A student writes:
Sophie –
I watched Jurassic Park for the first time since it came out last night. There was a scene that stopped me short and I repeated multiple times. I pasted the scene below.
To me this is yet another example of a truth that has popping up all around me since first beginning to understand the distinction while reading your website a number of months ago.
Knowledge must be earned through direct experience. Earning requires discipline and commitment – 2 things I have spent much of my life avoiding. It is my responsibility not contribute to the drivel and lies by offering only what I have experienced myself.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.
Donald Gennaro: It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations…
Dr. Ian Malcolm: I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you, you’ve patented it, and packaged it, you’ve slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[pounds table with fists]
Dr. Ian Malcolm: you’re selling it.
My answer: Brilliant. This is what distinctions are about. Once you get the distinction, once you put it on your reticular activator, it starts showing up everywhere, and you can see it even when it is hiding in tall grass…
Congratulations.
