What Does That Mean?
It's starting to become clear that there's a distinction between being right and being smart. Being right is easy, and there's one of two ways to really go about doing it. One is to just agree with the majority view. Blindly follow behind someone else and you can't go wrong, or at least not in their eyes. The other way to be right is to convince people that you hold the majority view. If you don't want to be a follower, be the leader. But as long as everyone is in concordence, you'll not go astray.
To be smart, on the other hand, kind of requires a bit more intuition. When you're presented with a set of facts, you need to put your interpretation on it. How you put your spin on things is, of course, influenced by things external to yourself, past experience or what have you.
So yah, I've been watching Loose Change which some guys at the office have been distributing around last week. It's basically a "documentary", if you will, on how the whole 9/11 thing was done by people on the inside and not completely by terrorists as is widely reported. And I've been reading Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, a pre-9/11 book on the dirty dealings of the Bush administration as you'd probably expect, while on the train every morning.
Now, I mean stuff like this is going to be pretty heavily biased, so you can't look at them and let yourself believe in it 100%. Then again, you can't exactly believe the Bush administation either given that they've told some pretty big lies. I guess you just have to be careful instead of just nodding along to everything someone says.
If anything, I think it's nice that material like this reminds you to question the validity of arguements beyond what you're told. Hit things with the "O RLY?" stick more and so on. :D
Speaking of work, this will be the second week in a row that I'm having a 4-day week. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind that one bit but uh... I would kind of like to go in a little more and really get a better grasp of this editor that I'm using. It's really not as intuitive as I would have liked and, well, it's really starting to make me feel dumb and frustrated. :B I don't really feel like going into the details about why I'm finding it hard to use, so maybe I could demonstrate with a visual aid instead.
The constant starting and stopping and trying to find out why it's so hard to do something so simple is starting to vex me. Soooo I figure that, for the rest of this week at least, I'll just stick with what I do know and get as much of it done as possible, and then go back and fill in the holes later with the help of some one who has more expertise than me. Oh they're going to hate me when that's over. :3
To be smart, on the other hand, kind of requires a bit more intuition. When you're presented with a set of facts, you need to put your interpretation on it. How you put your spin on things is, of course, influenced by things external to yourself, past experience or what have you.
So yah, I've been watching Loose Change which some guys at the office have been distributing around last week. It's basically a "documentary", if you will, on how the whole 9/11 thing was done by people on the inside and not completely by terrorists as is widely reported. And I've been reading Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, a pre-9/11 book on the dirty dealings of the Bush administration as you'd probably expect, while on the train every morning.
Now, I mean stuff like this is going to be pretty heavily biased, so you can't look at them and let yourself believe in it 100%. Then again, you can't exactly believe the Bush administation either given that they've told some pretty big lies. I guess you just have to be careful instead of just nodding along to everything someone says.
If anything, I think it's nice that material like this reminds you to question the validity of arguements beyond what you're told. Hit things with the "O RLY?" stick more and so on. :D
Speaking of work, this will be the second week in a row that I'm having a 4-day week. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind that one bit but uh... I would kind of like to go in a little more and really get a better grasp of this editor that I'm using. It's really not as intuitive as I would have liked and, well, it's really starting to make me feel dumb and frustrated. :B I don't really feel like going into the details about why I'm finding it hard to use, so maybe I could demonstrate with a visual aid instead.
The constant starting and stopping and trying to find out why it's so hard to do something so simple is starting to vex me. Soooo I figure that, for the rest of this week at least, I'll just stick with what I do know and get as much of it done as possible, and then go back and fill in the holes later with the help of some one who has more expertise than me. Oh they're going to hate me when that's over. :3