Building better idiots

"[Computer] programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
- Rich Cook

This quote is a sociology lesson in itself. It would take two or three chapters of a book to expand on its meanings and implications.

However, let's ask ourselves why people allow themselves to become "idiots." This is an obvious retreat from reality, at least to a social scientist. It doesn't make sense, in the context of a whole lifetime. Reality, to the people who become the "idiots", is something they can neither comprehend nor cope with. So they escape into a virtual world they can deal with.

Let's teach the coping skills people need, at least to today's young children, so that they will not face the same need to evade reality as they get older.

This is not hard, my friends. We are simply not doing it.

As I have said many times before, anything that can be fixed when it is broken can be prevented from breaking in the first place. This is never more true than with people.

TIA does not want people to break. You do not want people to break.

Let's do something about it. Learn how at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl

Bill Allin
'Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems'
http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl