#+TITLE: Talking to an old friend.
#+author: screwtape
I was reminded today of how utterly unknown lisp is in New Zealand when I literally ran into my friend Bill, who retired a few years ago. It took me quite a few moments to register a joke Bill made about lisp being a Monster Released Too Soon From The Lab, which I thought was a pretty nice line, and I only gradually placed that we were talking about MIT in the 1950s and not 80s. Bill is a computer scientist, and probably inspired me in some sense about the fundamentality of making new games in computing.

New Zealand requires that its universities teach a strong majority of their classes in Microsoft product purchases. The justification for this policy is that the Australasian Microsoft Sales Representative then gives the whole country's universities a discount on their Microsoft Subscription Purchases in exchange for the universities running students off a proprietary cliff. So otherwise scientists are forced contractually to run classes as Microsoft Product Purchase Information seminars.

By my memory, one of Bill's signature flourishes is coming across deficiencies in C++ libraries, wading in and spot fixing algorithmic mistakes. The last conversation I remembering having with bill, I think he was trying to convey iterative relaxing as a deep learning strategy to me osmotically through passing conversation, which is basically the only way information percolates at all (though unsuccessfully in that case; though I guess I did become soft on organic deep networks over time).

In fact, let me step away from Bill for a bit here to a conversation I had with a Chinese friend of mine: They were asking me, given how lackadaisical non-Chinese K-12 education is (all non-tertiary education), they wanted to know why they found a small but primarily western educated group of adults seemed to do nothing but work, and on inaccessible topics, all the time while they had not spent 17 hour days grinding government exam materials and extra tutoring.

I think Jung's idea of Playing Doctor Says which is pointless and increasingly contemptible in both directions is the nature of education. It takes the simplistic view that people can improve by being tested on regurgitating undigested official facts in front of basically their workplace manager, on forced repeat for one to two decades.

Then so-called educated adults are simply the children upon whom mandated education experienced a failure mode. The naievely paradoxical brokenness of all the wonderful and brilliant seems to bear this out. Western education is perhaps really Chinese standard education done badly, with intrepid teachers officially paid to mind the process reverse-capitalistically spending their own souls at the expense of career to create cracks in the system for the future to crawl out of with relatively few scars.

The tragic view of education then is The Nightingale And The Rose: Helping another is and is strictly mortal self-sacrifice, and the lesson taught is that love is dead but there's solace in an occupied life. Failure modes for this tragedy being requited love and the survival and flourishing of nightingales.

Prometheus is one failure mode: Stealing fire from the gods from which it became integral to humanity rewarded by recurring unanaesthatised hepatectomy. In New Zealand Maori mythology, Maui seeks fire from the goddess whose fingernails were fire: But she becomes angry and attacks by hurling her fingernails at him, catastrophically scourging the land. However Maui manages to survive, and humanity receives fire as a consequence of the devastating attack. Prometheus also may have eventually been freed by Herakles. Pandora's box also belongs here: Pursuit of curiousity releases the fairly intuitive evils sickness and death but also ambiguous other evils, with humanity receiving hope instead of fire.