A meditation from Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card

[netmouse]

In the college she had briefly attended, [...] she had quickly realized that intellectuals seemed to think that their life --the life of the mind, the endless self-examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-- was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people.
Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdrew from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.
In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasingly about them.

(p 298-299, hardback edition.)

Comments

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

However, I mean system administration as a field, not as individuals.

but the individuals who know what they're doing are still out there, and will still be out there. Five of my best friends, including my husband, would be better at computer security than this guy. The circle of my best friends is not a very large sample size in which to observe that computer security people vastly better than the person described are easy to find.

I think Card attempts to depict the computer security person as someone who made a wacky mistake, rather than as someone who was incompetent. It just doesn't ring true to me at all. In Ender's game, they didn't catch onto how Ender was hacking the computer system at first, but then they weren't really watching him. Here, Card repeatedly talks about how they put in systems to monitor everything Achilles does on the computers, but then when he actually describes what was in place, and the failure of it, the system doesn't stand up to his description -to the expectations of a medium computer geek.