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From: Jos Boersema <Josjoha@market.socialism.nl>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: one reason the Rabbis are so hard necked: they are "teachers"
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 20:54:52 -0000 (UTC)
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When someone is discovering things on their own, they will likely make
many mistakes. Their current opinion about what is best, has a quality
depending on how long they have been trying, and how succesful they are
in solving the problems they need to solve. If they have tried only for
a short time, relative to a complex set of problems (be that baking
bread or riding race bikes ;-), they likely know they have a lot to
learn, because they know that they are not yet so succesful at what they
are trying to do. If they have tried a long time relative to the
problems, they have so much experience with things going both right and
wrong, that they indeed may be thought of experts (depending) and know
quite well how to do things, but also what will be the consequences of
doing things in a less than ideal way. They will also likely appreciate
that differences in approach are not always a matter of what is best,
but different ways to do something can sometimes just produce a
different yet desired result. 

The point is: you can talk to these guys, who have a lot of experience.
The guys who do not have a lot of experience, they probably know that
they are failing, and that makes them humble enough so that you can also
talk to them (or it should be so I guess).

The downside of teaching things yourself, is that it takes a lot of time
and effort, it costs likely a lot of failures, and it may take so much
time to do this that there simply isn't enough time in a lifetime to
get to the necessary (competitive or comparable) quality. The process
may eventually produce a superior expert in some field, if you can have
the entire process of learning on your own, but it can come at a cost
in time, and in some cases a lifetime might not even be enough (example:
I don't think there is a way to learn how to survive in the wild as a
hunter gatherer by trial and error, because you may need to try out a
lot of things which may end up harming and/or killing you before you
have learned).

Teaching has the benefit of speeding up the process of learning greatly.
However there are several problems with it. The most obvious problem is
that of a bad teacher. Another problem is that it produces workers who
may reproduce what the teacher has said, but they have likely (though
not necessarily) less experience with what happens when things go
differently than according to the recipe they learned. It does depend
though on how things are being taught. You can try to get students to
learn more by experience, to have them benefit from learning on their
own from mistakes and learning the backgrounds and mechanisms of that
which they are studying, but still have some guidance for them and
explanations and theory, which could then boost them quickly to be able
to produce an expert result.

If you go to the extremes of either learning from experience and
learning from a teacher, to see if there may be a certain core element
of difference in both aproaches, you could get something like this:

Learning from experience: 

Someone who learns from experiences, engages by best guess in some
action, observes the result, and then may learn that this action has
produced that result.

Learning from a teacher (dictatorial/boring teaching style, or that
which essentially makes teaching different from learning from experience):

Someone is instructed to repeat and remember what the teacher said or
did, and if he did this correctly then the teacher will instruct the
student that what he did was good, and vice versa.

This is the point of this argument: the teacher can divorce the action
of rewarding praise or issuing punishments, from the actual quality of
that which is learned.

Example:

Student learns that 3 + 5 = 8. Student is asked: what is 3 + 5, student
replies 8, teacher rewards student with praise; or student replies not
8, teacher reacts with a negative remark.

This is the way people assume and hope teaching operates. Unfortunately
this is not always the case, considering the very great amount of
nonsense and lies being taught all around the world to incredible
amounts of people. Anyone can see that this world is completely
confused, because just take your own opinion on some much debated topic
(like religion or politics or even history), and you can probably find
more people who disagree with you than who agree, but we can't all be
right about the same thing (although we can still all have a fragment of
the truth in our opinion, I guess).

The problem with teaching errors by mistake (the teacher does not
comprehend they are teaching errors), is that the student gets rewarded
for giving the wrong answer, but this does not necessarily matter to the 
student anymore. The object is not so much to learn the topic at hand,
but the object of the study has become to please the teacher. When you
please the teacher, the teacher will issue you a certificate in the end,
and by this certificate you will then later be hired by other people who
believe in this certificate, and then you will be able to earn money for
your family and make a living that way.

In an extreme case you could argue: the goal of teaching is to please
the teacher, regardless of the quality of the teacher, with the ultimate
aim of getting to a monthly paycheck, so that you can pay for living
expenses. 

Things can get quite wild in this world of chaos and lies.

Why is someone supposed (ideal) to study physics ?

Because they are nerdy and are into experiments and want to know how
things work. They may also be interested in doing experiments and
helping people with developing technologies or just building complicated
machinery, etc.

At this point, this beautiful ideal may have been warped so far out of
shape, that we seem to have gotten to the absurd (put in an extreme way
for clarity): "We studied physics because we want money, and because our
teachers told us the absurd and shameful theory of Einstein's Special
Relativity is true, we believe that to be true, because that is how in
the end we will reach our ultimate goal, which is money."

Sounds wild ? It is the world you live in, now. (Really, Lorentz crazy
hypotheses, warped into the ultimate absurd by Einstein, but 'whatever'
for now.)

Did the students actually test any of this ? Do they run experiments on
ligth ? You wish. I was there, so I can tell you: absolutely not. It is
a dogma put on you, and if you are lucky they throw some fake
'experiments' into your face, which don't proof a thing (it's almost
more like philosophy). Should you believe me on this ? No ! If you do,
you are making the same mistake.

The point of it all is of course (... since we always need to rave and
rant about the prosbul, ideally several times a day, right ? ...), to
make the argument: Rabbis are *taught* by *pontification* that the
prosbul is an acceptable device. When they learn the supposed "why", it
isn't because they *understand*, it is because they want the
certificate. THere is no "why". The prosbul is an obvious lie. The
problem is: their activity of learning has shifted away from learning by
understanding and experience, to merely repeating and remembering what
they have been told by the "authority", to which they are subjugated,
which they IDOLIZE. For the purpose of getting out with a certificate
and making money in the end.

It isn't bad to want to earn money, everyone needs to pay for their
expenses and that is a good thing. However, you see the point. Things
can get warped: an ideal of learning and teaching, can be warped by a
general public acceptance of a school and their certificates, which they
then from their end reward with jobs and paychecks. You see how damaging
this can become in the many mad religions on Earth. These religions do
"work" in the sense, that the people operating the positions in those
religions are earning money. In that sense, their religion is "true",
because "true and good" means "I did what the teacher said, and now I
earn money doing it". Is it still good for people ? IT doesn't matter,
so long as they pay. Why do they pay if it doesn't work, though ?
Because most people are silly and don't care, I guess. They "trust the
experts" they IDOLIZE and go by blind subjugation. Sometimes or even
often that can work out, but I think the amount of scams in every part
of the world is quite amazing. Even bread making seems to have become a
scam, and we all know about doping in cycling ... What aren't people
lying about ?

You can go different on the topic of the prosbul: carefully thinking
things through a hundred times, running simulations and whatever you
could do, experiments are also possible. You can go out in the real
world and issue a loan to a poor person, nullify it or prosbul it (not
nullify it, which is breaking the Torah of course), and then observing
if the poor person is more happy when he is forced to pay or when the
debt is nullified, and what it does to the rich person, and how it all
works. You can spend years on just this topic. Are they doing it ? Of
course they aren't.

Teacher says: this is how it is, the prosbul is law. Students know
better than to object. You think a student can object to this in class ?
They will be getting a negative on their reports if they are lucky, and
risk being thrown out entirely as someone who doesn't subjugate himself,
doesn't IDOLIZE the teachers enough, hurting their pride I guess, or
having arguments they cannot deal with because they themselves are
students of the dictatorial method and don't have a lot of depth with
whach they are teaching either. In any case, the prosbul is just one
topic of the vastness of the Torah of Moshe Rabbeinu, it isn't easy to
be a through and through expert in every part of it. If you where, how
would you even communicate that back to people who don't want to listen?

The power is ultimately with "the silly public" who accepts without
thinking. They are the ones who pay all the bills, for an inferior
product (badly taught students, even misleading people without knowing
it themselves), and that keeps the mechanism going. If they withdrew
their money for sillyness, it would stop, but they themselves would have
to learn to discern between what is true and what is false, which again
requires study. 

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