I wouldn’t call it “slow.” It actually basically vertical:
The education President Obama received at Columbia University and Harvard Law School — and delivered to others as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School — encourages the fantasy of a political world subject to almost limitless manipulation by clever and well-orchestrated images. This explains why the harsh exigencies and intractable forces of politics keep stunning the president, each new time as if it were the very first.
How might higher education be reformed to produce political leaders more familiar with how the world really works, more alive to the realities of social and political life and better able to discuss them honestly with the American people?
He’s lived his entire life in a bubble of unreality. A lot of us realized this in 2008, but a few million too few.
When you’re already at the pinnacle of awesomeness, why would you need a learning curve?
Regardless of Obama and politics in general, do you disagree with the following argument concerning the use of the phrase “learning curve”?
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/steep.html
First sentence: “The phrase “steep learning curve” to describe a difficult-to-master skill is mathematical nonsense.”
The ‘curve’ can be indented up, down, linear or random. …and totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The topic isn’t the curve. The topic is does Obama learn. (I do understand your confusion.)
I see no evidence that Obama learns. At all. Zero. This is because children don’t always grow up and socialist are all enamored by a childish ideology based on a false foundation. Great ‘learning’ and being ‘articulate’ are not the same as wisdom which often comes from inarticulate sources.
Socialism, no matter how well spoken the source, is always childish gibberish. Being able to speak about it for hours doesn’t make it any less so.
Hey Bob is back. You can tell it is him when he demands we not talk about Rand’s post on Rand’s blog and demands we answer Bob’s question.
A learning curve should slope down. However, because of his bungling of Obamacare, the hours of effort Obama must expend to move items on his agenda has increased significantly. His curve is no longer monomial. It is binomial.
I’m a bit curious as to how Rand defines the phrase “learning curve”, but I’m hardly demanding an answer. I posted my comment partly as a very mild criticism, but mostly as a service: I sincerely hope that my comment prompts Rand (but also anyone reading this comment) to think about how they label their axes when they talk about “learning curves”.
Why should Rand care, since we all knew what he meant? Rand frequently shows an interest in prescriptive linguistics. See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription (I would not be surprised if this is interest is typical of engineers who are also published authors.)
Since I wasn’t being literal, I saw no need for mathematical rigor.
One use of the term “learning curve” was in WW-II industrial production, as a tool in predicting when war production would increase to a war-winning level — Churchill’s at first nothing, then scarcity, and after that, more than you can use.
The idea is that you have this really capable fighter aircraft, but it only exists as a prototype. At first get you no production because you have to set up the factory. Then you get low levels of production because the workers and production managers are building these things for the first time. And after that, you get high levels of production because the workers and production managers have figured out “machining tricks” and effective work flows.
The notion of a steep learning curve is that in the Battle of Britain, England didn’t have enough fighter aircraft. Unlike the Germans, when British and Allied pilots got shot down, if they were able to parachute out of their aircraft, they were returned to their squadron, but the factory wasn’t turning out enough aircraft to make good the loss. That factory would be turning out more Hurricanes and Spitfires than they would need — either next year or the year after that — hence the steep learning curve.
They would have to increase production more quickly to survive, In other words, they needed to ramp up production sooner, they had to move along the horizontal axis of the “learning curve” at a faster rate, hence they faced a “steep learning curve.”
Mr. Obama faces a steep learning curve. There is a low rate of PPACA enrollments right now, and there is a need for a much, much higher rate of enrollments very soon. He faces that steep learning curve. Like England that was slow to ramp up industrial war production in the ’30’s when faced with the threat of German militarism, there is evidence that the Administration was not taking seriously the size of the task of implementing the PPACA and hence they are still on the “flat” of the learning curve with the need to climb very rapidly up the curve very soon.
The political class in England were not fools — they were aware of the war ambitions of Germany more than anyone. But they were playing a balancing act between preparing for this war and imposing hardship on their people who were still paying off the debt from the last war with Germany.
I don’t think Winston Churchill knew how to assemble a Merlin aircraft engine let alone how to pilot a Spitfire fighter. But in deciding to continue the war after the Fall of France, where he defiantly pledged to “Fight them on the seas and oceans, we shall fight them on the beaches” and in so doing promised the British people “blood, sweat, toil, and tears”, he knew of the desperateness of the situation, he knew of the capabilities of his fighter pilots and the production capabilities of his factories.
So yes, to say that the Administration “has a steep learning curve”, it means that they currently face a steep learning curve, and we shall soon learn if the President and his advisors are “quick studies.”
Tom Clancy wrote about “steep learning curves” in the context of military systems that are largely made possible by computer software, and he chose the A-120 AMRAAM as an example.
The way he described it, the functioning of this advanced air-to-air missile was largely dependent on the software working and that the “software took a long time to get healthy” accounted for the criticism that this missile was a “boondoggle.” But as Clancy went on to explain a point that many of us who develop software are well familiar with, one “glitch” in software can make the whole system non-functional. But once the “bugs” are removed, and this can take a long time, software-based system can have high levels of functionality. Clancy continues to explain that our pilots who have fired AMRAAMs in combat are amazed at its capability.
I don’t know how to describe this effect as anything other than a near vertical “learning curve.” For some (undetermined) time you have “nothing”, an unworkable system, and then with enough expenditure of effort, presuming the politics gives you that blank check, suddenly the thing works and it is indeed amazing.
Healthcare.gov may indeed yet become this amazing shopping experience — by 2017. The question is whether Mr. Obama can lead his troops through the flat part of the learning curve for that length of time.
So, I would define a task as having a “steep learning curve” if you need to either learn many things or perform an enormous amount of work in preparation in order to have anything to show for your efforts.
Yes, Mr. Obama doesn’t have a steep learning curve, but it is the task that he has taken on — health care reform — that has a steep learning curve. For a program that was supposed to solve the long-standing problem of millions of Americans without a prepaid health care plan in today’s high-expense health care system, there is much to learn and do before he even gets enrollments above the attrition from cancellations.
It is not possible for H.gov to become this amazing site because no matter how wonderful the programmers they put to work on it… It is still on a foundation of steaming dog shit.
How might higher education be reformed to produce political leaders more familiar with how the world really works, more alive to the realities of social and political life and better able to discuss them honestly with the American people?
Assumption #1: that “higher education” is the problem. The problem is what the education is in. Unlike the theoretical world of the Liberal Arts, no matter how outside-of-the-box the thinking may be, engineering must still conform to reality.
Assumption #2: that the Leftists dreamers want a discussion with the American people. They don’t. They are closed-minded and exhibit totalitarian behavior because they believe that they know better.
they know better
A phase in life most adults go through in their teenage years. Socialists don’t go through it, they stay in it.
Engineers have their own perspective on themselves, students in other disciplines, and life in general.
Some while ago, some engineering students fielded a slate of candidates for the student government at the “U”, formulating a whimsical political platform.
One of Chancelor Shalala’s reforms (yes, a longtime Friend of Hillary) was a campus wide requirement for Ethnic Studies as a way of promoting greater social understanding between races and cultures. Engineering students tended to regard that as another obstacle to graduation in their already credit-heavy graduation requirements in relation to almost any other major, but not much was said — who wants to be called a racist for objecting to that course?
So the “political platform” was that there should be a campus-wide requirement to take ECE 430 Random Signals Analysis, a required course that was even despised by the EE’s as being overly abstract, theoretical, and math laden without apparent practical application. We all “got” that joke.
Another “feature” of the “U” is that if you drive into town, you cannot miss a big sign advertising the Diesel Driving School. The next plank on the “platform” was that all non-engineering majors would be required to complete that course of study in driving an 18-wheel truck. We all got that one too.
Funny that engineers themselves tend to be very ethnically diverse and often perceive ethnicity as being an irrelevant parameter. It’s the ones promoting ethnic studies that tend to be the racists.