Comment by svennidal

I had a teacher in college who before teaching, worked for a company within the gambling industry. He then went on to start his own company, which was as I heard, based purely on the knowledge and connections he made at his former employer. Dude struck gold getting rich off of gambling addicts. Due to his financial success, he thought of himself as some kind of Steve Jobs and an expert on all things related to tech. He would claim to have predicted the popularity of many tech related things, e.g. cloud solutions like google drive and google docs. Problem is that his predictions all came long after all these things had become mainstream.

His lectures were full of incorrect facts. He would ask the class questions and give us wrong answers. I’ve never seen a man so confidently incorrect.

He wrote a book about the fourth industrial revolution in which he used the introduction to brag about all the places he used for writing his book. Including his home in a upper class neighborhood, his home abroad, cafes around the world, etc. His book also contained errors that a simple google search would’ve helped him correct.

A lot of the stuff he taught were interesting. But all the contents of the course could’ve been covered in a video or two.

In my final paper I wrote about how the popularity of new tech can regress even though the tech gets up to great quality. He had stated that you wouldn’t see a computer science student using a laptop after 5 years (this was 10 years ago). They would all be programming on their ipads because the touch screens had become so good. As well as how everyone in their fields were replacing their interfaces with touch screens. I wrote about how mechanical keyboards and physical midi controllers had never been as popular in many fields like audio and video production.

Needless to say. I failed the class. I was just supposed to regurgitate his blogs and opinions.

This was not the only thing to make me lose most all my confidence in any higher education at a time. I went from critical thinking to skeptical thinking. And it was not solely because of my opinions about this teacher. It was because of the opinions of his peers and in how high regard he was kept in the academic society.

I learned that schools are not institutions of science. They’re more like a Church of Science or at the very best, Science’s weird fan club with a weird internal popularity power struggle.

Edit: A word.