3 ms·

Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interview (2000)

10 points by glymor 17y ago

vijayr 17y ago
most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects For them, education was about the doors they believed would open because of how they were labeled by institutions, not about making themselves truly better as thinkers :-(
- bbgm 17y ago
  I believe the fault here, at least in most third world countries, lies with society and associated expectations. My grandmother never approved of my decision not to become an engineer, but go into the hard sciences instead. The quality of education I got there was never a problem (and in fact was really good) and the institutions had a lot to do with that quality. I know of any number of people who kept trying to become an engineer or a doctor (at least in those days), or chose science in high school cause that's what they were "supposed to do"
  - vijayr 17y ago
    sadly, we don't learn something because we like it, or we want to learn it. we learn something (anything) because we think 1. it'll increase our job prospects 2. it'll increase our "status" in "society" and 3. it'll help us earn money.
Tangurena 17y ago
Some of the claims in that article are pretty bogus: Who has saved more human lives than anyone else in history? I'd put 2 other names ahead of his: Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented, the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we couldn't feed any more people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

10 points by glymor 17y ago

most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects For them, education was about the doors they believed would open because of how they were labeled by institutions, not about making themselves truly better as thinkers :-(

bbgm 17y ago
I believe the fault here, at least in most third world countries, lies with society and associated expectations. My grandmother never approved of my decision not to become an engineer, but go into the hard sciences instead. The quality of education I got there was never a problem (and in fact was really good) and the institutions had a lot to do with that quality. I know of any number of people who kept trying to become an engineer or a doctor (at least in those days), or chose science in high school cause that's what they were "supposed to do"
- vijayr 17y ago
  sadly, we don't learn something because we like it, or we want to learn it. we learn something (anything) because we think 1. it'll increase our job prospects 2. it'll increase our "status" in "society" and 3. it'll help us earn money.

Tangurena 17y ago

Some of the claims in that article are pretty bogus: Who has saved more human lives than anyone else in history? I'd put 2 other names ahead of his: Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented, the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we couldn't feed any more people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process