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In high-school, I had to write an expose... something about the "silver age of Russian poetry" (it's Block, Belyj, Akhmatova, Gipius, Gumiljov etc. if you are interested). It was about 20 pages long, on a typewriter. It's physically more straining than to type on any computer keyboard, even with very stiff keys. And I didn't know how to touch-type at the time. So, it was pecking with two fingers. With all that said... three words per minute isn't a lot. At all. By the time I was finished typing, I could probably do better than that. To me, this quote describes someone who rather hates / struggles with technology. I had a bunch of math professors like this: they couldn't draw diagrams to save their lives, they couldn't write formulas in any editor, and so often we'd have very poorly hand-drawn formulas photographed and inserted as images into MS Word documents or similar incomprehensible junk. This doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at the very narrow field they specialized in, but it usually means they are very bad at virtually everything else adjacent to that field. Also, this often means that they've made their career in academia by being the first person in that narrow field they specialize in. This is also my impression of Dijkstra: he had some novel, but also kind of low-hanging fruit ideas... at the time when he was almost alone in that field. Had he started today, he'd be very lucky to get a tenured position, but most likely would end up being a TA / dropped out and just do something else. Even though there's still a lot of politics and all sorts of un-meritocratic ways of getting into prestigious positions in academia, you need to be very good. A lot of the times it's being very good at cheating, but there isn't really any more room for greenfield academics who instantaneously propel themselves to the top of the academic hierarchy. |