Discussions of "Gifted"-ness Miss the Point
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
They miss it so because they are focusing on the capabilities that allow people to perform work rather than the capabilities for deciding what work should be done. This isn't the fault of the Times or Slashdot, as both have audiences among the Intellect Worker classes who are paid for mind work. Fact is that Einstein helped to discover nuclear energy, but he wasn't able to keep anyone from building an atomic bomb with his discovery. His job was the how of the matter.
The link to John Taylor Gatto's work has been posted in two places in this article's comments, and I recommend everyone read it. Our society has a special class of people - government officials, corporate managers and others - whose job it is to guide activity. They require no special amount of intelligence in any sense Slashdotters have conceived of it here and no special IQ score.
If I may digress for a moment, during the summer I was at a conference on homeschooling in Massachusetts and saw a talk on Multiple Intelligence Theory. The speaker went through all 7 standard intelligences: linguistic/verbal, spacial, logical/mathematical. kinesthetic, musical/auditory, intrapersonal and interpersonal, but also mentioned a theorized 8th intelligence: the existential. It is linked to intelligence that manifests itself in the study of such fields as philosophy and religion, giving insight into the what should be done and why areas of life.
Postulating the existence of that faculty for the moment, it would seem that our society nurtures a special upper class of people to use their Existential Intelligence, letting them decide what should be done and why, while the other classes are left to implement their decisions. This is where the focus of schooling needs to change. If the Existential Intelligence is real programs must be created and adapted to train people in its use. Even if it is not, we do our children a horrible disservice by depriving them of what up until this very century was considered the most important domain of the intellect, the study of philosophy.
My own ex-high-school was an example of the dismal state of why and what teaching, possessing only 1 single-semester (half of a school year) class on philosophy, which was linked to nothing else, unpublicized and generally only met if by chance enough students signed up each semester. This must change. Students must graduate high school knowing as much of Socrates and Locke and Huxley (examples off the top of my head) as of Physics, Mathematics and English Literature. Orwell's "1984" should be read as more than history. The philosophes of the Enlightenment should be read and debated as more than mere history. Students should even have the opportunity to swim the seas of Talmud if they desire so and have no sectary objection.
Then perhaps the Einsteins of today and tomorrow will be able to keep the Bomb from being built off their work if they so please. The greatest gift we can give students is the ability to make decisions for themselves, and that is the tool we hand them when we teach philosophy. It may not win them a $50,000 scholarship now, but it will probably help them earn just as much money later. After all, it does so for the business and political elites.
You are unfortunately correct. Get your ass off the drugs as soon as you possibly can. This is coming from another guy who went through roughly the same thing, except with more anger and violence.
Still, I'm rather proud I was able to cause my elementary school principle true pain when I socked her while on Zoloft. Once I got out of that school they quit messing with my head. Moral of the story is, stay off the drugs, because stimulants cause addiction and antidepressants cause rage.
I'm sure he'll thank you for being being put on an addictive cocaine derivative.
Yes, there are other things, but that's the common one. Besides, ADD/ADHD is merely a combination of boredom, lots of mental energy and a lack of willpower to turn it towards any single thing.
1.Yeah, I suppose us homeschoolers are completely unable to learn anything because we can't place it into the "Big Picture". 2.One correction: teachers go through educator's education to learn how to tame a class of 30 unwilling kids to servility. Any idiot can teach willing students, what matters is that they know the material they're teaching.
I was both pleasantly surprised and struck by the irony of seeing Brave New World come in at #3 on a "Top 10 Novels read by people of a certain subculture" list. Good to see geeks are getting their Huxleyan philosophy and the important insights into the modern world it brings.
Now if only people would read Island. That's the one that tells us what we should be doing.
Re:1984 is not a geek novel
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apparently you read it in school. Please reread (especially "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", which is the author talking directly to us) and learn more than the schools want you to know.
*Towards* CS? It would seem the opposite: that there is a strong negative stigma associated with CS degrees that keeps anyone from treating their holders well.
Parent is damned right! Teens are compelled to go sit for 8 hours in a building where they are ordered around, micromanaged, assigned endless busywork and never paid a thing other than a few strange numbers that wouldn't have any value if they weren't high school students. Think about it, this means that if the compulsory schooling laws were changed high school grades would have extremely little value, because there are always other ways to "show learning". Being a homeschooler, I should know.
Excuse me, but I don't think Napoleon Dynamite qualifies as a geek. He was just a pathetic and sad loser who happened entertain his pathetic and sad high school by dancing.
Badly drawing imaginary animals doesn't him a geek since the evidence shows he really had nothing better to do. He was just a nerd.
OK, great, we might someday live six times longer. However, wouldn't we be six times dumber because of it? I don't want to see the first Hegemon and Polemarch elected as an old idiot with the body of a 30-year old.
I don't use Windoze when I have to pay for it, and if the ad-supported version fails to have any features I happen to like (such as stability, a reasonable CLI, NOT the consistency of Swiss cheese, free software) than I won't use it.
No one company can ever control the internet, but unlike free-market ideologues corporations tend to have enough of a sense of cooperation to band together into an oligopoly and thereby control enough of the internet pipes for their collective needs.
Slashdot Mirror
They miss it so because they are focusing on the capabilities that allow people to perform work rather than the capabilities for deciding what work should be done. This isn't the fault of the Times or Slashdot, as both have audiences among the Intellect Worker classes who are paid for mind work. Fact is that Einstein helped to discover nuclear energy, but he wasn't able to keep anyone from building an atomic bomb with his discovery. His job was the how of the matter.
The link to John Taylor Gatto's work has been posted in two places in this article's comments, and I recommend everyone read it. Our society has a special class of people - government officials, corporate managers and others - whose job it is to guide activity. They require no special amount of intelligence in any sense Slashdotters have conceived of it here and no special IQ score.
If I may digress for a moment, during the summer I was at a conference on homeschooling in Massachusetts and saw a talk on Multiple Intelligence Theory. The speaker went through all 7 standard intelligences: linguistic/verbal, spacial, logical/mathematical. kinesthetic, musical/auditory, intrapersonal and interpersonal, but also mentioned a theorized 8th intelligence: the existential. It is linked to intelligence that manifests itself in the study of such fields as philosophy and religion, giving insight into the what should be done and why areas of life.
Postulating the existence of that faculty for the moment, it would seem that our society nurtures a special upper class of people to use their Existential Intelligence, letting them decide what should be done and why, while the other classes are left to implement their decisions. This is where the focus of schooling needs to change. If the Existential Intelligence is real programs must be created and adapted to train people in its use. Even if it is not, we do our children a horrible disservice by depriving them of what up until this very century was considered the most important domain of the intellect, the study of philosophy.
My own ex-high-school was an example of the dismal state of why and what teaching, possessing only 1 single-semester (half of a school year) class on philosophy, which was linked to nothing else, unpublicized and generally only met if by chance enough students signed up each semester. This must change. Students must graduate high school knowing as much of Socrates and Locke and Huxley (examples off the top of my head) as of Physics, Mathematics and English Literature. Orwell's "1984" should be read as more than history. The philosophes of the Enlightenment should be read and debated as more than mere history. Students should even have the opportunity to swim the seas of Talmud if they desire so and have no sectary objection.
Then perhaps the Einsteins of today and tomorrow will be able to keep the Bomb from being built off their work if they so please. The greatest gift we can give students is the ability to make decisions for themselves, and that is the tool we hand them when we teach philosophy. It may not win them a $50,000 scholarship now, but it will probably help them earn just as much money later. After all, it does so for the business and political elites.
Funny, but the Communist Manifesto I read contained no mention of education whatsoever. Mod parent troll.
The evil public school system oppresses everyone equally, not just smart kids.
The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto
Mmmm... Bacardi...
You are unfortunately correct. Get your ass off the drugs as soon as you possibly can. This is coming from another guy who went through roughly the same thing, except with more anger and violence.
Still, I'm rather proud I was able to cause my elementary school principle true pain when I socked her while on Zoloft. Once I got out of that school they quit messing with my head. Moral of the story is, stay off the drugs, because stimulants cause addiction and antidepressants cause rage.
I'm sure he'll thank you for being being put on an addictive cocaine derivative.
Yes, there are other things, but that's the common one. Besides, ADD/ADHD is merely a combination of boredom, lots of mental energy and a lack of willpower to turn it towards any single thing.
1.Yeah, I suppose us homeschoolers are completely unable to learn anything because we can't place it into the "Big Picture".
2.One correction: teachers go through educator's education to learn how to tame a class of 30 unwilling kids to servility. Any idiot can teach willing students, what matters is that they know the material they're teaching.
I was both pleasantly surprised and struck by the irony of seeing Brave New World come in at #3 on a "Top 10 Novels read by people of a certain subculture" list. Good to see geeks are getting their Huxleyan philosophy and the important insights into the modern world it brings.
Now if only people would read Island. That's the one that tells us what we should be doing.
Apparently you read it in school. Please reread (especially "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", which is the author talking directly to us) and learn more than the schools want you to know.
Some lazy students may be actually better students than the eager ones, given the correct environment.
Yeah, some kid could be working if they were motivated rather than reading Slashdot!
Have you considered that the compies might be used to say... look up lecture related material or *GASP* take notes? I know I type faster than I write.
You're not better than them.
*Towards* CS? It would seem the opposite: that there is a strong negative stigma associated with CS degrees that keeps anyone from treating their holders well.
Parent is damned right! Teens are compelled to go sit for 8 hours in a building where they are ordered around, micromanaged, assigned endless busywork and never paid a thing other than a few strange numbers that wouldn't have any value if they weren't high school students. Think about it, this means that if the compulsory schooling laws were changed high school grades would have extremely little value, because there are always other ways to "show learning". Being a homeschooler, I should know.
Excuse me, but I don't think Napoleon Dynamite qualifies as a geek. He was just a pathetic and sad loser who happened entertain his pathetic and sad high school by dancing.
Badly drawing imaginary animals doesn't him a geek since the evidence shows he really had nothing better to do. He was just a nerd.
Every fscking job description requires "social and communication skills", it's just their way of keeping people who hate everyone else from applying.
OK, great, we might someday live six times longer. However, wouldn't we be six times dumber because of it? I don't want to see the first Hegemon and Polemarch elected as an old idiot with the body of a 30-year old.
Exactly. The young are already disenfranchised (voting ages, anyone?) in favor of the old, why create more of the old?
I don't use Windoze when I have to pay for it, and if the ad-supported version fails to have any features I happen to like (such as stability, a reasonable CLI, NOT the consistency of Swiss cheese, free software) than I won't use it.
That is that.
The magazine you're thinking like is "Adbusters". Write to them.
No one company can ever control the internet, but unlike free-market ideologues corporations tend to have enough of a sense of cooperation to band together into an oligopoly and thereby control enough of the internet pipes for their collective needs.
Welcome to America, where Communism is Corporate.
Congradulations, this is the first comment I've read that's truly relevant to TFA.
Ah, the scourge of overproduction: reason that we need mind-numbing advertising and compulsory schooling to keep the economy from collapsing.
Those people are called "crackers". Hackers are an entirely different breed who can be learned of from ESR's website.
And Flux-Capacitor-Box! It's damn nice, too.