In this fantastic lecture at the end of August 2019 at the WorldSkills Conference in Kazan, Russia, he addressed some very interesting points:
✅ The importance of trial and error for the development of technology.
✅ Theory does not allow interaction with uncertainty.
✅ Theoretical knowledge is inferior to the knowledge gained from experience.
✅ We get smarter when we perform, not just when we sit and think.
✅ People who use trial-and-error are more successful than those who just dedicate themselves to designing, writing formulas, and reasoning in theory.
✅ Businesses that make small, cheap mistakes can end up making a mistake that will make them big.
✅ People involved in technology do not write books. The books are written by teachers. But the real heroes didn’t come from the academic world, they didn’t have time to discuss what they were doing.
✅ Do not try to teach birds to fly. The world does not develop from top to bottom.
✅ Industrial Revolution and Cybernetics did not come from academia and science but from people without formal study.
✅ Formal education does not generate wealth for countries.
✅ First, they must get rich and only then invest in this type of education (If you care about Brazil!)
✅ South Korea and Switzerland first became rich with the technical skills of their people and later invested in formal education.
I work with academics (delivering courses) at an agricultural university (Guelph, Canada) but I also farm. It (that experience) provides the clearest examples of how right NNT is with his point of view on academics and the science, technology, practice arrow that they think exits. I find it disgusting that the academics I work with think agriculture can’t exist without them yet the exact opposite is the truth. Does their arrogance come from and internal knowledge that they are pretenders or do they really believe that they are creating technology?
I keep working there part time because it gives me a chance to show young people the truth which in turn gives them a chance of not becoming an academic themselves (worst possible fate for an ambitious person).