Heuristics Re: RE: LOV and LTV

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

A wonderful story on heuristics.

Back in the fall of 1970 I got subpoened by a legislative commit6ee
investigating campus disorders. They were a bunch of buffoons -- as
shown beautifully by their interrogation of a professor of electrical
engineering from the U of I. He was a German emigre and stepped right
out of a cartoon of a kindly old professor.

The background was that for many years he had taught a quiet course in
the Engineering school on heuristics, in which only engineering students
enrolled. As part of the jazzing up of distribution requirements back in
the late '60s they made his course available to the general student
body. The idea he came up with was to let the students choose their own
goal, it could be anything sensible or not, and then their semester
project would be to establish how they would work out the means to that
end. They came up with some doozies. How to make a fortune selling
marijuana. How to blow up the student union building. All sorts of
"sixtyish" projects. The good Illinois senators decided that it was all
a commie plot hauled him down to springfield to testify. The high point
came when they began grilling him on those students who had,
purportedly, refused to carry out the project. The Illinois Legislators
(name for one of the lower forms of life) obviously thought that he had
assigned subversive topics and that some patriotic students had refused
to carry out the nefarious work. His reply (in a gentle German accent
but very clear): "I'm sorry, zey vas just lazy bums!."

Carrol