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Friday, June 07, 2002 |
COCKINESS IS NOT LIKELY GONE FOR GOOD
Can you say hubris?
Webbed, Wired and Worried. "I've been wondering how the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were looking at the wired world they've been building and the assumptions they are building it upon. In a recent visit to Stanford University and Silicon Valley, I found at least some of their libertarian, technology-will-solve-everything cockiness was gone." (By Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times, 5/26/2002.) [Brent Sleeper's Web Journal]
5:18:31 PM 
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CHEAPER THAN A BUREACRACY, TOO
MATTHEW YGLESIAS ON HOMELAND SECURITY:
It seems to me that no matter what we do, some people somewhere will still be able to pull off a devastating attack sooner or later. The answer to the terrorist problem isn't trying to devise foolproof counterterrorism measures, it's defeating the Islamist ideology that inspires the attackers. Going on the offense, (a) kills terrorists, thereby making it harder for them to attack us (b) deters states and other powerful figures from sponsoring terrorism, and most importantly (c) shows that hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings doesn't make America give in -- it makes America topple your regime. Going on defense, on the other hand, makes us look weak. It makes it look like... Well said. [InstaPundit]
5:08:51 PM
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GREAT WORDS
A few wonderfully inflammatory and thought-provoking ideas from an interview with Jeff Schmidt, the author of Disciplined Minds:
"Graduate school is an intensive and protracted period of scrutiny during which the individual is pressured to conform under threat of expulsion. The tenuring process is another years-long process of scrutiny. Those who remain after the two long rounds of weeding and transformation are so intellectually and politically timid that they don't need tenure. Thus the people who need the protection of tenure don't have it, and those who have it don't need it, because they have nothing provocative to say."
"Our society features a single, thoroughly integrated system of education and employment. The education component is hierarchical and competitive because it is a sorting machine for employers, a gate-keeper for the corporations and academic institutions."
"Learning doesn't require credentialing, ranking, grading, high-stakes testing, groveling for letters of recommendation and so on. Good teachers don't need -- or want -- the power to crush their students socially." [Ken Rawlings]
4:57:36 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Steve Pilgrim.
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