Comments on: Value infection

By: Cristhyano

Cristhyano — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:31:48 +0000

I’ve been reading here for years, but this is my first comment. Anyway, i’m one year far from finishing college and i can say it: i’m doing it without taking my books from the car. I rarely read anything.
And it’s a well respected college. I simply learned nothing that i can’t do from home.
Greetings from Brazil. Sorry for my english.

By: blah

blah — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:57:47 +0000

You also naturally judge that it is important to put forth effort in as far as it directly benefits you and your community of fellow human beings such as your family and close friends but then your friends teachers and parents tell you that it is important to put forth effort doing tasks for others as their slave. These tasks seem extraneous, irrelevant and inefficient but in exchange for all of the time and effort you can’t spend caring for the basic needs of your clan and yourself, you recieve green pieces of paper you can utilize to enslave others to take care of you and your clan’s basic needs. This at first seems soul crushing, extraneous and cruel, not to mention inefficient, but you soon learn that those who do not subject themselves to slavery and get many pieces of green paper are looked down upon or even ostricized and so you learn quickly that getting good grades in school is essential in order to gain the most time consuming positions of slavery so to gain the most green pieces of paper. You
now find this life’s ultimate most desirable goal!

By: Geek

Geek — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:24:36 +0000

That last longer paragraph was totally me. More money than I’d ever seen before, indeed.
Luckily I talked myself out of the house, and DH is going along with it. We were spending about 10% of our income on housing, and now we’re at 19%… because DH quit his job to try a startup.

Our wild parties usually involve Catan or, once recently, Munchkins. I think we’re setting up a D&D group.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:50:21 +0000

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a teacher at my son’s high school. He wanted to move from the regular track of history (where he was learning nothing) to the Advanced Placement. Since he hadn’t been in that track before they wanted us to talk to the teacher of the more challenging course before he changed tracks. When I called her, she kept stressing that since he wasn’t prepared he probably wouldn’t make an A. I kept thinking, “So? Will he learn more? Isn’t that the point?” Sometimes it isn’t.

Though to be fair there are many wonderful teachers who do encourage people to think.

By: enid

enid — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:02:44 +0000

tracy,

Best to keep them in public school. The world is a cruel, hard, and unfair place that ultimately requires (unless you are able to establish lifetime trust funds for your kids) STOICISM. No better place to learn that than the bullying, arbitrary, suffocatingly bureaucratic environment of the public school system. Otherwise you risk exposing your children to a very cruel culture shock indeed.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:53:53 +0000

WRT schooling, I guess each country has its own philosophy. In Denmark, the teacher spends half the time showing something on the blackboard (either new stuff or going through the the homework assignments of the last class) and then the students spend the other half of the time on exercises; if they get stuck they can raise their hand and ask the teacher for a hint. When I was an instructor in Switzerland, I tried the same approach once, that is, having the students work out a problem they had not seen before in class. Most of them looked like a deer caught in a headlight.

By: tlblack

tlblack — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:44:27 +0000

Tracy–it’s interesting that you mention your kids’ experience in Spain. I’ve worked in French schools and sometimes have gotten the idea that creativity and just freedom for little personal choices during the school day is less common than in the California classroom–obviously that depends on the teacher and I’m not claiming that we’re better. But I find schooling in France to be rather odd and I’ve heard Spain is similar. For example, my sister in law is going to nursing school right now and one of her ‘lecturers’ actually reads from a booklet while everyone follows along–weird!

By: tracysimplylivinginspain

tracysimplylivinginspain — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:31:39 +0000

Great post, as always! I have children in school and my husband and I had this same conversation yesterday. Our children are creative (really creative, in the sense my daughter spends every free moment writing, painting or drawing. Not like me at all); they are free spirits that truly risk being crushed up and spit out by the school system, and this is a shame. Don’t have any solution so far, although homeschooling does come to mind at times. Spain is very vague about this, and families are occasionally dragged to court for ‘neglecting’ their children. The cases, however, are almost always thrown out when they actually examine the family in-depth. I’m not really up for court battles and appearing in newspapers, however…

By: enid

enid — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:47:25 +0000

Well, not to make you state the obvious, but just to spell out how FI lifestyle is better than the work/consumption lifestyle. Is it because the emotional rewards of FI outweigh the emotional rewards of living like everyone else? And if so, what are these emotional rewards?

I always felt that FI minded people value their life more because they value their time more. I feel that way myself. But I had an interesting argument with a pro work/consumption lifestyle advocating friend today… they said that such people value their time just as much but she argued that you can have better quality of time as opposed to quantity. And that she would rather have a few hours a day filled with comfortable and aesthetic things and expensive hobbies/activities than a lot of time without those things. Kind of an interesting perspective too, so I wanted to see if the way you treat time is quantity over quality, or if you see no different in quality due to lack of consumption.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:35:21 +0000

@enid – I’m not quite sure what you mean by “meaning of FI”.Do you mean how I value it?

By: enid

enid — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:30:37 +0000

Also on an unrelated note, Jacob do you think you can address the “meaning of FI” in your next post if it’s not too personal?

That is, is FI ultimately rooted in an emotional satisfaction or a logical one, or both. I suppose it is like asking the “meaning of life” question. Since you are an INTJ, I am guessing that you would give a purely cerebral answer? Or is the intellectual tools used to achieve FI just a means and not a meaningful end, and FI is what allows you to enjoy the emotional happiness of being free, etc.?

By: o0O Bill O0o

o0O Bill O0o — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:11:43 +0000

“Selling out is the strategically right thing to do if you want to excel in the educational system. You apply the law of diminishing returns of grades vs effort. It’s even described in many economics textbooks. To wit, it is usually much easier to go from D to C than it is to go from B to A even though they are numerically equivalent.”

You are dead on! Bulls-eye! Bingo!

If we are interpreting the values derived from modern grades, homework, and group think, then what do you suggest the way ahead? What are we doing wrong?

For most people this set of values or precedent applies, though some are marginalized, and some are infact stupid. Oops, did I say that?
Good post.

By: enid

enid — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:09:32 +0000

This is why I return time and again to your blog. It’s the one place of validation that I’m not crazy for not deriving my meaning in life from shopping. Jacob, have you ever seen “The Truman Show”? A great movie that deals with the alienation of one man in a world of actors, it can serve as a metaphor for being FI minded in a materialistic consumer society.

By: tlblack

tlblack — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:24:03 +0000

I like this post-and I completely agree we are ‘infected’ with certain values nearly from birth and they are, in fact, strange and arbitrary.

But I still have a difference in opinion regarding education. I had fun in college, but I majored in French language (a useful, tangible skill) and took lots of classes in political philosophy–so it wasn’t so much about repeating what had already been said as pondering new ideas and using your brain to think in new and interesting ways.

I had one professor who wouldn’t give any assignment an “a” unless it contained creative, original thought. It was a class in European Intellectual History–so fascinating! I think I’m a more thinking individual for having taken that class–among others. Some teachers are just masters in the area of thought and can really help you start to get your mind working in new ways-.

But you’re right. Some teachers are not really worth anything. When you can memorize a book and learn just as much without doing the ‘homework’ or even going to class, then the teacher is really only there to give you a grade–which is a stupid waste of everyone’s time. Well, unless you really must get into a top school so that you can earn more money than other people . . .

By: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:05:41 +0000

@bwo – Selling out is the strategically right thing to do if you want to excel in the educational system. You apply the law of diminishing returns of grades vs effort. It’s even described in many economics textbooks. To wit, it is usually much easier to go from D to C than it is to go from B to A even though they are numerically equivalent.

In terms of regurgitation, med-school is the archtypical major of regurgitation, but you will find it in any field that has not developed to the point of having an overarching structure/unified theory. For instance, there is more rote learning in solid state physics (and moreso in chemistry and even more in biology and so on) than there is in quantum field theory.

By: bwo

bwo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:47:41 +0000

I’m intrigued by why the character in your narrative sold out to get grades.
Also what majors in college consist of rote fact regurgitation? I spent very little time on homework in either and came away from college surprised about the ways I had to think to solve problems.

By: George

George — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:04:18 +0000

A few months ago, when the annual Social Security projection arrived in the mail, I sat down and added up my earned income. Yippee! I made a million dollars!

Oh, wait, how much of it do I still have left?

By: Kevin M

Kevin M — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:18:59 +0000

Pretty much describes how I grew up until about 4-5 years ago. Sigh.

By: Basil

Basil — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:59:42 +0000

Another great article. I would like to add that traveling, learning new languages, and exposing yourself to different cultures help vaccinate yourself against the media/culture virus.