The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

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The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby h.harb » Tue Apr 21, 2020 6:18 pm

Sorry, if this has a political ring to it, but I had to post this because it's exactly what PSIA is about and unfortunately the nation as well.

Someone much smarter than me said this and it rings so true.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby Robert0325 » Wed Apr 22, 2020 11:55 am

Sorry,couldn't resist this famous quote
"The trouble with democracy is that 2 idiots can outvote a genius"
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby Vailsteve » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:00 pm

While I agree with much of this sentiment, I also have to wonder how our “experts” from the CDC and the WHO got the Covid 19 numbers so dramatically wrong. Remember just a month ago they said 2 MILLION deaths in the USA due to the virus. Then it was one million, then 200,000 and then 60,000. Basically revised weekly down down down.

Total so far is around 45,000 deaths....obviously NOT good, but many if not most of them have/had other issues...age, obesity diabetes, being the top three factors. I get that more/better data will refine a model, but come on...THIS model was used by the experts as the foundation to shut the entire country down???

I guess, and this is ONLY my opinion, as I get older, I question almost any government “expert”.

But, what do I know...I am just a retired ski bum.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby jbotti » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:13 pm

Harald posted the comment specifically focused on the PSIA. Lets keep political commentary and Covid-19 commentary away from this forum. Thanks!
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby NoCleverName » Thu Apr 23, 2020 3:42 am

jbotti wrote:Harald posted the comment specifically focused on the PSIA. Lets keep political commentary and Covid-19 commentary away from this forum. Thanks!

I beg to disagree ... look at the OP. Perhaps best moved to Social Chatting?

That being said, I 100% agree with the OP. I heard a variation on one of my favorite sayings that's better than mine: "The average person is stupid and half of them are below average."

We can talk about the models being off and expert opinion being wrong. Right now there's a hew and cry that we should "listen to science". But sometimes science isn't ABLE to present a correct model. Didn't we just have a small discussion on the limited application of physics to skiing? After all, a model (much like a scientific "law") is just a compression function on a data set. And the decompression to reality many times is not lossless ... there's detail missing (think the difference between JPEG and RAW).

As a microcosm of this, remember the panic over the "lack of ventilators". At the time, the standard of care was to use a ventilator for the worst cases. So everyone got up and arms screaming for ventilators, hundreds of millions spent to convert auto plants to ventilators, etc. Now we find it really isn't such a great standard of care and they were killing more people than saving. But that was the "hide bound" standard and experience at the time.

HH's parallel to the PSIA is appropriate to that tale: in the face of experience to the contrary, they won't change their "standard of care".
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby Daren » Thu Apr 23, 2020 9:02 pm

The thinking of the masses can bend the thinking of even the most advanced of intellect. It takes an independent thinker to go against the crowd to find the truth in regards to what works & doesn't work in regards to skiing since the herd in skiing has it totally wrong. A lot of people on this sight have been good scientists in regards to finding the best way to ski which I truly believe is PMTS. I always like to hear what other independent thinkers think in different subjects when I am trying to figure out truth from falsehood. I have found this thread of great interest & unlike the other so called scientists the thinking was not bent by funding.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby h.harb » Fri Apr 24, 2020 9:28 am

Good points Daren, totally unmotivated by the support of the ski community or money is true. I defied the national organization's wrong approaches to ski teaching and actually had to start over rather than taking a position that I could have had within the PSIA world. The other option was to go back to ski coaching and running of race programs. I knew I was on to something with my approach to coaching and ski teaching. But writing and coming up with a new and completely different teaching system, was never in my original thinking. Funny the twists and turns in life.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby ErikCO » Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:33 pm

It is interesting how, no matter the area in life, there is "expert" opinion (and, while this does have application to our current social situation, it applies equally to skiing, science, medicine, and I'm sure many other areas in business and engineering) that becomes the accepted truth. Then anyone who disagrees with this truth, or even questions it, is ridiculed, ignored, and defunded. For a society that claims to value science highly, we certainly can take unscientific approaches to things! As part of the scientific method, we are supposed to be able to see an area where we think conventional wisdom is wrong, formulate a hypothesis, develop an experiment to test the hypothesis, and then execute the experiment.

In the case of PMTS, if the "experts" wanted to run a scientific study, they would take three good junior racing programs, have one use straight PSIA teaching, one use the weird mixup of PSIA with a few PMTS drills that I see an increasing number of people in the broader ski world using, and one using straight PMTS. Run them for 4-8 years and compare the outputs. That would be the scientific way for them to investigate. (Of course, they could just look at Harald's results of the years as well as Welch Village's results, skip the experiment, and reach the same result! But I use this in way of illustration.)
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby h.harb » Fri Apr 24, 2020 7:25 pm

This is absolutely the correct approach. However when you have the fearful in PSIA afraid of losing such a test and being nationally disgraced; they will run away from a scientific approach like scared rabbits.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby Jjmdane » Sat Apr 25, 2020 5:17 am

As Winston Churchill supposedly said, and I paraphrase, “if you want an argument against a democracy, spend 5 minutes with an average voter. “ Take that thought and apply to our ski instruction conundrum.
Last edited by Jjmdane on Sun Apr 26, 2020 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby milesb » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:24 pm

Nobody actually voted for the things that most hurt our country and states.
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Re: The US direction since Ronald Reagan.

Postby ComprexX » Wed Jun 03, 2020 1:01 pm

ErikCO wrote:In the case of PMTS, if the "experts" wanted to run a scientific study, they would take three good junior racing programs, have one use straight PSIA teaching, one use the weird mixup of PSIA with a few PMTS drills that I see an increasing number of people in the broader ski world using, and one using straight PMTS. Run them for 4-8 years and compare the outputs.


The Austrians and Americans pretty much did this study- the Austrian PMTS guy won the overall World Cup 8 times in 12 years and completely dominated the men's technical disciplines before he decided to call it a good run and retire somewhat early. The entire US Men's Ski Team, using a different teaching method(s) and technique(s) which are very far removed from PMTS- well, with one exception, they didn't do so well in that time period...
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