Scantlings

I know you guys are all asleep at the moment, but an old post of Bob's has flushed Steve Dashew out on the Uglyboat thread on CA.

Olaf Hart wrote:I know you guys are all asleep at the moment, but an old post of Bob's has flushed Steve Dashew out on the Uglyboat thread on CA.

We're in the same timezone, or within an hour or two, I think.

Oh, clash of the titans; but likely a one sided argument.

Waiting to see how the conversation develops. Too bad I'm so many time zones ahead...

I have no time for Dashew. He and I do not speak the same design language. He'll have to debate himself.

Interesting.

I met him as a kid in Long Island when he was still sailing his second intermezzo - the ferro cement one. Our yard captain, who now is an editor for PS, was friends with him and I was friends with the yard captain's son. We got in a lot of trouble together. I was just a stupid Opti sailor, but I recall he had very good opinion of himself.

I love how he attempts to lecture us about smaller head sails and narrow easily driven hulls while seeming to say Bob does not know about those design elements.......guess he does not read the Sliver thread.

He said some ridiculous things about yacht design to me at a boat show years ago. My response was to tell him that "we do not share a common vocabulary with which can can discuss yacht design". Verbatum.

He likes ketches because they raise the VCG?
6 to 8 degrees of weather helm is good?

I've always been leary of someone promoting the "ultimate offshpore boat" when the ultimate boat is 70' LOA.

Nah, I won't play with him. He'll have to play with himself which I suspect he is adept at.

I bumped into Steve in the So. Pacific when he was a guest aboard one of his designs that was buddy boating with us. The other boat was a Sundeer 63 sloop (I think) and our SAGA was the big fat 65' ketch I've posted about. In any event, we had to have a race. Of course, we'd been sailing right next to this boat for about 2,000 miles so we pretty much knew what she could and couldn't do.

The 63 hung in there on a tight reach, with Steve running up and down the deck trimming etc.... but then we both turned downwind.... (drum roll here). Both boats set their chutes in brisk trade-wind conditions and SAGA with almost twice the weight, 18' of beam vs the Sundeer's 12' of beam, and a 96' spinnaker luff length vs about 60' on the Sundeer, just TOOK OFF. We were about two knots faster.

Steve spent that night in Vava'u going through all the reasons why our big fat steel ketch wouldn't "normally" sail away from his long slender sloop on a run. The only thing that cut him off was his boat's owner saying: "Well, SAGA really leaves us in the dust on a beat, we simply can't stay anywhere near her."

One of my fondest sailboat racing memories. Tom Wylie got a giant hoot out of the story!

BV

Beau:
I got a hoot out of your story Too. Love it.

Interesting stuff - I always got a similar vibe from Dashew as we get from Brent Swain about HIS boats. I guess the messiah's are all pretty similar, just like they are in religions.

I instinctively distrust anyone who has found "The Answer" or "The True Way" - in ANY field.

SloopJonB wrote:Interesting stuff - I always got a similar vibe from Dashew as we get from Brent Swain about HIS boats. I guess the messiah's are all pretty similar, just like they are in religions.

I instinctively distrust anyone who has found "The Answer" or "The True Way" - in ANY field.

I once saw Steve and Linda sail the last big ketch into Camden (ME) harbor and anchor her under sail- it was a nice bit of sailing from the two of them, who knew the boat. I share your distrust of anyone who won't accept that all boats have strengths and weaknesses, or situations where they are strong or weak- same as I don't trust anyone who lacks a sense of humor about themselves.

I've spent a fair bit of online time with Ian Farrier, and that is all I'm going to say about that. I sure love my boat though.

Well fuck! I want to be a messiah!

"Blessed are the cheese makers"

bob perry wrote:Nah, I won't play with him. He'll have to play with himself which I suspect he is adept at.

I knew I liked you for good reason. Never understood the cult of D.

Bob, All manufacturers of dairy products are equally blessed.

There is a general pattern in some people, as I've observed. They mistakenly believe that if they say an incorrect thing with enough conviction and often enough it will become true. Dashew has this problem with some of his design ideas (although many of them are great). Dennis Conners has it in spades. Ron Paul has it. One of my grandfathers had it.

For these folks, no amount of "discussion" or "proof" that they are wrong or incorrect seems to work. They are conflating "certainty" with "accuracy" with "truth" in a strange way.

This group also seems to believe that disagreement with their chosen ideas is a failure of your morals rather than their ideas. It makes it extremely difficult for them to learn new things or discover when they've made an error.

I've had the great joy in life of knowing a lot of amazing folks who are the opposite; whose egos are structured that they are strengthened by reaching the absolutely right and correct answer rather than by having whatever answer they believe to be right proven right by others. That list includes folks like George Griffith, Lowel North, Cuthbert Hurd and of course Stan Honey. It's impossible to imagine them "preaching" to people the way Dashew does.

That is a very good observation Beau.

But they aren't "incorrect" - YOU are.

The "hard" sciences are full guys, yes, guys, like that. They latch onto one finding and spend the rest of their careers interpreting the world in its "light". I have a touch of it myself, but I the gods of random chance don't like me enough to enable me to pull it off.

I kind of assume I have adults around me who can think for themselves. I'll throw out ideas but I don't care of you buy them or not. Sometimes an idea has to gestate a while in some peolple. I'm kind of like that because I'm slow.

bob perry wrote:I kind of assume I have adults around me who can think for themselves. I'll throw out ideas but I don't care of you buy them or not. Sometimes an idea has to gestate a while in some peolple. I'm kind of like that because I'm slow.

It took me about a half hour looking at Bob's stripes on the Francis Lee for me to see that he was right. But I was distracted by visitors, so maybe alone I could have gotten there in 10 minutes.

Beau, there is a real problem here in Oz with many Gen X / Gen Y who use what I call "magical thinking"
Our schools emphasised humanities, not maths and science, so there is no respect for evidence or scientific method.
They were taught by school and by marketing that if you want something to be true, then it will be true.
If it doesnt work out, you just want harder, so there is no capacity to learn.
Its a real PITA if you are a clinician, and very difficult if you are trying to teach them as adults.

Olaf Hart wrote:Beau, there is a real problem here in Oz with many Gen X / Gen Y who use what I call "magical thinking"
Our schools emphasised humanities, not maths and science, so there is no respect for evidence or scientific method.
They were taught by school and by marketing that if you want something to be true, then it will be true.
If it doesnt work out, you just want harder, so there is no capacity to learn.
Its a real PITA if you are a clinician, and very difficult if you are trying to teach them as adults.

I find that utterly astounding! I've spent my life as an engineer and an investor, and the humanities were entertaining but basically useless to me in my life, with the exception of teaching me enough about human nature to lead folks. However, that didn't really happen at school, it happened at home.

We have an analogous problem in the US. You can see it in the percentage of the population who believe in creationism and other non-sense. I'll apologize in advance for offending anyone, but I simply can't accept people believing in things for which there is no evidence (like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny along with many other supposedly more "important" beings for which there is zero empirical evidence). As so WISHING harder to make something come true or be true, rather than understanding the world and making things come true, it's beyond stupid it's pitiful.

Of course there's my maternal Grandfather's approach: "Beau, you're really lucky you get this stuff and most people don't. Taking their money away from them will be trivial for someone like you who knows engineering, technology and business structure. These clowns won't know what hit 'em." At the time he said that, I thought it harsh and meanspirited. Now, I know it to be painfully true and but one simple example of why were finding a greater and greater division between wealthy and poor.

Care to make a guess about the correlation or non-correlation of wealth creation and technical skills? How about wealth creation and a belief in a supreme being? How about wealth creation and test results in tests for analytical thinking? The answers to these semi-rhetorical questions are pretty obvious.

Olaf Hart wrote:Beau, there is a real problem here in Oz with many Gen X / Gen Y who use what I call "magical thinking"
Our schools emphasised humanities, not maths and science, so there is no respect for evidence or scientific method.
They were taught by school and by marketing that if you want something to be true, then it will be true.
If it doesnt work out, you just want harder, so there is no capacity to learn.
Its a real PITA if you are a clinician, and very difficult if you are trying to teach them as adults.

Here, we also have lots of religious literalism and postmodernist subjectivism in the mix.

I'll just sit here in the back of the class, keep my head down and draw another boat. And hope to hell that I am not called on.

But I had a tactic that always worked when I was called on to answer a question I didn't know.
I would stay perfectly silent and just stare back into the teachers eyes.
I would hold that gaze until the teacher got uncomfortable and called on someone else. It always worked.

BeauV wrote:I find that utterly astounding! I've spent my life as an engineer and an investor, and the humanities were entertaining but basically useless to me in my life, with the exception of teaching me enough about human nature to lead folks.

I think the answer lies in balance between the humanities and science. All science degrees should have more humanities and humanities degrees need more science. It would be a sad world if it rotated around just numbers or just the arts.

And Bob, you are slow...like a fox.

JoeP wrote:

BeauV wrote:I find that utterly astounding! I've spent my life as an engineer and an investor, and the humanities were entertaining but basically useless to me in my life, with the exception of teaching me enough about human nature to lead folks.

I think the answer lies in balance between the humanities and science. All science degrees should have more humanities and humanities degrees need more science. It would be a sad world if it rotated around just numbers or just the arts.

And Bob, you are slow...like a fox.

Couldn't agree more, and lets also take a skeptical look at some of some of the 4-year degrees which are neither.

As I gained experience professionally I decided to do something I liked doing, was morally reasonable, and was lucrative, in that order.

To me, a correlation between technical skills and wealth creation is a bit west coast, Beau. I think the basic requirement is a skill that few possess, like shooting baskets or picking stocks effectively, for example.

kdh wrote:As I gained experience professionally I decided to do something I liked doing, was morally reasonable, and was lucrative, in that order.

To me, a correlation between technical skills and wealth creation is a bit west coast, Beau. I think the basic requirement is a skill that few possess, like shooting baskets or picking stocks effectively, for example.

I totally agree - making money is a talent, like making music or designing sailboats. True, a lot of hard work and acquired knowledge makes a big contribution but by itself is not enough. I've known many wealthy people that weren't educated or even very smart - they just had the knack. I could draw sailboats every day for the rest of my life and I'd never provide any competition for BP.

As to the degree comments - I think that far too many people attend university these days. A degree has become the new high school diploma and far too many of them are meaningless or unused. Why should a car salesman require a BComm.? That is one of the biggest drivers behind the expansion of the Humanities faculties - the slider courses are there so the students who are merely after that powerful piece of paper choose them. The sciences are hard and require work & dedication from even the smartest people.

IMHO Universities should be reserved for academics and scholars in most cases , not everyman job training, at which they are very poor. I would venture to say that the VAST majority of university students attend, not because they are interested or want a sophisticated education but because it is so widely perceived as the only path to a good job or career.

I don't know what a Bcomm is, but I don't grudge my car salesman a BA, MA, or PhD in 19th Century South American literature, if that's what he loves. It raises the overall tone of things to have guys like a that around. That said, requiring a half-assed liberal arts degree for the guy whose summum bonum is selling cars makes no sense.

I suppose my objections to the "humanities" classes I took, and as a philosophy major I had to take a heap, is that they had darned little to do with "humanity" in any sense of the word I have rubbed up against. Rather, we had things like literature in which a professor with a limited understanding of a work by a writer, take James Joyce for example, attempting to explain it to a group of large children who completely lacked the framework with which one can comprehend the piece. My favorite quote attributed to James Joyce is that he said to T.S. Elliot: "It took me eleven years to write Finnegan's Wake and I expect it will take you at least that long to read and understand it, if ever." Ok, so Mr. Joyce was a LITTLE arrogant, small surprise there. Teaching Joyce to 20 year olds is just silly.

Then, there's the whole area of "research" by folks in the "humanities".... huh?

My final bitch, and then I'll go back to sorting out racing scores, is the plethora of pseudo-sciences. The list is endless and endlessly entertaining:

Political Science - Exactly how to does one set up a controlled scientific experiment in the political relm? The Germans tried it during the Nazi era, not so popular.
Sociology - 'nuf said
Psychology - more than 'nuf said, as we watch Freudian refuted over and over and over again.

I really think that folks should attempt to avoid naming something a "science" without the practice having any reasonable approximation of a scientific method or methodology; but what do I know.

One of the most entertaining examples of how mis-named things are is that at Cambridge University, my understanding is that the head of the Physics Department sits in the "Chair of Natural Philosophy" - because when Physics was just getting started it was a piece of Philosophy dealing with naturally occurring stuff. By contrast the head of the Philosophy department sits in the "Chari of Moral Science" - as if there was anything scientific at all about morality! Each field, and radically different times, attempted to cloak itself in the power and prestige of another field by rather oddly misnaming themselves. IMHO.

Ok, back to race scores....

BV