#+TITLE: Talking to an old friend.
#+author: screwtape
I was reminded today of how utterly unknown lisp is in New Zealand
when I literally ran into my friend Bill, who retired a few years
ago. It took me quite a few moments to register a joke Bill made about
lisp being a Monster Released Too Soon From The Lab, which I thought
was a pretty nice line, and I only gradually placed that we were
talking about MIT in the 1950s and not 80s. Bill is a computer
scientist, and probably inspired me in some sense about the
fundamentality of making new games in computing.

New Zealand requires that its universities teach a strong majority of
their classes in Microsoft product purchases. The justification for
this policy is that the Australasian Microsoft Sales Representative
then gives the whole country's universities a discount on their
Microsoft Subscription Purchases in exchange for the universities
running students off a proprietary cliff. So otherwise scientists are
forced contractually to run classes as Microsoft Product Purchase
Information seminars.

By my memory, one of Bill's signature flourishes is coming across
deficiencies in C++ libraries, wading in and spot fixing algorithmic
mistakes. The last conversation I remembering having with bill, I
think he was trying to convey iterative relaxing as a deep learning
strategy to me osmotically through passing conversation, which is
basically the only way information percolates at all (though
unsuccessfully in that case; though I guess I did become soft on
organic deep networks over time).

In fact, let me step away from Bill for a bit here to a conversation I
had with a Chinese friend of mine: They were asking me, given how
lackadaisical non-Chinese K-12 education is (all non-tertiary
education), they wanted to know why they found a small but primarily
western educated group of adults seemed to do nothing but work, and on
inaccessible topics, all the time while they had not spent 17 hour
days grinding government exam materials and extra tutoring.

I think Jung's idea of Playing Doctor Says which is pointless and
increasingly contemptible in both directions is the nature of
education. It takes the simplistic view that people can improve by
being tested on regurgitating undigested official facts in front of
basically their workplace manager, on forced repeat for one to two
decades.

Then so-called educated adults are simply the children upon whom
mandated education experienced a failure mode. The naievely
paradoxical brokenness of all the wonderful and brilliant seems to
bear this out. Western education is perhaps really Chinese standard
education done badly, with intrepid teachers officially paid to mind
the process reverse-capitalistically spending their own souls at the
expense of career to create cracks in the system for the future to
crawl out of with relatively few scars.

The tragic view of education then is The Nightingale And The Rose:
Helping another is and is strictly mortal self-sacrifice, and the
lesson taught is that love is dead but there's solace in an occupied
life. Failure modes for this tragedy being requited love and the
survival and flourishing of nightingales.

Prometheus is one failure mode: Stealing fire from the gods from which
it became integral to humanity rewarded by recurring unanaesthatised
hepatectomy. In New Zealand Maori mythology, Maui seeks fire from the
goddess whose fingernails were fire: But she becomes angry and attacks
by hurling her fingernails at him, catastrophically scourging the
land. However Maui manages to survive, and humanity receives fire as a
consequence of the devastating attack. Prometheus also may have
eventually been freed by Herakles. Pandora's box also belongs here:
Pursuit of curiousity releases the fairly intuitive evils sickness and
death but also ambiguous other evils, with humanity receiving hope
instead of fire.

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