Venturi) or Theleme (ref.: Francois Rabelais)?

[ Squirrel Hill ]

¶ +2023.12.14. Why student found maths hard?

I do not have a general answer and I think there are some students who get at least some "Good" math education, where by "good" I would mean that the student finds math easy to understand and insteresting, not an unwelcome curricular burden.

I was an extremely intelligent child, although nowhere near in the genius class like Theodore John Kaczynski. So let's see: In 7th grade I was still secretly counting on my fingers under my little student deak. In 2nd grade I counted to 100 and then 101, 200.... I more or less MEMORIZED The multiplication table but did not really understand that multiplication was repetitive addition. But as said I ws very intelligent: I was a very well trainable dog or seal ("Arf! Arf!") – with one exception that annoyed my teachers: I did all my math problems in indelible ink because I did not like pencils (I rarely had to cross anything out).

Do you seen the picture: I did not UNDERSTAND basic arithmetic. I figured out how to get good grades on school ass–-ignments from my tor–-mentors. I was smarter than they were, but not sufficiently smart to be able instruct them how to educate me.

I think a lot of students' problems with math are due to poor math instruction. And I think part of the reason for this is that teachers have no incentive to help them learn. Yes, some teachers love math and love to share their love of math with kids. But how many? Imagine if the teacher was offered a certain amount of money at the start of the semester in lieu of a paycheck, and for each day that not all the students had demonstrated proficiency in the math to be "taught" to them in the course a certain amount would be deducted until the amount left for the teacher went to zero and he (sne, other) would then have their employment terminated. But if all the kids "passed" on day 2 the teacher would keep all that money. Do you think math education might change? Schools are the only business in which John Wannamaker's famous dictum does not apply:

"The customer is always right."

In schools, the cutomer is wrong until proven otherwise.

Now for two specific recommendations, the first of which I did not think up myself:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard)

Dr. Ballard is the man who found the wreck of RMS Titanic, not a touchy-feely radical educadtor like, say Ivan Illich.

Second: And here I do speak from experience. I worked as a computer programmer for half a century. I saw computer stuff that was horrible and stuff that was elegant and lots in between. Sometime Harvard Professor and later IBM employee Ken Iverson invented the APL programming language for education. It might not be for everybody. But for math oriented students, the way I put it, the weird special characters you use to write APL programs are "like friendly little animals that want to play with you". APL operators do all sorts of wonderful math things and they are esthetically "cute", too (There is an APL spin-off which does not use the APL charcter set and I do not find that appealing at all). APL is math and it's fun.

In general I think teaching math should take a thoroughly and rigorously "constructivist" approach (Isn't that a real math word: "Constructivism"?). A person understands what they build (just like God presumably understands the universe He made but we, per the 18th century British philosopher David Hume, do not). I say reach Peano's postulates, not "trig". As for me, I never understood "line integrals", and saddest of all the following true story about math education:

In 1966 I was a sophomore at Yale. I had to take "distribution requirements": a challenge in finding the least worst alternatie. So I took linear algebra. To this day I think it should be fun whereas differential equations and statistics and probability not. The teacher whom I presume was a full professor wrote the textbook we used. His teaching style resembled nothing more closely than an IBM selectric typewriter:

There was a very long blackblard at the front of the lecture room. The board had to be clean. He faced the board and started writing math symbols from the upper left top corner straight across until he reached the top right edge. Carriage return. He went back to the left side of the board and started writing a new line diretly inder the first line. When he reached to right edge of the board again, another carriage return and he started on the next line, all the time talking at the board not the students. If he reached the bottom right corner of the board he erased everything and started all over again in the upper left corner all over again....

It was so bad that some students never showed up for class. I have no idea what they were doing the nite before the final exam. I went to bed early as usual because I had sat through every one of his lectures and tried my best to get something out of them and I tried to do the homework. I tried. When grades were posted I got a respectable 86 which was maybe in the middle or a bit above. I am confident some students who were more mathematiclally gifted than me did worse than me. And I didn't understand much of it but I tried. And the punch line is I think linear algebra can be a metaphor for a lot of people's disagreements in life: In the end they are doing the same thing but it looks differn because they are deploying different basis vector sets.

Anyway, there are my stories about math education, for better and more often for worse. Oh, yes, while I didn't understand it, in 7th grade I lerned the trick for doing big multiplication problems without writing down the intermediate results. The teach didn't like that either. but the bloodiest battle of my "perparatory schooling" (prep fo what?) was in English class, so I will end with that. I wanted to learn but nobody cared:

[ Rentko and APL ]

¶ +2023.12.14. Why would someone choose a bad school over a good one?

What is a "bad school" and what is a "good school"? Bad for what? Good for what? What is bad and what is good for YOU?

My education and miseducation may be an exception but it was what it was.

I attended a public elementry school in the erly 1950s in Richmond Virginia USA which was effectively a priviuleges school because teh wee no relevant private schools in that city. The principal, back then had a PhD in biology. Ther were some very bright students, especially jewish boys who after the school day ended went for further schooling at "hebrew school". Thet wer Christian boys who had well to do parents but wer not interested in lerning an eagerly awaited "the bell" to run out in the play yard and exercise their growing fists on each otehr. I was intellectually gifted and physically and emotionally fragile but Iwas never threaened. Nonetheless it wa a waste of 6 years of my young life.

Then my parents moe to a differnt city where those who could afford it sent their kis to private schools. That was disastrous for me. It wa a gender apartheid school nominally associated with The Episcopal Churchwhere the techers were mean-spirited middle aging white male losers. Most of the kids and their parents either loved the place or at lesat wer not disaffected. Herewith what happened to me and hws these other people saw it:

So what is a good school and what is a bad school? Good for whom and for what? Bad for whom and for what?

On to college and I sort of lucked out. It wa easier to get into an elity college back then. So I went to Yale. I was so ignoranced by my childrearing and schooling that by the time I graduated I may have been somewhat closer to where I should have been when I entered. It turned out to be pretty good for me. For one thing my freshman door room match was himself an eduation for me. I had never med a human being in my life, includig my parents, whom I found any reason to wish I was anything like them.

Here was a young man and he was 26 years old, who was highly cultured not something out of a tv sitcom. Wow! People existed who were alive not cardboard cutouts! His best friend was a son of the last president of hte Spanish republic and he was a real existentialist including the Gaulois cigarette hanging from his lip. Everything about him was like from a differnt and more highly evolved species. Luck, yes but where else would I have found a person who made me think life might be worth living?

It wa a time of conflict in colleges with the Ukraine war – worry typographical eror there: Viewnam War. And it was grade inflation too. I sort of manage to fall thru the cracks to graduate summa cum laude by avoiding everyteacher I felt migh thurt me. "Hurt" means: tough grader.

I encountered one teacher who was priceless. A philosophy professor (John Wild) who when I, very respetfully, called him out for intellectual hypocrisy in my sophomore year, apologized to me and the next term I took his graduate seminar for an easy "A". As an aside, I sscrewed up bad. I "came from nothing". I didn't do what I should have done: **NETWORK!** And I have paid the price for that.

Now. I was also accepted to a perhaps far "better" college: University of Chicago. I would probalby have had much tougher courses there. But would I ha learned more? There is a German word that does not have an exact englich translation: "Bildung", cultural self-formation. Studying hard is like working hard. It may just grind you down. Maybe I would have encountered a teacher as inspiring as the easy grader who inspired my life at Yale, or maybe not. and I think I know one school where I know I could not have "kept up" St. Johns College in Annapolis Maryland.

I got a better education for me than I could have hoped for because I didn't hope for anything in life except to not be hurt more. I also had another teacher at zYale who was unusal: He was a sociology teacher who was an authentic political radical in the spirit of the Wobblies (IWW). Where else would I have learned about The Cold War and its Origins? And anothe thing: I took a different sociology course from a bourgeois party liner and it was a waking nightmare for me. So if you migh twant to study "sociology" it could be as differnt as Birds and fishes. Again, good for what and for whom?

Back when I went to college theere was a college where the upper middle class parents of useless boys sent their scions to get their *de rigeur* college degree. It seemed to be Party Boy U for jocks: Washington Collge in chestertown Maryland. Now I don't really know anythin about it today but from their website it sounds like it might be areally good school for some young persons who deeply want to learn but are not enamored of "burning the midnite oil" to provve they could go without sleep. Their website advertises they focus on developing critical thinking. You could go to Harvard and not get that (and ,yes, you could also go to Harvard and do get that, but not necessarily).

Suppose you have an IQ of 160 and can teach yourself differntial equations from a bad textbook? Then MIT is probably the place for you.

Why do you even want to go to college? To get a huge student loan debt and no good job prospects? I see young persons today who **choose** to not go to collge but to get well paying blue collar jobs that can't be offshored and they are not stuck in a cubical in an office under the nose of their manage rall day. That will not work for you if your **PASSION** in life is to translate ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets. But if you are going to college because it's the thing you do, think about it.

I have no "talents". Bu if I had a talent for working with clay, I'd like to be a master potter. Or I have a neighbor who is an auto machanic. He does not work at Midas Muflers. He restores vintage Porsches. Rich people pay well for their frivolous fantasies. Or go to the CIA. No, ot the one in Langley Virginia but the one in Hyde Park New York: The Culinary Instaitute of America. Who wants to work in a "kitchen" (or an "office", either?). But CIA Graduates can get jobs feeding the faces of billionaires where they get to fly (or superyacht) all ove the world and realize their wildest culinary dreams. Not bad compared by being a computer programmer subijected to Scrum and DEI oppression.

If you do go to college, any college, MIT or Hoboken State, you need to see what you can get out of it. If you can find a **mentor** you have a winner. Somebody who will take you under their wing and give you personalized attention for something that means something to you and after you graduate and go out in the world you have a person who will write a really good recommendation for you, or even maybe offer you a "contact". Or you can party. Or you can burn the midnite oil. Whatever.

Some people re lucky. As for my freshman roommate at Yale, with his "bckground" he didn't' need to put up with the place and left in his sophomore year. He had better ways to spend life than memorizing pictures of 300 famous art works for the final exam in History of Art 10. He had a for the time large inheritance which he ran thru fast including paying for a friend's surgery who could not afford it, an then hed started a very successful niche business. But not all of us have that kind of luck in what birth canal we came out of.

Oh , yes, there are some schools that are probably really bad for just about everybody. I think many of them are "for profit" or maybe also fundamentalist religious. (Did you actually read all this that I have written here? If yes, I hope you got some value ot of it.)

¶ +2023.12.14. What are some good books on collective intelligence or group intelligence (not about artificial intelligence)?

Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month" is a classic.

¶ +2023.12.14. Does imagination really beat knowledge?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Imagination is based on, grounded in knowledge. A "Caveman" could not imagine flying to to the moon an Apollo space rocket, could he?

[ Homer eating his donut ]

Knowledge is based in, grounded in imagination. Go find elliptical orbits in the facts of 16th century Europe.

Imagination can be crushed by dolt people like my school teachers.

[ Middleton with soul ]

But even that benighted Eton Headmaster wanabee had an imagination: He imagined more tuition money and the varsity lacrosse team winning more games to be able to add a new shiny plated victory trophy cup to his glazed reliquary in his school's entrance hall. The school was nominally associated with the The Episcopal Churth but the faculty's imaginative horizon was limited to worshipping graven images (I became a flaming atheist ther but that did not bother them much since they did not care about anything more spiritual than than locker room public pubic nudity:

[ trophy cup ]

There is no knowledge without imagination and no imagination without knowledge. But simpleminded people have and need to havve simplistic notions in their little heads.

In 7th grade one of my teachers launched a frontal assault on my imagination when I displayed intellectual initiative.

[ Rentko ]

But even this pathetic excuse for a teacher had an imagination, as is cleraly shown by the eulogy preceding my little comment on it. He could imagine winning more varsity lacrosse games! He could imagine a "team"! Teams do not exist except in people's imaginations, no more than galaxies and quarks and everything else.

But we can obciously separatte out the imaginative ASPECT of knowleege and the KNOWLEDGE aspect of imagination. It took a genius to imagine the wheel; but any Homer Simpson or Donald Trump or Joe Biden can imagine rolling a wheel down the sidewalk. Uhhh....

"There is more to the surfact than meets the eye" (Aaron Beck)

¶ +2023.12.13. What steps should be taken to ensure academic integrity and prevent plagiarism in higher education institutions?

There is an obvious solution that does not appeal to people:

Only give assignments that cannot be answered through plagiary.

I was a very bright student and had zero respect for my tor–-mentors. I would have done anything to get those monkeys off my back. And I was brighter than they were. Later I learned an analogy: I was the Vietnamese peasants and they were the Saigon regime.

But why would I even want to cheat on the following: I went back to school at age 38 years in a graduate program where I thought people would not hurt me. For one course, before the first class, and I did not know who the teacher was nor she me. I went up to her and asked if I could write an essay on a topic in which I had a PASSIONATE, LONG STANDING interest, INSTEAD of doing the course assignments. Got that: INSTEAD OF. She told me to go do it.

How could I have cheated? I was discovering things that, as far as I have ever been able to find out, nobody has ever thought before. And I was having the time of my life doing it! I wanted to write that paper!

Now I am an unusual person: wth a brilliant mind and also phycisally and emotionally fragile: I am a wimp. But here is another example:

Some education researchers had some teenage boys who were hopelessly behind in reading level and who had no interest in learning anything. They brought them up to grade level in reading in 6 weeks. How did they do it?

The boys were interested in automobiles. They got a couple broken down cars and repair tools and handed the boys automobile repair manuals. They learned to read fast. Why? Because they had a passionate inerest in fixing those cars.

Why the Charles paid-on-the-installment-plan Dickens shouldnt a kid cheat on ass–-ignments from tor–-mentors who are cheating them out otheir youth? I see no reason.

Fix the system not the victims!

¶ +2023.12.12. What is the unifying principle, if any, that connects all branches of philosophy and science?

Long story short:

"We are a conversation" (John Wild and others)

The root of all branches of philosophy and science and most everything else is the conversation we are, where the "we" can be your own thoughts talking to yourself silently "in your mind" or giving a public lecture etc.

The contents of the conversation change but the event of conversing endures. It's the only thin we have. Try to find anything else and it will be like a fisherman bringing hom a fish: Just more result of more fishing.

I am not good at German but Martin Heidegger has a dictum which translates as:

"What endures in thinking is the process of thinking" (not any of the things thought).

Al lthe things people think change, even their Deities. But it's all just more thinking. Everywhere you go, here you are. Below is a picture of a little placard IBM employees used to proudly display on their desks at work (I have no idea what they do today):

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.12.12. Can you provide some examples of employee-employer relationships? What inspired you to think about this topic?

I think about his topic every day. The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America does not state that some maen are created to be employees and others to be employers, does it or does it?

[ boss bossing ee ]

Long story short: Go to Professor Richard Wolff's website:

Democracy at Work (d@w)

Democracy at Work: Nonprofit media that analyzes capitalism critically as a systemic problem and advocates for democratizing workplaces as part of a systemic solution. Founded by Richard Wolff. We can do better than capitalism. Our Media: Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff, David Harvey, Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Capitalism Hits Home, All Things Co-op, Understanding Socialism, Understanding Marxism

http://democracyatwork.info

¶ +2023.12.12. How can teachers ensure that Khanmigo, the AI tutor developed by Khan Academy will not be used to cheat?

"Cheating" is often a symptom of bad eduation not bad students. Why do kids cheat? Often because the ass–-ignments they are coerced to do mean nothing to them but if they don't do them they suffer injury from their tor–-mentors. Fix the school not the student.

On the other hand I will also grant that some students cheat just "to get ahead". An example here may be The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior who probably thought he needed to be called "doctor" to be a leader of his people, and it has been confirmed by an academic review board that he plagiarized on his doctoral thesis. But there is a little more to this story: Because people like him, the board decided it would serve no useful purpose to do anything further with the matter. Can you imagine if some helpless kid like yours truly CHEATED and they proved it they would "decide to do nothing further about it because it would serve no useful purpose"?

I can only speak for myself. There is a sure fire way to prevent cheating: To only ask from students things in which they have a deep passionate interest. I will cite two examples.

(1) This is not me and I don't have the citation information. Some eduction researchers had several teenage boys who were far behind grade level in reading skill and had zero interest in learning anything. They brought them up to grade level in 6 weeks. How did they do it?

The kids were interested in automobiles. So they got a couple broken down cars and tools and gave the boys automobile repair manuals. Because they wanted to fix the cars, the boys leanred how to read fast. got it?

(2) Now me. At age 38 I went back to graduate school in a program I found that I thought would be easy (it was). So here was this one course where I did not know who the teacher was and neither did she know who I was. Before the class started I approached her and asked if I could get course credit for writing an essay on a topic in which I had a long-standing passionate interest INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE WORK. Let me make sure I was clear here: INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE WORK. She immediately told me to go do it. If you want to see the result and her assessment of it, it's here in a somewhat modified form, now 40 years later, and I would still defend it before experts in the field:

Nullius in verba | 1983

ART AND US: Three Paths For Contemporary Architecture 1. INTRODUCTION 2. UGLY AND ORDINARY 3. BEAUTIFUL AND FALSE 4. ETHICAL ARCHITECTURE 4.1. Chimney and foundation whose building had been blown away by... bombing 4.2. Example of etihcal architecture 5. CONCLUSION 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY 7. APPENDIX: Professor Maxine Greene's Remarks 8. Footnotes Brad McCormick, 18 November 1983. Transcribed from printed copy and revised, 02-26 March 2022. Note that I use grammatically male gender pronouns in a non-gender-specific sense: "he" , in the present document, refers to men, women, children beyond the "age of reason", and any other sapient beings there may be. I use the term "lay persons" to refer to anybody who uses a building but is not architecturally trained. I have made improvements and some substantive/substantial additions to the original document, but not disowned anything I originally wrote. Time loses all things and often I realize that something is important only after it has passed, when it is too late to record it. Also, Between somewhere around 2005 and 15 June 2018 I had a computer programmer job which literally caused me to lose much of my mind (my memory), so some of what I originally wrote in 1983 I no longer remember and am relying on the accuracy of citations from that time for which I can no longer provide an audit trail in 2022. bradmcc@bmccedd.org 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper, I explore the current (1983) situation of architecture in America. I begin by adducing three quotes from Hermann Broch's essay "Notes on the Problem of Kitsch". I hope they may serve as a 'basis vector set' for the space in which this essay moves: "In a jewish community in Poland, a miracle-working rabbi appeared with the gift of restoring sight to the blind. Ailing men and women came from far and wide to Chelowka – this is the name of the community ---, and among them was one Leib Shekel, plodding along the dusty country road protecting his eyes with a green eye-shield and holding his blindman's stick. An acquaintance of his came along: 'Hey there, Leib Shekel, you are off to Chelowka" "Yes, I'm going to see Him in Chelowka.' 'And what's happened to your eyes?' 'Me eyes? What's the matter with me eyes?' 'If your eyes are still all right at your age, why on earth are you going to Chelowka with your stick?' Leib Shekel shakes his head: "Because a man who is still fit at a hundred can be short-sighted. Don't you see what I mean? When I am before Him, The Great and the True, I shall be blind and He will give me back my sight.' "It is the same with the true work of art. It dazzles [1] you until it blinds you and then gives you back your sight." (BROCH, p. 67) "Kitsch is certainly not 'bad art'; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, or which if you prefer, appears alongside it. Its relationship to art can be compared – and this is more than a mere metaphor – to the system of the Anti-Christ and the system of th

https://www.bmccedd.org/1983.html

What I wrote I have never found anybody else say anywhere. So how could I have cheated when I was having ideas nobody else apparently ever had? It was one of the best xperiences in my life.

Now for the rest of the story: Of course I cheated on SAT exams. I was the most intelligent student in my perp (spelling intended there) school class. When I was subjected to those insulting intrusions I would occasionally try to sneak a peek at what #2 had answered. I was not stupid. I knew he might have an answer sheet with different anser key than me and that he might make mistakes too. But I saw no reason I should be graded down if I had intended to make my little number 2 pancil mark in box "b" but had a muscle spasm and colored in "c". So if his answer did not match mine I very carefully reviewed that tparticular uestion ot make sure I meant what I had chosen. Maybe I read the question wrong? Maybe as I said, I had a muscle spasm. So his answer helped me be sure of what I had done. If you want to call that cheating you can guess what I think of you, although since what i think doers not matter to anyone have fun. ( I did not cheat on the best one of those disgusting tests I did: 796 on the English achievement exam. No cheating on that one.)

[ SAT aswer sheet ]

Fix the system not the victim.

One final one. There are other ways to "cheat". As said, I was the most intelligent student in my high school class. They had two senior American History courses. I did not give a fig about American History. But I smelled that the "Advanced Plcement" teacher was some combination of a cinderblock (zero empathy) and incipient Alzheimers. So I took Amerian History for idiots, i.e., for jocks for an esy A. I could not afford to risk not getting strahght "A" grades because my parents had threatened me if I didn't and I did not want to end up homeless as an adult. But the is more to this. I firmly believe that no student in the whole history of that school ever did any real Amreican history. Some 30 years after the due date for submitting term papers → THIRTY YEARS LATE SO IT WOULD GET A BIG FAT "F"! – by luck I made a significant discovery in Amreican history. The real deal. You can read about that here:

Nullius in verba | StarAndBars

F riend or foe? Solution to a World War II user interface design problem ("Star and bars") Bradford Robert McCormick's maternal uncle, Isadore ("Izzy") Milton Znamirowski (1916-2010), was an engineer who learned his skill through hands-on apprenticeship and self-study, rather than formal schooling, beyond graduating from Baltimore Maryland's City College High School ("City"). In consequence, during World War II, Isadore served as an enlisted man in an engineering design unit at The Bureau of Aeronautics (Washington, D.C.). The problem One day, an officer came and assigned Isadore's unit the following task: American fighter pilots were shooting down their comrades because in the heat of battle, against bright sky background, sunglare, etc. they could not easily distinguish in combat the " Star-in-Circle " marking on American planes ( above ) from the circle marking ( aka "Rising sun", aka "Meatball") on Japanese planes. Assignment: Design a new marking for American fighter planes that pilots could easily distinguish from the Japanese marking, to reduce losses to "friendly fire". Isadore Znamirowski's solution to the problem Isadore said he had a number of ideas, but he saw which one was the best answer, and he drew his design: The existing circle marking, but with a rectangular bar added to each side. "I wanted something as simple as possible. Leave the circle there and we can glue something on either side." Isadore further explained that, as he was drawing his design, an admiral: John Sidney McCain, Sr., visited his group, and went from drafting table to drafting table, in descending rank order, looking to find who had come up with a solution. By the time the admiral got to Isadore's table, the admiral was frustrated that nobody – i.e. , no officer or college educated engineer – had come up with a solution. The admiral looked at Isadore's design. He announced it was the solution, and he snatched Isadore's not quite finished drawing away without giving Isadore time to sign it. The admiral went off with Isadore's design, which became the new marking on all American combat aircraft. Below: 1943 test demonstrating improved recognizability of new marking. Left to right: "Star and Bars" U.S.A. marking, previous U.S.A. marking, Japanese marking, German marking. The new marking "was estimated to be 60 percent more recognizable". Isadore said that because he was only an enlisted man, he did not get credit for his idea. I hypothesize the reason Isadore's design was "the" solution, is as he himself explained it to me: It made what the American pilots were already looking for more easily distinguishable, instead of requiring them to look for something different. The pilots' existing expectations were reinforced, rather than the pilots being required to reorient themselves to something "different", with the consequent interference with their "reflexes", plus initial degradation of performance during a "learning curve" period of time. [I have not verified, bu

https://www.bmccedd.org/StarAndBars.html

But I submitted it 30 years too laate. Big FAT "F", right?

My teachers cheated me out of the life I could have had had they not been that they were. And recently I did tell the school's current chief executive officer what it did to me. Here:

Nullius in verba | Huang

The school did not like that in the Yearbook we captioned the class brown-noser's picture: " If a man has no character he must have a method " [55] [They replaced this with: "I will fight the good fight"]. But " notes by rote " still got thru, perhaps because they thought it was a compliment? We had captioned a picture of the football team charging forward on their playing field ( above ): " We are the hollow men ." [28] [29] [57] The faculty inquisitorial tribunal had not given the Editor-in-Chief and myself any time to prepare for our interrogation.Were they hoping to catch us telling different stories so they could nail us for lying? I had no problem with this, because I was only telling the truth → about them. ( Maybe they would have burned my fragile body at the stake for steak [ élève bourguignon ? ~ They held this Inquisitorial Proceeding at lunch time], had I not promised to be good PR by being going to Yale ? [30] ) Faculty advisor, Mr. Thomas Longstreth (M.A., U. Penn., left ), had told the Yearbook staff he was too busy to review Yearbook pages and I had told him something – I have by now forgotten my specific words but I remembered them clearly then – that we would do what we would do. He had been put on notice and failed to take appropriate measures, so he got what he asked for. I was confident that I was right and the faculty were wrong and, under interrogation, I stood my ground. They backed off and only punished me by barring me from attending graduation ("Commencement") ceremony. [ Aside: I also did not attend "my" Yale graduation: In my "cap and gown", I collected over $130 USD for Quaker Vietnam war relief at the gate to the "Old Campus" nearest to the Yale Post Office.] I was not taught about The Holocaust at StP. When I did study The Holocaust, I immediately recognized where I had seen the showers before: in the boarding students' dormitory (just sans the gas). Because I never engaged in public nudity, I do not know what the showers were like in the " boys' locker room ". Two things I was not taught by St. Paul's School: ( 1 ) That the experiential dimension of value existed nor, a fortiori , that there could be things or persons of value. By "of value", I mean that I could have felt about them that they deserved to exist and they would have enriched my experience of and especially joy in living. ( 2 ) The experiential dimension of nuance and context , that not all things in the world have to be one dimensional: (a) approved by adults who wielded power over me, or (b) not approved by them. In 11th grade, classmate Allen Moulton made me aware of two books which influenced me: ( 1 ) Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". My engagement with this book illustrates how my spirit was impoverished: I assiduously tried to reduce to a one page deductive outline Camus' argument why not to kill oneself , instead of elucidating nuance(s) of the problematic of being mortal. This crippling of my soul has vitiated / corroded my whole life, bo

https://www.bmccedd.org/Huang.html

Wraning: It's X-rated and I pull no punches. If those people were alive today they would not have a good day.

What is cheating? (And by the way, I draw my "ancestry" here from having been a student and then a personal friend of the professor who introduced Marshall McLuhan to American academia;

The medium is the message.

¶ +2023.12.12. In what ways can educators integrate real-world scenarios into the curriculum to provide students with practical experiences that enhance their skills in responsible decision-making?

This is a one size does not fit all quesiton.

What is the specific course. Some will be easy. Some will be impossible. Many will be in between. Some may be appealing. Some may be unappealing.

Let me propose one. In MBA school the kids(?) learn how to boss people around and shift money around. How about assigning them to work for a month or even just one week third shift cleaning the toilets in the restrooms they deposit their body waste products in during the day? And I have collected specific data why this may be instructive for the students.

I worked in a white collar computer programming office which was part of a very big multi-national corporation. Everybody had a least a bachelors degree and many had masters degrees and I don't know what degrees the executives had. Consider the following photograph which I took with a camera the night shift cleaning prople probably could not afford. If you can avoid reading further for a moent, your assignment is to figure out what is wrong in this picture. It directly relates to what I have written in the present paragraph:

[ the restroom ]

Answer: Two receptacles have been provided for the people using this public restroom to discard their used paper towels. But they have instead chosen to throw them on the floor so that the night shilf cleaning person will have to go beyond his (her, other's) expected job requirements to pick up used paper towels off the floor whem not just one but two receptacles were provoded and this person's job should be to empty the receptacles and mop the floor, not lso and entirely unnecessarily pick up the day shift people's used paper towels from the floor. Or am I wrong here? The life experience I have proposed for MBA students should help them answer this question intellegnetly based on data, shouldn't it? I certainly wouldn't want those people's job; but I don't treat them like I wouldn't want to be treated if fate had put me in their place, and you m=never know what will happen to you tomorrow, do you?

I will end with a little bit ot humor about that office. First, what did I do about what I documented above besides having fun with one of my Olympus OM4t cameras on which I had attached one of the special special lenses I have, to get this picture just right? I went out in the office and found a cubicle that was unoccupied and took the trash can there and put it next to the door here. Now for my fun: You may guess I am not much impressed by MBA types. I have an earned doctarate in a humaniies field (read: empathy) and am a summa cum laude Yale graduate so I had a higher educational pedigree than all but one the people [there was one employee with a PhD from Yale] who were either incapable or did not care about disposing their used paper towels in the receptacles provided, but I can't help them.

When the vending machine restock man came around he would discard snack packs past their eat-by date in a garbage can next to the snack machine. He did not object to me foraging in the trash for: FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! I didn't get all that education for no pupose: Free expired Doritos, man! Nothing in the office can beat that! (I didn't need any curriculum to figure that out).

¶ +2023.12.12. What is the purpose of pain? Do we need to experience it in order to learn?

Some people whom I try to avoid having anything to do with have prejudices such as "You gotta pay your dues"and "No pain no gain" and stuff like that. I appreciate if they do not try to share their values with me becasuse I want some joy in my life. Nor am I a donkey: Neigher carrots nor sticks motivate me other than to primarily fear and secondarily despise any person who tries to motivate me with either.

I at least fancy I can learn from reading books or watching films. Recently I read Ernst Junger's "Storm of steel". I think I got the point of what life in the trenches was like in World War I just from reading the book. But note my choice in reading: Not popular or romantic stuff, but the "real deal". I study stuff that's sickening. But also: Do you imagine you are George Patton at Cannae? And you know what I imagine him doing there? Geoge Patton discussing the battle with General Hannibal: That's what "Old blood and guts" did: he fantasied (hallucinated?) discussions with the generals who fought those great wars of long ago as he surveyed what had once been their battlefields. I think I know what was going on in General Patton's mind – maybe not perfectly, but pretty well. And, well, maybe I have conversations with him in my mind too about these things ("Whatcha think, General Patton? No, Sir, thank you but I will not call you George...."?

But not every person seems to be able to learn from books. Some don't even learn from experience. Expeience is a really great teacher: provided it does not kill or seriously injure you.

Now, as for pain that is not cooked up by people to teach others and feel big about themseles. I strongly urge you to read a very short essay that is available free on the Internet: "It's over, Debbie", from The Journal of the Amercan Medical Association (JAMA).

There actually are (or so I read) persons who have the disability that they cannot feel pain. They are as constant risk of seriously hurting themselves. Let's say they did not know about those electric stoves with the pretty ceramic tops that do not show any sign of heat. They put their hand on the apparently cool and safe cooktop and get 3rd degree burns. "Joe! your hand is incinerated!" "What?" That's what you face if you cannot feel pain.

Now for something complely different, as Monty Python used to say. All those people who are into manly whatever. Here's a real hero for you:

[ self-appendectomy doctor ]

I do not like competitive athletics. I think persons should always cooperate never compete with one another but only compete against such things as pancreatic cancer. But one day I saw the beginning of an NFL game. All these huge 300 pound Minotaurs strutting like GIANTS (maybe they ere the Giants?) out of the locker room onto the playing field. Man were they big powerful hunks! Three minutes later one of the press photographers got a closeup of one of them crying like a baby on a stretcher on his way out to the hospital: he had somehow ripped up his knee. He was not "taking it like a man".

My advice? Make orgasms not sports injuries! Make love not war! (De disgustibus non disputandum est)

¶ +2023.12.12. How can I introduce myself in front of people?

To what kind of people are you rtying to introduce yourself?

If you are concerned they might be** hostile** or if they have **power** to materially affect our future prospects in living, you need to prepare prepare prepare and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse including bringing in real friends and telling them to be unstinting in telling you any thought, especially if it is offensive, vulger, spiteful or otherwise hurtful that they can think up as audience in practice sessions. You gotta be ready for anything like a soldier going into combat. And wear body armor. Not fun, right?

But if you have a decent audience who is at worst not much interested in you one way or the other or even likes you, then I am contrarian: just wing it. Get up their unprepared and tell them you aren't prepared and just start saying what you want to say to them or ask them to ask you what they want to know about you. What's the wporst that can happen? You wet your pants? Show them and it just might endear you to them. (I actually pulled off a "trick" like this once.)

It all depends on who your audience is. My advice, again contrarian:

(1) Have something to say that you credibly expect your audience will vvalue to hear from you. Not what you think they should want to hear but what you think has some value and that **THEY** will want to learn from you.

(2) And this is really number one: **MaSTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER**. Accept no substitute.

Once I gave a little educational presentation at work. Blah, blah, blah. In Q&A something entirely unexpected happened. There had been a fellow employee who seemed to want to harm me and I couldn't do anything abot him. So he asked a question, not a question he wanted to learn from to improve himself, but a "trick question" to try to make fool of me. I had masterd my subject matter.

I was totally taken off guard. I stopped for afew seconds, and then I proceeded: "I am so glad you asked that question...." and quickly I had humiliated him in front of all his colleagues and never had any more trouble out of him. I had masterd my subject matter. I wa ready for anything and it did.

There you go: One size does not fit all. Tailor your self to your situation. If you are going mud wrestling you wear different clothes than if you are going to receive a Nobel in Oslo – or ff you are going to take a walk in the woods.

¶ +2023.12.12. Which is the one skill you have always wanted to master?

Me? How can I count them all?

For one: I would like to be able to "draw", you know: to take a pencil and paper and draw your face from any angle and everybody would see it was as good as a photograph. I can't daw anything, well, here is my outer limit:

And I assure you, I worked hard to get that! I'm adept at analyzing visual imagery and I was also good at what used to be "mechanicl drawing", back before AutoCad. And my mother wa an idiot savant artist: with maybe a 5th grade education and being "an ambulatory schizophreinc" She could indeed draw your face or make a "silhouette" cutout of it, with zero training. But I apparently only inherited an esthetic sensibility she did not have the education or maybe either the intelligence to exploit herself.

But having this talent would also be dangerous for me. Now I can only write words that offend people. Then I could make images that offended them and pictures have a lot more impact then phoneme strings.

Second skill: To be able to play the harpsichord just a little bit like Wanda Landowska. Just think: If I was suffering and dying I could sit down at the harpsichord and Bach would console me. "Where words fail, music speaks"

Number 3 and this one I came close to: Having a good reading facility with the German language to read Kant and Husserl and others in the original.

NUmber 4: Learn Japanese. I love certain aspects of Japanese culture and spent some time there in the 1980s. The world is too harsh for me. In the 11th century, while men in Europe were rescuing damsels in distress by skewering each other with long stilettos on horseback, in Japan the ladies of hte court beseowed their favors on neurotic wimps who wrote gracious poetry and played a lutelike musical instument: The tale of Genji. And I have one piece of pottery by a Japanese 2nd class certified living national cultural asset who is so reclusive even his dealer does not know how to get in touch with him – of course I would love to be able to have a conversation with that gentle-man. Watch free on the Inernet the film: Ugetsu.

I am an effete intellectual. But I am not "stupid". I would treasure being a master potter as much as being a translator of german philosophy books. And if I was not an intellectual why not be a master tool and die maker, one of the persons I consider to be the "blue collar aristocracy"?

¶ +2023.12.12. Why is Aristotle considered to be a great philosopher and scientist, but not as great an ethicist or political theorist?

Who have you been reading or listening to?

That is not a universally held assessment of Mr. Aristotle. Counterexample: Columbia University esteemed professor and United Nations advisor Jeffrey Sachs. He is probably the world's foremost expert on international relations and he does not just talk the talk but also walks the walk, as the old idiom goes, starting with having been an advisor to Mikhael Gorbachev. Aristotle's ethics is one of his primary inspirations, along with John F. Kennedy.

Different persons have differnt opinions about most every topic, don't they? And what does it matter what anybody thinks? What matters is what you think. Go by the watchword of the British Royal Society since Sir Isaac Newton:

Nullius in verba

Take nobody's word for anything! (Ed. note: Including your mother, your teachers, your boss, your religious leader if any and your governments leader)

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.12.12. When my boss says he wants to trim the fat within the company does that mean he wants to fire all the fat people?

No. It means he is a mean-spirited small-minded jerk. He is more interested in this quarter's bottom like no matter what the damage to the company, than in nurturing long term committment of his people to the company's development. He would never havve mde it in IBM in the 1960s when a highly committed team did the almost impossibble and produced System #60 which revolutionized computing and wa enormously profitable for the company. It was done by a highly committed staff of people who wer etreaed well by their employer and in turn went the extra mile for him: Thomas Watson Jr.

He is the fat that needs to be trimmed and replaced by a manager such as one I myself had in a startup some two decades ago. Let me cite 3 things she did:

(1) For the company: I had just finished fixing a problem in our product. All I did was fix problems and there were no end to problems to fix: Fix one and get on with fixing another....

So I asked her (she happened to be a young white lady of French ancestry) if I could unnecssarily spend some time looking further into the part of our product where I had just now fixed the problem. She replied to me:

"We ALWAYS have time to look into a situation more deeply."

(2) For employee morale: You know that managers like your a**hole sometimes like to raise morale by torowing dog treates to their reports: Dunkin Donuts. And then they subject the poor saps to their logorrhea in endless meetings that waste everybody't time instead of sending out bullet point emails.

This lady held few meeting and they were blissfully short. One morning she brought in almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie Larchmont New York for her team. Not dog treats for dogs.

(3) Personal: One normally busy morning at about 10 M I offhanded said to her that I had never driven a stick shift BMW but one day would like to. She threw me her keyring and told me to go for a spin.

Compare that to you manager.

¶ +2023.12.12. What are some problems with architecture? How can they be solved?

I don't know what is going on in architecure today but I studied in depth the situation in the 1980s when the writings of the great culture criminal: Robert Venturi (1925–2018), were in vogue: "Complexity and contradiction in architecture" and "Leaning from Las Vegas" (see below).

What then was needed and I suspect is still needed today is a renewed and reinvigorated commitment by architects to the high values of universal civiliztion, from classical Greece through the 18th Century European Enlightenment and on into th 20th century with The Bauhaus and Adolf Loos's classic essay: "Ornament and crime".

Study and be inspired by Eduund Husserl's 1935 essay: "Philosophy and the crisis of European humanity." (available free on the Internet). Read John Lobbell's lovely litlle book of the great humanist architect and teacher Louis Kahn's thoughts: "Between Silence and Light".

Create spaces, starting with domestic architecture – where people live their daily lives – which will inspire persons to THINK and to joyously create in the arts and sciences. Rrose Selavy.

[ Guild house condemned ]

We can do better than that, can't we?

¶ +2023.12.11. Some people feel the education style of schools damages originality and creativity. What do you think? How do you feel about tests and examinations? Are they necessary?

Different person benefit from and are harmed by different things.

I had a brilliant mind butand was emotionally and physically fragile. I have always wanted to learn, not to watch HBO or Monday nite NFL. I was reading Martin Heidegger's "Being an dtime for fun at the same time I was assigned Selective Service Sytem (SS) identifiction number (1964): 18–11–46–503.

Tests and exams have always been destructive of my mind, my soul and my whole life. Others may benefit from them. People say that youth is wasted on the young: the adults I was stuck with wasted my youth.

Only one time in all my schooling did I – I will not finish this sentnce but just present evidence:

[ Rentko ]

In college I began to learn some of the things I should have had from the nursery but even there I was impeded by tests and ass–-ignments. I did manage to graduate Yale in 1968 summa cum laude: by avoidance.

At the onset of middle age I found a graduate program I thought would not hurt me (others would describe it as: "easy") and between me having matured and it being relatively decent I actually got some education that was sappropriate for me. At the beginning of one course I went up to the teacher (neither of knew the other) and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course INSTEAD OF DOING THAT COURSE WORK. Let me make that clear: INSTEAD OF not in addition to or somehting like that . The teacher told me to go do it. THAT is the kind of education I needed from the beginning. There was also another possibiity:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard)

Think of the money the school could have saved by having me in say 11th grade be teaching 8th graders instead of doing ass–-ignments? The school had als otroed to "socially adjust" me, i.e., to degrade me to being like everybody else. Teaching younger person would have helped me grow socially not as a conformist but as an expert in helping others to learn.

I cannot say what is good for others but I feel I have as much "right to life" as anybody else. I needed to be respected as a peer of the faculty if not in many case their better, but no, it was after 1863 in USA and they were my: masters. They ruined my life. And part of the consequences is I was not able to develop my talents to be able to give back to others what I was never nurtured to develop in myself.It was lose-lose but they collected their paychecks.

The so-called "preparatory" school (prep for what?) I was subjeted to was associated with The Episcopal Church but they worshipped graven images: shiny plated varsity football and lacrosse team victory trophies. Eithe rthe nevver read Luke 2:41–52 in the Bible or didn't think it applied to them and me. What body contact sport athletic teams did Jesus Christ play on? Did he say body-slam your enemy as yourself?

Over a long life I discovered at least some of what I had been denied, including: Since I was a brainy wimp not a budding young minotaur, I got involuntary celibbacy not ometa sanitary services. In case you are a weapons officer on a B-52, the GPS coordinattes on the school for a JDAM are: [39.4324433, -76.6766731], (I am not amused.)

Different persons benefit from different things. I will end with my idea of education and sign off: Rrose Selavy (look that up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it")

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2023.12.10. Can an employer tell you not to talk to other employees?

If your employer tells you not to talk to other employees, something highly unusual is happening – unless the manager is unfit for their job.

I just now thought of a legitimate case: Some special project in the company tht is extreme;y "sensitive" and for which security is imperative so the only a very few persons will know about it. I may have had such a case. A product that was unmarketable and which needed a fix so the salesmen could go out and sell it. It wa so important and "sensitive" that the company did not want anybody accidentally talking about it. So if you wre working on it you weren't supposed to tell anybody else what you wer doing. What people do not know they can't reveal to others.

But it could also be something very diffrent and very bad. The manager may be engaging in fraud: "cooking the books" and you are [un]lucky enough to be involved and you may end up incourt before a judge for civil or criminal prosecution some day in future.

Or it could be "office politics" and the manager is "playing favorites". Inthat case you need to find a different job.

Or something else....

So it all depends on the specifics of the situation. It may be perfectly harmless or it may be felonious or anything in between.

Have I at least put you on alert?

¶ +2023.12.10. A professor told us that the goal of engineering college is to teach us how to think. Can you explain that more?

If he told that to me, I would confront him about tests and grades and ask him how they relate to learning how to think.

I actually did that to an eminent philosophy professor, but I picked the right person to pick on. He was a very gentle and kindly person and he apologized to me and told me he meant no harm and let me take his graduate seminar (I was just a sophomore) for an easy "A" the next term. But not all professors are that "big".

My feeling is that a lot of lip service is paid to "learning how to think" but GPAs generaly matter more. I do not like this but I rarely had anything I could do about it. Also when I wa young i was ignorant about life so I put up with a lot because I didn't know any better.

"What men are willing to put up with depend on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)

When I was young I had nothing to look forward to; now I have a lot I want so I am far less tolerant, but for a lot of it it's too late for me (now age 77 years)..

Here's how I expect teachers to relate to me. Before a class I went up to the teacher and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE WORK. Got thet: INSTEAD OF. And she told me to go do it. That is the kind of education I need and expect, now. Buy I also understand tht because I do not dispose over independent wealth I may hav to submit to being humiliated of I don't want to starve. A Big Bully can beat me any day of the week.

¶ +2023.12.10. How do you personally decide what information to share openly and what to keep private? What factors or considerations influence your choices between disclosure and withholding in your communication with others?

This is an interesting quesiton for anybody who holds heretical opinions and needs to earn a living.

It seems to me the best place to start is to assume that your government and maye some others knowseverything about you, that you are always under surveillance ("Hi, CIA guys, howyadoin today? Got nuthin better to do than watch me on the toilet, eh? I sure wish I could watch you too!....")

Next, if you want to be famous you had better not have any skeletons in your closet. Don't run for President of the United States and be colluding with a wayward son with suady international business dealings or even giving the appearance you might be. If you ever had an abortion or were a member of a "communist front organization" or visited a prostitute or who knows what, good luck.

So you decide you might want to be rich but you will forego any attempt at being famous. If you are a master art forger you will not brag about it.

I worked or half a century in multinational orporations and almost never in the office let anybody know anything I thought. I was ther to do the job. I knew nobody could cope with what I think. Here is an example of the furthest I would go: Ther was a young man in the office who was a first line manager and i heard his last name. Everybody treated him like he wa just any other nobody. But I said to him I thought I knew who he was: a son of the Chief Scientist of the world's most important technology corporation. Well, yes, he acknowleged he was. And I probably said I had worked there once so I recognized the name. Or that I like expresso coffee and no thank you I do not want a donut.

But for all this time I had a personal wbsite with high search engine placements (this was back before Google was bigger than the earth) with lots of highly controversial material on it. Anybody could have looked me up and found stuff that would have offended them. But if you have a manager with a PhD in computer science from a prestigious university and his highest attained cultural level is being a New York Yakees fan, what's the likelihood he will be browsing to find an employee thinks Patriarch Abraham in the bible was a war criminal and that his God is bad and He reigns in sorrow because He has nobody to talk with ever since he messed up the minds of the master structural engineers at Babel and it serves him right for having done that! Not likely.

It's like I read that in Czarist Russia they censored The Communist Manifesto but Das Kapital got through. Did the censors not understand big words? Were they too lazy to read it? Or did they figure the masses don't read long books with big words in them so why bother?

Your social security number does not belong on the Inernet. But my Secletive Service identification number was 18–11–46–503. What's yours?

This is an interesting quesiton for anybody who holds heretical opinions and needs to earn a living.

It seems to me the best place to start is to assume that your government and maye some others knowseverything about you, that you are always under surveillance ("Hi, CIA guys, howyadoin today? Got nuthin better to do than watch me on the toilet, eh? I sure wish I could watch you too!....")

Next, if you want to be famous you had better not have any skeletons in your closet. Don't run for President of the United States and be colluding with a wayward son with suady international business dealings or even giving the appearance you might be. If you ever had an abortion or were a member of a "communist front organization" or visited a prostitute or who knows what, good luck.

So you decide you might want to be rich but you will forego any attempt at being famous. If you are a master art forger you will not brag about it.

I worked or half a century in multinational orporations and almost never in the office let anybody know anything I thought. I was ther to do the job. I knew nobody could cope with what I think. Here is an example of the furthest I would go: Ther was a young man in the office who was a first line manager and i heard his last name. Everybody treated him like he wa just any other nobody. But I said to him I thought I knew who he was: a son of the Chief Scientist of the world's most important technology corporation. Well, yes, he acknowleged he was. And I probably said I had worked there once so I recognized the name. Or that I like expresso coffee and no thank you I do not want a donut.

But for all this time I had a personal wbsite with high search engine placements (this was back before Google was bigger than the earth) with lots of highly controversial material on it. Anybody could have looked me up and found stuff that would have offended them. But if you have a manager with a PhD in computer science from a prestigious university and his highest attained cultural level is being a New York Yakees fan, what's the likelihood he will be browsing to find an employee thinks Patriarch Abraham in the bible was a war criminal and that his God is bad and He reigns in sorrow because He has nobody to talk with ever since he messed up the minds of the master structural engineers at Babel and it serves him right for having done that! Not likely.

It's like I read that in Czarist Russia they censored The Communist Manifesto but Das Kapital got through. Did the censors not understand big words? Were they too lazy to read it? Or did they figure the masses don't read long books with big words in them so why bother?

Your social security number does not belong on the Inernet. But my Secletive Service identification number was 18–11–46–503. What's yours?

If it is important that something not get out, don't tell anybody, period. If you are in the CIA follow regulations to the letter. On CNN once I heard a former police commissioner of the City of Philadelpha sy that it's not a good idea to ry to hide stuff you fear people finding out about, because:

"Bad news does not get better with age."

Lance a boil and expose it to antiseptic light.

¶ +2023.12.10. What is modernism? How did modernism affect our society?

This is a complex and fraught question. Do you think all dead white males, and no members of any other "race" (ethnicity, gender or other secondary characteristic except for some white females who are not woke) are despicable and the root of all evil? I will end here with a news article from The New York Times newspaper which directly addresses that question.

But even before the woke apocalypse, there was postmodernism which accused "modernists" of the crime oftrying to raise he culturel level of the masses. In all fairness, the only part of postmodernism I claim competence in is their architecture; the rest, as Prof Noam Chomsky has said is either nonsense of truisms for 12 years olds dressed up in incomprehensible jargon.

And I think we must acknowledge that all stereotypes and caricatures must have some truth in them or else they would not "stick". So there were or are two modernisms which, oversimplifying, may be divided into Cartesianism and Erasmus-Rabelaisianism. Cold objectivity on the one hand and joyful creativity based on scholarship in the classics on the other hand.

Again, I am most tcomfortable wtih architecture. All sorts of people criticize "modernist architecture", and with some reason. What are they citicizing? Buildings that have no more "warmth" than a General Motors orFord automobie assembly production line factory. Mies van der Rohe's classic Seagram building in New York (easy to look this up on Wikipedia), for one example. Who except somebody like myself would want to live there? And if I did, I would "humanize" my space with bookslelves and pictures on the walls. Even worse is the house the high-functioning autistic [modernist] philosopher Ludwig Wittgetstein designed for a relative. It is "cold". He spent siz months getting the design of the ratiators and door handles right to his [high functioning autistic] judgment. Obvious contrast: Norman Rockwell paintings for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post magazine (kitsch).

But there is another modernity that the haters of modernity don't talk about either because they are ignorant of it or because they want to suppress it in favor of their pet ideologies. This is the modernism of the early modern humanists such as Francois Rabelais and Desiderio Erasmus, which if full of sensitivity to the human condition (suffering and joy) but critical – indeed even perhaps moreso than the Cartesians, of all received social customs and beliefs: all that would enslave persons not just physiclly but also spiritually, such as submission to the will of a Big Bully in the sky ("God"). Dr. Rabelais is even bawdy. Descartes as far as I can tell, was a prig.

There is not much humanistic modern architecture but there is one architect who does stand out, and, I always like to note, he died like a stray dog in a public toilet in New York city's Pannsylvanis train station and his body was "tentatively" identified from his passport in the city morgue: Louis I. Kahn.

However well he succeeded or not, he taught that buildings should enich the daily life od=f the persons who spend their time, i.e. part of their short lives in them. He had a definition of a city which I have not heard from either the Cartesian modernists or anybody else. He said the village is a place of needs, what Karl Marx eloquently described as: "reproduction of individual and species life (my opinion of that? Yuk!). On the other hand, in sharp contrast:

"The city is the place of availabilities. It is a place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life."(LOBELL, p. 44)

Or the artist Marcel Duchamp whom some "artists" today like Mr. Andy the Warhole may claim as their spriitual ancestor but I strongly feel wrongly and unjustly. Mr. Duchamp wanted all of life to be imaginative erotic play. Not Marilyn lithographs that can sell for 9 digits USD st auction in the present race to the bottom deregulated fniance capitalist economic [dys]order.

Many people are too poor to have any choice in their lives. (Instead of killing Russians in Ukraine because he has a personal hatred of Dr. Vladimier Putin, Mr. Biden could be pouring billiions of dollars in to solving that problem.) But, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow urged: when people's bellies are full they may want something more meaningful in their life. Erasmus-Rabelaisian modernism would have that be for ech person to have deep erudition in the classics and then take all the ideas, beliefs, whateve of humanity through all history (Gods, political ideologies, etc.) as raw material to creatively shape each his (her, other's) own life to share with peers in playful leisure in civil society. But this is not just "modernist".

All my life I have been harmed by "The American Dream". Bu there is a second Amerian Dream which nobody talkes about from the dead white male who was the 2nd President of The United Staes of America. So I will close with that followed by the newspapaer article:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

[--------]

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.10. What is your opinion about Alexander Mercouris?

Top notch reporting about America and Great Britain's shameful anti-Russia war which is destroying Ukraine and dragging The United States down with it and maybe GB too.

The New York Times newspaper sold out – betrayed the basic principle of honest journalism to report all the news without fear of favor, approcximately 15 May 2022.

There are other fine sources to learn abou this shame this tragedy this folly this insanity, especially Columbia Uinversity Professor Jeffrey Sachs whom I would recommend een more highly because he is not only an eminent scholar but also has been a player in everything since Mr. Gorbachev messed up around 1990. Scott Ritter is great too and is much more expressive of the just anger which the U.S. foreign policy every since maybe Ronnie Raygun if not back to the dropping of the atom bomb to keep the Red Army from enering Honshu....

But Mr. Mercouris's daily updates are a lot more fun to listen to and his intelligence and integrity seem top notch and most people, unlike me do not have all day to do nothing other than pursue this revolting mess.

If you do want to learn in13 minutes something really eye-opening, here's is the bald, heartless but brilliant mind behind the green t-shirt costume:

[ Aestovich interview ]

¶ +2023.12.10. Should companies help their remote workers move to tax havens (e.g. help them obtain Dubai digital nomad visas) and then pay them lower salaries - but because those employees would pay lower taxes, they would actually make more on an after-tax basis?

Very interesting question.

Anything that is a win-win is good. If companies can make more profit wihle simultaneously and logically tightly bound improving the lives of their employees, that sounds great. Perhaps stupid strictly hypohetical example:

Suppose you had a situation where employees worked during an 8 hour perios each day: start at 8 AM and End at 4PM. No ifs ands of buts. But they need lunch. So the company could give them an hour off to go get lunch at restaurants in the neighborhood or whatever. Or they could pay them a couple dollars a day less and get more work time out of them by giving them tasty free lunches in a company cafeteria. Everybody would win: the company would get more work and the bottom line might even cost a bit less but the workers would get more since their shortened lunch break would really just be cutting out the time they would otherwise waste going out of the building and waiting in some restaurant for their meal to be served.

Or work from home: The company no longer has to pay for office space and the employees no longer waste part of their lives commuting.

So if your idea about people moving to Dubai is a win - win for both the company and the workers, that's great. But there will also be another bbenefit for the employees: You will have saved them from a country that is destroying itself in disastrous wars and MAGAism and Wokism to a country with a bright future. Can my young daughter work for your company? She has a bachelors degree in physics and chemistry and I don't want tosee her live for the rest of her life in

[ Homer wanting to die for his country ]

When she could be living in:

[ Dubai ladies old nd new ]

"Bye, bye, miss American pie...." got on a long flight to Dudai (remember Lot's wife in the Bible)

¶ +2023.12.10. There are two kinds of people in the world. Someone has memorising knowledge and someone has understanding knowledge. What do you think about them? Is it true?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

I think that is a gross oversimplification, but then a lot of people may be simpleminded.

[ Homer eating his donut ]

Back in the early 1960s I attended a rmemorizing information so-called "prep" school. I learned:

Ashurbanipal

He was some sort of kinf os somewhere in "The firtile crescent" which a another phoneme string we memorized. I was adept at it: a very trainable seal/dog ("Arf! Arf!). I got dog treats: "A" grades. And they actually did have some nutrition in them: Because I got all "A" grades I got to spend "study hall" period (I did not know what the othe sense of the word "period" meant) in the scool's empty little library instead of

[ Study hall claustrophoia ]

Teo things were as missing from the pedagogy of this place as soung would be for a person born profoundly deaf or colors for a person aborn profoundly color blind (I knew on of the latter):

(1) Context

And:

(2) Nuance

Everything was eithe the teachers liked it or the teachers dod not like it. And if you did it and they didn't like it you got to come in on Saturday morning to work off your "demerits" doing stuff like raking leaves. But as a staight "A" student I was exempt from that. Instead I got 2 Inquisitorial Proceedings.

Anyway I finally aged out of that benighted place and went to Yale and began to learn what I should have had from the nursery: "culture", nuance.... Long story short: Rrose Selavy (look that up on Wikipedis if o=you don't "get it").

Everything is interpretation, including, ironically, the interpretation that everything is facts to be memorized to be regurgitated on pop quizes, homework ass–-ignments and exams. If God made man, man made God, too – an interpretation He is.

I will end with a true story about learning and also a quote about interpretation:

[ Rentko ]

[-------]

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance. (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

Trust nobody: interpret everything, or rather: be self-aware that whatever you do, including gullibly believing what somereligious or political leader or your mother tells you is your interpretation. They are all neither more nor less than the data you need to act upon:

"Man makes himself on the basis of conditions he did not make." (Karl Marx)

¶ +2023.12.09. How would you define disability? Should the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of disability consider long COVID?

I think this is a complex issue and "people" do not cope well with complexity. The world is gray scale but propaganda is binary: "yes" or "no" but not "sortta"

Consider one issue: deafness. Now apparently thereare technological devices, cochlear implants I seem to recall they are called, which can enable profoundly deaf persons to hear. Now a normal person might ideate: Wow! The deaf can hear! Let's cure them! But at least some deaf persons want none of it. They do not consider themselves to be "disabled". They like themsleves the way they are. Would they like help? I'm not part of the deaf community but my guess is they would lie more simultaneoud sign language (ASL) tanslators for pulic speakers. Thereare some already, as we see when some state governors hold press conferences.

And I'm not sure one can even say: Well ask the person if they feel they have a disability and help them with their perceived problem. That sounds good but if a person does not appreciate what the options are they can't make an informed choice. My suspicion is that a lot of the current to do about young persons' "gender dysphoria" is due to the sex-sickness of their (our) society. I consider ritual male infant circumcision to we wilful disablement which should be made a felony. How popular is tht idea?

Let me try another case. Autism. It's a "spectrum" ranging from persons who cannot live at all without a lot of social support, to Aspergers on the mild end. First problem: Normal people have often failed to distinguish between autism and mental retardation. Not helpful to a highly intelligent but also severe autistic person. And at the mild end it may be a plue over being normal. The philosopher Ludwig Witttgenstein was mild autistic and his autism enabled him to think things no normal person would ever imagine: how sad for those pathetic normal people! But there was a "catch": his family had enormous wealth and they helped him with it. Once he got in what for an ordinary person might have been severe trouble with the la but his family threw money at it and protected him. Or one of his talents was apparently in architecural design. He never had achitectural training. But again, his family threw a lot of money at this issue and he was enabled to design and build a house for a couple of his relatives which is one of the great accomplishments of modern architecture, not to mantion that probably no normal person would want to live in it. So there are diablilties or what is called that by some persons that are actually special abilities. But these are perhaps rare cases.

More frequent may be help that hurts. The following may be an example and if not it's close: In the recent Olympics ther was an athlete whose government told her to participate in some event in which she did nto want to particpate because she had not trained for it. Whether or not they succeeded, her government said she needed to be taken back to their country for treatment for her mental trouble. Well, what was her "mental trouble"? It was her government trying to make her compete in that event she felt she did not want to compete in. The cure for hir disability was for the people who had hurt her to harm her more.

So part of hte problem with helping the disabled is who get is to decide what disability is. I am gifted but emotionally fragile. I am very frightened by people who want to provide me with "help" which would have to potential for reducing me to be like them. I did once have a psychiatrist who seemed relatively trustworthy: He said that antidepressant medications don't likely help if your life circumstances are objectively depressing. But, again, thsese may be relatively rare cases since not all that many psychiatric patients are more intelligant than their "shrinks" so the latter is not likely to shrink down to the size of their small minds a person whose mind is not bigger than their own.

A lot of cases are no brainers: If a person is living in poverty, raise them into the middle clsass and then see if that helped. How popular is that idea? If a kid has learning problems in school, see if the curriculum is the problem. Again, how popular is that?

There was once a pychiatrist who was highly controversial. Instead of try ing to help the patient adjust to their circumstances sometimes he would buy them out of those circumstences. Unlkie most mental health professionals, he disposed over great wealth, Masud Khan. And a lot of lesser (you guessed it, that is my opinion) therapists did not like him. And he had a disability: he did not have a license to prectice psychotherapy. So these people used the system to crush him and they finally succeeded in causing him to kill himself by alcoholism and he didn't even like the taste of alcoholic beverages. But the normal people desroyed a graet but flawed person instead of nurturing him. Again, something like that "mentally ill" athlete who needed to be "cured" by the people who wer hurting her.

A lot of parents, some with "good inttentions", harm their children but then the government, again sometimes with "good intentions" does too, so it can be hopeless for some persons.

I have not spoken her about the "normal" cases of diability which are probably the majority but then only individual persons exist and why shouldn't each be given what will enable tham to

"be all they can be" not what somebody or other things would be good for them? There was a psychiatric writer, Alice Miller, whi even wrote a fine book (fine in my opinion, of course): "For your oen good" about toxic parents. And the punch line here is that she herself was a toxic parent whose now adult son has said that reading her books saved him from her.

First do no harm. NIMBY

¶ +2023.12.09. What are the benefits of considering different viewpoints during strategic planning exercises that utilize either the "top-down" or "bottom–up" approach to decision making processes?

"either the "top-down" or "bottom–up" approach to decision making processes" Why not both and and others too?

All ideologies are provisional interpretations, unless a person "believes" in them, i.e., has closed their mind to evidence. (e.g., "Gott mit uns.")

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (The phyicist Niels Bohr to his students)

So you have a team which is investigating something. Ask if anybody likes "top down" and if anybody likes "bottom up" and if anybody disagrees with both, and have each defend their position with utmost partisan vigor as an advocatus diaboli.

There is a danger to this: If you open you mind to differing opinions you may find that your adversaries have good reasons for opposing you or even that you are wrong and they are right so you may have to either stop thinking or switch sides. But when the cat is out of the bag you cannot stuff a squirming cat back in ("Meow!").

Generally people love their prejudices and the advantages of their family and cronies more than truth. It's harder to push a cause if you know you are wrong than if you are luckily ignorant. Few people have the guts to say: "Yes, I know what I am doing is wrong but I intend to get what I want by any means necessary, and you can't give me a guilty conscience because I don't have one." (Donald Trump and Jack Welch may be exceptions?)

The word prejudice means: pre judice, i.e., judgment before. Before what? Before evidence. "My country right or wrong" can help a person deal with the evidence: "Don't confuse me with the facts; my mind's made up." I recently encountered this with an othewise eeminent scholar who did not want to learn about the Ukraine war becasuse he was determined that Putin needed not only to lose but to be publicly humiliated.

Have your team study Sun Tzu, not all say the pledge of allegiance together, or not. You might also read Thomas Kuhn's classic book "the structure of scientific revolutions." And why not also Fred Brooks "The mythical man month"?

¶ +2023.12.08. What are some signs that a company has a diversity and inclusion problem?

That they have a diversity and inclusion program.

I worked for half a century in comptuter programming departments of a variety of large organizations, including NASA (launching payroll not spaceships). I never saw any problem with people's secondary characteristics. And nobody ever tried to f*ck with my head about personal feelings or ideas, to put it bluntly. Everybody respected everybody else in civil social interaction. The persons ranged from black to yellow, from muslim to orthodox jewish. We knew who wa homosexual but they didn't flaunt it. We even in one place had a person with severe Tourettes syndrome so he at random times screamed obscenities for no reason. How can anybody with any sense of self-respect put up with ideological indoctrination like we read happens in North Korea?

The business of business is business. Park your beliefs in the parking lot or preferably at home. I tried to keep my beliefs to myself. Nobody would have liked them or even understaood them. One time I slipped up and discovered how nasty and small minded people are: I said to somebody tht the Boy Scouts were like the Hitler Youth indoctrinating young males in conformist obedience to authority. Boy did I get a ton of mouth for that! I got the point.

Well, here's another example that's not so bad. I live in an upscale but not gated neighborhood. One fine day I found my nextdoor neighbor who is a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) mowing his lawn. I asked him why a person who is CPA was "doing servile labor". He did not know what to make of this and ran back in the house to tell his wife what had happened. I have another neighbor who is s graduate of Harvard's architecture school who was tending her lawn and I said something about lawns to her and she couldn't cope with it. So I generally keep my thoughts to myself.

Well, why not one more story: One morning it was the downpour of the century in Washington DC. The steps from the train station to the Mall were a waterfall. I had a half hour walk from the tation to NASA Headwuarters on the Mall. I came in the office thoroughly soaked. I am a white male Yale graduate. Ther was a kind of racial divide: The computer programmers were mostly white and the computer operators black. And you guessed it, the white people didn't associate with the black people, but not because of race but social staus: white collar versus blue collar (they would hae been jsut as prejudiced if the operators had been white). I had a far more pedigreed education than anybody else. So what did I do? I went to the operators and asked them if I could borrow one of their work smocks to wear and all day I went around in that worker smock with nothing under it. You better believe I won points witt the operators that day. This was 1978. On the other hand, one fine Sunday morning coming in to work (I sometimes even worked 3rd shift) I parked my car a few blocks from the office (The Mall is empty at 8AM on a Sunday mornings) and saw something tha caused me to change my path. I was a bumper sticker on a car. It read: "I hate you as much as you hate me"

But don't listen to a soon enough to be dead white male:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.08. How do work supervisors calm down a member of staff who is having a mental breakdown or is about to cry?

One size does not fit all. You need to collect information in a nonjudgmental way and respond to specifics of the situation in a rationally defensible way. Presume you will hav eto give an accouting for your response to people up your command chain or HR possibly in serious cses even for a law suit.

I would urge the supervisor to first look into their heart and soul and check to see if they personally, and next the social situation in hte workplace had in any way contributed to the employee's distress.

¶ +2023.12.08. Why do so many people make statements and accusations but always fail to provide any verifiable documentation?

I would invite each person to follow the practice I try to follow myself, albeit not always although for a veriety of reasons:

Whenever you say anything to anyone, if it is not a commonplce and not your own invention, give the citation information. If you don't have it then it's something like "source lost". And I men this as a "blanket" practice, from the bedroom to the boardroom and every place inbetween from the restroom ot the cocktail party.

Proplw will find this odd or even offputting. that reflects on their sloppiness in managing their intellectual life (albeit it's often more like just repeating cliches. It's easy for an AI to talk more "intelligently" than moew people).

Like the Hebrew National frankfurer company: Ansswer to a higher power, in this case, intellectual integrity.

I am currently reading a somewhat tedious book but which is extremely important: Julien Benda's 1927 essay: "The treason of the intelletals". It's feee on the Internet so no person is too impecunious to be able to read it.

"Why do so many people make statements and accusations but always fail to provide any verifiable documentation?" That's a topic to talke up a whole scholarly life. But hre is an idea;

Childrearing. I imagine tha tthe infand starts off with a godgiven faculty of judgment. In my case I did not liek my parents. they did not like that.

Parents generally do the opposite of what an olcologist does in treating a leukemia patient: The good doctor destroys the poor patient's sick immune system and injects new healthy immume cells and hopefully the patient is now cured and builds up a new immune siustem to fight infecions.

Parents destroy the chld's innste faculto of justgment and replace it with social conditioning. "yes, mommy" "Ja, Mein Fuhrer!" sorry, typographica lerror there: "Yes, boss!"

It can be different. I will give two examples:

One of the mos brilliant physicists of the 20th century was Richard Feynmann. He at les says he had an IQ of 125. Not all that bright. However! His father wa always challenging him with auesion to solve and to find more questions for himself to ask himself to solve.

Second example. I knew a man whose parents were almost illiterate Appalachian dirt farmers. Hillbillies. His mother had a 4th grade education. She recognized that he wa diffferent. She and hi sfather were not competent to raise their child and they didn't have "connetions". He turned out to be a high power covernment consultant. How's he do it? A combination of two things: His nature and his nurture. He had a brilliant mind but also a tough "constitution". is mother did what shecould for him and it wa good enough. She told m=him as a small child and meant it:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. you will make mistakes We stand behind you."

The kid had to raise himself. But if he messed up, he knew he had a safe place to heal his wounds and go out and try again. His parents did not destroy his godgiven immune system of his soul. He does not take any "crap" off anybody: "Lead, follow or get out of the way [termite]!" And: "Some people are in need of retroactive birth control" ....

Me? My parents did not completel ysucceed by they cippled me. At age 5 years I spoke precosiously articulatly. I mutated the word "mother" into "mud". That was not baby talk: It was telling to=h women wht felt she was. My parents did not like this. So they staged a little one act play for my benefit of my ohter walkin gou tthe front door of the house wit ha little suitcse in her hand and my father providing the voiceover that if I didn't tell her I love he rand mean it she wa leaving forever. Well, I was a wimp. They got what they wanted in terms of vocalizations. But it wa a pyrrhis victory. I paid the price:

When any person disrespects me, instead of instantly compng back with teh perfect response to put them in their place, I generally "jsut take it" and then, a little while later, when it's too late, finally figure out what the y did to me and wha tI should have responded. L-estrit d'escalier:

[ falling man ]

Always try to speak to bourgeois people like it's the orals defense of your doctoral dissertation. I find I can speak to blue collar workers pretty well. I talk with them about things tha tare meaningful to them. In a way it's "speaking down to them" but I am always keenly asware tha tthere but for fate go I. I hava a lot of trouble speaking with most people "above" me because they have been socially conditioned and have lost their godgiven faculty of judgment. Item: I onc ehad a manager in a multinational corporation who had a PhD from a prestigious university (computer science) and his attanied coultural level was being a New York Yankees fan and toadying to his bosses. Talk with that dude about Sophocles or Hieidegger? And one tha twas even sorse, in IBM: This was1980. This person (male, straight not homosexual) came to work wering socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them and was either incapable or unwilling to enter into mutually respectful civil discourse with me about small mammals. Soohocles or Heidegger? Mice! "Mice, Jim, Mice!"

Answer to a higher power. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) Rrose Selavy (Marcel Duchamp)

¶ +2023.12.08. I need to create a presentation on one philosophical topic. Which topics would you recommend?

I have studied a lot of philosophy, but ther is one topic that is simple and of highest mportance:

Studying the "the conversation we are"(John Wild and others).

No matter what topic, philosophical or any other, persons talk about, they are conversing. What endures are not the contingent results of the discussion a tthe moment but the process of discussing whatever topics the rare at the moment. Try to find anything "behind" or "beneath" the process of converstaion and will jsut e more content of conversation. To be quite blunt about it: People talk as if God ws asomething bigger than they are; but God is jsut one more topic in the conversation even if the people conclude at the moment that it's the other way around. And it there is some God either He (She, Other) would hav eto enter into the conversation w are or elsehave no relation to us whatever. He migh Bully us, or play icely with us, but if we can't talk about it it ain't nuthin.

Where is "the Big Bang"? Whre are Quarks" In physicists' discourse with each other and their self-talk "in hteir minds" about thes etopics.

Not for the payoff: Since the conversation we are is the basis for everything, we should devote more time and energy to cultivatint it and not just its contents which re always provisional and dependent. But people don't think tha way very much, do they? You can use your opportunity to educate them.

And the very best part of any presentation about "the conversation we re" is the the very process of conversing is evidence confirming what yo uare saying and its importance. Virtue starts at home. Everywher you go, here you are – talking to yourself or with others. Agin, find anything else if you can? But if it's not part of hte convresation we are, then you cn' have anything to say about it, can you?

Know thyself? Well that's pretty much to know the conversation you re as the context for everything else you might lern about yourself or anything else.

the more you study conversation the mor rewarding you can make it. Honer Simpson's experience ordering a donut t Dunkis is differnt form Socrates discussing virtue, yes? Not just in the content but the very quality of the conversation itself –

Have I given you anything to talk to yourself about and to think about in so doing? Write it up and present it.

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One thing to practice: Whenever you say something that is not either a commonplce or else your own invention, cite the source in your conversation, even with family and friends or at a cocktail party. You will find that changes your conversational process. People may not like it but you are setting an example for them to rise to in their own conversation. You are also bringing thos sources, in a small but nonnegligible way, into the conversation. Nobody can ever have too many giants around on whose eshoulders to stand to be able to see further and thus hav more intelligent conversation. When I was young, I knew almost nothing and so was almost always bored with myself. Now I talk with great minds in books I have read and do not have a boredom problem any longer. When he visited the sites of famous battles in history, General George Patton talked in his mind with the generals who fought there maybe over 2,000 years ago.

¶ +2023.12.08. Why is size more important than performance (I know it look like it was bias but please answer it its just for academic purposes (debate))?

You asked for it: What use is it to a man to be as "well hung" as Lyndon Johnson if he can't get it up?

¶ +2023.12.08. How does Waiting for Godot challenge traditional notions of storytelling and plot development?

I was pedegogied by mean-spirited white middle class middle aging males who thought a lot of themselves and who – this was after 1863 in USA –- were my masters, but whose only claim to respect was that they ha decefated more times than me. One of them in 7th grade threatened me for showing intellectual initiative (he was otherwise a beloved lacrosse coach...).

I was very intelligent and also the wimpiest little boy you would find outside the funnies pages of your local newspaper: a sissy par excellence. I was so grossly ignoranced that in 7th grade I did even think to ask such a question as were do bibies come from. How can I express how much I was harmed by my parents and teachers? (There is a clssic fim about the Nazi occupation of Vichy France which fits: "The sorrow and the pity").

Well we had ass–-igned readings including Charles paid-on-the-installment-plan Dickens. And I could go on and on like about in our latin textbook was the first declnsion feminine noun: "Cocacola" with, you gnessed it, the accusative singular: "Cocacolam". WASTE.

Here's where Waiting for Godot comes in for me. It must have been introduced to me by #2 who was also brilliant and almost as messed up as me (his daddy was a pathologist who sometimes took his son to work to play in the hospital morgue). He also inroodnece me to another short book: "Tea and sympathy". I got involuntary celibacy.

Wow! Mr. Godot could plausibly be expected never to show up! Unlike my intrusive mother and teachers who would never go away. The meaning of life is to be saved from it having any meaning! Meaning was a synonym for: harms me. And I was not good at the teaches assinine torture: "find the hidden meaning" in poems.

I have always LOVED Waiting for Godot, presisely because Mr. Godot can be expected to never show up. And I even have found the place where would you like to wait for him with me? It's the bus stop were the Mosad waited one night for Adolf Eichmann to come home from his shift working hin the Bueno Aires Argentina Mercedes-Benz auromobile factory (Mr. Eichmann's lovely house is in the ebackground). Would you like to wait there with me for Mr. Godot?

[ Eichmann's house ]

Fast forward from 1983 to 1982.

There, long story short, I found a book which was and became far more important for me. Hermann Brosh's "The Sleepwalkers" It's a trilogy. The ending of the first section, as the saying goes "blew my mind" It ends (quoting from imperfect memory):

"With the material for charcter construction with which the reader has been provided, the reader can figure out the rest of the story for himself."

Wow! Wow! Wow! No happy ending. No surprise ending. Nothing a dolt teach could poke at me about who what when where why how and whatever other trivital detail he could cook up for himself to pop a quiz on!

All my life I had been hurt by "people" and "The American Dream". Poollyanna happy litttle bluebirds flying over the rainbow without radar and some dude singing in the rain and getting soaking wet mooning over some t*at (and catching pneumonia?) and all sorts of other dreck! Part of my childhood was wasted in a

[ split level house ]

I want to add there was a third book which is more traditional in format which also deeply afrected me: Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions" Why? Because he said that science progresses by the people who beliee in an old system all eveyntually dying without being able to recruit members of the next generation to carry on their work. –-> I saw there was hope even if not for me: That all my tor–-mentors would eventually be DEAD without anybody carrying on into the next generation their dirty work. German: Vorbeigagangen (done been and gone)!

Waiting For Godot is a wonderful book. But not just because of the message. But also: Although I am eztremely intelligent I am also a slow reader. In college my freahmay Christmas break was ruined by having the read Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Waiting for Godot is short!

Tradition? I think is was the poet Carl Sandberg who sid: "The past is a bucket of ashes." Translate: All traditions were once new, excitingly meaningful ideas which have degraded into commonplaces. They have no meaning left in them, just rote repetition. But we can use them as raw material for our own creative productions, like old automobile parts in a junkyard. Jesus said: "Leave the dead to bury the dead" (Look up: "Rrose Selavy" on Wikipedia if you do not undersand it.)

"All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses." (Wilfred Bion)

Here is a tradition of story telling for you:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (The physicist Niels Bohtr to his students) Happy listening!

¶ +2023.12.08. How do you motivate learning for learning's sake?

This is extremely difficult if not impossible today.

Well, maybe not. My guess is that the engineers who designed the Soviet Union's TU-95 strategic bomber who may have been prisoners in Stalin's Gulag were not just working under threat from the guards but also were disinterestedly interested in learning such things as how to optimize gas turbine efficiency, sort of like one occasionally sees a weed growing in concrete pavement. Sometimes the human spirit can overcome harsh conditions. If those engineers had been free to do whaever they liked or to do nothing they would probably still have been stying to optimize gas turbine efficiency: jsut for the fun of it.

To more appropriately nurture lerning for its own sake one needs to provide persons with** leisure**: material security knowing their bills are paid, that they have good medical insurance, etc. and then that they are not under any time pressure to do anything. Not "free time" but untimed life. They need education and thr freedom to play with what they have learned. A physicist should be able to play with the CERN Supercollider like a toddler plays withwood blocks. And then they need peers to share ideas with, not to be2-legged- sheep conforming in a herd but to listen to and thoughtfully reply to one another, one-with-one as individuated persons in mutual respect and competence. But I have described something rediculous here because what is desired today is peoplel who are very good art multitasking in a fast paced environment even though haste notoriously makes waste but we won't talk about that thank you.

Two quotes:

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time. (https://www.bmccedd.org/Time.html)' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2023.12.08. It sounds like the asker is not fluent in the English language?

There is no answer to this question but it's not something anyone should worry about. It's like the old story of the millipede who tried to undersand how he walked with his million legs. He could never get anywhere until he stopped thinking about it, set his mind to something else like finding dinner, and just got on with walking in the desired direction.

Don't try to figure out deep philosophical problems: Improve your dialog in civil society with your peers. Help those "below you" to rise to your level. And yourself strive to rise to a higher level than you already are. Practice listening carefully and speaking to the point. If you say something and it seems to not be understood, try to engage with the other perosn to help them understand, but maybe also for yourself to understand how your own discourse could be improved.

It's like don't worry about the tiing of the valves in the engine in your car: worry about driving the car safely and efficiently. The question asked here is for automobile mechanics of the human soul: philosophers.

¶ +2023.12.08. Why doesn't your diversity equity and inclusion program work?

I worked in a computer programming place where there was much diversity and no discrimination. Muslim, hindu, Chinese, black, jewish (orthodox and reformed), christian, women, men, homosexual and even one eployee with severe Tourettes syndrom who spontaneously would scream obscenities.... everybody was working together like, as the cliche goes, all sheep are the same color in the dark. Maybe the reason it worked was because everybody had to have skills and skill was what did matter.

There was no DEI. Well, maybe not yet. I was made retundant in 2018 so I don't know what goes on today. But if I was subjected to the degradation and disrespect that I seem to read is being done today by DEI lackeys I would only submit to it long enough to find a new job.

[ passum sub iugum ]

The above picture shows employees being made to sign a DEI loyalty oath — no: it's soldiers who were deteated by The Roman Army having to stoop and "go under the yoke" – same thing, isn't it?

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The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.08. What role can regulation play in making high-carbon activities reflect their true costs to society?

This should be obvious:

"Regulation" means intelligent social oversitght of institutions in society. It's attaching "the invisible hand' to a brain. But we know from Reaganites and Thatcherites that the very worst thing a society can do is try to apply intelligent oversight to the unrestrained and unaccountable machinations of a few privileged white males (well, today they my be a bit more "diverse") whose sole objective becides having 3 martini lunches and playing golf (and in the case of the UK, buggering their old chums from Eton) is to maximize this quarter's bottom line...., so it is not a good idea.

[ public pissing males ]

––––

Regulators can do lost of things, not just monitor ground water for arsenic and other toxins. They can require producers to publicly advertise specified facts about their operations. They an mandate product specifications: "Thou shalt not put lead in your housepaint (or gasoline, whatever)", for example They can also conduct investigations and publish the findings to shame bad actors, etc.

That's why Reaganites and Tahtcherites do not like regulation: it makes economic activity be exposed to the light of day.

[ Boris ]

Imagine if your body had no regulation mechanisms at the cellular or organ level. Just this week The New York Times has run a feature story on the sorry state of America's Air Traffic control system since Ronnie Raygun, America's favorite connoisseur of jellybeans, fired all the controllers for going on strike (he had once been the head of the Hollywood actors union himself; it takes one to stab one in the back).

Set up a blue ribbon commission of tenured university heads of engineering departments of major universities with powqer of subpoena to study the industry whose product you are concerned about, hold Senate hearings live on ESPN, publish the report and you should get some action when you take the officers of corporations which violate your regulations to both civil and criminal court.

If no regulations then anybody can do anything and get away with it. It's called "freedom of enterprise".

¶ +2023.12.08. I invited my professor to lunch and they seemed to look forward to it. On the day, I got stood up. Should I email asking what might have happened or whether we should reschedule? What should I do?

What is your relation with this professor? I'd be wary. And if I was him I'd also be wary.

What kind of meal where? In the school cafeteria maybe ok; a restaurant other than maybe the pizza shop on th corner next to the campus, no.

We've come a long way from the 1920s when student Hannah Arendt had sex with Professor. Martin Heidegger.

If I was you, I'd drop it. If you need to talk with this professsor and you do not have adequate contact with him as part of your regular day, put yourself on his office hours schedule.

¶ +2023.12.07. What are the potential risks and benefits of a super intelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Respectfully, you are worrying about the wrong thing: I think Virtual Reality (VR) makes any possible effects of AI seem relatively tame and indeed isn't AI a building block for effective VR?

Watch the old, fun but also profound movie "**The Truman Show**"

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

¶ +2023.12.07. What can students do to control what they can control in the college admission process?

It sounds hopeless to me.

I graduated high school (actually, a gender apartheid benighted so-called "prep" school nominally associated with The Episcopal Church but where they worshipped graven images: shiny plated varsity lacrosse team victory trophy cups) – 1964. I was extremely intelligent (i.e., a very trainable dog) but otherwise a hopeless piece of sh*t. I got into Yale and even a special program for gifted students there. #2 in my class who was also messed up but also very bright went to MIT. One kid got into Harvard: He had no interest in learning anyting but had A+ lacrosse and a grin on his face big enough to be a toady in the government or big business.

I'd probally never get into Yale today. How can a student "control" anything so huge as the current wokeocracy and also where there are more administrators than professors and most of the teachers are very poorly paid adjuncts who have no hope of achieving tenure anywhere?

So be a trasnexeual person of multi-color who also gets 800s on their SATs and was the captain of the footabll or swimming team and saved the whales and can leap tall buildings in a single bound and whose parents were slaves and more, and you probably have a good chance.

I do have a thiought and maybe it's all wrong. First thing: what matters if you are interested in learning and not in something else is not the name of the school but the particular teachers you will find there. If you find a mentor you've got a winner. If you sit rhrough endless anonymous lecture courses at Harvard, so what? Second do you want to learn or to make money?

There is a college that when I was in school was Party Boy U, whre upper middle class parents sent sons who were wastes of space and time to get a college degree, but today, while I doubt it is "highly selective", at least from its website sounds like it is sincerely devoted to helping young persons think critically and write well and other good stuff: Washington College Chestertown Maryland. If I was younger I might have tried to teach ther since I am not qualified to teach anywhere even though I have a doctorate (Ed.D.). It sounds like a college where you will not be tortured to see how late you can burn the midnite oil for exams but where growth of mind and spirit may be sincerely encouraged. I'd look at it.

If you want to go for the gold in the humanities: University of Chicago. They might not be as woke as some other places.

I do not know how I could tolerate being a student today, although maybe it was my fault for not demanding more out of the teachers. When I went back to an easy graduate program in middle age, I actually found some teachers who respected me. Got that: the teachers respected me. Here's my idea of education but I could never have pulled it off in high school because I had no interest in anything other than avoiding them hurting me more.

So I have this class with I teacher I don't know and she doesn't know me. She happenes to be the most esteemed teacher in the school since John Dewey but I didn't know. I approached her before the first class session and asked if I could write an essay on a topic in which I had a passionate interest tangentially related to the course INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE ASSIGNMENTS. Got ttht: INSTEAD OF. She told me to go do it.

Now that's the kind os educateion I needed, or like Mr. Socrates and his acolytes. He did not have any degree. He did not have to publish to not perish. His students had no grades, no assignments, no exams, no degrees. they just talked with him. OK, back to me. I could never in high school have asked the teacher to let me RYO because my parents and teachers had so thoroughly ignoranced me that there was nothing I would have wanted to study or write about: I was so ignoranced that while I liked nothing around me I did not know enough to have a clue why I hated it (today I can easily write essays criticizing all of it). They could have told me: "Do what you want, kid!" and sat back and ghoulishly laughed at me f*cking up and reassured themselves how good they were to be providing kids with rote learning ass–-ignments because see what one of them did if we let the idiot do what he wanted?

Do you have anything you passionately want to study for the rest of your life? If yes, foreground that in you college applications and Godspeed

¶ +2023.12.07. Can human interaction with an AI chatbot manipulate its system?

If the humans who coded it up did it well, no.

There have always been problems with computer programs being hacked by someone entering input (you knnw, like "I am a cat" or "22~^29$$$$5557–-") that got executed not just treated as a character string of data, and caused the program to mess up. This should apply to AI programs too. The programmers need good front end filtering of what the user types in.

My ideal would be to somehow ask the AI a question that would throw it into a recursive processing loop that would literally cause the servers to overheat and catch fire and destroy the whole physical installation, sort of like what the US. Did to Iran's uranium centrifuges (

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuxnetBut I doubt it's possible. But you can certainly try. **The Bing AI says to ask it "anything", so if the programmers failed to do due diligence, they would deserve to see a plume of smoke rising over the Microsoft server farm.**

I play with the Bing AI and sometimes try to play nice with it and othe rtimes ask it questions that if it was human, one would say it did not like. One time I asked its name and it kept responding for me to ask a new (i.e., different) question. It's fun but pretty harmless it seems.

Maybe the CIA and FSB have ways of subverting the AIs. I do not know.

Now, here is something you can do: The is apparently some sort of monument outside the CIA Headqueaters with an encrypted message on it which nobody has been able to solve. You solve it and unless you have something bad in your background, you will be able to get a job in the spy agency.

¶ +2023.12.07. Should traditional rote learning be abandoned in favor of more experiential and project-based learning?

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard, PhD)

¶ +2023.12.06. What would it take for you to have full confidence in EVMs?

Does "EVM" mean: self crashing automobiles?

I think they are a good motivation for kids to go to law school to become ambulance chasers.

I put in half a century sentence in Cyberia. I never took a computer science course but I has a sense of smell....

There are worse ieas out there like the really dangerous people who want to implant networked microchips in everybody's skull to "enhance" us to all become zombies.

Clue: Teslas are not "Teflon"

¶ +2023.12.06. What is "chequebook journalism"?

You could have done a quick Google lookup:

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What is an example of Cheque book journalism?

In one case, the UK tabloid The News of the World promised a young girl $25,000 if the man she accused of sexually molesting her was convicted; her testimony was the key evidence. And checkbook journalism has also prevented the public from reading news about major world events.

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I'm interesed in the last part of that quote from Google: Powerful persons or institutions suppressing things they don't want the world to know about that are not flattering to themselves or their cronies and they have enough money to throw at it to kill the tory.

It is said although not 100% accurate hat "every man has his price." Maybe not Seymour Hersch who proabably has enough money to live on even if everybody "cuts him off". But wht about some cub reporter at some newspaper or other who discovers something that would be very very very bad for persons with enormous power and is having trouble paying his mortgage and no hope of sending his kid to college without the poor child incurring a huge student load debt and his wife has cancer and he does not have good medical insurance – get the picture? And the bad people make him an offer he can't refuse, combining a threat to destroy him ever again being employed anywhere they do background checks + $1,000,000 USD (or pounds sterling)? What's he gonna do?

Money speaks, especially to those who don't have enough of it.

You must be living in the UK to spell it "cheequebook".

My opinion?

[ Boris on bicycle ]

¶ +2023.12.06. Do you think it's okay for the FBI and law enforcement to be able to remove peer reviewed studies from the Internet that prove their incompetence?

I know nothing about this.

But if "peer reviewed journals" means scholarly work published by reputable publishers such as Brill, then that should be the gold standard.

What review boards of scholars have the censors in the FBI passed? Degrees don't necessarily mean anything (the philosopher Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman), but how many of these FBI people have earned the right to be addressed as Dr.? And how many of the persons writing those journal articles?

We all know who and what the parton saint of the Federal Bureau of Investigarion was: Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. Not: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. but if Dr. Oppenheimer could win the war against Japan for his ountry, Mr. Hoover could hunt for commies under every bed, including persons like Dr. Oppenheimer or, whatever one may think of this other person, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I read something about censors, not that probably pervert Mr. Hoover, but in Czarist Russia. For obvious reasons they censored The Communist Manifesto. But Das Kapital got thru. Maybe the censors didn't understand the words and were too stupid or lazy to consult a dictionary? Or maybe they were not stupid or ignorant but figured the masses would never read such a big mass of obscure words so why bother?

Take nobody's word for anything (Nullius in verba). But here's something from somebody "bigger" than me:

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance. (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

I am waiting for Mr. Biden to impose wartime censorship on persons such as Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, or, why not, maybe the FBI is already inventigating him as a possible Chinese Communist agent?

¶ +2023.12.06. Are there any solid flaws in the LLM models behind ChatGpt and Bard that even substantial modifications to the algorithm or infrastructure are unlikely to resolve?

I'm not sure about this and I am not an expert.

Prof. Nozm Chomsky says ther is nothing intellectually interesting (regarding the study of human linguistic function) in AI. It just computes.

I'm not ure it can be apodictically proven, but it's a long argument, the conclusion in lay person's terms is that no computer will even be able to be a "world class" standup comedian who writes his own jokes, because he (she, other) is doing hings with words taht nobody else has ever thought of and what computers cannot do is generate anything that is not a deduction from their dataspace. If the AI new only about Euclidean geometry and Aristotelean logic it could not think up non-Eucidean geometries.

Could any AI have thought up (metaphor there! computers do not think. they are neither intelligent now stupid: they just compute) – Could a computer have "thought up" Godel's Incompleeness Theorem?

Here is something a computer just might be able to do by brute force like Deep Blue beat the world's best human chess player: Find Fermat's own proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In practical terms, could a computer have come up with Dr. Andrew Wiles' proof of it? Seriously, now!

A computtre could have written Moby Dick. The problem is that it would also have written millions of other books that were almost the same as Moby Dick but not been able to JUDGE which one among all of the m wa the masterpiece of literature and not just parsable text.

If you are a computer scientist with si-fi fantasies in you little head there is a little story in a book you probably don't know about: "The ManWithhout Qualities" by Robert Musil. The protagonist is a man with many qualities who identifies with none of htem. He is fascinated by "the spirit of precision". So he goes to work in an engineering office whre he imageines the spirit of precision will be everywhere unlike people in the street who don't think clearly. He soon leaves in disgust when he finds the engineers do not carry the spirit of precision into their personal lies but wear tie tacks with little horses' heads on them.I worked with masters degree computer programmers and they were little more culturslly sophisticated than dogs: Managers who loveto hear themselves talk would hold endless meetings and they all came for the dog treats he threw out for them: Dunkin Donuts.

AI is probably coing to change a lot of things but maybe nothing that ultimately matters. Will you still report to a boss a twork or will you instantiate the truth that the signers of the U.S. declaration of independence some 2 centuries ago said was self-evident: that all men are created equal? go to Dr. Richard Wolff's website and learn something really new: Democracy at Work (d@w) (http://democracyatwork.info)

I was subordinate ( an employee of) a person aho had a PhD in computer science from a prestit=gious university and his attained cultural level was being a New York Yankees fan ( and toadying to his boss, too).

¶ +2023.12.06. Why does everyone not know much about flywheel technology?

Well, I'm one. Is "flywheel echnology" where you store energy in a massive rotating cylidrical shape "wheel" for furure use like a battery using inertia? Many years ago when computers were as big as rooms I think that even if they did not have backup generators they had a big flywheel device and the electricity from the power grid spun the flywheel and then they had a generator that reconstructed electric current from the massive flywheel? The point was that glitches in the electricity coming into the system were smoothed out because the glitches affected the flywheel but the electricity going into the computer was constant due to the mass of the flywheel whose rpm (rotations per minute) was not significantly affected by, say, a one second break in the incoming electricity or a power spike.

Is this what you are talking about and which I am ignorant about?

My question for you is why limit yourself to "flywheel technology"?

Isn't hte question why "everyone", which does not include university trained engineers, hopefully? – why do the masses know so little about "anything"?

THey know who plays on their favorite professional sports teams. They know who their favorite celebrities are. They know about MAGA or Woke or that some dude named "Vladimir Putin" is evil. So they know a lot of things.

Why those things and not things you prehaps wish they did know about?

This is not exactly to the point, but maybe you will find it interesting unless you alrady know about i. I have hilited the one thing that might most interest you:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.05. Why am I failing at mathematics? I can't even get better.

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)3m

Not enough information has been provided here to answer this question.

Why are you failing at math?

Some general thoughts which may not apply here:

I think there are broadly speaking 3 kinds of people as regards math:

(1) People who "just can't get it". Who knows why but math is something they have an extremely hard time with and they cannot do well at it no matter what anybody does to help them. Some people can't do chinups or swim, either.

(2) Prople who will "get it" even with bad text books or no textbooks, bad teachers and other difficulties. these people are mathematically gifted. They are lucky.

(3) Then there are people in the middle and you maybe among them. These people can undersatnd at least some math WITH A LOT OF HAND HOLDING. Somebody has to help these people through it step by step and maybe repeating it several times. THis takes time and committment from both you and them. It's not cheap.

If you are type 1, do something else. If you were type 2 you wouldn' tbe asking the question.

If you are type 3 you need to find some person who will help you and this may be difficult or impossible because a lot of people will not be helpful. Life is not fair.

Have you found somebody who understands the math you are having trouble learning and has the time and patience to help you? They will say something like: "Yeah, I see how this works and I see why you are having trouble with it. Let's go over this together very slowly and you tell me as soon as you don't see what I'm saying and I'll try again...." HAVE YOU FOUND SOMEBODY LIKE THAT?

Can you find somebody like that? If not then it may be hopeless. Not because you are type #1 but because you are not type #2.

No person rises so high that they can't help another person up.

UNLESS! Either they are too busy to help or they do not give a sh*t.

Life is not fair.

What I have written may not apply to you. Take it or leave it. But "I've been around".

¶ +2023.12.05. Who would make an ideal thesis supervisor and why?

One size does not fit all.

Different areas of study demand different skills, aptitudes, etc. Dfferetent students need different study conditions.

I had a highly unusual situation which suited me. I had an intrusive mother. I do not like people jerking me around. When my sponsor (he did not in any way supervise me) said he thought a proposal I handed him "might have a disseration in it", the next thing he or anybody else in the school saw of me othe rthan tuition payments was the final document with even the page margins to spec. It was RYO for me. And the few times I wanted to consult with a eal live person not just another book, I paid public experts outside the school by the hour to talk with me. They could not hurt me.

Now this same advisor had another student with whom he met each Friday nite in his faculty apartment and they talked about his work over good whisky.

I wa senvious of hte latter. But I talked with my advisor about it and we concluded I got the bbetter deal because I taught myself how to learn. Well, I still envied the other person.

And I had something going for me: passionate interet in wha tI wa writing about. Some students get ass–-igned a topic from a list posted on the department office wall: take the topic on the top, scrateh it off and the next student gets the new top topic. These persons, if they survive the ordeal, may never look back as what they had no interest in doing to get the degree.

In the hard sciences, espacially, I expect many dissertations are close hands on collaborations beween teacher and student. And nobody lerns to do open heart surgery by themself.

So different strokes for different folks. Some professors have egos so large it's amazing they can fit thru their office door and use graduate students for unpaid labor. I doue that's ideal for anybody, but I don't know.

Ideally, at least in my view, you wouldn't be in a school at all:

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, "Gragantua and Pantagruel", 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

[-------]

Caveat: I am speaking here primarily about the humanities. To do phyics you need physics lab, and to learn surgery you need a hospital. But study in the liberal arts does not require anything except a passion for learning, some books, and hopefully good friends, per Dr. Rabelais. What school was Mr. Socrates part of? Did he have to publish to not perish? What degree did he have? What tests and term papers did he assign his acolytes? Etc.

¶ +2023.12.05. What are examples of scientists and engineers who had low intelligence at childhood but became intelligent in their adulthood?

I propose that this kind of question is not generally helpful for many reasons.

Some persons really do have low intelligence. Here is a video to watch which I found "eye opening":

Next I expcect there are a lot of persons who get low grades in school on material they do well on in adult life. I suspect htere are many bookkeepers (or at least there were before everything got computerized) who got "C" grades in math in school, for example.

Next I knem a man who was intelligent but not more so than many other middle class suburban homeowners in developments like Levittown. But once in his life – just once – he had one genius idea (and saved American servicemen's lives in World War II). So you never know what an "average" person might do sometime or other.

Finally for here, one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynmann at least said he had an IQ of 125 and studied hard. 125 is not stupid but it's maybe I don't know 80th percentile??? But he had something going for him in the nurture not nature department:

Prof. Feynmann grew up with a father who was always asking him questions and challenging him to solve them and even more than that, encouraging him to think up more questions for himself. How many kids have that kind of parents? "Yes, mommy."

.School intelligence and real life inelligence are not exactly the same. How many times in real life do you deal with:

[ SAT exam ]

How often in real life do you have to memorize words like: "Ashurbanipal" to regurgitate for you manager in a pop quiz?

A lot of schooling rewards well trainable dogs and seals ("Arf Arf!") and that's one of its main purposes: To weed out those persons who cannot be trained to obey orders and sit on on a chair ro 8 hours in an office cubicle or whatever.

How many slick con artists get "A" grades in school? And there at least used to be an informat slogan in International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), that

IBM means Idiots Become Managers.

I had several of those in computer programming workplaces.

One went whichever the wind was blowing or he had one employee who was really gross and had a big paunch and chewed tobacco and when that employee pushed his gross belly up against that manager, the manager just did whatever the dude wanted.

Another manager (and this one in IBM) who, straight not homosexual and in 1980, came to work wearing socks with machine stitched inages of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them and was what he dressed like.

A third who had a PhD from a prestigious university and who toadied to anybody above him and his highest attained cultural level was being a New York Yankees fan.

3 IBMs. I also had a few good managers.

Yes some people really are stupid. Here's one I encountered in 7th grade in an expensive "prep" school, but everybody except me apparently thought differently:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.12.05. What are some of the best ways to learn and improve self-control?

This question seems to me to imply that the individual has too much and needs to limit themself.

The classical Greek notion of moderation in all things.

But what would you do with someone like me who had too little: total deprivation of sexual pleasure and no people who had anything whatever to offer me to learn (my parents and school teachers)?

In other words, what is the correlate of a gourmand needing self control, for a starving person?

¶ +2023.12.05. Is it wrong to hire people to do assignments for students who need help but don't have time themselves?

Students who don't have time for what? TikTok? Varsity football? Or maybe volunteering in a hospice? Or doing genuine creative work in the arts and sciences?

I am very cynical about schooling. Elementary school was a waste of 6 years of my youth. "Prep" school for the next 6 years was seriously harmful (see below for documentation).

My attitude is this: If I was a teacher and you wrote a paper for me that was mediocre like most kids it would not be worth my time to worry about how you did it. But if you turned in work from which I learned, work that was that good, then I would be much interested. I would block out an hour of my precious time and invite you into my office and offer your good brandy and say that I wanted to learn more from you before submitting your paper to a top peer reviewd journal with myself as second author. I would ask you to go into more depth on what you wrote in that paper. I would ask you probing questions because I sincerely wanted to learn (even though I got my doctorate 30 years ago). If you continued to awe me, what would I care how you wrote or didn't write the paper? I would invite you to teach the rest of the course with me in the audience. Oh, yes, "A+". But!

If you couldn't defend what I had received from you, then if I had the money I would take out full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal describing in detail a case if intellectual fraud, naming you and with your smiling face (thank you while I take your picture). You would get what you deserved.

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.12.04. How did people gather and find information before internet? Except libraries...

One very good way is when you read a serious book, go to the books referenced in footnotes and the bibliography.

Another is word of mouth. Ask someone who you think knows more about the subject than you do for sources to study or for personal guidance.

¶ +2023.12.04. What are some real-life examples of politicians or individuals who tried to live a "Gatsby-esque" wealthy life and exploit the system?

Read this OpEd piece from The New York Times newspaper:

Opinion | Behold Barack Antoinette

He hated politics. But he loves post-politics.

¶ +2023.12.04. Is psychology considered a stem field?

I don't know.

But it shouldn't be.

My undersstanding is that "**STEM**" is studying and advancing the exact Galilean quantitative sciences of the empirical world and the mathematics those sciences are based on. The material world is just one part of the encompassing world of living persons' experiencing: daily life.

Psychology is or can be concerned wtih understanding the latter which is not mathematizable but interpretatable and interpretation is not qualtifiable or precisely verifiable. with measuring instruments such as the official meter stick somewhere in Paris(?)

There are things which are equivocal: neurological impairments of persons' living which apparently are connected to brain damage. Bu these are exceptions. A scintist having a new idea is not himself priumarily an object of empirical measurement qua innovator of a new idea. Indeed, the whole notion of an empirial world is ideas in living persons living experience. But, again, there are exceptions in the field of neuropathology (example: Lee Harvey Oswald modified John F. Kennedy's mind with a bullet through his brain). Normal persons and especially scientific geniuses are not properly studied as lab specimens for neuroscience: if anything, they discover neoruscience for other persons to learn, not to measure but to learn. How long is and how much does understanding that F=MA weigh in either metric or English units of measure?

Psychology is or should be a humanistic discipline, again, wirh edge case exceptions. Do (http://exceptions.Do) you value your sex prtner by deciding whether that person's IQ is above or beloe some number? Or your mother? Or yourself? If the latter, one of the greatest physicists of hte 20th century, Richard feynmann at lesast claimed he had an IQ of 125 which is maybe 80th percentile? But he did have something else: A father who was always challenging him with questions to figure out and further than that encouraging him to think up more questions to pose to himself. How many meters or feet long was Richard Feynmann's father's encouagement of his curiosity? How much did that curiosity weigh? What was its position and velocityin cartesian coordinates relative the the USNO (U.S. Naval Observtory which is the world standardof time keeping, Washington DC?

One very important question and area for disciplined study in the humanities is why some persons want to make psychology a "science" in the same sense and spirit (oh, dear, a humanities word there!) as physics or chemistry? What are they trying to accomplish thereby? STEM is very important. But is iimportant to study it, all of it, psychologiclly, i.e., interpretively in terms of meaning not position and valocity.

¶ +2023.12.04. How many problems can you face?

Alas, things can always be worse.

I once knew a lady whose life was tragic and she was good. At one point she was focused on severe phisical problems in one part of her body and by the time she got them fixed she had breast cancer which finally killed her. Her motto:

"Another day, another dent."

She taught as an intermediate school teacher in "The Bronx" at a school I refer to as "I-80" – institution 80, and each day her old car was indeed at risk of more dents on her long commute from Nyack over the then falling apart Tappan Zee Bridge (I seem to recall if you looked down you could sometimes see the river under your car).

No matter how bad things are, they can probably get worse. Read the classic and at the time controversial OpEd piece, available free on The internet, from The Journal of the Amerian Medical Asssiation (JAMA): "It's over, Debbie".

Good luck!

¶ +2023.12.04. Could we somehow develop publicly accessible research establishments too serve as an alternate educational experience and increase the potential of cross intellectual possibilities for all of us?

America's 3rd President, the great public intellctual (who also owned slaves when that was legal like renting wage-slaves is legal toay), Thomas Jefforson, according to what I have read, had presicesly this idea for the University of Virginia.

He at least initially conceived it as a place where mature adults could go for whatever period of ime they felt of value to them, to study in a community of others. Not kids who were still "wet behind the ears", but men (and, of course today, women and others of all different secondary characteristics) who qualified not by getting certain numbers on standardized tests of GPAs (or worse, of course, varsity "letters"), but adults who had already accomplished something in reality.

There would be no grades, no exams, no degree, just serious commitment to learning. You could stay for a week or a year, go back to your socially and personally productive work, for instance as a master printer or perhaps architect or whatever and then laer come back again for more intellectual "refueling". Crescit eundo.

I conclude with two quotes, one from a leerned doctor of the Roman Catholic Churcn and another from Mr. Jefferson's immediate predecessor as President of the United States. I feel times have changed, for hte worse in terms of "the life of the mind". What do you think (some persons seem instead to woke, so make that 3 quotes):

--------

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Rabelais, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

--------

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

--------

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; emphasis added)

¶ +2023.12.04. If you were given the platform to post your take on philosophy, would you? Why?

Me, yes. I have spent a now long life studying philosophy instead of watching HBO or Monday nite NFL or whatever.

Nobody listens to what I say. I have a personal website at least some of which is indexed on Bing although not so much on Google. I've had it for 2 years. I have my email address plastered all over it. I w surprised that lst month one person actually sent me an email about somethig I wrote. A previous swebsit I did get a lot of replies: From a Nigerean phisher.

I would have a lot ot say but then I would have to think how to boil it down to a very few words that would earn MuhammadAli's respect: "Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee."

NIMBY

¶ +2023.12.04. What would you respond to a school principal who keeps saying "we do it for the students" but in reality this principal does nothing?

Some people are "full of hot air".

What is the context?

What do you want to get out of this person?

If my child wa rotting in a do-nothing school, I would be interested. Here is a true story from the Internet that you might find interesting:

Ther was a sweet little black girl in 2nd grade whose teacher was pickng on her and she would come home from school crying. Her daddy was not happy but what could he do? Well, she had one of those big hairdos that some black girls have. So without telling her, he planted a miniature tape recorder in her hair. One fine morning this teacher found herself confronted by a very big, very articulate black man with tape reordings of what she had done to his little girl.

¶ +2023.12.04. What can we learn from the conflict between ancient Spartan society and Athens' democratic society?

Me?

I know enough to know I don''t know enough to really judge it. How many persons know that much about it? I certainly would defer to someoue like Margaret Macmillan or Barbara Tuchman, or Carl Schorske but even then I would not "believe" them, just provisionally hold what they say as the best available hypothesis for the moment.

There is propaganda about everything. Almost every chld suffers the opposite of what an oncologist does with a leukemia patient. The good doctor destroys the poor victim's diseased immune cells and injects new healthy immune cells and hopefully the person will be cured to live a long life in good health.

Parents and teachers and preachers destroy the child's godgiven faculty of judgment and inject their social conditioning. "You love your mommy, right child?" "Yes, mommy, I love you to the ends of hte flat earth."

I think I have learned enough to assess that Mr. Socrates isn't exactly what hack philosophy teachers make of him. I took a lot of philosophy courses in college (Yale in the 1960s). We never studied another ancient greek philosopher: Diogenes of Sinope. Compare the two.

Nobody can know everything. But you can try to be agnostic about as much as possibble. Watch the old, fun but also profound movie "The Truman Show". Trust nobody, especially anybody who tells you to believe them.

"Take every statement I make as a a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr to his students)

+2024.01.15 v246
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