Archive for February 9th, 2011
A Note From Your Absent-Minded Professor
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 02/09/2011
Mantra Thinking is looking at basics that one in Mommy Professor’s world would never look at. Once you get used to it, it is amazing how no one notices the truth of the so-called “race” problem, that it applies only to white countries and to all white countries.
But Newton also did Mantra Thinking. Through all the ages of hard work that had gone before, gravity was a force everyone was all too familiar with.
But Newton didn’t just NOTICE gravity he LOOKED at it.
Likewise in all the millennia before Adam Smith successful merchants all the way back before Neanderthal knew that what was most valuable was what was most rare. Men have made their livings buying things where they grow in plenty and taking them to places where they are not for time out of mind.
But Adam Smith didn’t just NOTICE supply and demand, he LOOKED at it.
These days the million of our Mommy Professors are a bureaucracy like any other bureaucracy, but it hasn’t been that long since someone who became a college teacher was FASCINATED by his subject.
A century ago they were known as Absent Minded Professors, because their minds were on mathematics or history or whatever they devoted their lives to. That is forgotten now, when there are so many of them and most of them did well in school so they just stayed there.
I hope I am throwback to the old fashioned kind of prof. I think Mantra Thinking is the most fascinating thing in the world. It fills all my hours. And, like an old-fashioned professor, I want you to be fascinated by it too.
For instance a documentary talked about how the trilobites died out in the Cambrian Extinction but have descendants, today’s ANTS. They just mentioned it in passing, but to me the idea is fascinating when you THINK about it.
A trilobite was a couple of FEET long. There was no land life then, so they were in the ocean. We don’t know if they had any social life at all, but it seems unlikely. So I love the sheer mystery of this. I dwell on it.
We do have a complete fossil history of how the whale began as a hoofed predator about dog-size. Became something like a hairy alligator breeding and living on land, and evolved into the whale as we know it now.
Back when the name of this forum was changed from blog to seminar, I talked at length about how this was about the only real seminar existing today. A seminar today is simply where graduate students learn to think and talk like members of the professorial bureaucracy.
Seminars used to be the place where one moved from student to talking about one OWN ideas of the subject he had mastered. It was the transition point between hearing and coughing up facts to the level of being a scholar. I explained at length, and it is still there if you want to look for some of it, that I give you points but you have to look at them from your own religious or non-religious, or any point of view from your own mind.
This is a real, old-fashioned seminar, and I am a real old-fashioned professor.
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