<p>This guy is a Youtuber I have been following for a while. Needless to say, not the typical Ivy League or Brown graduate, but he offers a perspective that I never would have imagined to be true. I don’t necessarily believe 100% of what he is saying or how he interprets events in college, but it is interesting to hear what he has to say. He does take this to extremes though (wait till the end to see!).</p>
<p>Has Jamie ever heard the phrase, “If you don’t like the news make some of your own”? I have to believe that someone that wears chains on his wrist is just a bit off.</p>
<p>Yeah, because no one took the time to watch a 20-minute babbling, incoherent video bashing something they care about, I guess that no one cases about the role of a Brown grad in the world.</p>
<p>I haven’t had time to watch the whole video, although something is definitely off about him – not because of the chains, but because his thoughts are disorganized and he is disturbingly obsessed with minor details of events that happened many, many years prior. I’ll watch the entire video and respond at some point, but my response will be colored by the fact that this man is clearly a little off his rocker.</p>
<p>In any case, the Brown he seems to know is not the Brown I know and love.</p>
<p>No, you’re all off. He’s angry, but his thoughts have a pattern; they’re not as disorganized as they appear. I believe what he is actually angry about, though he may not know it, is society at large, not specifically people with college degrees.</p>
<p>There are parts of his story that don’t add up, or there are a few holes needed to be filled before you can fully understand his thoughts and situation. For example, he said the event happened freshman year, and that afterward he stopped going to classes. What made him return to Brown to finish his degree? There’s something he’s not telling you, and I almost feel that he’s displacing some of his anger on those with college degrees, when perhaps he may have exhibited some of the behavior that he seems so upset about.</p>
<p>For all of you saying that he’s “off” or “wack-o,” I think you have a little thinking to do. If you can’t consider criticism about something that is important to you, and instead ride the person off as crazy, you’ve got a lot to learn. This guy has a point, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say, but if you can’t question the direction of society and look at things as they are and not through distorted perception, maybe you don’t belong at Brown.</p>
<p>My labeling his thoughts disorganized had nothing to do with his criticism at Brown, and I’d guess that the same is true of others here. He might as well have been talking about Princeton, or the University of Maryland, or Churchill College of Cambridge University – his thoughts would have been as incoherent. In fact, you identify one of the disorganized aspects of his thoughts: he really has a beef with society, not Brown or higher education. </p>
<p>From what I can tell (based on the five minutes I watched), his beef with society is that people expect him to be a team player and convince other people of his position, and to value the contributions of others, neither of which he seems particularly comfortable with. </p>
<p>Another aspect of his strange thinking (again, from the five minutes I watched) is his odd obsession with what he (wrongly) perceives to be deeply offensive aspects of something that happened many years ago. There are flavors of paranoia and delusions of grandeur.</p>
<p>I’m familiar with him and his work. He’s a very eccentric. Lives miles outside of civilization in Vermont on a mountain side most of the year. Survivalist style, for real. </p>
<p>He went viral a few years ago with his video of making a cool toy spider.</p>
<p>He wears chains on his wrists, as well as chain mail and other “body weights” to help keep him in shape. He lives on 25.4 acres of land inaccessible by road (couple of miles through rough terrain to the side of the mountain where he lives in a shanty/dome he built out of recycled materials). He actually hand cut a road into his place several years ago.</p>
<p>Dude’s crazy. He rants for 5 minutes about how they didn’t adjust their graph for him and tries to make that a metaphor for the establishment keeping him down?</p>
<p>Also, that is one horribly designed website. He has made some cool stuff though.</p>
<p>@Gratisfaction-
Putting up a video like this on a website full of the people that this man is critiquing will get you nowhere.
Although he is a little incoherent, his arguments make perfect sense and are true of today’s sad, capitalistic society. The story of the engineering project was not simply an “example”. It was a metaphor for the sad state of education that the "college game has created. The pressure of society to go to an ivy league institution creates irresponsible and dishonest high school students who are willing to do whatever they can to achieve their goals. That is why he chose the engineering story to represent this problem; because the 6 other students who stole his idea for the sake of bettering themselves on a social ladder were products of this construction. They tried to take the credit for an idea that they initially thought was stupid, and they deserved exactly 0% of the reward.</p>
<p>The graph represents the black-and-white thinking that this mentality has produced. His point was that instead of engaging in activity for the sake of intellectual curiosity, they simply acknowledged that his project was the best. Instead of continuing to add weights to the structure for the sake of curiosity, they instead gave him a medal and told him “nice job”. This shows that its not the educational value that is of concern, but the social status one gains from their intelligence that is rewarded. As he repeats multiple times, this kind of thinking leads to Ivy league graduates who make arguments such as “war is good for the economy” or policy makers who create rusty bridges for the excuse of creating job growth.
He isnt mentioning these stories from years ago because he is bitter, he is trying to provide anecdotes that explain the development of his viewpoint. Everyone on this thread who critiqued him for using examples from years ago that dont matter are not thinking on a meta-level deep enough to understand his philosophical rhetoric.
Collegerm is completely right in that the people who cant at least understand his argument does not deserve to go to Brown, or any higher institution of education. Your inability to see the viewpoint of others and to keep an open mind is exactly the problem that this man is trying to critique. Especially those of you who thought he was wack-o, this man is more wise and has more insight than you will ever have in your entire life. </p>
<p>For arwarw who said that it was hard to stomach someone denigrating such privilege, you are not understanding that you are an example of the kind of person who has been brainwashed by social construct. The fact that you automatically assume that ivy league institutions are prestigious means that you never question the validity of this claim. He makes the argument that people like you need to open their eyes to the fact that the majority of the people who attend these institutions are greedy and capitalistic, which is an attitude that is encouraged by society. Therefore, the whole idea of prestige in the ivy league institutions is for the purpose of developing this negative attitude, where high school students will cheat and do whatever possible to get to the top of the mountain.
But of course most of you dont understand his message; youre on this site most likely because youve already bought into capitalistic thinking. Youve been so conditioned by society that you dont even give him the benefit of the doubt. You wont watch his whole video, and even if you did, his message would go into one ear and out the other.
Although he does make good points, I do disagree with him. I know that ivy league institutions are filled with the kind of people he regards to be immoral, but there is always that top layer of students who are selfless in their quest to better humanity. Even if he is right, and 99% of the students who go to Brown are ignorant, the 1% of enlightened individuals who are produced from these institutions are the ones that call the shots and make the changes of the future, overriding the negative influence of the other 99%.
Whether you agree with his message or not is irrelevant. If you disregarded him as a loony or a psycho and didnt even stop to think that he might have a point, you are the problem. Like it or not, his evaluation of society has many indisputable points; ones that you failed to recognize. If you dont UNDERSTAND his message, you are ignorant. If you didnt even LISTEN to his message, you are stupid. </p>
<p>*I know there are a lot of grammar mistakes, I refuse to go back and fix all of them.</p>
<p>Schlaag said:For arwarw who said that it was “hard to stomach someone denigrating such privilege”, you are not understanding that you are an example of the kind of person who has been brainwashed by social construct. The fact that you automatically assume that ivy league institutions are “prestigious” means that you never question the validity of this claim.</p>
<p>Shlaag, i don’t think YOU are understanding me. I’m not at all talking about prestige. I’m talking about privilege. It IS very much a privilege to attend almost any university. Do you realize how few young people in the world get that opportunity? </p>
<p>What bothered me about Jamie is that he (so he says) did not attend class, did not do homework and minimized his interaction with others at the university, yet he stuck around for four years to collect his degree, which he now likes to wave in peoples’ faces via youtube? </p>
<p>Pardon me if I don’t bow to Jamie’s self-professed genius.</p>
<p>By saying that attending university is a privilege, you are also making it prestigious… if the only hole that you can find in his philosophy is that he “stuck around to get his degree”, then you have no argument. Just because he criticized the construct of society doesn’t mean he is able to reject it completely. Yes, he thought that the institution was worth nothing, but he needed a degree anyhow to get a job and survive in the world, because EVEN IF the social construct is messed up, to engage in this screwed up construct is the only way to SURVIVE. Also, he actually even breaks this boundary by going out of his way to disengage from the social construct as much as possible. He lives in the wilderness by himself as isolated from capitalistic society as he can. Of course, he still needs to engage it in somewhat because of the state of the world that he is in. He still needs to go to a store and buy his camera equipment and computer because those are things that he cannot produce with his own hands. But other than that, he pretty much is 100% in line with his own philosophy. Its like the high school sophomore who wants to become an actor when he grows up. He isn’t going to do anything in academia, but he still sticks around to get his diploma because 1) he might as well, and 2) he might need it later, regardless if he is planning to use it or not. </p>
<p>And also, the whole point of his argument is to say that the “privilege” attached to going to prestigious university IS THE PROBLEM. Because people are willing to do whatever they possibly can to gain this “privilege”. This makes it so that the “privilege” comes not from being able to expand your mind and explore new ways in thinking. Instead, you gain privilege for being able to dupe the system, play the game, and step over other people/cheat in order to get there. That is the prestige that is being awarded to an ivy league graduate, at least in his argument. YES, IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES ARE PRESTIGIOUS, AND THAT IS THE PROBLEM!</p>
<p>Also, you obviously didn’t understand/read my argument. EVEN IF 99% of people at Brown are greedy and capitalistic, the top 1% that care about advancing humanity still gain valuable and unique knowledge from the resources that are made available to them. Jamie probably learned a lot about survival technique and stuff like that in college, even if he didn’t show up to class. I mean, how else would he have found out how to smelt stainless steel? </p>
<p>Lastly, you are not thinking of the inverse relationship in this case. If he didn’t graduate from Brown and uploaded this video, would anyone take him seriously? The fact that he went through the system and actually got his diploma from Brown gives him credibility to critique the system. Otherwise, he would just seem to be a hater who couldn’t survive in the academic world. It makes 0 logical sense that you are not listening to his philosophy if your only beef is that he “got a degree from Brown”.</p>
<p>I mean I don’t think the guy in the vid was non-sensical but that doesn’t mean he isn’t wrong. I’m surprised that, as an engineer, he decided to ignore practicality in some of his complaints about stifling intellectualism. I would assume the real reason the profs didn’t go searching for more weight or didn’t redo the graph was because it wasn’t practical, not because intellectualism or learning aren’t valued. If we spent every effort possible trying to learn everything about everything we would end up learning nothing because we would get so bogged down in details and minutae and variables that have such a small impact on our understanding of things that they simply aren’t worth the time when there are bigger intellectual fish to fry. Getting through every group’s tower within the time they had the room reserved for was probably more important than determining exactly how superior his tower was. How would it have been fair to the group(s) that didn’t get to go and test their intellectualism if they spent loads of time trying to find more and more stuff to hang from his tower? Would it have been better to stay as long as possible and displace some other class from using the lecture hall? What kind of scale did they use - could they have used a more sensitive one to figure out if his thing held 100.1lbs or 100.1000000000000001kg. Was the point of the exercise not to find the most weight it could hold?</p>
<p>There are plenty of scumbags with no college or college aspirations. I don’t really believe that there won’t always be people who will lie, cheat, and steal no matter what we do.</p>
<p>War may not be good for the economy, but it’s not because we destroy things, it’s because the money is diverted away from other potentially more beneficial ventures.</p>
<p>I fully understand what this guy is saying. I just think he’s wrong, and if he thinks I’m wrong so be it. Agree to disagree.</p>
<p>@iwannabebrown
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with him, as long as you understood it.</p>
<p>@arwarw
Thanks for the ad hominems. I sincerely hope for your sake that you become educated some day, because as of now, you are essentially an oxygen thief. Those chance threads were posted to ask the effect that a junior year grade drop would have on my chances; this was due to my best friend dying. Also I find it kind of sketchy that you stalked my profile. And yes, I do give full credit to high school debate for my understanding of philosophical critique. I urge anyone reading this message to engage in policy debate, it’ll help shed ignorance and provides new perspective on life. </p>
<p>Also, please don’t be one of the 99% of people who go to a prestigious university just because they want to feel uppity about it. Ivy league and other advanced universities have ridiculous amounts of opportunity and resource for the honest student to take advantage of. Even though there are negative side effects of the “college game”, those who engage this system being aware of the pitfalls can use these tools to make positive change in the real world that counterbalance the dishonest ends-justify-the-means mentality that the educational system produces. Its pretty sad really; the amount of genius that is squandered and buried due to the greed that the college game generates. Some of my best friends are ridiculously smart, but they don’t have any dreams or goals to speak of besides “getting into college” to impress their peers and fulfill their parents’ wishes. Don’t be that guy/girl. Have a dream, and use university as a checkpoint to get to those dreams. You shouldn’t want to go to an ivy league university to just become a scientist; you can become a scientist with the same amount of pay by going to another college. If you’re attending an ivy league institution, you had better be using those resources to become the next Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin.</p>
<p>Dude Schlagg, this guy makes so much sense. Most everything he says is completely true and though I didn’t read some of these comments near the end, I get the general gist that these people only like to talk trash about something they haven’t even seen, solely using ad-hominem attacks to fight someone who’s talking trash about an ivy league. It’s sad how people won’t even listen to the guy.</p>