House of Eratosthenes

The ninety-ninth award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) goes to Proessor Mondo’s late Dad. It is a sentence reported in passing on another thought, and paraphrased, second-hand. The topic is the higher education bubble:

This also ties in to an idea my father drilled into me a long time ago. He said I could get a good — even a great — education anywhere, but I had to want it.

Stop the presses, stop everything. This is a big thought. The context is universities, as in the economical ones versus the prestige-value ones that really break the bank. And you already know my thoughts on this:

Thing I Know #263. The one thing that’s wrong with higher education that nobody ever seems to want to discuss, is that it is valued through something called “prestige.” Get this prestigious diploma. Get that prestigious degree. Attend a prestigious university. My alma mater is more prestigious than yours. Trouble is that genuine learning has very, very little to do with prestige. It is, arguably, the exact opposite.

Once I expressed my admiration, Mondo expounded on what his old man was all about:

I hope you’ll trust me then when I tell you my late father was Smart. We’re talking at least 4 or 5 standard deviations to the right end of the bell curve here. And he used it, going from an apartment in the projects of Nashville, TN to becoming one of the top professionals in a very technical field…[some more stuff to provide evidence]…

See? Smart. But in the 43 years in which I had the chance to know him, he never would have seen himself as being “too talented to do what ordinary people do.” In fact, he saw himself as a regular guy, if a talented one, and was generally happy to live what he saw as an ordinary life in the burbs with his high school sweetheart and his kids. I never saw any indication that he thought any honest endeavor was beneath him. If other folks wanted him to be mayor, that was fine, but he would (and did) also serve as janitor at the city building when that was needed.

There’s some discussion taking place here, vis a vis contrasts…with a certain other guy whom I’m tired of talking about. You know the one. Hope, change. That guy.

Regarding the main point, about smarts, education…ultimately, it means readiness, willingness and ability to do what must be done. Yeah, the janitor can be smart. Take the initiative. Don’t wait to be told what to do. Figure things out.

I suppose there’s a reason I can identify with this. I don’t identify with much anymore, and I guess I never really did. I didn’t set out to be a software engineer, I just saw things needed to be done, and everyone was standing around waiting to be told what to do. No nicely pre-assembled procedures would be forthcoming, someone would have to figure things out so I figured things out. That was just upbringing.

I’ve often had the strangely reassuring, and also unsettling, idea that I’m the product of such needs and nothing more than that. In other words, I don’t really have any special aptitude for writing computer software — I have experience doing it because it needed to be done and nobody was doing it. If I grew up in a seventh-century village down by the seashore in post-Roman England, and what the village needed most was someone who could gather the clams, I’d be a clam-digger. If there was a need for ditch-digging and nobody knew how to do it, I’d be a ditch-digger.

Smarts, ultimately, is flexibility.

And to think you can only engage in a learning process, in some gilded institution constructed for such a purpose and only during the four years out of your life where you’re supposed to…well, that’s just silly. Maybe that’s why it’s not commonplace you can find anyone willing to say such a thing.

But a lot of people believe it. This is a great human tragedy.

All right, all right…we’ll talk about that other guy, President Barack Obama:

David Foster at Chicago Boyz posts the following jaw-dropper from Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett about her boss:

He knows exactly how smart he is… He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

Now, this is Jarrett saying this, not the man himself, so your (and his) actual mileage may vary. While the first part of the quote is interesting enough, it’s the attitude conveyed in the last sentence that stuns me.

Foster fills in just the very few small pieces that are missing from this thesis:

Strangely, it would appear that Jarrett believes that the above statement reflects positively on Obama.

In reality, individuals who are exceptionally intelligent — at least those who are possessed of any degree of creativity — are rarely bored. Rather, boredom is the domain of the spoiled brat, the overprivileged aristocrat, and the person with the flat and empty interior landscape.

And many individuals who are exceptionally intelligent–especially those who have leadership aspirations and abilities–have in fact spent a considerable amount of time “doing what ordinary people do,” and have learned a great deal from the experience.

The people now running the White House are a very strange crew indeed.

To be fair about it, this is a quote from Valerie Jarrett. So evaluating the evidence strictly, we can only surmise something strange about her.

But she’s plenty strange enough. Left to my own desires, I wouldn’t burden her with the chores that other people do. I wouldn’t trust the woman to so much as pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel.

People like her are like anti-Mike-Rowes. For their own safety, they need to be isolated into citadels…which, in turn, depend on these ordinary jobs done by ordinary people, but in a very subtle way, so the residents living within don’t realize these things are being done. And then they, in turn, never have to do anything that requires competence.

That really is the arrangement they require. To provide it to them, requires a separation from reality. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be provided to them. They want to live in a dream and I think they should be accommodated.

Beats the hell out of having them actually running things.

This is why I laugh at the accusation that Palin is an airhead. If this is what we get when the smartest guy is in the big chair, I think I’d prefer the airhead.
- Jason | 09/16/2010 @ 20:20
[…] the public seems to have tired of this. I believe comment-poster Jason spoke for my nation, when he said: This is why I laugh at the accusation that Palin is an airhead. If this is what we get when the […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/17/2010 @ 19:11

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