If you're going too fast to stop for a light that changes, the camera that nabs you is hardly the problem. Lights are generally timed in such a way that, once they turn yellow, you have _more than enough_ time to stop safely, even if you're going above the speed limit. If you think you're going too fast to stop, you're doing something wrong. And as for rain or snow: slow down! There's no excuse for poor driving, especially in hazardous conditions. That's a deadly, two ton piece of steel you're piloting, not a go-kart, and your right to reckless abandon is seriously curtailed in the presence of other people (which is pretty much always, if you're on public roads). If you're going too fast and you hit something, or run a red light, it's _your_ fault, and that's that.
That assumes that we can rely on the government prioritizing the needs of the people over the needs of, say, large corporations who contribute large amounts of campaign funding. Unfortunately, we already have plenty of evidence against that assumption.
Roads aren't a great analogy in favor of neutrality, because our roads aren't neutral. We have toll roads, and we have commuter lanes that are restricted to 2+ passengers. In Atlanta, trucks are banned from driving on the interstate highways inside the perimeter highway unless they're making a local delivery (they have to use I-285 to bypass Atlanta, which slows them down and adds maybe 10 miles to their trip, but prevents them from clogging up commuter traffic inside the city). In the northeast, and possible elsewhere, there are many parkways that are restricted to cars only - no trucks.
Maybe the problem is that the world is inherently not neutral, at least in its current state. The government is no better at this than large corporations, and unfortunately there's really no alternative at this point. If we want a truly free internet, we need to build it ourselves. A collectively-owned distributed network would be able to scale with the number of people who buy into it, something like a co-op, and would be free from external regulation. Each person's upstream bandwidth is someone else's downstream bandwidth, so major content providers wouldn't be able to overpower individual users as long as those users were willing to band together and keep their own best interests in mind.
Of course, there are problems with that too. Enough consumer apathy and the content providers would win out. Then again, that's the same problem we have with government now. Removing the regulatory role that the government has, and placing it into the hands of the people who actually use the internet, at least places the power within the people whom it affects.
There are a number of alternative schools out there - you might also want to check out Marlboro and Sarah Lawrence. (I'm sure there are many more than that, but those are the two I'm most familiar with.) Not that they aren't fraught with problems... but I think most schools are. Hampshire in particular has gained an unfortunate reputation for being a school where spoiled rich kids can go in order to go lots of drugs, ignore their work, and still manage to scrape by. The difference is that it's up to you to challenge yourself: if you want to just do the bare minimum, you can get by, but if you want to push yourself as hard as you possibly can, the resources are there. The reason the whole system works is that you can challenge yourself in ways that are vastly different from traditional schools. Otherwise, we all really would just sit around and do nothing all day, because there'd be nothing interesting to apply ourselves to.
Ironically, I'm finding myself focussing mostly on philosophy; I'm still interested in computer science, but I've chosen to only pursue it outside of school. But, at the same time, the philosophy curriculum that I've taken on is vastly different from what you'd find at an ordinary school. I'm adding political theory to the mix, among other things, but for now I'm still stuck with the overly idealistic plan to change (sigh, this sounds so crazy) the world. Shoot for the stars, I figure, and at least I'll manage to get up there somewhere.
We have a terrible website, by the way. It's unfortunate, because it would be a lot easier to learn about the school if it weren't so poorly organized. But, in a way, that represents the (at-times frustrating) philosophy of the school, which emphasizes a lack of administrative oversight. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but at least it's different.
If you decide to transfer, I wish you luck. Don't worry about having a low GPA - alternative schools will evaluate you, not your transcript, when considering whether to accept you. Hampshire doesn't even require SAT scores, as far as I know (they'll look at them if you send them, but they won't ask for them). The culture shock is strange at first, but if the environment fits you, it only takes a few weeks before suddenly everything feels right in a powerfully new way.
I agree that there are certain subjects where it is important to specialize. Brain surgery, like you point out, is an excellent example. However, outside of the operating room, outside of one's main profession, it is still possible to explore other interests. I code in my free time because I enjoy it; I don't take classes, I just explore, and do what I can. I'm not a world-class programmer, but I don't need to be in order to enjoy it. It doesn't detract from my studies, and on occasion something overlaps in an interesting way.
I think we're encouraged to avoid thinking in our free time. Relaxation is certainly important, but I know people who are glued to the television every moment that they aren't at work, in class, etc. That's their choice, of course, but I prefer not to do that: I'd rather apply my brain to other things. I'm sure your brain surgeon watches TV; he probably watches a lot of it, and it doesn't make him a worse surgeon. Just think what he could accomplish if he spent that time doing something else. Just think, collectively, of what all the hours of all the millions of billions of television watchers around the world could accomplish.
It would change things dramatically. And that, of course, is why we're encouraged not to think in our free time. Because, when you think about it, what better way to support the status quo?
Sorry about that - I've written a lot, and in the process, forgotten a lot. Among the forgotten? That newlines in a post turn into, well, not what I expected.
That, and that it's important to preview things first. I realized my mistake after I posted... but I don't think there's any way to fix it now.
Two years ago, I started college as a computer science major at Georgia Tech. I hated it. I had a lot of programming experience before I even showed up, so the classes bored me; however, that wasn't what really bothered me. It was the lack of meaning in what I was studying. Don't get me wrong - the curriculum would have most likely turned me into an excellent programmer, but nothing more. Most problematically, my classes focused on practicality at the expence of exploring the subject in any real depth. I was bored not because the classes weren't interesting, but because they followed the same structure: they explored a single neatly carved-out role, and made damn sure never to leave that role. This was excellent preparation for a code monkey, someone who would be happy sitting at a computer day after day, churning out line after line of code. In a way, this is appealing. It would have pretty much guaranteed a comfortable life, with a hefty paycheck. But, intellectually, it just wasn't satisfying.
I dropped out. I took a year off, kept programming in order to support myself, and went back to school at Hampshire College, where I'm studying philosophy, among other things. The among other things is key: the way the school is designed, every student gets to decide what they study and how they study it. In short, the school provides a basic, abstract structure, and lets each student fill in the details however they see fit. The most important part is that students are encouraged to combine disciplines. Why? Because there are connections everywhere. We've fleshed out various disciplines long ago; focussing on them, obsessing about them, is only going to hold us back. Now isn't the time to pick an area and focus on it; we've focused enough. Now is the time to focus on other things: on the connections between disciplines. To spend one's time solely within the computer science department or the philosophy department would be equally limiting. There are plenty of connections between philosophy and computer science, between sociology and computer science, between anthropology and quantum physics and religious studies.
These days, we're encouraged to pick a job and stick to it. Highly-specialized labor is efficient. But it's also highly alienating, because once you gain even a cursory understanding of other fields you realize just how much you're missing out by wearing blinders all the time. Rather than honing out skills to one particular task that society demands we do (and for what? for efficiency? efficiency at what cost?), we owe it to ourselves to reexamine and reevaluate what society asks of us and how we might best contribute to society. That might mean studying things in a different way than ever before. The goal is to enrich not only our lives, but the lives around us, by exploring the world with undying curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going too fast to stop for a light that changes, the camera that nabs you is hardly the problem. Lights are generally timed in such a way that, once they turn yellow, you have _more than enough_ time to stop safely, even if you're going above the speed limit. If you think you're going too fast to stop, you're doing something wrong. And as for rain or snow: slow down! There's no excuse for poor driving, especially in hazardous conditions. That's a deadly, two ton piece of steel you're piloting, not a go-kart, and your right to reckless abandon is seriously curtailed in the presence of other people (which is pretty much always, if you're on public roads). If you're going too fast and you hit something, or run a red light, it's _your_ fault, and that's that.
That assumes that we can rely on the government prioritizing the needs of the people over the needs of, say, large corporations who contribute large amounts of campaign funding. Unfortunately, we already have plenty of evidence against that assumption.
Roads aren't a great analogy in favor of neutrality, because our roads aren't neutral. We have toll roads, and we have commuter lanes that are restricted to 2+ passengers. In Atlanta, trucks are banned from driving on the interstate highways inside the perimeter highway unless they're making a local delivery (they have to use I-285 to bypass Atlanta, which slows them down and adds maybe 10 miles to their trip, but prevents them from clogging up commuter traffic inside the city). In the northeast, and possible elsewhere, there are many parkways that are restricted to cars only - no trucks.
Maybe the problem is that the world is inherently not neutral, at least in its current state. The government is no better at this than large corporations, and unfortunately there's really no alternative at this point. If we want a truly free internet, we need to build it ourselves. A collectively-owned distributed network would be able to scale with the number of people who buy into it, something like a co-op, and would be free from external regulation. Each person's upstream bandwidth is someone else's downstream bandwidth, so major content providers wouldn't be able to overpower individual users as long as those users were willing to band together and keep their own best interests in mind.
Of course, there are problems with that too. Enough consumer apathy and the content providers would win out. Then again, that's the same problem we have with government now. Removing the regulatory role that the government has, and placing it into the hands of the people who actually use the internet, at least places the power within the people whom it affects.
There are a number of alternative schools out there - you might also want to check out Marlboro and Sarah Lawrence. (I'm sure there are many more than that, but those are the two I'm most familiar with.) Not that they aren't fraught with problems... but I think most schools are. Hampshire in particular has gained an unfortunate reputation for being a school where spoiled rich kids can go in order to go lots of drugs, ignore their work, and still manage to scrape by. The difference is that it's up to you to challenge yourself: if you want to just do the bare minimum, you can get by, but if you want to push yourself as hard as you possibly can, the resources are there. The reason the whole system works is that you can challenge yourself in ways that are vastly different from traditional schools. Otherwise, we all really would just sit around and do nothing all day, because there'd be nothing interesting to apply ourselves to.
Ironically, I'm finding myself focussing mostly on philosophy; I'm still interested in computer science, but I've chosen to only pursue it outside of school. But, at the same time, the philosophy curriculum that I've taken on is vastly different from what you'd find at an ordinary school. I'm adding political theory to the mix, among other things, but for now I'm still stuck with the overly idealistic plan to change (sigh, this sounds so crazy) the world. Shoot for the stars, I figure, and at least I'll manage to get up there somewhere.
We have a terrible website, by the way. It's unfortunate, because it would be a lot easier to learn about the school if it weren't so poorly organized. But, in a way, that represents the (at-times frustrating) philosophy of the school, which emphasizes a lack of administrative oversight. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but at least it's different.
If you decide to transfer, I wish you luck. Don't worry about having a low GPA - alternative schools will evaluate you, not your transcript, when considering whether to accept you. Hampshire doesn't even require SAT scores, as far as I know (they'll look at them if you send them, but they won't ask for them). The culture shock is strange at first, but if the environment fits you, it only takes a few weeks before suddenly everything feels right in a powerfully new way.
I agree that there are certain subjects where it is important to specialize. Brain surgery, like you point out, is an excellent example. However, outside of the operating room, outside of one's main profession, it is still possible to explore other interests. I code in my free time because I enjoy it; I don't take classes, I just explore, and do what I can. I'm not a world-class programmer, but I don't need to be in order to enjoy it. It doesn't detract from my studies, and on occasion something overlaps in an interesting way.
I think we're encouraged to avoid thinking in our free time. Relaxation is certainly important, but I know people who are glued to the television every moment that they aren't at work, in class, etc. That's their choice, of course, but I prefer not to do that: I'd rather apply my brain to other things. I'm sure your brain surgeon watches TV; he probably watches a lot of it, and it doesn't make him a worse surgeon. Just think what he could accomplish if he spent that time doing something else. Just think, collectively, of what all the hours of all the millions of billions of television watchers around the world could accomplish.
It would change things dramatically. And that, of course, is why we're encouraged not to think in our free time. Because, when you think about it, what better way to support the status quo?
Sorry about that - I've written a lot, and in the process, forgotten a lot. Among the forgotten? That newlines in a post turn into, well, not what I expected.
That, and that it's important to preview things first. I realized my mistake after I posted... but I don't think there's any way to fix it now.
Two years ago, I started college as a computer science major at Georgia Tech. I hated it. I had a lot of programming experience before I even showed up, so the classes bored me; however, that wasn't what really bothered me. It was the lack of meaning in what I was studying. Don't get me wrong - the curriculum would have most likely turned me into an excellent programmer, but nothing more. Most problematically, my classes focused on practicality at the expence of exploring the subject in any real depth. I was bored not because the classes weren't interesting, but because they followed the same structure: they explored a single neatly carved-out role, and made damn sure never to leave that role. This was excellent preparation for a code monkey, someone who would be happy sitting at a computer day after day, churning out line after line of code. In a way, this is appealing. It would have pretty much guaranteed a comfortable life, with a hefty paycheck. But, intellectually, it just wasn't satisfying. I dropped out. I took a year off, kept programming in order to support myself, and went back to school at Hampshire College, where I'm studying philosophy, among other things. The among other things is key: the way the school is designed, every student gets to decide what they study and how they study it. In short, the school provides a basic, abstract structure, and lets each student fill in the details however they see fit. The most important part is that students are encouraged to combine disciplines. Why? Because there are connections everywhere. We've fleshed out various disciplines long ago; focussing on them, obsessing about them, is only going to hold us back. Now isn't the time to pick an area and focus on it; we've focused enough. Now is the time to focus on other things: on the connections between disciplines. To spend one's time solely within the computer science department or the philosophy department would be equally limiting. There are plenty of connections between philosophy and computer science, between sociology and computer science, between anthropology and quantum physics and religious studies. These days, we're encouraged to pick a job and stick to it. Highly-specialized labor is efficient. But it's also highly alienating, because once you gain even a cursory understanding of other fields you realize just how much you're missing out by wearing blinders all the time. Rather than honing out skills to one particular task that society demands we do (and for what? for efficiency? efficiency at what cost?), we owe it to ourselves to reexamine and reevaluate what society asks of us and how we might best contribute to society. That might mean studying things in a different way than ever before. The goal is to enrich not only our lives, but the lives around us, by exploring the world with undying curiosity.