40 karma · joined March 14, 2015
We should minimize the amount of decisions people make about government. The best way to do this is to mostly do away with the federal government and maybe the state government, deferring as much as possible to small, local communities where it's possible for people to be reasonably informed.
Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about currency? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 economics classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of bitcoin or some alternative currency... similarly the requirement that someone be code-literate and have algorithmic "chops" to change bitcoin is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what a distributed system is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.
Please don't call me arrogant. (However much you might dislike me I can assure you I dislike myself more.) I don't have any pretensions to being intelligent or having something worthwhile to say. What I wrote was a knee-jerk reaction to what I read, and I criticized his character because the idea of his existing as a person "made me angry", and because I could not fully articulate my problems with the content. Maybe someone else will be able to do that. Part of it is that I spent a portion of my life believing in things like "self enrichment through education" or "being a well rounded person" -- the general sentiments expressed in the article -- but now I think they're meaningless. I learned Homeric Greek and read parts of the Odyssey in it, but the idea of an engineer going home after a day of work and reading the Odyssey in Greek and thinking to himself, "boy, this really makes me think; I am a well-rounded person. Maybe tomorrow I will start Gravity's Rainbow" strikes me as ridiculous and makes me laugh, again for a reason I can't fully articulate, probably because I once had thoughts like that and I no longer do.
There is nothing wrong with that last quote about his writing style. It is vague to the point of meaninglessness. My experience with the humanities has taught me to reject most writing. In fact I have "unlearned" most of my writing style and now try to be as honest as possible. Many people assume I am uneducated, so I guess it's worked.
I said the article conflated STEM with "Asian educational systems", which are conflated with memorization. Read:
>But technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success. America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically-trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook. A country like Japan, by contrast, can’t do as much with its well-trained workers because it lacks many of the factors that produce continuous innovation.
>Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are oriented around memorization and test-taking. I went through that kind of system. It has its strengths, but it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving or creativity.
"No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write." Ironically the author has none of these skills, and the best thing for him to do would be to avoid the humanities and take several rigorous math courses -- maybe then he will learn how to define his terms and stop writing things that mean essentially nothing.
This is my real account. I joined a week ago. People seem to dislike everything I say.