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pnathan

Try reading 1800s literature. It'll awaken a certain appreciation for modern writing in you.

But the point is that there's a certain box smart people today in the 1975-1990 generation are put in.

* Get good grades

* Go to college

* Get job at company (alternatively, start your own company. That's pretty trendy today.)

* Find spouse

* Buy house

* Have kids

...etc.

Why bother? That's a good question. Why not simply drop out and go surfing? What's the point of the job? What's the point of having the money to buy stuff? Why use your intelligence, this intelligence that so many people have complimented, in the same way every other person like you has been doing?

It's a variant on the age old question - who are you, really? Why bother being you as you are now?

Maybe that explains it better. But the article really resonated with me.

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"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." --Bucky Fuller

Interesting quote. Where is it from?

Do you agree that we need to do more school? Lots of people indicate that much of American school really isn't about learning to think, it's more about passing the class, fitting in, mixed in with a heap of credentialism.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

I believe that he meant to keep learning and reaching...not stacking up degrees.

I love the ole' trimtab

Having been kicked out of school himself he probably did mean more about learning than about formal education. Though (IIRC) he did attribute much of the post-WWII technological innovation to soldiers going to university after the war.

I don't see what's specifically American about that. It's far worse in Asia, for one. I imagine it may have been better in Fuller's younger days.

Honestly, I can't speak to non-US schools. They might be better, worse, etc. I hear both. I do know about American - well, USA - schools. So I circumscribe my speech to ensure correctness.

Can you write a bit about what makes Asia far worse?

I think the majority of schools have two ways for students to get through schools.

One would be to skirt the system, prepare for exams, and basically retain hardly anything.(This happens extremely often now, especially because of the number of smart yet not-so-determined kids who can get away with coasting, but they don't realize that it'll cost them later.

American schools tend to be lenient on the amount of time required to be spent on school work which allows them leeway to pursue things interesting projects if they are so motivated.

The second is to actually learn the material and work your way through it, thus being able to handle the exams well, and getting something out of your education.

The large part of why students pick the first option is most of the time the material is not very challenging and students find it much easier to slack off than take an initiative to go above and beyond the standard curricula.

The flipside occurs in Asian schools, where while the material is not challenging, it does take a lot of time and effort (not mental, but just constant work) to do well, and survive. This albeit crushes the innovative side that students should nurture at a high school level.

If you're interested in education systems in other countries, then you may find this post, by an ex-lecture/prof from the UK talking about why he's not a lecturer any more, interesting:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080709051840/http://www.lambdas...

^_^

I can't speak for all countries either, but I live in Japan and study in general is very test-oriented (see Juku aka cram school, etc.) Students graduate university with little applied skills, so companies recruit with mostly little regard for the major (just a general separation humanities/science) then spend 1-2 years training them. University is in many regards a place where students learn how to fit in society. Getting in a good university, i.e. passing the very difficult admission test, mostly guarantees that you'll get a degree.

When I was a student here I had a class where you could get an A for submitting a copy of your notes, no test, no homework. A lot more had tests with "fill in the blanks" questions. Then there was the rare few classes which actually made you think, but in my experience these were at the graduate level.

    > Try reading 1800s literature.

Some of the most gripping literature I've ever encountered - thank you :-).

But seriously, why be dismissive (perhaps too strong a word - but mildly derisive at least) of such a wide swath of human culture that many admittedly find interesting to make a point that has nothing to with literature or writing style for that matter?

The grandfather post was whining about the length of the article. It's a completely specious complaint, made with fatuous disdain. Supposing that the grandfather post had read much of works pre-Hemingway, they would have realized that their callous dismissal of "tl;dr" was tremendously ignorant when compared to, e.g., War and Peace, Three Musketeers, or some of Sir Walter Scott's lesser-known works. In other words, primelens, I was preferring to be dismissive and deprecative of the grandfather's twitter-length reading abilities.

edit: Of course, coming out of Victorian works and then reading modern works feels like a breath air of simplicity and prose without a hint of purple... perhaps to the detriment of the moderns.

It's a completely specious complaint, made with fatuous disdain.

Hi, I wrote that post. I'd appreciate it if you didn't attribute factors like "fatuous disdain" and "twitter-length reading abilities" to me.

My point was not that long passages of writing are a bad thing in every context, ever. That you've extracted that from what I said speaks more about you than it does me. Pretty much every length of prose is appropriate somewhere. My point was that this length of text was not warranted for this story. The extra passages do not add to the story, they detract from it.

"World famous, highly regarded literature of the 1800s was long, therefore no passage of text can ever be too long" seems like a spectacularly self-defeating argument to me.

As a general rule replying to people who insult you is a status lowering move unless your response lowers their status. Do not engage with the enemy, it suggests you care, and if you don't care you can't lose.

Disagree. Don't atrophy your ability to care just so you can get Internet points.

Internet points are indeed worthless. Understanding that reacting to insults is usually a losing move socially and then failing to modify your behaviour is not just a losing move, it is a decision to lose. This is more true in real life than on the internet where it is much safer to read an attack on your ideas or positions as a direct personal attack.

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It's really not OK to say, "tl;dr - dull, pointless". That's the critique of a particularly young child. If you want to critique - fine, go ahead. Explain why corporate life can be fulfilling. Explain why the stable career is good; point out philosophical flaws in the argument for going off and doing a start-up based on personal angst. I'm quite sure that to the thoughtful critic, there are quite a few more ways to break down and point out issues.

But it's really not a story about "why I left X to start Y". Sure, that's the narrative. But the point of the story - that so timeworn story so fresh for each person who takes that journey - it's about "why Z at all".

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