Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency

[Thomas Lord]

    > From: Andrew Suffield <address@hidden>

    >>> I have never seen any education system which performed appreciably
    >>> better at this. 

[at fostering original thinking]

    >>> As best I can tell, it's normally left to natural
    >>> aptitude. I've never seen any evidence that there is a practical way
    >>> to teach this sort of thing.

    Tom:
    >> Where did /you/ come from?  Are your gifts and advantages purely
    >> genetic?  Or did you luck into a circumstance wich might have some
    >> more "commodifiable" properties?


    Andrew:
    > I can think of no meaningful way to determine that. There's no obvious
    > answer and no practical way to sample it either.



Taken literally, you have implied:

  a) There's no telling where Andrew's original thinking
     has come from.

  b) Andrew believes, therefore, if he is a "normal" case, it must be
     the result of some "natural aptitude", at least in his case.
     Certainly, "there is no practical way to teach this sort of
     thing."


That's a pretty startling and alarming and fatalistic and
proto-totalitarian world-view for a person to have, if you ask me.
(And, what's more, it seems refutable almost by first principles and
certainly with only uncontroversial help from the empirical sciences
(assuming we can come to terms over what the illusive "original
thinking" category refers to).)

Whatever snobbery they led you into as you entered and passed through
I.C., perhaps it's time to question it?

-t