Propaganda and the Mainstream Media

[RabidCat]

I think in general students should read commentaries or at least annotated sources, not original sources. This applies not just to philosophy and history but also to science and mathematics and even music. The talent for discovery and doing is different from the talent for teaching and explaining.

However, if someone shows a talent, then get them doing it right away. Don't put them under some "experienced" person who will only diminish that talent and load it down with unnecessary procedures, and waste their time.

I could say I agree with this. However, in the sciences, such as electronics engineering, that which is taught is pretty much outmoded by the field. In places such as Silicon Valley, the good ole college books are far behind what's really going on: so far, in fact, that it requires several times the study time just to catch up. Most high level companies will dedicate part of an engineer's time to reading the trade pubs, since those are usually up to date. I can provide many examples of this, particularly among the recent grads I hired in my management time (admittedly, a relatively small percentage of my tenure, since I preferred contract positions rather than company employment; made for a wide variety of projects).

While I was teaching, one thing I found was that textbooks, generally speaking, simply don't provide the sort of variety that is on the job. Some authors had the simple mindedness to use the same or similar circuitry for all a text, which annoyed me no end because it just doesn't happen in the field. It simply shouldn't be done, except as simple illustration. An instance would be Grob and mesh analysis: he uses the same circuitry throughout his books, and the mesh is super-simple. Have a student learn that and when the student gets into the field and encounters something real, that student will be 100% lost, and won't recover for months.

Someone who has talent in a field will show it, and the other engineers will see it, usually. That, of course, is not always true, since there are good engineers, mediocre engineers, and engineers that suck and should be bagging groceries at walmart. Most practicing will recognize talent and use it, since if it shows well, it happens to be another feather in their caps. Especially true in the leading edge areas such as Silicon Valley. Yes, I do keep mentioning that place, a place (when I was there in the 80s and early 90s) 55 miles long, 2 to 4 miles wide, where 7000 firms designed and produced, with a local economy that would have been the seventh largest GP in the world, and without question the greatest concentration of electronics minds anywhere in the world. The above comment is also true of physicists, to a somewhat lesser degree, since a physicist will usually pass along his beliefs and subjugate anyone who works for him. Electronics is pretty hard and fast: it has long since ceased to be theoretical, in most cases, and the talent is shown in doing new things and old things differently, while theoretical physics is a dream world for people to fiddle around with magical stuff that more likely than not simply doesn't exist, such as virtual particles that appear when the theory needs them and go away when the math says they shouldn't be there. All that while they make noise about everything being made of energy and so forth, along with such crap as saying if it can't be measured it doesn't exist, except when the math points to something else, there magically appears dark energy and dark matter. Rubbish.

I better shut up, someone will take me up on that, but that's ok, I guess. Been through much of the math, much of the particle theory, was friends with some of the leaders, and opine that qm/qp is not the right direction.