If the ideas seem right, but the logical result seem atrocious then one might reconsider the original idea.

Dr Huemer has an idea about logic that if the premises seems right but the conclusion seems absurd, one might take a second look at the premise. Danny Frederick expanded this to include systems. If the ideas seem right, but the logical result seem atrocious then one might reconsider the original idea.
[Danny Frederick and Dr Huemer were thinking of communism.]
Sherlock Holmes mentioned something like this also in explaining his way of reasoning.
That is he said his was reasoning backwards.

In any case I mentioned this once to my learning partner once as a critique on any system that leads to results that do not seem good.

This is the opposite of all philosophy which tries to start with a something that vaguely seems OK at first glace, an odd   premise, and reach absurd conclusions.  But they figure they have won the argument because you grudgingly conceded the first premise.


The fact is some philosophy does make sense. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Maimonides Plotinus, Aquinas, Anselm, and a modern philosopher Kelley Ross all see very far..
Where things seem to go wrong is when people take them too far or follow them in wrong ways.
One of the wrong ways of going about philosophy was pointed out by Leibniz about the followers of Descartes. They were followers in the sense of following his system, but not continuing his kind of reasoning. Another problem was pointed out by Thomas Reid of taking the logic too far as happened with Aristotle in thinking in analogies,  or with people taking Descartes idea of the Mind as the beginning.
You might based on that simply dismiss Hume and Locke, but Reid notices important ideas they had.
You really can not go back to straight Neo Plato though that looks pretty great as you can see in Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and Aquinas. Things have made some progress since Kant with Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross.

Thomas Reid  to me looks very much like the Kant Fries school except for the fact that his epistemology is not clear as Dr Kelley Ross wrote to me. Sometimes Reid seems to be like Hegel that even sense perception. is thought. Other times he says it is immediate.

Passover versus leavened bread.

A pot or pan that has not been used for leaven for the last 24 hours is נותן טעם לפגם  and"gives a  damaged taste." From the Torah one can use it. (But דרבנן it needs boiling).


The top of a stove needs nothing because every time you use it, makes it OK. [Not to mention the inside of an oven which needs nothing at all in the first place.]

The best way to make unleavened bread is to buy flour and water and mix it and fry it like a pancake. The major thing to be careful about is to do it immediately. Once water and flour have come into contact with each other you have 18 minutes left to cook or fry it. However, the mix must be thick to be thought of as bread; and  to use only a little oil on the bottom of the pan. Otherwise it is cake.
[Another reason not to use oil is a molecule of oil is hard to break down. It can cause over strain on the intestines.]



15 days from the new moon turns out to be Friday night.[The calendar people use was invented by Meton in Athens, and is not from Sinai. And it is usually off by a day or two.]

Night starts 72 minutes after sunset [to the vast majority of Rishonim] The beginning of twilight is 58.5. [You might be strict to stop work after 45 minutes because in Israel it looked to me that that was about when middle stars became visible. However in the Rocky Mountains and in the mountains around Southern California  it looked to me that stars kept coming out even much later--until the middle of the night the sky seemed to be much more filled with stars than around 90 minutes. So you might rely on doing work until 58.5 minutes.]

For wine the best idea is to buy grapes and get one of the small crushers that are used for garlic. But this takes a good long time to get up the volume. One cup is the size of 1.5 eggs.;which means one needs the volume of 6 eggs. [If one does not have enough grapes for that he can do מזיגה --put in water.] [The amount of water you can put in and still have the blessing be Pri Hagefen is astounding; one part wine, 6 parts water.]


It is best to do everything yourself and to buy nothing but grapes, flour, and horseradish, nuts and raisins. 

the Rambam's approach to Aristotle

How do you make sense of the Rambam's approach to Aristotle? In what way does learning the Metaphysics of Ancient Athens bring to love of God?  Perhaps you can say, "It does not", but then you are at a loss how to see "the big picture."
Can you ignore Metaphysics? And get your world-view elsewhere? And if you do, does that in fact lead to a more accurate idea of what the world is all about?

The way to test this is to look at people that have not learned Metaphysics, and never touched a book of Plato or Aristotle. Do they seem to have a more accurate idea of what it is all about? I doubt it.  Just the opposite. They seem to have various mixtures of confused ideas.
Still what does one make of this?
If Aristotle and Plato are good  to ignore, then why would the Rambam and Saadia Gaon have written books incorporating their ideas? And creating a synthesis between Torah and Metaphysics?

[I would like to suggest here two people that had very important ideas in Metaphysics and Philosophy that are  overlooked. Leonard Nelson and Thomas Reid.]

Thomas Reid I think has an epistemology just like the Kant Fries School of Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross, but since he does not spell it out exactly people in academia are trying to figure it out. In any case I find Reid amazing.

My high school PE instructor tried to get us into shape then by having us run around the track four times--every day.

My high school PE instructor tried to get us into shape then by having us run around the track four times--every day. That was one mile.  This is  think good for other high schools and adults also.
For some reason when  got to Shar Yashuv in NY I was viably more physically fit than most other students. I am not sure of the reason, but I figure it must have had something to do with the running around the track every day for four years which I can guess was not the regular approach in NY high schools.
I am not sure, but the first time that Rav Freifeld saw me in the mikveh, and saw that I was physically fit, maybe was the time he began to think of me as a good prospect for his daughter. [Not that I was in comparison with my classmates anything at all. I ran an average mile. I forget, but it might have been around 6 minutes. There were plenty of other kids my age that were way ahead of me.

{In the end I did not end up marrying his daughter. He must have seen I was too unruly, and would not make good son-in-law of the rosh yeshiva material. The major event which stopped the whole thing was my trip to a different yeshiva. In any case, he was certainly correct that I am not rosh yeshiva material in any sense at all. My view is even though learning the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and Shas and poskim is important, that is best done privately. The whole yeshiva scene is a disaster zone except for the few great Litvak yeshivas in NY like the Mir and Ponoviz in Bnei Brak.
[That is to say I am not rosh yeshiva material because I do not think the whole project is so great in the first place. Only a few yeshivas are great like the three big ones in NY Mir, Haim Berlin, Torah VeDaat, Shar Yashuv, and one in Israel-Ponoviz. 

U-83 D Major  U-83 midi format  U-83 nwc  [MIDI has the notes and nwc has the notes and instrumentation and the whole score. NWC (note worthy composer) is the format each piece was written in.]

All the nonsense people are forced to waste time on distracts them from what they can excel in.

Some people are enormously talented. I knew one girl like that in high school, who was brilliant in anything she put even a slight bit of effort into. [Wendy Wilson] Wendy was shockingly brilliant. The girl I eventually married also got straight A's, but Wendy's brilliance went way beyond good grades.
But I who am severely limited in brain power, I have learned  and tried very much to limit my efforts towards one thing alone. However even in this I have limited success.In Gemara I also have seen this. My learning partner with the slightest effort could see questions in Tosphot that I knew from experience eluded even great roshei yeshiva.

Still a balanced education has a lot going for it.

Some people like Bryan Caplan think the whole education system ought to be dropped.

Putting my own experiences along with some of the critique of Allan Bloom and Bryan Caplan, I would say education in the humanities and pseudo sciences [Social Studies] ought to be dropped completely. [If the humanities and social studies had any human decency, they would have closed themselves down a long time ago and stop feeding people nonsense. But of course they have no human decency in the first place, and that is why they teach those Sitra Akra (Dark Side) subjects
All the nonsense people are forced to waste time on distracts them from what they can excel in.
[However in STEM universities are doing great. The only thing is-- even there I have a complaint.--There is no reason to limit STEM to smart people. It is good even for people as dumb as I.]

So how do dumb people like me learn STEM? Easy. Say the words in order with no repetition and go on. But just one subject at a time. It is like when the Gra was asked by Reb Haim of Voloshin whether to go on or review Seder Moad he answered "Review."
So whether it is Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, the best thing is to learn the book from beginning to end with no review, but then when you get to the end to go to the beginning and do it again many times. At least four.

The reason people  are fooled by pseudo science is because they have no idea of what real science is. Give people a bit of Quantum Field Theory, and all the pseudo sciences will disappear automatically. That is the solution. Have public schools, but in science offer only the natural sciences [STEM].






 

What makes Israel difficult are the internal conflicts. Ashkenazi versus  Sephardi. Religious versus secular, etc. These conflicts are not intellectual but play themselves out on the ground level. Any one of one group that ventures into an area of the other group is guaranteed to find himself the focus of lots of attention and effort to get rid of him. These efforts are sometimes simple shunning of lack of being helpful. Sometimes these efforts are less veiled and amount to downright sabotage of one's welling place or actual physical violence.
Then on the other hand there are the occasional do good-ers who realize that this kind of thing often results in throwing out the wrong kind of people-people that in fact would be good to have around.

[This is not to say that sometimes it is  a good idea to get rid of criminal elements.]

The result of all this is often when one is making "Aliya" he finds himself in an unexpected situation where people he thought were his friends [and in fact when they came to the USA to collect money always presented themselves as his best friends] turn out to be his most bitter and determined enemies.
[It is hard to know what to make of all this. The nicest period I had was when I was invited to join Rav Ernster. He had been offered by the State of Israel a set of buildings --on condition he could fill them. So I was invited to live there and join the learning group. That was a really glorious seven years. Later attempts to make it there fell flat and were somewhat disastrous also. I was a loner and people made it clear in short order that I was not wanted.]

Outside of the great Ponoviz yeshiva  and maybe  few other places like the Yeshiva of the Gra of Rav Silverman, the main problem in Israelis simple. The religious are insane. I mean literally insane.

Of course just being insane as long as one does not harm others is not so terrible. The trouble is the religious do as much harm as they can.