It amazes me how often I see stories like this one that appeared in Salon.Com a few days ago. The allure of the perpetual motion machine seems unstoppable (either that or the United States has an oversupply of stupid people).
My theory is that there are a large number of people who lack basic self-monitoring abilities. The most important thing to getting very far in life is to realize when you are full of b.s. People with poor self-monitoring skills are unable to realize when they have gone off the deep end — they really sincerely believe things that have almost no relationship to reality. This is why studies consistently show that U.S. students do poorly at math compared to the rest of the world, but they are near the top when asked to rate how well they understand math.
Getting back to the perpetual motion machines, typically these things are not straightforward scams — the people pushing them actually believe the machine works and that there is an organized conspiracy of one form or another preventing the device coming to market. When I was in high school, I had a geometry teacher who spent a considerable amount of his spare time trying to trisect an angle with an unmarked ruler and compass. For reasons that are too complex to go into here, it is impossible in principle to trisect an angle this way, but he and his buddies were convinced they were going to be the first to do it. They would have been just as successful spending their time trying to disprove the quadratic equation or the Pythagorean theorem.
Part of the problem is that there is little effort in schools to promote critical thinking skills. Instead, they tell kids who are marginal performers at best that they are, in fact, excelling, because the school does not want to hurt their “self-esteem” (don’t even get me started on social promotion). Hell, when I graduated from high school my math scores on standarized tests put me in the top 3% of high school seniors, but I failed my math class that year. I was not bad at math, unless you’re comparing me to the average Japanese student. Rather, my math teacher was from the old school and made the class extremely difficult. I could not stand her at the time, but she did me a favor by pushing me instead of just patting me on the back and telling me I was doing a good job in order to preserve my “self-esteem.”
I see the same thing with the Internet. I am never going to be rich, but I have made a lot more money just telling people about stuff I am interested than I ever did freelancing (plus I have control over what I write, which is more important). If I work very hard over the next couple years I should make enough so I can quit my day job and do this full time. But I constantly run into old friends or people I knew from around the way who have all these pipe dreams about making millions off of the Internet with little effort (I cannot believe the number of people I talk to who think they can still just set up shop as a web designer and they are on the road to riches). Very poor self-monitoring abilities.
The moral of the story: work hard and do not b.s. yourself — or you just might end up throwing away all your money on some perpetual motion scheme.
Source
Trick of the light. Chris Colin, Salon.Com, Aug. 3, 2000.
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