GENIUS FORUMS

I Respect Education...I just don't Agree with Everything

When an educated person is educated it is often presumed only their ideas merit credibility over the layman's.

Being an 'educated layman' I respect 'Education' however, I cannot always agree with other's theories, or facts, but I will respect the fact as a fact if I can see it logically in my head. I will respect a theory as a little more than an opinion until proven as a fact that I can see, or I will offer what I see in the theory to contribute it as a fact if I see it as a fact.

If I had of followed my passion to be university educated, I would have become somebody great, to help run my country. Instead I followed my reclusiveness, and I question myself if reclusiveness found me, or if I found it first. In other words am I reclusive by nature or genetics.

In a debate I will respect the opinion of others as just that, but I will choose the opinion which makes the most logical sense to me regardless if it is mine or someone else's opinion, but most often people agree with me.

I look upon Education differently now, with a new found respect. It was always my dream to be university educated, but that dream has now died. Instead, I continually educate myself on a daily basis through reading. The closest to a university education I am getting is through this forum.

I am appreciative of this forum for it's intellectuals, and contributors. It is no longer my intention to be combative, argumentative, mean-spirited or nasty, but to have intelligent dialogue, discussion, or just to comment on people's posts.

Dan, I know you don't really see me as an idiot, so please refrain from calling me one. Nobody has ever called me an idiot before, honest to God.

mensa-maniac wrote:The closest to a university education I am getting is through this forum.

Harsh! You should check out MIT's OCW or something.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

No offense to the forum participants, but there is rarely anything posted as rigorous as is found in formal scientific work.

Here are some more great sources:

The Science Network: Broadcasts the best of science lectures, news, interviews, publications, demonstrations and history.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/

A few conferences of note from TSN are:

http://thesciencenetwork.org/programgroup/beyond-belief
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programgroup/brains-r-us

Scholarpedia.org: the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/

Project Gutenberg: the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks)
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Here you can read anything from Hume's Treatise on Human Understanding to Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Videolectures.net: Free on-demand educational video lectures from world's leading and prominent scientists, research institutions, EU research projects.
http://videolectures.net/

Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Biomedical research, grants. HHMI investigators contributed to the discovery of genes related to diseases such as cystic fibrosis and obesity, ...
Contains video lectures on Obesity, Sex Determination, Neuroscience, Rhett's, Evolution, etc..
http://www.hhmi.org/
Also a lot of interactive content available on the sister site http://biointeractive.org

Scribd.com: Scribd is a social publishing site, where tens of millions of people share original writings and documents. Scribd's vision is to liberate the written word.

PubMed: PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

There are other sources, but this is all I can think of right now. The layperson can get quite an education from these links.

Also, the point is good for newer ebooks, textbooks, mainly Board Review Series.
http://thepoint.lww.com

Thanks Animus

From what I see in the first link you provided, it appears to be free education, am I right?

If this be free education then this link is the best gift anyone could give me--Thankyou seems not enough to express my gratitude and appreciativeness.

I checked this great chinese site out you've provided, and found under the title Linguistics and Philosophy, clicked onto Theory of Knowledge, where I found courses on Cross Disciplinary topics. I immediately saved it to my favorites.

I will have a hayday exploring education on this great site, and I have enough here to keep me reading for years to come. I wish that I had something equally as good to send you.

mensa-maniac wrote:Thanks Animus

From what I see in the first link you provided, it appears to be free education, am I right?

If this be free education then this link is the best gift anyone could give me--Thankyou seems not enough to express my gratitude and appreciativeness.

I checked this great chinese site out you've provided, and found under the title Linguistics and Philosophy, clicked onto Theory of Knowledge, where I found courses on Cross Disciplinary topics. I immediately saved it to my favorites.

I will have a hayday exploring education on this great site, and I have enough here to keep me reading for years to come. I wish that I had something equally as good to send you.

With MITs OpenCourseWare you don't get all of the information you might want. Rather OCW provides as much free information as possible. For example under the course Metaphysics: Free-Will there is a link to study material. On this page of study material there is a book referenced The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wagner, clicking this link takes you to a MIT press book preview and order page, because the book itself is not free. However, further down it refers to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and provides a link to the full text at project gutenberg.

Besides the occasional full book and book previews, OCW often provides lecture notes, lecture videos and the occasional supplementary study material. Its not a complete source of information, but its damn handy and informative as it is.

Btw, all the sources I provided are mostly free with the exception of thepoint.lww.com, and all of them are originating from what I consider to be reliable sources of information, mainly universities or organizations made up of respectable individuals (e.g. Scholarpedia.org). None of them are open to public interference like wikipedia with the exception of maybe Project Gutenberg in which a person could theoretically upload an altered text - though judging by the copies of "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin there hasn't been any such alterations, I'd imagine on the origin would be the prime target for such foolishness.

Animus

I aim to take advantage of this great site by participating in free education, by submitting my theories online. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, to get the education I've always wanted. I realize I get no credentials, but I get the free education which will give me knowledge, and that will be my credentials!

So thanks Animus for the rest of my life for the ultimate gift anyone could give me.

mensa-maniac wrote:Animus

I aim to take advantage of this great site by participating in free education, by submitting my theories online. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, to get the education I've always wanted. I realize I get no credentials, but I get the free education which will give me knowledge, and that will be my credentials!

So thanks Animus for the rest of my life for the ultimate gift anyone could give me.

Umm, lol. I don't take thank yous so well, especially when I didn't do much to deserve them. I felt similarly when I first came upon these sites, I suppose the proper avenue of appreciation would be to the site creators. Anyway, glad you like em and hope you enjoy them for years to come.

no education is free, because time is money... says the blind, educated businessman (not me).