seangabb
Published 26 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
What happens when resistance fails?
In this lecture, we examine the dramatic collapse of Greek resistance after Thermopylae and the advance of the Persian army into central Greece. With the Spartan force destroyed, the road to Athens lay open.
We explore:
– The consequences of Thermopylae
– The evacuation of Athens under Themistocles
– The Persian capture and destruction of the city
– The psychological and strategic impact on the Greek world
– Why, at this moment, Persian victory seemed inevitableThis is the darkest point of the war for the Greeks — a moment when everything appears lost, and yet the story is far from over.
August 24, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 4 – The Fall of Athens
QotD: The difference between “book smart” and “street smart”
Joca @jocadbz
Translated from Portuguese
How many geniuses have you heard about in recent years? They all had very superior IQs and were supposedly going to change the world
Know what happened? Nothing. Nothing ever happensWe hear a lot of people go on about the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”.
But psychologists who test and study intelligence know there’s no such thing. Smart is smart. So is this all just a way of coping with envy of higher IQs?
No. We’ve all met that guy who is clearly very intelligent, but can’t seem to accomplish anything outside a cloistered academic environment.
But we always seem to find him in a academic environment, don’t we?
“Book smart” is an incorrect name for a person who is intelligent, but has been mentally and psychologically harmed by an educational system, to the point where he can’t actually use that intelligence properly for tasks outside that environment.
Ironically, the more a child is obviously intelligent, the more the education system conspires to destroy him … because everyone with a “degree in education”, almost without exception, is either actually stupid, or is himself the end product of this same sort of mental mutilation.
Here’s how it works.
There are two types of intelligence tasks: answer tasks and result tasks.
A result task is graded by the reaction of the environment to your work. Either your software runs, or it doesn’t. Either your rockets fly, or they don’t. Customers buy millions of your product, or none.
You have unlimited tries unless you run out of money, but there’s no partial credit, and you can’t talk the universe into accepting your answer if it doesn’t.
Result tasks typically require a lot of work, are data-intensive, and have lots of sub-problems, because the ones that didn’t are already solved.
Result tasks are why we care about smart at all. Because smart people are the ones who can do this. And every human advancement or achievement ever was a result task.
Answer tasks are quite different. They are artificial problems created by a human being for another human being, whose goal is to produce the known answer.
Tasks like this have useful features. They can be tightly calibrated for appropriate difficulty. They are easy to grade. They can be used to teach particular subjects or skills.
But there are certain things they don’t teach.
How to do the boring parts that don’t impress anyone with how talented you are.
How to fail and try again.
How to change the question instead of answering it, because the question itself was wrong.
How to absorb from others what they had to learn the hard way, instead of reinventing the wheel.
How to deal with problems that have no solutions, only tradeoffs.
How to work with others and pass the ball.
How not to adapt instead of freezing when the universe gives the exam before the lesson.
How to substitute the adequate you can afford for the ideal you can’t.
How to prioritize what is needful over what is elegant or cool.
Without this learning, and other similar lessons, the talent child turns into an adult with an unbalanced intellectual development, like a bodybuilder who skipped far too many leg days.
You’ll find a lot of men like this in academia because it provides them with a sheltered, tightly controlled environment, where the problems are abstract if not utterly fake, and the persuasiveness of a solution trumps its workability.
They tend to scorn achievers, especially achievers with modest academic credentials or none, and this invites scorn in turn from people with real jobs.
But really what they are is victims. Entire campuses and networks full of what was potential greatness, crippled in it youth by bureaucracies that claim to serve it.
Homeschool your children.
Give them projects, not puzzles.
Teach them to build things.
Devon Eriksen, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-05.
