I'm brushing up on basic economic principles at the moment and in the course of my reading, I realized that I understand far less than I feel like I should, about the ramifications of economic policies within the U.S. and abroad.
For example, individual vs. systemic rationality (from Basic Economics, A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell, 4th ed.):
This is a pretty easy trap to fall into, I feel.
I also feel like I should know more about general car maintenance than I should. Then again, for most of my adult life I've lived in cities where a car wasn't necessary, or where cars were not the primary means of personal transportation.
I have issues communicating with new people, and I have issues becoming part of something, anything really.
Thanks :) I like hubski so far, so much more... Tight knit than reddit. I'm not worried about making myself seem like a fool, just conversing.
I find it to be a much more human experience than say, reddit. Other users compare it to hanging around in a bar with a bunch of regulars. Don't worry about coming off like a fool. I ask dumb questions all the time. Generally users on this site are eager to share their knowledge and ideas about any number of things, especially when questions are honestly asked. That's a part of the site culture that I think really sets this place apart.
I'm enjoying it so far, but I think if hubski grows too much that feeling of familiarity would disappear.
I feel like my maths background is still sorely lacking. When I started going down the autodidactic road and got myself a proper calculus book, I envisioned that I would be able to jump from subject to subject building a huge tower of mathematics in my head. Then I got to the really messy bits of Spivak and quit. I was a naive young'un back then, thinking a couple of hours here and there was enough to go through all the problems. I was unsatisfied with the way I was being schooled in algebra so I asked around for advice on the net and found out about autodidactic communities. Also I was very interested in physics at the time so I googled some terms and this page came up: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html. And so like any kid with more than half a brain I imagined myself just toiling away, going through all the things on that page and sketched a kiddie schedule. Needless to say I quit very early on. Come picking majors time, I got hit by a renewed interest in physics and so I picked it. Now I don't know whether to kick myself in the shins for having picked this subject or just suck it up. Anyway, so after I do my bachelor's I'm planning to go on a two year break from all the social stresses in the world and relearn everything while working odd jobs. I don't know if my plan will be economically feasible or if my motivation's going to leave me again but I have a feeling that going through with this hiatus will scratch this itch I've been trying to get rid of ever since that semestre when I didn't learn anything because my school kept switching the algebra teachers.
I feel you on the math. I basically avoided it from second year of high school on. I don't know how things are where you live, but around here it's pretty tough to get odd jobs at the moment. Also, in my personal experience, taking a hiatus rather than de-escalating activity has made whatever it is, much harder to pick up again. Everyone is different, but I think it's worth thinking about.
That applies to what I'm saying too. A potential employer might not appreciate or understand why you decided to take a hiatus. Not to mention that new potential employees will be graduating, as qualified for whatever jobs you're interested in pursuing as you are. It seems to me, that it would be possible to take some time off while looking for jobs you might be interested in. You never know when a good opportunity could come along and it would be a shame to miss out on it.
Ugh. Frak that. I refuse to adjust my lifestyle for future employers. xkcd puts it better than I can: http://xkcd.com/137/ I'm sorry for sounding like a bellend, but I just don't see the value in thinking that. If a potential employer doesn't like what you're doing with your life, why not just hop on to the next?
History. The history of my area, my country, my planet. The history of the different sciences, of different cultures, of warfare, agriculture, medicine. The history of just about everything. Today, it's almost taken for granted our society can and will change dramatically every decade. It's easy to forget that many of those bits stayed relatively constant for centuries without much change. Not that I'm complaining, with regards to STEM, but I've been reading more on modern agriculture recently, and it seems rife with local optimizations that completely ignore the big picture and what was and wasn't sustainable for the millenniums up to now. Part of my inadequacies is because my memory is terrible and my classes exceedingly uninteresting. I can't memorize dates to save the life of me. Obscure acts and battles go in one ear and out the other. But I'm at least finding that there is plenty of resources outside of textbooks and primary documents that I can absorb and learn from, so I'm slowly trying to reconcile this. Edit: Also writing, but that's part of what I use hubski for :)
I feel like I should know more about home construction than I do. A friend was over the other day and was baffled at how little I know about these things. Only several times in my life have I ever used a tablesaw. I have no idea how to build things in a practical way. I was recently over at b_b's house and he has done a large amount of renovation to his home. It looks fantastic and I could tell he was very proud of his work, as he should be. I would have to hire someone to do that type of work for me, which is fine but when you are in a bind and need to get something done it's really frustrating. I suppose I just don't enjoy that type of thing or I would know how to do it. The same thing exists for any sort of auto repair. I'm horrible at that stuff. Change a tire? Jumpstart a battery? Yeah, I can do those things but ask me to change my own oil and I'll shrug, pull out a $20 bill and pay some business to do it for me. Those are two things I should know how to do by now, home repair, and auto repair.
The thing I've noticed about repairing things, is that whatever is broken or needs replacing is often connected to something else, which is connected to something else and so on, as almost everything exists as part of a system, so what might to the uninformed, look like an easy fix, could quite easily become a big project. If I ever have the means to buy a house and decide to pull the trigger on buying one, I will definitely take some time to learn about home repair.
I bought a house that two guys spent years fixing up. I intentionally bought a house that would, in theory only require routine maintenance.
My parent's house is being worked on right now and the other day a guy doing the floors took off a baseboard and immediately, water starts shooting out. Apparently, whoever put the baseboard on accidentally drove a nail into a pipe, just puncturing it. If the worker hadn't taken the baseboard off, there's a good chance that eventually the nail would have rusted and then water would have leaked between the walls. Right now there's a screw soldered into the hole until the plumber can get back to fix it properly. To do that, he'll have to cut out part of the ceiling in the finished part of the basement and move this unusual pipe assembly higher up in the wall. I'm nowhere near being able to afford my own home, but if/when I am in the market for the house, I'll make sure to try to get as clear a picture as I can of all the systems in the house I might buy to see what might become a problem in the future. From where I sit, being a homeowner seems very stressful.
So far it's okay, the stressful part has not been any catastrophe, but rather the upkeep. I am thinking about putting my home on zillow's "make me move" to see if anyone makes us an offer at a price that would gladly make us get up and go. I'd then rent a larger home at far less than my mortgage and just hire people to mow, clean etc. I want zero home responsibilities if possible. Then, someday I want to build our dream home.
When I was in high school a guy from the university came to talk to us about nanobots. One of the things he mentioned was that nanobots might someday be used to mow lawns. At the time, it struck me as weird to consider using an advanced technology to perform such a mundane task, but in America it particular, mowing and maintaining a lawn can be a very significant time commitment. I have thought about solving the lawn problem in other ways, such as by using a goat or a cow, but then the yard would smell farmy, not to mention poo disposal is less enjoyable than mowing grass. I like the look of a nice lawn, but honestly to me, it seems a bit frivolous and wasteful. Consider how much water is used and all the fertilizers and other chemicals that get sprayed onto lawns and then all of that residue washing into street drains, not to mention the space that is either under utilized or never used, except as a space to mow and maintain. That said, my views may change. If you built your dream home, wouldn't you then have a lot of home responsibilities and also an increased interest in maintaining it?
I'm in the same boat, man. Been in my house about a year and a half, and am overwhelmed with how little I know about doing renovations. I go to friends houses and they've completely gutted and replaced bathrooms, installed new floors, etc. I need some kind of Master/Apprentice relationship with someone to help train me or something. I'm pretty handy with little things, but drywall? Tiling? Any project involving wood I have to cut myself? Simply don't have the tools or know how, and finding this information on the internet is time consuming in extremely lacking in content. Seems most of the handy people are too busy doing things in the real world.
It's good to know that I'm not alone, thanks. Question: I have a couple of decks/porches off of the back of my house. The wood is just raw, it's never been stained or treated. I'm afraid it's going to rot and that I need to stain it to protect it. Can I do this while the boards are all in place or do I need to take the thing apart? If the answer is I don't need to remove the boards, then I'll do it myself. Otherwise, it's beyond my skill level.
They probably used some kind of pressure treated wood to begin with, perhaps not for the planks (it doesn't look as good as other options, cedar for example), but definitely for the structural wood. You can just stain the deck surface. That's what's exposed to the elements most. Every other year, power washing and staining is probably a good idea to extend the life as much as possible (although people who are very particular do it every year up here where the winters can suck balls). Staining a deck is just like painting, which anyone who has the slightest amount of patience should be able to do.
Its funny, there are all those diciplines throughout school that you always ask yourself (to justify not caring) when will I ever use this in the "real world"? Well, for many of them the answer is "not often," but for things like "shop class" and "home-ec" the answer is Often! Good luck with that bookshelf.
And yet (from my perspective) they are driving these classes out of high schools in favor of more academia. I value education a lot, but I don't believe everyone should have a college degree. I do believe everyone needs a certain set of life skills that things like shop class and home-ec help impart. My high school didn't offer either of these. I would have liked the opportunity to take a shop class. I think it's more than just sad that these classes aren't considered core/vital curriculum. I think it sets up future generation for dependence on others and on establishments in order to provide for them services (and even goods) that they should be able to complete/create themselves.
I absolutely agree with you. I think that by the time my daughter is in High School she will wonder what Physical Education (gym class), Shop and Home Economics ever were. But these are the things that she can learn at home from me and her mother (not so much the shop class). A trade is an important thing to know. If the zombie apocalypse comes and we survivors are judged on our abilities, nobody is going to care about the wise-cracking business development manager that can strum a guitar and write a song. -I'm basically zombie bait. A poet? -You may actually be fed to them prior to me ;)
Isn't PE mandated or something? Did you see the article last week about how US schools focus more on sports than many other civilized nations in the world? I found this very interesting. Hey! I have a tool kit! I learned how to take doors off their hinges this weekend. Now I, too, will be able to punish my children using this method at some point in time. But my poetry and my (sigh) knowledge of the federal regulations that govern banks isn't going to do me much good in the apocalypse, I agree. I think you and several others on here (humanodon?) are runners. Every once in a while I pick up running and it's mainly in fear of the zombie apocalypse. Rule Number 1 is cardio after all.
How to study effectively. I hear my classmates talk about upcomming tests and how the studied 1-2 hours for it and get 70%+ while I have to study 2-3 hours for somehting to get the same result. I realise its thanks to the mix of lack of concentration, too much focus on useless points of the theory and too much revision of examples, but how do I improve on those elements?
Ugh. All growing up I struggled with this. On all standardized tests I hit it out of the park and tested far beyond my current level. But on tests that required route memorization and a lot of concentration, I had a hell of a time. Especially homework every night. If you look at a list of ADHD symptoms, I have basically every one of them in spades, though when I was a kid this was not diagnosed much if ever. Even the fixation on useless points of theory over the practical tested materials I identify with. My brain just naturally wants to think about what interests it, and if there is not some sort of honest connection to a real curiosity I have on the subject, I'm kind of screwed. Luckily I'm a curious person as a matter of principle, but again, it made studying difficult. Maybe meds would have helped, but the bottom line is that I just had to brute force it. When I wanted to succeed I did fine by brute forcing it. When I was younger and there wasn't yet a tangible connection between my performance and things like getting into the college of my choice, my grades suffered as I didn't have the extra discipline that was required. For the subject requiring route memorization, what worked for me was reading the text, and literally, line by line, hand crafting a flash-card that contains information I might be tested on. After creating my cards by reading and comprehending, I simply flashed the entire text out of order to myself in a series of cards and never stopped doing that until I answered every single one correctly. All day every day. Take them with you. Shit works. The last time I had to do this was for an industry certification for my job where supposedly only 18% of the applicants pass the test the first time. I was one of them.
For more conceptual subjects like mathematics, the only thing that ever worked for me was solving extra problems and basically doing twice the homework assigned. If I did, I did ok. If I didn't, I just got by...or didn't in the case of Calc II a couple times in college. Oddly geometry was the only math subject I aced in my sleep, along with anything writing or science related. Edit: To answer the main question though, it would be home repair. The house I live in used to belong to an old man that was especially handy. Everywhere I look I find functional built-ins he hand crafted to do a job. Work bench and vices in the garage...a wooden shelf with various hole sized drilled to hold his drill bits and tools...smaller work bench in the basement...a wooden storage rack holding all of the old window panes and doors from the house that he kept instead of discarding...loft beams and flooring in the garage for additional storage. Everywhere I look I see where his hand was, changing the structure in utilitarian ways. His ghost is showing me up in front of my wife every day while I'm still trying to hang that damn bathroom light fixture two weeks later.
It's interesting to see someone with this problem. I don't know where you're from, but many schools take it for granted that their students know how to learn because they see that students are learning some things. At the moment, there is the idea that "multiple intelligences" exist. I don't really care for that title because people are then prone to saying things like, "I'm intelligent in another way" which sounds like an excuse. Anyway, the theory of multiple intelligences basically looks at learning styles. People take in, process and retain information in different ways. For example, some people learn well by listening and taking notes, or by reading about something or perhaps they learn best when engaged in physical activity. Perhaps you might think about how you go about studying and try different things. I bet if your instructor knew that you were actively doing something to try to better your understanding and your scores, then they would be supportive of that. Good luck!
I like that a lot. Capitalism is based on individual rationality, I think, and someone like Marx would argue that it suffers from a lack of systemic rationality as a result. It's an interesting way to put a fresh spin on an old argument. Anyway, to answer the (excellent) question -- I had this thought process in about the 10th grade. I think my dad asked me a question about the different types of energy sources -- oil, coal and so on. I was clueless about something very basic that I realized I should absolutely know. Then I took a step back and applied that mindset to my entire life and began what I wholeheartedly consider a lifelong journey to know as much as I possibly can. thundara mentioned history -- that was a big one. Philosophy, too. Literature, general knowledge of the hard sciences. Current events, especially economics. Biographies, documentaries. Even movies to an extent. In my opinion constantly being on the lookout for new knowledge (outside of school, which teaches me very little) has improved my life a lot and made every day more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Years later, I'm still going strong, reading articles and books on things I'm ignorant about as often as possible. Incidentally, hubski has streamlined this process a lot; thanks guys.
Cars, i live in the south and everyone talks constantly about how they suped up their car yesterday, but i can barley recall the year of mine. It seems as if all those genes went towards computers, I can name my specs as easy as i can my ex-girlfriends.
I too, know nothing about cars. As I understand it though, mechanics are starting to have to know more about computers because the newer cars all have more complex computers in them. Maybe they'll converge enough for that lack of knowledge to change for you? It takes me a bit to recall ex-girlfriends though. I guess I put a lot of energy into forgetting them :)
Deep breath and count to ten? I used to have anger problems and this actually helped for a while, no shit. What's making you angry?