The Liberal Gun Club Forum

As usual, the media fucked it up pretty badly. They reported that the Aurora murderer was some sort of neuroscience genius. Not so, according to actual scientists.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/sto ... 56467518/1

Eagleman didn't know Holmes but says the teen parroted his advisers' words in his presentation on temporal illusions. A video of the speech was first reported by ABC News.

"He was just given the presentation to read," Eagleman says. "He wasn't any sort of superscientist when he was 18."

(Eagleman is a researcher who worked at the institution which held the summer camp the murderer attended.)

Eagleman didn't know Holmes but says the teen parroted his advisers' words in his presentation on temporal illusions. A video of the speech was first reported by ABC News.

"He was just given the presentation to read," Eagleman says. "He wasn't any sort of superscientist when he was 18."

"Recipe-book stuff, literally, that every biology student should learn," Eagleman says. As for the grant, Eagleman says, "Holmes is being depicted as some sort of brilliant researcher who won a rare grant, but there are thousands of research students in this country with such grants. Everyone has one. There is nothing elite about it."

The murderer was just good at following recipes... but when you are a journalist "recipe-book stuff" amounts to magic.

Then there is this:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/james-holmes-b ... d=16850268

Accused movie theater gunman James Holmes purchased a high-powered rifle hours after failing a key oral exam at the University of Colorado, ABC News has learned.

Boy, I would not want to be one of the professors that was on the panel that failed the murderer. I mean, even if from a logical standpoint I could see I'm not responsible for this guy's actions, I'd still be second guessing myself.

Eagleman sure comes across as an arrogant prick. No doubt he's wishing he'd kept his mouth shut around the reporter.

The initial media reaction was "Ooh, long words we don't understand. Must be some diabolical brain genius." The reality, as usual, is less interesting. He sounds like a pretty typical 1st year grad student. Faculty beating up on each other's students is a common form of hazing in some grad programs, so I wouldn't take one professor's opinion as definitive.

One thing I've seen often is people who graduate with honors/top of the class from high school or a bachelor program go on to another (possibly more elite) university to discover that he or she is only average compared to his or her new peers. This is especially true at universities like Harvard and MIT. In many cases it leads to depression and other mental ailments.

axel wrote:One thing I've seen often is people who graduate with honors/top of the class from high school or a bachelor program go on to another (possibly more elite) university to discover that he or she is only average compared to his or her new peers. This is especially true at universities like Harvard and MIT. In many cases it leads to depression and other mental ailments.

A thing I've seen, but just once, is a student being carried to the finish line of a Ph.D. program by his advisor. You have to be just in the right position to be able to witness that first hand.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum I've seen a program in danger of being dismantled (probably is dismantled by now) because the professor responsible for admissions did not find any applicant strong enough and was not willing to compromise the integrity of the program for its survival.

lemur wrote:

axel wrote:One thing I've seen often is people who graduate with honors/top of the class from high school or a bachelor program go on to another (possibly more elite) university to discover that he or she is only average compared to his or her new peers. This is especially true at universities like Harvard and MIT. In many cases it leads to depression and other mental ailments.

A thing I've seen, but just once, is a student being carried to the finish line of a Ph.D. program by his advisor. You have to be just in the right position to be able to witness that first hand.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum I've seen a program in danger of being dismantled (probably is dismantled by now) because the professor responsible for admissions did not find any applicant strong enough and was not willing to compromise the integrity of the program for its survival.

And it looks like the pressure is going to get more intense before it diminishes:
http://news.yahoo.com/40-degree-holders ... 07023.html

Xela

Xela wrote:

lemur wrote:

axel wrote:One thing I've seen often is people who graduate with honors/top of the class from high school or a bachelor program go on to another (possibly more elite) university to discover that he or she is only average compared to his or her new peers. This is especially true at universities like Harvard and MIT. In many cases it leads to depression and other mental ailments.

A thing I've seen, but just once, is a student being carried to the finish line of a Ph.D. program by his advisor. You have to be just in the right position to be able to witness that first hand.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum I've seen a program in danger of being dismantled (probably is dismantled by now) because the professor responsible for admissions did not find any applicant strong enough and was not willing to compromise the integrity of the program for its survival.

And it looks like the pressure is going to get more intense before it diminishes:
http://news.yahoo.com/40-degree-holders ... 07023.html

Xela

WTF do you expect when our educational system has been gutted?

More hysteria. Actually, this article is dispelling some misconceptions but it is also pointing out to earlier sensationalistic headlines:

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sci ... 8097.story

“Did NIH Funds Help Fund the Massacre?” asked a headline on CNN on Tuesday. A news story on the website of a local TV station in Washington, D.C., finished with the thought, “It is difficult even to consider that taxpayer dollars may have helped fund his alleged rampage.”

Cue in the calls for dismantling the NIH.

Thinking is dangerous and can only lead to the deaths of Good People.

If he just relied on faith, his mental brain wouldn't have been suceptible to devil thinking-rays. Or maybe someone with decent above-average intelligence and a work ethic lost his shit when he had a personal crisis, which then revealed a physiological or psychological aberration that led to a violent, antisocial outburst.

Simmer down wrote:Thinking is dangerous and can only lead to the deaths of Good People.

Was all that cipherin' and fancy book learnin' that done it.

This caught my eye (from the ABC News report)

"...Using the kinds of guns Holmes allegedly fired requires training and practice, and law enforcement officials are now trying to figure out where and with whom..."

*facepalm*
Really? Even a mediocre grad student ought to be able to figure out the point-and-click interface. Maybe he practiced with Airsoft guns...or played Modern Warfare 3 on his Xbox?

Sheesh. Or maybe he actually RTFM'd?

Also, I don't know what to make of some of the early reports of him being actively involved with his local (Presbyterian?)church. Maybe it was just for the social aspects of it, but most neuro grad students I've known are pretty hard-nosed science-minded folk without much time or patience for organized religion as such. I guess strictly speaking it's not impossible for him to have been a sincere believer and a neuroscience grad student, but the cognitive dissonance/compartmentalization required to do so would, I think, have been quite large...maybe he was no longer able to maintain that dissonance, and failing that oral exam (a very bad thing for a grad student...pretty much spells the beginning of the end of one's grad school career absent some heroic effort and someone on your side among the faculty) might have been what caused him to finally snap...his dreams came crashing down all around him and perhaps he lost all grip on reality...

What ticks me off is that apparently he'd been under the care of a university psychiatrist who specializes in Schizophrenia (!?) but when he withdrew the university basically washed their hands of him with an attitude of "well, not our problem anymore, thank god"...and nobody will ever know why a movie theater got shot up instead of it turning into a VA Tech-like shootout instead...but seems to me it could've gone either way...point being the university was being incredibly short sighted with this guy, IMHO...