TIGHT THINKING | 2008-05-19
In his discussion of tmporal provincialism below Prometheus gave the best example yet of something I am trying to encourage here, TIGHT thinking. This is exactly the opposite of the kind of comment you so often see on SF, where a person uses a thread to wander off into his pet repetition of something he would have said if the person starting the thread had never been born or as a chance to put in some news item about Iraq or JEWS or something.
Prometheus had a thought and he put it down. He thought about how anti-whites use dates, explained it, and QUIT. The compliment to the rest of us is that he then left it to US to expand on his observation. He thought it out and put it out there. It is tight, it follows, and it becomes food for our minds.
Contrast this to the "education" we are overcoming. We have learned to listen to every word Mommy Professor says and regurgitate it, preferably word for word, in exact detail. I know this intimately. When I was a graduate assistant, the professor would tell me how to grade papers. On each "essay" question a student was supposed to say certain things, so many points for each thing regurgitated.
The last thing an "essay" question asked for was an essay. An essay is a discussion of a subject which consists of YOUR OWN interpretation of it. An essay is what YOU have to say about it. What is called an essay question in college is exactly the same as a multiple-choice test, except that you have to put in the right choices on a blank sheet.
The exact same perfect contradiction exists in what is called a "seminar" course. I always considered it rather funny when I got there before the FINAL EXAM in what was called a GRADUATE seminar course. The students would be sitting there comparing notes and cramming on what Mommy Professor had told then in the course.
Which was exactly what they had done before a final exam as freshman.
Which was exactly what they had done when they were HIGH SCHOOL freshmen. In modern "education" you never grow up. That is why BUGS is the only surviving example of an otherwise extinct animal, a real, honest-to-God GRADUATE SEMINAR. There will be no final exam. I can tell how well you are doing by the DISCUSSION you present, since a SEMINAR is by definition a DISCUSSION, not a COURSE.
In real education, making you repeat the multiplication table is what a grammar school teacher does. But I would walk in and see a bunch of graduate students in a so-called graduate seminar sitting around and cramming on what amounted to another example of a multiplication table.
As far as Mommy Professor is concerned grad students are still six years old.
So when I say that BUGS is for people who have outgrown their college education, whether they had one or not, it is not just a "cute" statement as SFers would generally think. It is a profound truth. My profound truths are simple, and a weak mind will assume that they are therefore childish and go on to repeat what they think is Profound.
Just the opposite. ADULT thinking is TIGHT thinking. It is the opposite of regurgitation. It is Porch Talk. Adult thinking is making an observation and then leaving it to other minds to expand on it. Old grandpa out on the porch had more respect for his grandchildren's minds than any Mommy Professor is capable of.