I Agreee
A well thought out and written little essay from Sippican Cottage
Excerpt ... The 3-6-3 Rule
Why did the nascent United States produce so many great thinkers? Where are they now?
Great thinkers come to the fore when they are required. The founding of any great enterprise requires inspiration coupled to intellect. If the intellect is wanting, the inspiration is usually enough, but makes it harder to carry out the fruits of your inspiration except by dogged determination. Intellect alone is not useless -- it's worse than useless. On a good day it's counterproductive; the other 364 days it's destructive. You cannot come up with a worthwhile concept based solely on intellect. It qualifies you only to be a clerk or a sophist. Clerking is hard work, so everybody goes full sophist right away.
Well not just the US but rather most of our European / Western culture.
Now the world is run by sophists. They think that because they read a few books about people who were great that they are great in their turn. There are two problems with this surmise. One, the people they think were great probably weren't. Secondly, most people are incapable of much more than misremembering and misunderstanding the twaddle they read anyway, because education isn't very rigorous anymore. If you think the world's business is decided by simply choosing wisely between John Galt and Noam Chomsky, I don't know what to say to you. Mozart is never going to show up on American Idol.
Thanks for pointing that out .... seriously .... thank you!
My father was a banker. He told me the old saw about the only rule in the bank is the "3-6-3 Rule." Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and play golf at three.
It was a joke and pop never played golf and he never left at three and people were always coming in to the bank to rob it and shoot the guard. You see, you don't understand the joke. You think it means that bankers were effete and lazy and thick-headed. It really meant that the wisest of them knew that after you borrowed (judiciously) at 3% and lent (wisely) at 6% there was nothing left to do. If you kept coming up with bright ideas after that, it was all bad, brother.
Exactly!
Read the whole thing at the link to Sippican ....
OMMAG
Excerpt ... The 3-6-3 Rule
Why did the nascent United States produce so many great thinkers? Where are they now?
Great thinkers come to the fore when they are required. The founding of any great enterprise requires inspiration coupled to intellect. If the intellect is wanting, the inspiration is usually enough, but makes it harder to carry out the fruits of your inspiration except by dogged determination. Intellect alone is not useless -- it's worse than useless. On a good day it's counterproductive; the other 364 days it's destructive. You cannot come up with a worthwhile concept based solely on intellect. It qualifies you only to be a clerk or a sophist. Clerking is hard work, so everybody goes full sophist right away.
Well not just the US but rather most of our European / Western culture.
Now the world is run by sophists. They think that because they read a few books about people who were great that they are great in their turn. There are two problems with this surmise. One, the people they think were great probably weren't. Secondly, most people are incapable of much more than misremembering and misunderstanding the twaddle they read anyway, because education isn't very rigorous anymore. If you think the world's business is decided by simply choosing wisely between John Galt and Noam Chomsky, I don't know what to say to you. Mozart is never going to show up on American Idol.
Thanks for pointing that out .... seriously .... thank you!
My father was a banker. He told me the old saw about the only rule in the bank is the "3-6-3 Rule." Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and play golf at three.
It was a joke and pop never played golf and he never left at three and people were always coming in to the bank to rob it and shoot the guard. You see, you don't understand the joke. You think it means that bankers were effete and lazy and thick-headed. It really meant that the wisest of them knew that after you borrowed (judiciously) at 3% and lent (wisely) at 6% there was nothing left to do. If you kept coming up with bright ideas after that, it was all bad, brother.
Exactly!
Read the whole thing at the link to Sippican ....
OMMAG
posted by OMMAG at 10:46 a.m.
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