Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2019

“Our” intellectuals and how they got that way

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Over at Rotten Chestnuts, Severian says we should blame the eggheads:

Because its goals were impossible, The Revolution didn’t go as planned. For every two self-deluded fools who thought the Soviet Union was a new civilization, there were five who knew exactly what the Communists were about. Bomb-throwing anarchists had terrorized European cities for years before 1917, and Red atrocities during the Civil War were no secret. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, then, that horrors like the White Sea Canal were features, not bugs, of Communism.

If you’ve read your Festinger, you know what happened next. The True Believers searched frantically for any “explanation” that wouldn’t invalidate their precious Marxism, and Antonio Gramsci gave it to them. Though he didn’t coin the term “false consciousness” (Georgy Lukacs did), Gramsci weaponized it. The reason the Bolsheviks are forced to do all that awful stuff — which we don’t admit they actually did! — is that The People lack the proper revolutionary consciousness. They still believe in stuff like “God,” “free speech,” “not getting starved to death while the Party fatcats drive around in limos,” etc.

And where do they get this “false consciousness,” comrades? Why, it’s the same place the Western proles get theirs, which is also why the Western proles haven’t joined The Revolution (yet!), in fulfillment of the scriptures. Gramsci called the false consciousness installation process “hegemony.” There are a zillion unread academic tomes covering all the nuances, but the basic idea is simple enough: The ruling class controls the institutions; the institutions transmit culture; therefore, the culture takes ruling class values for granted.*

The solution, therefore, is as simple as the diagnosis: Capture the institutions, change the culture.

I trust y’all see where this is going. The best conspiracy theories are the ones that are actually true, and this one is. You want a grand conspiracy to destroy Western Civ? Here it is, laid out as openly as Marxist prose can express it, in excruciating detail. If anything, I’m being unfair to Antonio Gramsci. He put it all together in true kommissar style, but these ideas were everywhere on the Left in the early 20th century. In America, for instance, Progressives like John Dewey had been maneuvering to get control of elementary schools since the late 19th century. Progressives just looooove putting their hands on children. Have you noticed?

Every single insane, culture-destroying, gulag-enabling idea the Left has had in the last 200 years, starting with Karl Marx’s sub-Hegelian flatulence itself, can be traced directly back to some fucking egghead. I’ll repeat that: DIRECTLY. You can find their works, and quote them, because this stuff is in every syllabus of every Humanities class of every college in the Western world. The prose is opaque as only PoMo prose can be, but the main ideas are easy enough to decipher….

…I wrote “ideas,” but there’s really only one “idea.” Since The Revolution obviously ain’t gonna happen — it seems even Leftists can acknowledge one tiny aspect of reality, if you give ’em twelve decades and 100 million bodies — the Left’s entire program, top to bottom, stem to stern, is shit-flinging nihilism. Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go — not because it’s Western, but because it’s Civilization.

May 12, 2019

Mechanisms for redressing employment gender imbalances

Filed under: Business, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We’ve often been told that too many men occupy positions of power and influence in the working world, but what would it take to meaningfully address those imbalances?

Equity … is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome — educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.

[…]

Now it doesn’t seem like mere imagination on my part that all the noise about “patriarchal domination” is not directed at the fact that far more men than women occupy what are essentially trade positions. Nor does it seem unreasonable to point out that these are not particularly high-status jobs, although they may pay comparative well. It is also obvious that none of these occupations and their hierarchies, in isolation, can be thoughtfully considered the kind of oppressive patriarchy supposed to constitute the “West,” and aimed at the domination and exclusion of women. By contrast, the trade occupations are composed of cadres of working men, with difficult and admirable jobs, who keep the staggeringly complex, reliable and essentially miraculous infrastructure of our society functioning through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night and who should be credited gratefully with exactly that.

Let’s assume for a moment that we should aim at equity, nonetheless, and then actually think through what policies would inevitably have to be put in place to establish such a goal. We might begin by eliminating pay scales that differ (hypothetically) by gender. This would mean introducing legislation requiring companies to rank-order their sex representation at each level of the company hierarchy, adjust that to 50:50, and then adjust the pay differential by gender at every rank, so that the desired equity was achieved. Companies could be monitored over a five-year period for improvement. Failure to meet the appropriate targets would be necessarily met with fines for discrimination. In the extreme, it might be necessary to introduce staggered layoffs of men so that the gender equity requirements could be met.

Then there are the much broader social policy implications. We could start by addressing the hypothetical problems with college, university and trade school training. Many companies, compelled to move rapidly toward gender equilibria, will object (and validly) that there are simply not enough qualified female candidates to go around. Changing this would mean implementing radical and rapid changes in the post-secondary education system, implemented in a manner both immediate and draconian — justified by the obvious “fact” that the reason the pipeline problem exists is the absolutely pervasive sexism that characterizes all the programs that train such workers (and the catastrophic and prejudicial failure of the education system that is thereby implied).

The most likely solution — and the one most likely to be attractive to those who believe in such sexism — would be to establish strict quota systems in the relevant institutions to invite and incentivize more female participants, once again in proportion to the disequilibria in enrollment rates. If quotas are not enough, then a system of scholarship or, more radically (and perhaps more fairly) women could be simply paid to enroll in education systems where their sex is badly under-represented. Alternatively, perhaps, men could be asked to pay higher rates of tuition, in some proportion to their over-representation, and the excess used to subsidize the costs of under-represented females.

May 7, 2019

QotD: Competitive Wokeness

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I love competitive #Wokeness.

No, seriously — it’s high time you people out in the real world got to experience one of the defining joys of life in the ivory tower. In the ivy-covered halls of academe, the Marxist Postcolonialist Feminsts have longstanding beef with the Postcolonialist Feminist Marxists. They’d each happily feed the other into a wood chipper, even though to outsiders it would look like the pot executing the kettle for counterrevolutionary crimes. If you’re the sort who takes schadenfreudy delight in very obvious folly, university life is hilarious.

It’s even funnier if you take these buffoons at their word. Compared to the pronouncements of your average Angry Studies professor, Pol Pot was a sane and balanced man. In reality, of course, university people are so soft and coddled, they make the Eloi look like the Sons of Anarchy. Spending so much time around college folk is one of the main reasons for my mantra: “Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.” They talk a fearsome game, these campus Ches, but they cry if the cafeteria is out of free trade sustainably sourced indigenous grown gluten free soy milk. When the zeitgeist shifts, they’ll be the first to knuckle under.

Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.

April 13, 2019

QotD: School vouchers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am still a supporter of school vouchers. I don’t think they’ve lived up to the hopes that I (and a bunch of other folks) had for them. But that said, the best opponents can say is that they don’t do all that much better than the public schools on academic measures. Parents like them, kids like them, and they cost less. I just don’t see a good argument against them.

I think it’s telling that of the folks I know who oppose vouchers, not one of them has voluntarily kept their kids in a failing urban school. When they move, they choose a house in a good school district. I don’t see how you can morally do that and then tell some other, poorer parent that they need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.

That said, maybe there’s an argument for restricting them to kids in failing schools, or below a certain income. I don’t see any need for the government to subsidize Exeter. But for the kids who are trapped, I think they should get the same chance middle class kids do, even if it’s not the panacea we once hoped.

Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.

March 24, 2019

Trust in scientific findings decreasing among the general public

Filed under: Education, Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Scientific American, Louise Lief discusses the problem of rising public distrust of science:

We live in a moment when preventable infectious diseases like measles are spreading because parents distrust vaccines, and scientists at government agencies are being told not to use terms like “evidence-based.” The president dismisses the findings of a National Climate Assessment by more than 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies that warns of massive economic and environmental damage totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, crop failures, disrupted supply chains and multiple threats to human health, saying, “I don’t believe it.”

But when I argued in favor of the proposition (Resolved: “Science writers are responsible for building public trust in science”) during a debate at the National Association of Science Writers’ 2018 annual conference last fall, the majority of science writers and science journalists present voted that building public trust in science was not the responsibility of science writers.

[…]

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication also tackled the science trust question at the NASW conference, and researchers at Cardiff University have traced credibility and accuracy problems to press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions.

If a problem is discovered or a study is retracted, said Jamieson, the scientist or scientific journal needs to explain to journalists and the public how the error was discovered, what the problem is, and what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Scientists often make it hard for journalists to cover these three interrelated issues, she says. Scholarly journal publication protocols may cause scientists to write one article on the problem they’re investigating, and a second or third article on processes and solutions, resulting in coverage that emphasizes problems and shortchanges corrective action.

For their part, researchers at Cardiff University found that press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions about their work were a significant source of exaggerated claims and spin, even though most scientists can approve their wording.

Their study of press releases from 20 leading British universities on health-related science news found that when the press releases exaggerated, it was likely the news stories would too.

An analysis of 41 news articles on randomized controlled trials based on 70 press releases showed only four articles that contained exaggerated claims not included in the press release or journal abstract. Interestingly, they also found the hype and spin intended to tempt the media did not result in more news coverage.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

March 22, 2019

QotD: Millennial socialists

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, as George Santayana once said. Slightly before him, Karl Marx claimed that history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. Both of these Dead White Males are arguably right, if only the latter still continues to inspire people, though not with this particular quote.

Throughout the developed world – with the notable exception of Poland – Gen Ys or the Millennials veer strongly to the left. Young people have always done so, but the current crop would make even their proud Baby Boomer grandparents blush in their enthusiasm for collectivism. It’s not just that in countries like the United States or Australia two thirds of them vote for the parties of the left – after all, the left can be a broad church, from Tony Blair to Jeremy Corbyn – but they positively heart socialism: 63 per cent of Australian university graduates and over the half of the American cohort. Those who literally cannot remember the past are very keen to repeat it – let’s hope that this time only as a farce.

The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.

Any surprises that socialism is now nearly synonymous with Gen Y?

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Socialism as a Millennial religion”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-02-19.

March 17, 2019

QotD: McGill University

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… if the freedom to speak harsh truth and engage in adventurous social critique means nothing at McGill, it is doomed at younger universities — especially those that have materialized, or been promoted to new feudal rank, during the ongoing academic bubble era.

The stakes are high. We all enjoy a laugh at McGill’s perception of itself as the Canadian Harvard, but if there is one university from which others in our country are bound to take ethical and stylistic cues — well, McGill probably is Harvard.

Colby Cosh, “Scary Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: an alternate view of the storm engulfing McGill”, National Post, 2017-03-27.

March 16, 2019

QotD: Teaching critical thinking

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.

Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason — then prioritizing the latter over the former.

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.

Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.

Rob Jenkins, “Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think”, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2017-03-23.

March 14, 2019

Life in the modern academic paradise

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:

Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?

Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.

That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….

…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.

How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…

March 13, 2019

How to Do Research

Filed under: Education, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 12 Mar 2019

Ever wondered how exactly I make the magic happen in my deep-dive videos, like Dionysus, Aphrodite and King Arthur? Wonder no longer! Today I’m dishing out all the answers in this extra special bonus video I made in three days!

We’ve… we’ve been REALLY busy, guys. March is CRAZY.

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

March 8, 2019

Education schools and the bloat of university administration

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Remember the old joke:

    Those who can, do.
    Those who can’t, teach.
    Those who can’t teach, teach gym educational studies.

As far as higher education is concerned, the joke is on us:

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.

Everyone knows about the kudzu-like growth of the administrative bureaucracy in higher education over the past three decades. What most don’t know is that at many colleges, the majority of administrators directly involved in the lives of students — in dorms, conduct hearings, bias-response teams, freshmen “orientation” programs, and the like — got their graduate degrees from education schools.

Ed schools, such as Teachers College at Columbia, or Penn’s Graduate School of Education, have trained and certified most of the nation’s public-school teachers and administrators for the past half-century. But in the past 20 years especially, ed schools have been offering advanced degrees in things like “educational leadership,” “higher education management,” and just “higher education” to aspiring college administrators. And this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm.

To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism — not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice — is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”

Stephen Fry on Political Correctness and Clear Thinking

Filed under: Britain, Education, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rubin Report
Published on 4 Apr 2016

Stephen Fry (actor and comedian) joins Dave Rubin for a quick discussion about political correctness, clear thinking, V for Vendetta, free speech, and his decision to quit Twitter.

This is a bonus edition of ‘The Sit Down’ on The Rubin Report, filmed on the set of Larry King Now.

What are your thoughts? Comment below or tweet to Dave: https://twitter.com/RubinReport

Watch more on Ora TV: http://www.ora.tv/rubinreport

Find us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rubinreport?ty=h

******
Stephen Fry
Actor, Author, and Comedian
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Care about free speech? Tired of political correctness? Like discussions about big ideas? Watch Dave Rubin on The Rubin Report. Real conversations, unfiltered rants, and one on one interviews with some of the most interesting names in news and entertainment. Comedians, authors, and influencers join Dave each week to break down the latest in politics and current events. Real people, real issues, real talk.

March 6, 2019

QotD: Teaching evolution in the “Bible Belt”

Filed under: Africa, Education, History, Quotations, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I teach college in a small city in Arkansas, deep in the American Bible Belt. I am a historian of Africa and in my department that means that I also teach a world history survey. I always start with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa and their encounter with other types of humans: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denesovians and what seems like an ever-growing list of newly discovered human-like creatures. It’s less the case now, but when I started twenty years ago this part of the course was initially met with polite but firm resistance, which gradually gave way to a sort of furtive curiosity. I eventually realized that even my cleverest students knew very little about human evolution except that it was false and that they were supposed to reject it. They came to the university having been taught that evolution was part of a larger attack on their faith and values, but they had never really been exposed to anything but a sort of parody version of it. A small number of them accepted evolutionary theory, but being a Darwinian in rural Arkansas was usually more about youthful rebellion and non-conformity than it was about informed, rational consideration of evidence.

Once we got past the denunciation or acceptance of evolutionary theory as a form of tribal affiliation, I found students to be deeply curious about it. It was such a taboo subject that their high school teachers had only skimmed over it and often with some careful personal distancing from the material. So the opportunity to delve into the details of this forbidden knowledge was intellectually thrilling for them. Despite the excitement engendered by the topic only a few changed their minds; most did not.

My students had grown up in communities where evolutionary theory was so wrong, so contrary to the accepted worldview of all decent people, that the only acceptable way to talk about it was to denounce it or reject it. The result was that most of my students rejected evolution, but getting a chance to learn about it was profoundly exciting, even if most of them were too conformist (these were Honors students after all) to change their positions.

Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.

February 17, 2019

QotD: Nanotechnology and quantum computing

Filed under: Education, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that Quantum Computing isn’t at least theoretically possible. I also do not have a mathematical proof that we can make the artificial bacteria of K. Eric Drexler’s nanotech fantasies. Yet, I know both fields are bullshit. Both fields involve forming new kinds of matter that we haven’t the slightest idea how to construct. Neither field has a sane ‘first step’ to make their large claims true.

Drexler and the “nanotechnologists” who followed him, they assume because we know about the Schroedinger equation we can make artificial forms of life out of arbitrary forms of matter. This is nonsense; nobody understands enough about matter in detail or life in particular to do this. There are also reasonable thermodynamic, chemical and physical arguments against this sort of thing. I have opined on this at length, and at this point, I am so obviously correct on the nanotech front, there is nobody left to argue with me. A generation of people who probably would have made first rate chemists or materials scientists wasted their early, creative careers following this over hyped and completely worthless woo. Billions of dollars squandered down a rat hole of rubbish and wishful thinking. Legal wankers wrote legal reviews of regulatory regimes to protect us from this nonexistent technology. We even had congressional hearings on this nonsense topic back in 2003 and again in 2005 (and probably some other times I forgot about). Russians built a nanotech park to cash in on the nanopocalyptic trillion dollar nanotech economy which was supposed to happen by now.

Similarly, “quantum computing” enthusiasts expect you to overlook the fact that they haven’t a clue as to how to build and manipulate quantum coherent forms of matter necessary to achieve quantum computation. A quantum computer capable of truly factoring the number 21 is missing in action. In fact, the factoring of the number 15 into 3 and 5 is a bit of a parlour trick, as they design the experiment while knowing the answer, thus leaving out the gates required if we didn’t know how to factor 15. The actual number of gates needed to factor a n-bit number is 72 * n^3; so for 15, it’s 4 bits, 4608 gates; not happening any time soon.

It’s been almost 25 years since Peter Shor had his big idea, and we are no closer to factoring large numbers than we were … 15 years ago when we were also able to kinda sorta vaguely factor the number 15 using NMR ‘quantum computers.’

I had this conversation talking with a pal at … a nice restaurant near one of America’s great centers of learning. Our waiter was amazed and shared with us the fact that he had done a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of quantum computing. My pal was convinced by this that my skepticism is justified; in fact he accused me of arranging this. I didn’t, but am motivated to write to prevent future Ivy League Ph.D. level talent having to make a living by bringing a couple of finance nerds their steaks.

Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.

February 14, 2019

QotD: Knowing how to find out is an essential skill

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The thing is, you don’t have to be an expert on everything. Simply knowing the basics and the relevance is enough in many cases. You have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips so knowing how to look things up is more important than memorization. Einstein allegedly said he had no reason to memorize how many feet were in a mile because he could find in any book. Today, you can find the details off your phone or laptop in seconds. What you need is an understanding of how to find it.

That’s the first thing a modern person needs to know. How to look things up on-line is an essential skill in the modern age. Working with young interns years ago, I was surprised to discover that none of them knew how to be curious. I had to teach them how to find things on-line. They had no idea how to discover the world by inference. What I ended up telling them is always ask what a thing is, not where a thing is. What is its nature, what does it do. Who thinks it is important. Enter those things in a search engine and you will get close to what you seek.

This is probably obvious to most reading this, but there is a reason browsers have bookmarks and there are services that let you synchronize your bookmarks on all of your devices. Most people store knowledge and then remember where they left it. That has its place, but when searching for things on-line, you may, whether you realize it or not, be looking for unknown unknowns. By thinking about what a thing or event is, you will find things like it or related to it that you never considered or simply did not know existed.

This will no doubt strike some as pedantic, but in the modern age, the ability to quickly acquire necessary information is probably the most valuable skill and therefore, the most essential of knowledge. All of us have at our fingertips the totality of human understanding. Knowing how to quickly dig through it to find what it is you need is vastly more useful and important than the ability to remember how many feet are in a mile or where the book you learned it is on your book shelf.

The Z Man, “Essential Knowledge Part I”, The Z Blog, 2017-01-13.

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