I have recently been invited to visit Truthdig and I can say that the contributors do indeed strive to live up to their motto "Drilling Beneath the Headlines".
The message couldn't be clearer: sharpen your critical mind before digesting whatever you read.
Here's an excerpt from The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff that would probably send you to reassess what you thought was obvious:
Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think
Go for it and think!
3 comments:
We should all go to LSE then.
Not even there, according to Kee Chong Li Kwong Wing in Mauritius Times yesterday and should we agree that cognitive skills development is key:
C’est le digne produit d’une école de pensée et d’une profession qui croient détenir la vérité à force de jongler avec des modèles théoriques basés sur des équations mathématiques ésotériques. Je me rappelle bien de mes classes d’économie à la London School of Economics qui finalement n’avait rien à faire avec l’économie mais qui s’adonnait à “churning out quantitative hodgepodge”. Tous ces savants mathématiciens et autres physiciens étaient devenus des figures incontournables dans tous les établissements boursiers et financiers. Ce que l’on surnommait les “Quants” terrorisaient les salles de marché comme ils le faisaient avec les pauvres étudiants du Tiers Monde atterrissant dans la salle de conférence du LSE.
The mess we are in has more to do with lax regulation, greed and politics. For instance, what was the model used by the board of MK to blow up the company? What about the STC? And the poverty-creating policies implemented by Mansoor/Sithanen?
Models can take different forms: verbal, graphic or quantitative. The important thing is for all of them to have feedback loops so as to check for their validity.
And books like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution or Feynman's Pleasure of Finding things out should be compulsory reading for anyone.
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