You Can’t Handle the Truth

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

You Can’t Handle the Truth describes Strategic Communication Laboratories’ psy-ops solution to a potential small-pox epidemic:

The government faces a dilemma: It needs people to stay home, but if the news breaks, mass panic might ensue as people flee the city, carrying the virus with them.

A shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech “ops center” to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal.

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Phileas Frogg: I had no clue Murakami used this method. Honestly my prose can get a bit purple at times, I should try it out. Now I just have to learn enough to write in another language.
Gaikokumaniakku: It is very hard to give honest and constructive feedback on complicated student projects that might prove a student has skill. If it were easier to give feedback, training desired skills would be much easier. Whether any form of training can really imbue a student with skill is questionable. Skill is like a delicate seedling: the teacher can try to provide the right conditions and after that everyone can HOPE that the student manifests skill by mysterious processes. Of course,...
Gaikokumaniakku: There are top-down and bottom-up approaches. In the hard sciences and engineering, we sometimes try to induce parents to send their bright 14-year-olds for special programs that could be called “baby’s first internship.” These top-down programs may or may not inculcate some detectable level of professionalism. These programs certainly are not common enough, or effective enough. But the scientific community is aware that more high-quality personnel are needed. Some...
Isegoria: I see that Swift’s knowledge engine has an entry in Technovelgy.
Bill: The Giertz method sounds like Swift’s knowledge engine, used for generating new ideas: These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round...
Bruce: Great catch James James! All the stuff about well-fed people and well-fed horses sounds like why the Mongols invaded everyone with food. Like starving men from small Viking settlements going after any seaside town with food.
Gaikokumaniakku: “Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop.” This is why teachers ought to make sure that their students take notes on paper, and teachers should not police those notes. The doodles and vagaries of paper ostensibly devoted to notes are the nesting-grounds of...
Gaikokumaniakku: “…given the important nature of the research performed by academics in the sciences and engineering, does he support having them them funded by the government, working in academia, and their work freely available in academic journals?” I don’t speak for Caplan, and he doesn’t speak for me, but I have a few choice jeremiads on the topic of why the peer-review system is broken. Engineering is so vitally important that I believe humans must prioritize its success despite the...
James James: This version of the quote comes from Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (1927) by Harold Lamb. The original comes from Rashid ad-Din’s “Compendium of Chronicles”, according to Wikiquote.
Phileas Frogg: “Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.” This is why boredom is so valuable. Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop. The mind, thus confined, suddenly begins to produce truly astonishing imaginations and...
Isegoria: There is, David Epstein explains, a very bright side to the scientific carnage: The so-called replication crisis over the last decade has been painful for many scientists, but researchers in every discipline have been learning from it and working to improve their fields. It was, after all, scientists themselves who raised the alarm about their colleagues’ work (and in some cases their own work) in the first place. Increasingly, researchers now share or formally preregister their hypotheses at...
Jim: The question, perhaps, is what to do with the boys and young men once they have been freed from bondage. Bryan Caplan, low-T Catholic mischling and natural-born slave that he is, proposes unpaid labor accruing to the Boomer and Israeli owners of the occupational gigacorporations. After he is sent to the Idaho potato farms established to permit the United State’s lipservicedly reformed academics, lawyers, traders, and assorted other Boomerregime water-carriers to perform honest labor for the...
Jim: At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the schooling apparatus, operated as it is by the least-competent white-collar workers in United State society, could be more exploitative than the relentlessly metastasizing tumor that is Corporate America, but its open secret weapon is that the very worst crime available to the inhabitants of Earth is simply to waste boys’ and young men’s precious, fleeting, and unrecoverable time. All education-related policy proposals not opening with...
Isegoria: Caplan isn’t recommending that we forbid science, math, and engineering classes. In fact, he’d probably recommend teaching those subjects much more thoroughly to the handful of students who expect to use the material beyond school.
Curious: How does Caplan plan on creating the next generation of scientists, mathematicians and engineers? And given the important nature of the research performed by academics in the sciences and engineering, does he support having them them funded by the government, working in academia, and their work freely available in academic journals? There have been several excerpts from his book, but none of them discuss these issues.
Gaikokumaniakku: The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are both true and interesting was carried out of the colleges by nerds as soon as Internet access became available to run-of-the-mill civilians. The people sucking on the broken bones of college...
Gaikokumaniakku: “‘Science!’ has died and been buried…46 years of my life…” It is better to struggle for a worthy vision of truth discovery than to surrender and willingly embrace ignorance. This gives us a small measure of cold comfort as we endure the collapse of civilization. The spirit that moved Galileo is not dead. We may not live to see it manifested. We may die in the smoldering ruins of decadence, but the spirit will prevail even if we might not live to see it.
Gaikokumaniakku: So bankers trick young people into getting loans in order to chase useless diplomas. But Caplan does not suggest hanging the bankers. Why does Caplan love bankers so much? Perhaps he should be persuaded to write a follow-up book titled The Case Against Usury.
Isegoria: That Onion piece is from 2003, so The Simpsons beat it by three years.
James James: “The Simpsons” made the same joke in 2000: President Lisa Simpson: As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten? Milhouse: [shows a chart] We’re broke. Lisa: The country is broke? How can that be? Milhouse: Well, remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation’s children? Big mistake.

Isegoria

You Can’t Handle the Truth

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