Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Nothing worth showing yet. Right now I am going through some actual Fundamentals courses, learning all the things I never learned properly the first time around, like value studies, one, two and three point perspective, contours and negative spaces, sight sizing, etc.
I am way too old to pursue my dream of being a comic book artist, but I'd just like to be able to illustrate my own stories.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
The rules for "low effort" are somewhat relaxed for the Friday Fun Thread, and "this is culture war" could arguably apply to anything with such a broad interpretation as "there exist people who disagree with you."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.
I think the problems with academia are multifarious and go well beyond "leftist capture."
I'd distill them down to the following:
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Academia used to be for the wealthy. You had to be rich to be able to go to college to study Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery, and expect to be make a living afterwards. There were only so many professorships available to teach more academically inclined scions of wealthy families. When that landscape changed (in the US, largely due to the GI Bill after WWII, but also due to the general liberalization and tearing down of class barriers that occurred after the war), the market didn't. Lots of people still thought studying Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery sounded like fun; the number of professorships did not scale.
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But for a while, academia could still coast, because the very fact of being accepted into university and graduating was a sign of intelligence and industriousness. In high school, I was still being told by school guidance counselors that "Lots of companies will hire you just for having a college degree; they assume you can learn." This was already becoming no longer true. I don't know if school guidance counselors still say this, but if they are, they're lying.
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The reason for that is, well, a college degree was seen as the ticket to a good job. Therefore everyone should get a college degree. Therefore denying anyone the opportunity to earn a college degree was unfair. Therefore college should be accessible to everyone. I don't think we need to go over the many, many observable negative consequences of this. It's well-trod ground that touches almost every aspect of the culture war.
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So, here we are. College degrees are largely seen as worthless (or a minimum barrier to entry), the government has shoveled money into ensuring everyone can go to college, and universities have eagerly sucked up all that money in the form of ever-inflating prices. And we have all kinds of bombs ready to go off.
The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.
As a side note, I liked to draw as a kid (had dreams of becoming a comic book artist) but put down the pencils for decades (I went to college for "a good job.") Revisiting some of my old drawings, I realized I was both better and worse than I remembered. And recently got an urge to actually Learn Art.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from professional artists who largely agree with you that art school is pretty worthless. Art instruction, among other things, is more accessible than ever before. Free YouTube tutorials are abundant, but there are also online ateliers and coaches who are vastly cheaper than art school. Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.
I wrote a whole post about this.
Whether or not AI text is "worthless slop" depends on context. For fiction, or original thinking? Yes. For summarizing things or presenting information? No. The reason we prohibit LLM-posting (except when clearly stated as such and to serve a purpose) is that the Motte is supposed to be a discussion site, and no one (well, almost no one) actually thinks LLMs are "discussing" anything. If you just want to see LLMs arguing back and forth, there is OpenClaw for that.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots?
Yes, and no. AI is already very, very good at some things. This is undeniable. It is getting better at a lot of things. It is an enormously useful tool, too useful to imagine that it's going to go away or turn out to be a passing trend.
Whether it's actually going to achieve AGP(ETA: AGI, wtf kind of Freudian slip was that?) or trigger the Singularity is what warrants skepticism.
Most AI boosters do not, in fact, think it's going to become a "super-intelligence that will obsolete us."
You are allowed to express opinions, other people are allowed to express opinions about your opinions, and whether or not technical analysis is beneficial or not is arguable enough that you are in no position to tell someone "not to tell people" this.
You've been warned repeatedly for the kind of low-effort eye-poking antagonism that constitutes the majority of your posts. Even your posts that don't get reports are mostly like this.
Your next warning will not be a warning.
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