Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further
To me there seems almost an anticorrelation between being a diligent student and going further. It’s not gender specific, I’ve noticed it in musicians in general, and it puzzles and frustrates me. It seems the more diligent they are about learning technique and proper ways and so on, the less willing they are to write their own music. I’ve known conservatory folks who are literally scared of it. While the messy amateurish folks often do compose, and it’s occasionally good. Maybe you have to be a little bit independent-minded to go further than others.
There’s a little bit of contradiction in there, in that it’s not enough to be independent—you also need some amount of good technique. But you almost need to luck into it, acquire it in your own way. If you get it by being too much of a good student, then that mindset in itself will limit you.
Yeah. I wondered what if we have a series of concentric cylinders connected by spokes or walls, then the required material strength might be lower because some of the load would be transferred from outer to inner shells? The amount of material still grows with radius, and you can’t use all floors as living space because they will have different g’s, but maybe some floors could be industry or farming. This way the structure might be safer, as it wouldn’t have so many moving parts in contact. And it could be easier to build, from the inside out.
Though I still feel that we won’t go to space at scale unless we learn to modify ourselves biologically or technologically, and if we learn that, we might as well cancel the need for gravity and other things. Or at least, the groups that embrace self-modification will clearly outcompete in space.