Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "We’re Living In An Idiocracy.." video.
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There was no internet until I was out of high school. As soon as it came out, I was using it. For ME, it was perfect, because I no sooner had Calculus II and Differential Equations under my belt than here was this computer algebra system that could perform all the calculations. Every generation after mine had this sort of capability from birth.
I took a break in graduate school (math) to work on bringing the Internet to rural northern Idaho. System programmer, help desk, and general go-fer on a federal grant that brought dial-up Internet to places it had never been. In those days, capabilities were far more limited than today, but hopes and expectations for the future were through the roof, but little did we know at that time what the level of connectivity would one day become or the bandwidth, which is 3 orders of magnitude (1000 times) greater than the crap dial-up that we were so proud of.
I sort of feel like I came along at the perfect time, but as a math professor, I'm seeing more and more 15- and 16-year-olds who are WAY more advanced than I was at that age. At that age, I was discovering girls and looking for the next kegger. If not for a physical handicap that said "Go to college or be a drain on society," I'd've been perfectly content just getting through high school and blue-collar work.
For every kid who gets led astray on the Internet, there are 10 who figure out that what they learned in k-12 was mostly garbage, and the good stuff they learned in high school was delivered in a garbage way. Traditional schools put a lid on your learning. Technology makes the learning as fast as you can take it in.
I can't tell you how many high-school drop-outs I see on the Internet who know the difference between the Frankfurt (socialist) and Austrian (free-market) schools of economics.
You want kids to think more critically? Give them more word problems in their math classes! LOL! Or have them write opinion papers on historical figures. Have them write pro- and con- pieces on each. One thing I learned in school that they don't teach, today, because "the other side is evil and toxic," is "If you don't understand the arguments of "the other side," then you don't understand your own side.
What I see from the so-called "left" are people who can quote Marx, but never heard of Adam Smith, and our entire education system, with few exceptions, consists of indoctrinated socialists who don't understand economics. They just see the fruits of free-market, voluntary transactions as wealth that they should redistribute by force to "those in need."
I help people in need. AND I pay taxes. I could help more people if I paid less in taxes, and there'd be a lot more assistance tailored to the needs of the people I help, on a case by case basis, than all the bureaucrats and all the red tape could ever do, without the 80% overhead that government typically requires. Poverty programs aren't for the poor. They're for the bureaucrats who administer them.
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