How Elite Military School Feeds Israel’s Tech Firms

Monday, July 9th, 2007

How Elite Military School Feeds Israel’s Tech Firms:

After graduating from high school in 1993, Arik Czerniak entered a secretive Israeli military program called Talpiot. The country’s most selective institution, it accepts 50 students a year and trains them in physics, computers and other sciences. Its mission is to create innovative, tech-savvy leaders capable of transforming Israel’s military.

Upon graduating from the nine-year program, Mr. Czerniak took a different route: He helped launch Metacafe Inc., an online company that lets users post short videos, such as a clip of an acrobatic squirrel and one of a bikini-clad woman making a snow-angel. Now 32 years old, Mr. Czerniak spends most of his time in the Israeli company’s new offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

Three decades after Talpiot was founded to modernize the Israeli army, the program has created an unforeseen byproduct — a legion of entrepreneurs that has helped turn Israel into a technology juggernaut.

Posted in Business, Education, Technology, War | No Comments »

Bruce: D party ringers are expensive.
Phileas Frogg: The cost of civilization is the vicious, perpetual, and unapologetic enforcement of civilization. The refusal to pay that cost by our leaders is their insistence that we must forego the laws of civilization and be subject to the laws of the jungle once again. While the American experience of this seems to still be at the stage where institutional efforts could, maybe, still reverse our descent, in Europe, and the UK in particular and in light of the Belfast situation, it appears that they...
Bob Sykes: So, this yet another benefit of open borders and free migration. Evidently, this is an unintended (?) consequence of the wholesale, heavily subsidized transport of illegal aliens into the US by the Biden administration. Or did the anti-red meat crowd piggy-back a pet project on the Biden scheme?
Isegoria: Apparently “Descendant“ appears in his The State of the Art collection.
Bill: Eventually, the US Army will get to the logical conclusion of this line of development, namely, the smart suit from “Descendant” , a 1987 short story by Iain Banks. After a bad crash, the protagonist is badly injured; can he walk back to base? The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet. The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of...
Isegoria: I’m reminded of Feynman’s anecdote, in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, about struggling to speak Portuguese: Now I wanted to say, “So, I learned Portuguese,” but I couldn’t think of the word for “so.” I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: “CONSEQUENTEMENTE, aprendi Portugues!” When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, “Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!”
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.

Isegoria

How Elite Military School Feeds Israel’s Tech Firms

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