Opting Out (@electronics)

Some of what this account of mine was going to be about, before I got sidetracked with various sorts of nonsense and then stopped cold by Torba's latest brainstorm ... Unlike what is clearly the majority of the people who claim STEM backgrounds online, I really am what I claim to be. As a graduate student, I really have worked as a TA, and would have been more than qualified to do this: first, I was going to set up a series of lecture notes starting with Calculus, and then working my way through the first few years of graduate school, focusing more on Analysis, Probability and Statistics (especially Stochastic Processes) and maybe a bit about the theory of differential equations. If one read through and understood the notes, one would have had a huge jump of one's coursework in a number of classes. Likewise, I was going to cover undergraduate Physics, maybe venturing a little bit into graduate school as I covered Statistical and Quantum Mechanics and Electromagnetism (and the basics of Special Relativity), and some of the basics of Electrical Engineering (with particular emphases on Solid State and Telecommunications Engineering, and maybe some discussion of a few areas of Biomedical Engineering) before veering off into a discussion of how to mess with electronic surveillance. This selection of topics was not a random one, the topics stressed in the math coverage being used in both the Physics and the Electrical Engineering topics to be covered, and the topics from the Physics coverage being of vital importance in the Electrical Engineering topics to be covered. Everything there was fairly essential, even that which might seem to be a frill - eg. the introduction to Special Relativity, which is needed, because Magnetism, itself, is a relativistic phenomenon. Working with other former TAs (and swapping links) I (and the others) could have provided a service of some value, because contrary to popular opinion on social media, the Internet does not come close to containing the sum total of all human knowledge. Those "gee wow" statistics telling one how many petabytes of data are found on the Web mislead, because aside from that which is garbage (eg. the "Electronic Universe), instead of seeing coverage in depth, what one sees is spotty, shallow, and repetitious coverage of the basics, and a few scattered advanced topics covered in just enough detail for a lover of copypasta to be able to briefly sustain an illusion of expertise. This is really not a good thing, when so many are still so far from the resources (such as good libraries) needed to develop enough of a base of knowledge for those possessing it to see the copypasta posting pseudo-intellectuals as the poseurs that they've always been. The bringing of knowledge out to those who, until now, have been denied access to it, was something that seemed like a social beneficial thing to do, one which would draw in enough traffic that those taking part could find honest ways to turn a reasonable (grocery buying and rent paying) profit off of it, while evening the balance of power between an increasingly authoritarian government and its citizenry. This all seemed like a good plan, until I set up my account on Gab and started repeatedly running into certain things, which seemed to center around a collective dogmatically uneducable stupidity that at all times demanded validation. The first of these that I recall at the moment was the alleged mother of a few children who "knew" that a university education was a scam, because one could learn everything online, if one maybe bought a few books. After I tried to explain to her why one really couldn't learn Engineering that way, she quickly blocked me and declared victory. There was that endless wave of pseudoscience (eg. flat earth) backed up with bullshit, and then, "best" of all, were the Nazis and their friends, claiming victimhood on the basis that "da Joos" were overrepresented in Academia and a number of professions, and people like them weren't. Why do the hard work of studying, when one can go on trying to bullshit one's way through and then claim victimhood and murder some of the "eggheads" when, one day, one finds that bullshit no longer sells as well as it used to? This seemed to be the logic, and it was a bad sort of logic that most of the Gabbers seemed to cling to for dear life, as they smugly dismissed the important of "cleverness," and even of common sense. I could go over the @AstronomyPOTD, see the reception he was getting, and then read an account of the latest good ol' boy who thought he'd be able to take out a city's power supply by pumping bullets into a transformer station, and see just how futile my plans had been. (continued in comments below)