"Consent of the Governed": Now a Commodity

[metavac]

On this I think we agree. (That I think our thread hijak should end now even if it is more interesting then coberst's rambles.) It is more than clear that he has little idea what the text he's C&P-ing means so can't clarify any of it.

We've done our duty.

I also just now noticed he makes early allusions to being older for no particular reason, thereby setting up a standard troll tactic of lying about his age to make his point seem somehow more authoritative because he has 'experience' greater than ours.

Well, apparently he's this dude. And apparently he's on a dozen or so other boards pretty much posting the same stuff.

[Setesh]

Well, apparently he's this dude. And apparently he's on a dozen or so other boards pretty much posting the same stuff.

Wow, he really did just c&p from his 2 pages of his own site. But inane bullshit is still inane bullshit. He's going out of his way to attempt to sound 'educated' and 'profound' in a 90's doublespeak kind of way. Though this got to me, in a chuckle at the moron kind of way.

I have been trying to encourage adults, who in general consider education as a matter only for young people, to give this idea of self-learning a try. It seems to be human nature to do a turtle (close the mind) when encountering a new and unorthodox idea. Generally we seem to need for an idea to face us many times before we can consider it seriously. A common method for brushing aside this idea is to think 'I've been there and done that', i.e. ' I have read and been a self-learner all my life'.

I love the intellectual dishonesty at the end of that. 'Anyone who is already doing this isn't really because I've only just given them the idea.'

Strangely, has yet to learn in time on this board that we are exactly what he claims to be. A rather large group of people with a tendency to go out of there way to learn things that have no practical value to us entirely because we feel like it. Yet his inability to actually discuss any of this beyond c&p text shows he doesn't understand the very text he claims to have written. Here he is in a veritable nirvana of intelligent people who embody, at least in self-education, his ideals and he cannot convey them to us beyond quoting these pages.

Take me for example, I work in a restaurant, calculus has no practical value to me personally. So why the hell do I know what Christoffel Symbols are? I ran across the term while trying to work out if Lister's planetary pool shot in the Red Dwarf episode 'White Hole' was feasible. (Turns out the shot would work but only if A) the planets were capable of surviving the impact both with each other and with a solar flare powerful enough to push a planet out of orbit. B)That a planet moving solar flare can be produced with nuclear weapons.)

What? Haven't you ever been bored?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I don't really think this coberst is the real Chuck Oberst. He doesn't sound like one would expect an engineer to talk, act, or think. Some of the ideas expressed in the real engineers page aren't that bad (and some are commonsensical) if explained. It's simply the way he's doing it; they make no sense then.

[Darth Wong]

Engineers tend to be very practical folk, while this guy's ramblings are totally disconnected from any kind of practical application. It's all airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky vague feelgood bullshit. Of course, he might have still been an engineer, albeit a shitty one. Someone had to graduate dead last in his class.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I would think that the major flaw with this whole "self learn" thing is that it's just an essay. I don't know why educational magazines (such as the one cited earlier) would use his essay, which certainly is vague, when there are ample scholarly journals that are very specific in how parents, children, etc can life-long self learn.

It's an important concept, but I think the execution of it is done poorly. For example, if you want to be a self-learning, you need to have a variety of skills such as:

1. Finding resources that are scholarly and peer reviewed
2. Finding these resources in a variety of media (electronic and paper journals, texts)
3. Visits to the library regularly (or on weekends)
4. Classes


Some people think that one is a life long learner or self-learner if he reads an article once a month in a pop journal or something, and I think that's a mistake. Popular science can be useful for interesting people and giving then a general understanding and awareness of big issues, but to be more specific and in-depth as a learner, you need to know where else to go after that.