Author: admin

Part of me always hated taking any exam, that’s why this kind of hits home for me.  More on this later!

The U.S. system may be too lax when it comes to rigor and memorization, but it is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind. It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why the United States produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore’s minister of education, explains the difference between his country’s system and that of the United States: “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam says. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people’s talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well — like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority.” This is one reason that Singaporean officials recently visited U.S. schools to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem solving. “Just by watching, you can see students are more engaged, instead of being spoon-fed all day,” one Singaporean visitor told The Washington Post. While the United States marvels at Asia’s test-taking skills, Asian governments come to the United States to figure out how to get their children to think.

–Fareed Zakaria

from Roger Ebert: NYTimes Article here:
when writing, you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it
I think I will modify this to suit my needs.
When writing, you should avoid cliche, but when conversing you should embrace it.
I will try to be true to this more often with this blog.

from Marginal Revolution; Link Here:
It also suggests that today we might have some very important ideas amongst us, we simply cannot yet see how fruitful they will be.  Their own proponents may not even know it.
The context of this is that a lot of the foundation of modern economics have already been theorized by thinkers much earlier than when they were widely considered useful information; Widely considered useful were what some people thought of these theories and thus a necessary cohesion and further study weren’t done. The ideas were not thought of to be of any positive use. Talk about a parallelism with esoteric subjects of Math that suddenly turned out useful. I think what this should tell us is that we must set aside a part of our time for our curiosities.
We never know if our ideas are useful or true,  Why not give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.