Comments by "" (@rstevewarmorycom) on "The Most Persistent Myth" video.

  1. I'm a retired physicist-engineer. I'm a lifelong learner and I've done industrial design of electronics and taught electronics in the classroom setting to novice would-be technicians. I've mastered countless other physical and mental skills as well, from music to medical technician. I recall when I was four or five wanting to be a scientist when I barely knew what to call it. Everything I saw I remembered and it all looked obvious to me. When I went to school I always seemed to learn everything shown to me first time, and never had to be shown again. This while I saw other kids struggling around me. I noted that while I always believed I could learn anything, and that excited me, that they didn't believe that about themselves, and were consequently uninterested, except to get teachers and parents off their backs. This continued into high school and so on. There were always a small number for whom science was all they ever wanted to do, and the rest who never seemed to know what they wanted to do in life except find a way to keep people in authority from bothering them to learn and find a way to get rich quick so they didn't have to learn anything. Scientists are people who would do science even if they couldn't find a way to be paid for it. They approach everything in life as an experiment and it fascinates them. They can't picture doing without that in their life, even if they had to do it for free. The rest seem to live on the outside of things, and they can't figure out what to do with themselves and try to find happiness with formulaic antidotes to boredom, sports, marriage, family, parties, and other distractions that bored people like me. And if you try to teach them things they can't remember them for more than five minutes. These are the people who are always calling their friends up to "fix" their computer when they screw it up. These are the folks who get gypped by their mechanic because they never bothered to find out how engines work or what is what in gasoline vehicles. They seem quite sad to me, really, they have NO confidence that they can learn, and that lack dates back to before they even went to school. I'm not sure if it comes from the way their parents talked to them, or didn't, or the way they first apprehended the tiniest lessons in the way the world works not long after birth. My impression is that it is a fool's errand to try to teach these folks, they will not learn, they have a mental block against it, and no strategy, no new teaching medium, or any such new method will enable them to believe they can learn. And of course people lose interest in things that totally stymie them. I am beginning to believe this may be inherited, and that it may have something to do with the complement of genes and their behaviors which we inherited from our forebears, and the distribution of some very special genetic features in a small percentage of the population. Whatever it is, it is inherited unevenly throughout the human population, and there appears to be some Gaussian distribution of these abilities in our population genome that will ever prevent many people from achieving that kind of facility with ideas. As an inveterate teacher I hate that thought, but as I grow older it seems more and more to be the obvious reason why we struggle in vain to teach many or most students.
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  2. johnny dss Yes, it makes me wonder whether all these other people I see are even real or if they are just robots, players in the play of my life, people reading lines with no content, and I wonder if only some of us are really real persons. Are they automatic response mechanisms? Is this just an interactive movie adventure with only a few real players? Are the rest just simple software? This is a genuine question and a puzzlement.
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  3. FlorisYT Well, I just hope I'm never again reincarnated into someone who has no confidence in their ability to learn. Of course that happens out of time, and we must be everyone sometime. I just hope there is progress between lives.
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  4. Ezequiel Djeredjian It resembles talking to creationists or other denialists and conspiracy paranoids who don't believe that anyone can really learn all this stuff, because they don't think THEY can learn. Their belief they can't learn is a denialism of the most difficult sort to contradict, because they intentionally try to make it true so that they don't have to otherwise conclude that they are just being stupid or lazy, which they actually are not, they are just emotionally hamstrung. The students I have had who didn't believe they could learn usually dropped out before they could be reasoned with, but the one I know that stuck around did so because he needed to invest in and grow his loser status to a self-fulfilling prophesy, becoming the class clown or class loser. Kind of pitiful, really. This mental block is so severe that it is as though they have a voice yelling in their ear at every moment screaming "loser, failure, loser failure" so that they can barely hear anything you're saying. It is a form of stifled panic attack when confronted about something they should know. I recommend some form of mild sedation for such people to quiet their demons yelling in their ear telling them they're stupid. I've had some luck with taking such a person out of the classroom setting, which is especially anxiety producing to some, and tutor them privately. But their own self-doubts often return when they try to then learn more on their own, and they can become addicted to your tutoring and imagine they can't perform without being led by the hand. It's a severe form of insecurity. What I have always trusted is that if I could get past their insecurity, that their hobby interest might take over and circumvent their insecurity. This is true of electronics and computer science and science in general.
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  5. Avrelius Titvs I don't mind if some people would rather pursue a more industrial or artistic path, as long as they don't deprecate those with deeper knowledge or contradict them out of spite. I don't even think most people are suited to the sciences, but they should give the scientists their due, then, and be damned glad someone wants to do it. This tendency lately to reject science and knowledge because you didn't do well in school is damaging humanity.
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  6. +Karla Lee No idea what you're talking about here.
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  7. Red Deimon I don't do social media. I think it's puerile. I investigate things. 
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  8. Ezequiel Djeredjian Just talk here. I don't give out my email on YouTube.
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  9. +Lehtaan SIc, "their" job.
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