That's not jewelry she's talking about
Now
that only good singers are left, I don't think that I'll be watching
American Idol any more. I hope that olde timey guy wins, but I wouldn't
bet much money on it. In the future, I hope that some reality show
producer will create something as funny as my two all-time favourite
reality shows "Superstar USA" and "The Joe Schmo Show".
Especially the second season of Joe Schmo was perhaps the greatest
reality show ever devised. This spoof of Bachelor-style mate finding
shows was a constant laugh riot with its parodies of other then-current
reality shows and their events. In Superstar USA, I wonder if some file
sharing system has the second-place winning Mario's rendition of
Aerosmith's "I don't want to miss a thing" available. If you ever have
a chance to see this performance, jump on the occasion. I guarantee
that you won't regret the time and effort spent in doing so.
I once toyed with a daydream of an idea of a Superstar USA -style university that takes in only the dumbest, the easiest-to-fool and the most narcissistic applicants, as revealed by appropriate psychological tests. In this university, the "lectures" and "assistants" graded the exams and essays in an inverse fashion so that the dumber the essay and more erroneous its logic, the higher grade it would receive. The more inane the essay, the more the lecturer would praise its original ideas and literary qualities.
Of course, the teachers would teach everything in a way that is amusingly wrong but internally consistent, so that students would have an illusion of having learned something. In the graduation ceremony the dean could give a speech that reveals that the whole thing was just a con. Or perhaps this shouldn't be revealed at all, but this was left for the life after school.
Of course, such a con would be possible only in fields in which the truth value of claims and the student's level of knowledge are not made immediately obvious by the cruel measure objective reality. For example, in computer science this would not work at all, since a student could quickly tell that he can't even write a program that outputs the text "Hello world" on the console. (Or perhaps there could be an elaborate scheme where the programs that really execute and display their results are not the ones that the students wrote.) However, many other subjects such as literature, various resentment studies and basically every subject in liberal arts in which there are no real objective standards other than what the guys currently on top believe would work nicely. Heck, even mathematics would work despite being the queen of sciences, if restricted to a level of abstraction that is high enough. For example, the students could be taught a handy formula 1/a + 1/b = 1/(a+b) if it could be ensured that they will never try to see if it works by plugging in some small numbers.
How long could this con possibly go on? Thinking back to some students that I have come to know, I can imagine quite a few of them falling into this snare and staying in it. I remember especially vividly one guy in computer science who obviously didn't even understand the whole idea that some things are true and correct and some other things are false and incorrect. Given a task to write a simple function or program, he just randomly slapped some keywords and numbers together and offered that as a solution, in all seriousness believing and claiming that his program works and that there was no difference whatsoever between his code and the code that they next guy wrote. At least they both looked exactly the same to him. I don't know what became of him: he is probably some postmodernist guru somewhere now.
If the con was not revealed to students but they got to maintain the illusion after graduating, I wonder how long would it take for real life to reveal to them that they don't actually know how to integrate or differentiate a mathematical formula or that they don't actually understand Sanskrit... hrm. Oh well.
I once toyed with a daydream of an idea of a Superstar USA -style university that takes in only the dumbest, the easiest-to-fool and the most narcissistic applicants, as revealed by appropriate psychological tests. In this university, the "lectures" and "assistants" graded the exams and essays in an inverse fashion so that the dumber the essay and more erroneous its logic, the higher grade it would receive. The more inane the essay, the more the lecturer would praise its original ideas and literary qualities.
Of course, the teachers would teach everything in a way that is amusingly wrong but internally consistent, so that students would have an illusion of having learned something. In the graduation ceremony the dean could give a speech that reveals that the whole thing was just a con. Or perhaps this shouldn't be revealed at all, but this was left for the life after school.
Of course, such a con would be possible only in fields in which the truth value of claims and the student's level of knowledge are not made immediately obvious by the cruel measure objective reality. For example, in computer science this would not work at all, since a student could quickly tell that he can't even write a program that outputs the text "Hello world" on the console. (Or perhaps there could be an elaborate scheme where the programs that really execute and display their results are not the ones that the students wrote.) However, many other subjects such as literature, various resentment studies and basically every subject in liberal arts in which there are no real objective standards other than what the guys currently on top believe would work nicely. Heck, even mathematics would work despite being the queen of sciences, if restricted to a level of abstraction that is high enough. For example, the students could be taught a handy formula 1/a + 1/b = 1/(a+b) if it could be ensured that they will never try to see if it works by plugging in some small numbers.
How long could this con possibly go on? Thinking back to some students that I have come to know, I can imagine quite a few of them falling into this snare and staying in it. I remember especially vividly one guy in computer science who obviously didn't even understand the whole idea that some things are true and correct and some other things are false and incorrect. Given a task to write a simple function or program, he just randomly slapped some keywords and numbers together and offered that as a solution, in all seriousness believing and claiming that his program works and that there was no difference whatsoever between his code and the code that they next guy wrote. At least they both looked exactly the same to him. I don't know what became of him: he is probably some postmodernist guru somewhere now.
If the con was not revealed to students but they got to maintain the illusion after graduating, I wonder how long would it take for real life to reveal to them that they don't actually know how to integrate or differentiate a mathematical formula or that they don't actually understand Sanskrit... hrm. Oh well.
Comments