Do we learn from History?

It always works at my house. My teenagers are always right, and I always get the blame, like at the moment.

 

Don't worry, when they hit 20/21 they'll suddenly be amazed at how much you've learned since they were teeenagers

 

when i was a teen i once made the mistake of informing my dad while loungeing in the back yard ...that i was BORED ..he quickly found me a rake and kept me gainfully occupied for the rest of the afternoon cleaning up leaves and trash ...never again did i announce anything so stupid to my father ...my own boys have also learned this very good lesson from me ..and never ever do they announce that they have need of yard work details ...

 

My German teacher used to have a poster on his wall that said, "Lehrer haben vormittags Recht und nachmittags Frei" (teachers are right in the forenoon and free in the afternoon). Maybe there's a lesson there for all of us...

Teenagers these days are fairly useless indeed, whatever will they do with the world when they inherit it? Wait, who am I to speak...

 

Teen-agers rarely learn from history. (Lame attmept to get back on topic.) Neither does anyone else, that's why they'll be foraging for food and heading for the high ground when they inherit this world.

 

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for the non germanics , hight school in germany was only on in the mornings , maybe still is ?
teen-agers are supposed to do stuff their way , I wouldn't think much of a youth who would accept everything from his elders ,
they are supposed to be the triumph of hope over common-sense and of hormones over reason

I'm an old guy , giver of wisdom ... never trust ANYBODY over thirty

 

and never believe anyone under 20

too be honest most teenagers(well in Bristol anyway) simply don't give a S*** anymore, most just try to get laid, or get drugs or seem hard,
many don't realise what's ahead of them in life, and sadly it wil hit them too late.

 

You mean teenagers were once different, many years ago?

 

True, but my Generation does seem to go abit more to the extreme, or is this merely history repeating itself?
I do recall someone once quoting Plato on the forum and the quote contained a complaint about the youth of his age,
So i guess the next Generation seems more extreme than the previous.

 

I have long known that humanity does not learn from history. They just repeat the mistakes of the past and wonder why this keeps happening.

 

The thing about learning from history is that it doesn't really help, because every situation in human history is unique. Few historians still believe that there are patterns and laws to be found in the science of history; they merely describe and compare, generalizing only to the extent they will allow themselves. You can never truly say that something has happened before, because the context and the forces at work are never exactly the same.

Arguing as if history itself offers lessons for the present often leads to a "slippery slope" fallacy (check Ricky's thread on fallacies in the Announcements section). In concrete terms, for example, you'll often hear people argue that "if you allow [discrimination, police action, government interference] then before you know it we'll have another Hitler in charge." Sorry, no, it doesn't quite work that way.

 

history is just human experience writ large ...we (mostly ) learn from our mistakes and policy makers without a good knowlege of history have the power to make big mistakes that cost everyone ...if a person wants to lease a property from me , you can belive i want to know all about his credit and rental history before i consider him...this is a lesson i learned the hard way of course...or say a good freind wants to borrow my boat ...well ..i want to know how many boats he has owned and what mistakes he has already had driven home ...being able to drive a car has nothing to do with running a boat even though both have a steering wheel and a throttle ....airplanes are even more unforgiveing of carelesness, and one must be signed off on each paticular model in order to transition ..an f16 pilot might assume that he is qualified by default to pilot a piper cub ...but he is very mistaken....

 

This one is asking for a reaction....Piper Cub's were used to be primary trainers for the CPTP (Civilan Pilot Training Program) and that is not because it's so hard to fly...
as every fighter pilot needs PFT and BFT (primary flight training and basic flying training) on single engined prop aircraft and will get a PPL (privat pilot license) before going to AFT (advanced flight training) i would say yes a F-16 pilot is qualified to fly Piper Cubs!

 

This is true, but there are still things you can learn. Like, maybe, if a country has been taken over by a hard-line 'dictator'* and is making threatening war-like noises about territory it demands should belong to it (and not whichever nation currently has it), then simply saying 'oh, go on then, you have it' is not likely to be a particularly good solution. That situation is not exactly new nor uncommon.

* term used simply to mean an ruler or ruling class that is in more-or-less total control. Could be a monarch, an elected leader, a military councel, a Soviet, whatever.

 

except that a modern f15 pilot has typically zero hours in any type of tail dragger whatsoever and he would have almost no chance of jumping into a piper cub and not turning it into a tangled mess of fabric and tubeing.....also flying jets all day at 700 mph does not make them race car drivers ...so many were killed in corvettes and ford mustangs in the early sixties that the us airforce had to set up training seminars to warn these young pilots of their mistaken notion hot rod driveing expertise....

 

I doubt that it was lack of expertise so much as overconfidence and a propensity to drive aggressively, drive fast and to take risks. The same things that result in higher accident rates for young men everywhere, only more so in the case of fighter pilots.
Although it takes some practice to master a taildragger I'm not convinced that a highly trained fighter pilot would be unable to handle a Piper Cub safely the first time he tried it. He wouldn't be smooth and expert his first time out certainly and though they are not trained to fly in a taildragger the skills needed are not foreign to them and they would surely be aware of the need to handle the plane gently and no pilot is likely to be unaware of the pitfalls of the taildragger if they have read anything about aviation or talked to other aviators, and surely they are likely to have done both.

 

It's simple a PT or Primary Trainer is an aircraft wich is very forgiven and easy to fly so surely a pilot wich is allowed to fly aircraft like the F-15-16-22 or whatever can and a lot of will fly such aircraft in their spare time.
In holland we had for instance a commercial 747 pilot who flies a DC-3 whenever he had the chance and an ex-F-16 pilot who flies a P-51 so i bet/know their are lots of these guys in the US who do the same (and yes a P-51 or a DC-3 are harder to fly than a piper cub).

 

Ohh, I thank you 4 that, lad

Regards,
Che.