One of the questions that I have studied is this: "Why doesn't education work better than it does?" I think that I have some answers to that question.
I have found that there is a common answer to most questions of the type: "Why doesn't XXX work"? That answer is this: "Things don't work because there are people in the world who don't want things to work". These people are both diligent and clever in their efforts to insure that things fail.
Such people never talk about their real aims - if they did, they would stand no chance of succeeding. Instead they use plausible lies to cover up what they are really doing. They count on the good nature of most people - that tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt - to act as camouflage for them.
Let us dissect some games played in academic settings to see what is really going on. The first game we will look at is the quibble game. The following dialog will give an example of the quibble game in action.
Quibbler: "Rather than your folksy 'The first game we will look at is the quibble game' would not a superior, and more precise, phrasing have been: 'The first academic stratagem to examine is the discussion gambit'"?
Author: (Confused and 'Put In His Place') "Oh, perhaps you are correct."
Quibbler: "Besides, you can't even prove that I exist, let alone that there is such a thing as quibbling".
Author: (Cowed and beaten) "I flee in terror from your display of superior intellect. Never again shall my unworthy presence be a blight upon humanity. I will immediately kill myself in shame and repentance for having bothered your august personage".
At least, that is how quibblers want it to work. Let us shed a little light on the subject; here is the American Heritage Dictionary definition:
QUIBBLE intr. v. 1. To avoid acknowledging the truth or importance of something by raising trivial distinctions and objections. ...
A few points: from the definition of the word it is obvious that quibblers know that something is true and/or important - they are simply seeking to avoid admitting its truth. How quibbling ever became an accepted part of the academic environment is a bit of a mystery - but accepted it has become.
So ingrained in academia is quibbling that it has a major effect on the writing done by academicians; academic writing is terse, dry, and boring in an attempt to deflect quibbler's attacks. People in the academic community think that they are writing in a 'professional' manner, but their style originates from a reaction to quibbling attacks.
The purpose of the educational system is the transfer of accumulated knowledge from one generation of people to the next. The purpose of all of the academic games we will discuss here is to PREVENT the transfer of that knowledge. As such they are diametrically opposed to the fundamental goals of the educational system.
By changing the style of writing to something which, as my friend Mark Landrum says, has a high "snooze factor", quibbling has the effect of making the transfer of information more difficult. Instead of writing in such a way as to maximize the transfer of information, scientists actually take a perverse pride in the terse unreadable quality of their work.
Hello, earth to savants: you are screwing up big time here.
Current academic writing is very precise, but there is a difference between precision and accuracy. For example: a volt meter that indicates 4.32765 volts - has excellent precision. But if the actual voltage being measured is 5.6 volts, then that precise reading is not very accurate; despite its displayed precision.
The precision of the reading in the above meter example created an illusion of accuracy which in fact did not exist. In much the same way today's precise academic writing style produces an illusion of accuracy which may or may not exist in the actual work being done. Rather than relying on the precision of stilted formal writing; today's academics would be much better off concentrating their efforts on improving the accuracy of their work.
As my brother Terry pointed out to me: a digital clock is a precise instrument, but if it is flashing 12:00 it is probably not very accurate.
What is even worse, by only excepting a terse, precise, writing style scientists allow questionable results to masquerade as good science - while simultaneously rejecting work such as these web pages which are quite accurate - because they lack the apparent precision scientists are used to.
There are a number of games played in academia which are not obvious. One of these is in the area of peer review. Suppose that you wanted to publish a paper to avoid perishing under the publish or perish doctrine, and you had nothing to say. One way of doing this would be to publish a paper that said nothing, but masked that fact by being so difficult to understand that no one in the world could make heads or tales of it.
In effect this is a modern replay of the 'Emperors New Clothes' story. What these people are counting on is that no one on the peer review board is going to publicly admit that they don't understand what the paper is saying.
In a sense this is an intimidation game: "My intellect must be superior since you are unable to understand what I am saying". The truth is that truly superior intellect is accessible. People who obscure things generally have something to hide.
Recall what I had to say about education and communication: any writing that is so difficult to understand that the majority of people in the specialty being discussed are locked out of understanding what is being said - fails to perform any possible function of either education or communication.
Because of this failure, such writing is worthless. In my experience profound thoughts and profound thinkers are almost always understandable. Aristotle is much easier to read and far more understandable than the false precision of academic Techo-Babble written ABOUT Aristotle and his thoughts.
The Publish or Perish doctrine itself is another example of an academic game. Suppose for a moment that you wanted to lower the accuracy and quality of what is written in an academic environment. One of the things that you could do is require academicians to turn out an arbitrary number of papers over a period of time. Since any sort of research is a chaotic, unpredictable exercise; requiring some sort of rigid time table for published results of that research is guaranteed to have an adverse effect on what is written.
Another game played in academia is the 'superior - nay saying game'. Like all academic games it is very destructive toward the fundamental goals of education. This game is particularly destructive. I would like to quote from a letter that I wrote to Peter Stout about a theory I had published on Compuserve; about why lemmings run off of cliffs. (The theory, in a nutshell is that lemmings have eyes which are close to the ground, and that they are unable to see the edge of the cliff until they are right up on it; which in the case of a stampede doesn't give them enough time to get stopped.) Mr. Stout had written to say that while he enjoyed my approach in analyzing the phenomenon that he had read that lemming mass suicides were a myth and that there is no evidence that lemmings run off of cliffs. My reply follows:
"Dear Mr. Stout,
Sorry for not writing back to you sooner, I was doing some printed circuit board design on a rush project and didn't get free until now.
While I have never seen a lemming herd go off of a cliff, I have seen a hamster run off of a table - for all the same reasons.
In addition, after I related my theory to a married female acquaintance of mine she said "Oh, that's what happened to our dog. We took a vacation to the Grand Canyon several years ago. When we let our little pet dog out of the car he started running around excitedly. He ran right off the cliff into the Canyon and was killed".
These are a couple of data points that suggest to me that the lemming stories are true.
I suspect that no one has ever run a study of lemming "suicides" for all the same reasons that no one has ever run a study to find out if being punched in the nose hurts. After all, there is no scientific evidence that is true either. When something is obviously true it is not necessary to study it.
Ask yourself this question: "How believable is it to think that people who live around lemmings and postulate that they run off cliffs - never bother to check to see if there are mounds of dead lemmings at the bottoms of the cliffs"?
One would have to think these people to be incredible dullards never to look for such obvious evidence. It takes a great deal of contempt for the mental abilities of those people to think that not one person among them would ever bother to look.
I suspect that the proposition of lemmings running off cliffs most likely came from someone encountering a mound of dead lemmings at the bottom of a cliff and trying to explain how they got there.
There is a very dangerous trend in academia which is currently quite popular; the ploy of 'nay saying'. I'll give a made up example of this trend so that you can understand what I am saying:
"There is absolutely no scientific evidence that looking both ways before crossing a street improves your chances of surviving the crossing. Not only is there no scientific evidence, there is not even any anecdotal evidence that the proposition is true. This is simply 'folk wisdom' which everyone knows is 'true' but for which there have been no studies run to confirm it".
Just because there is no confirming scientific evidence does not mean that a proposition is false; it means merely that there is, at the present time, no confirmation which exists, and NOTHING more. What a statement like the above street crossing statement is designed to do is confuse, not to illuminate.
Any sort of understanding of nature is a very difficult thing to do. People who are incapable of extending knowledge try to build themselves up, in the eyes of others, to the level of thinkers by casting doubt on the work of those who are capable of extending knowledge.
Humans build up belief systems based upon common experience. A statement like the above street crossing proposition is meant to sew distrust of those belief systems. Much of the academic world is designed not to improve knowledge, but to PREVENT anyone from improving knowledge.
Why would anyone want to do that? The answer is that it gives people a feeling of power to have other people confused and uncertain. However, this is only an illusion of power; real power doesn't feel like anything.
One of the things I have learned in my martial arts career is that when you do something truly powerful people go flying, but you feel nothing - it is almost as though something magical has happened.
People who chase the illusion of power caused by making trouble for others are going up the wrong path; the path of illusion leads nowhere but to misery and unhappiness.
I am very careful when I read something to search for hidden agendas on the part of the author. If someone were trying to do something good why would they hide what they are doing? (Surprise parties excepted of course.) People who want to appear to do one thing while actually doing another almost always intend you harm.
If you will think about it I think that you can find the element of danger and harm in the street crossing example I give above. If this statement were to be published as an actual 'scientific' statement rather than as an example, I think that it would be apparent that the author was attempting to get away with murdering some random stranger. "
Trouble makers are insidious. As I said in the 'Greatest problem facing mankind' section evil people attempt to blend into society so that they may influence society's structures. Part of the difficulty in recognizing trouble making behavior comes from the Yin and Yang nature of reality. Incredibly, troublemakers are often mistaken for problem solvers, and vice versa. An illustration may explain why this occurs.
A troublemaker is a person who sits in the back of the boat and rocks it. A problem solver is a person - who seeing the boat is filling with water - attempts to bail the boat out. However the act of bailing the boat causes it to rock; while rocking the boat may splash some water out. Thus troublemakers may, through the action of plausible lies, claim to be problem solvers - while simultaneously pointing a finger at a problem solver and claiming he is just rocking the boat.
Actually troublemakers are easy to spot: anyone who disagrees with what I have to say about troublemakers and problem solvers is a troublemaker - no matter how persuasive and elegant his plausible lies are.
There is a particularly insidious breed of troublemaker: that is one who is clever enough to rock the boat in rhythm with a problem solver. Problem solvers almost never notice these people since they appear to be pursuing the same ends as the problem solver; but in actuality their goals are very different.
A concrete example of such a troublemaker might be useful in clarifying my abstraction. A school authority figure who makes no attempt to find the instigator of a fight - but who instead automatically punishes both parties equally is a troublemaker, or a person who has been duped into working in a trouble making fashion.
What distinguishes troublemakers from problem solvers is attitude. The latter is attempting to do good - the former is not. Unfortunately, our social structures fail to consider attitude - restricting problem solvers in the name of insuring order. As a result people are prevented from solving problems which could otherwise be solvable.
Any institution which has the power to change the human condition will be a target for troublemakers. Because academic institutions have great potential for improving things they are a prime stronghold of troublemakers. Troublemakers are not difficult to see - if you realize that they are there working their agenda. Look for them, you'll see them.
One of the reasons that evil is so successful is that there is no formal academic study of evil, it tactics, goals, and methods. A major way of frustrating evil would be to formally expose everyone to a study of the 'Street tactics' which evil employs. People who are familiar with and understand the methods of evil are much less likely to succumb to evil ploys.
Before anyone starts to do something about the influence of evil in society by studying it I wish to issue a warning. Troublemakers are very good at sensing the winds of change and using them to brew up a storm. Great care must be taken to keep the influence of evil from affecting the study of evil - and from allowing it to affect the implementation of any social structures designed to combat evil. Rest assured that these new structures will be a prime target of evil effort.