ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I think this comment assumes that banning is the only mechanism in question. Indeed, some forms of banning were used with smoking, but it certainly wasn't the only tool. Nor was it actually just a general ban. Moreover, while folks could quibble with an externality analysis, externalities are certainly not the only things that societies make "pushes" about.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
which are all now reasons for any random individual to stay in the current cultural equilibrium
I sort of don't believe you. Game theory is hard in general, and it's extra difficult for complicated cultural games. It's easy to ipse dixit some into existence; it's much harder to actually show with a reasonable model.
If you want to push them and together with them whole of society to other equilibrium, you need to a path from here to there.
I mean, no? Most social engineering projects fail, and many cultural changes have occurred without someone planning out a specific step-by-step path. This sort of demand is basically trying to set up an impossible task, as no one here is going to be able to just apply magic to accomplish intermediate steps, and any proposed intermediate steps will be responded to with, "...then why haven't you already done that?" I'm feeling the FConSCC/Hlynka flowing that you're just working from a completely flawed conceptual framework for the base of a discussion.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Do you think it was unlikely for rates of smoking to decline after society had shifted HARD toward embracing it? ...with a side of "don't tell me what to do"?
My point is that saying something like "our society should push not having premarital sex" is stupid because it doesn't work.
I'm not sure how I would analyze that. Someone in the past might have said that it was similarly stupid to push not smoking. Yet, we did, and major changes occurred. There are all sorts of mechanisms by which a society could push such a thing. Those various mechanisms might have different effects. It's pretty strange to me to lump them all together carelessly. It seems to be actively missing the point to lump them all under "we should simply tell them to not have sex", as if they're all actually equivalent to that. I think it would have been similarly stupid to say that all methods of pushing to reduce smoking are equivalent to "simply telling people to not smoke".
My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades. It's just seriously difficult to reason about, and flippant takes like yours are not even really serious attempts at doing so.
EDIT: I will note that my original response was with respect to your statement:
How is convincing western populations not to do this going?
Again, this makes it sound like this is a thing that is actively being pursued. That's sort of the opposite of reality.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex"
Good thing I'm not doing that. Perhaps I need to repeat my claims?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
You might have the causality reversed. Average age of first marriage rose significantly after a societal push to embrace ubiquitous premarital sex.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Notably, this was not part of the original violinist argument. It was pretty clear from the original violinist argument that they were positing a cabal of music fans kidnapping someone in the middle of the night and attaching them without consent. This version is getting close to my preferred analogy - rock climbing.
When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope.
More generally, the idea of prospective consent exists elsewhere in the consent literature. The classic example is Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast. It would normally be objectionable for his men to tie him to the mast (or to keep him tied) against his objection. He had reason to believe that his future self would protest profusely, demanding to be untied, but we respect his original consent to overcome his later objections. A related example is the skydiver example. A new skydiver might know that they have a fear reaction to actually jumping out of a plane. It is normally not allowed for someone to just strap their bodies together and throw them out of the plane. But the new skydiver can prospectively consent, saying, "I know that I'm going to protest when we're standing on the edge, but I still want you to pull me off the plane with you."
Nearly all of contract law is an attempt to enforce prospective consent to things that you might not want to do at a future time. Even the most basic, "You give me stuff now, and I'll pay you money later," when at a later time, after having received the stuff, one might protest and want to withdraw their consent to paying the money. But there are clear responsibility laws/rules/norms in gobs of different situations. Commercial passenger pilots, for example, are known to have taken on a responsibility to stay in their airplane and try to save it and the lives of their passengers, even when they might want to just grab a parachute and leave the passengers to somehow save themselves. I think many people would also consider that to be literal murder.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
How is convincing western populations not to do this going?
You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Affirming the consequent is quite out of fashion.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The effort required is basically just to actually put together the currently publicly available information and describe why people would be interested in discussing it.
Suppose we subtracted the snark from the OP and added, "People may be interested in discussing this because it's a surprising, significant military operation between countries that people are historically interested in discussing." Is that enough? How about, "People may be interested in discussing this because c'mon! Of course people are going to be interested in discussing this. There's a 0% chance people aren't going to be interested in discussing this."
And for this effort bar we filter out a lot of fluff. The cost is that we will have to wait 20 minutes for someone to do this before we have a discussion about breaking news, but we're not aiming to be a breaking news platform so this is a very low cost.
Waiting 20min has approximately nothing to do with it. It is entirely at the conceptual level. Moreover, I contend that my proposed distinction allows us to filter out at least the same amount of fluff. My proposed distinction also does not aim in any way toward turning TheMotte into a breaking news platform.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Excellent news! I am not asking for every minute detail of a rubric. I understand that there is some subjectivity in modding.1 Instead, what I'm asking for is much more high level than that. Just an acknowledgment that "providing a canvas" (to use @quiet_NaN's terminology) for discussion on a 100% topic is a useful service, rather than having it be a warnable/banable offense. It's just a change in subjective mindset (and policy). It's a useful service to stand in for something like automated identification/posting of megathreads for 100% topics.
1 - I have made a distinct complaint when a mod action couldn't point to any actual problem whatsoever, but that's obviously also different.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The competitive advantage of the motte is not that it can report what is true faster than twitter, nor that it is better at reporting facts than the news media.
I think you have mistaken what my model was. I agree with this.
A decent current news top level post is basically providing a canvas for takes.
I think a pretty low-effort comment is sufficient to provide the canvas. It seems to me that you are asking for it to paint the canvas.
But all the interesting takes, like ... will only happen after the facts are in and the posters have had a day to think on them and how they tie into their world view.
If the mods believe this, then they should simply impose a moratorium. No breaking news for 24hrs. That would be clear.
I would propose a system of sliding standards. In the first 24h of a news item being reported, I would expect someone putting in a solid twenty minutes of citing multiple news sources. After 36h, if it is an important CW news item (e.g. the first Trump tariff story, not the tenth), I propose top level posters should get away with a low effort post (source+quote+two sentences).
This seems like an unstable equilibrium. An individual actor can defect by putting in only 19min of work. Then the next individual actor can defect by putting in only 18min of work. Rinse and repeat. My proposal acknowledges that it is a useful service to provide a canvas, but only for a small subset of genuine 100% topics. Moreover, it says that this service is valued in that it will not be warned/banned, but in order to maintain incentives for the equilibrium, it will come with a shower of downvotes and significant penalties if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses?
I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.
You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this."
Technically, even this OP wrote something about it. But yeah, I still have no idea what the actual standard is.
Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue.
Perhaps your numbers from the mod history will bear out that the typical response is just a warning. I still think this is a bad equilibrium. It provides insufficient distinction between typical low effort garbage that we don't want and obvious 100% topics, which we (I) do. Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.
For any other mods who might be casually interested in subscribing to my newsletter this meta topic, I would like to note that so far in the responses, I see very little engagement with my conceptual definition of the problem to be solved, the incentives involved, the current or desired equilibria, or valuation methods for what type of resulting posting dynamics we'd prefer.
I'm a bit of a dissenter on this one. I get the point; I really do. I don't want to be bombarded by every single little thing that happens. That said, from an objective perspective, I think there is a 100% chance that TheMotte will discuss a story that is this impactful and this close to the culture war. There is a 0% chance that it will not be discussed. This is not some random little news story that, if it's just not posted with a low effort comment, it'll skate by and never take up precious Motte real estate (which is the fate that I hope for with most of the random little news stories that the rules are trying to filter out). I felt the same way about the (main) Trump assassination attempt. (I will note that this is not some pet topic of mine; I almost never comment on Israel matters and would actually prefer less of them in general; I have not otherwise commented in this one, either. But this is truly a "C'mon" one.)
Thus, in my mind, the only question is how such 100% stories make it to the Motte. Speaking personally, it feels almost impossible to write a 'quality' top-level comment on it. There's not some ultra-unique take I'm going to have that provides an independent reason why I'm bringing it to your attention. What is the actual bar to clear? I don't actually know. Just fluff it up a bit, like you're re-reporting from a few sources? Seems weak to me. If we actually deleted these low-effort comments rather than just temp banning them, what would we get? Would this story just never get discussed? I doubt it. At worst, it'll end up in one of the links posts that are (allowed!) in the Transnational Thursday Thread, and then the entire discussion will blow up there.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
An alternate solution that has sufficed from time to time is a megathread. You can see how that works with, e.g., US election results. There's little point in making someone have to come up with the gumption to think that they're going to have some 'quality' TLC for the discussion to happen. Everyone knows there's a 100% chance that discussion is going to happen. It just happens to be that the mods know in advance that that's the case, so we don't have to have someone eat a ban in the process. They don't know that in advance for a major Israeli attack on Iran or a presidential assassination attempt. The dream would be to have some mechanism by which a topic is so obviously a 100% topic that it prompts the mods to say, "C'mon, this is obviously a 100% topic; just click this button, and it'll make a megathread, so no one has to eat a ban." Yes yes, this is not a trivial mechanism to design.
To not leave this comment without at least some suggestion that might be plausible, I'll at least try one. IF the community were to embrace some version of this "100% topic" terminology, we could just include an additional reporting option. We could report low-effort comments like this one with the report, "Low-effort, but c'mon, this is a 100% topic." If enough people report [EDIT: and it actually meets the mod-declared standards for 100% topics], the mods could then respond with, "Approved on grounds of being a 100% topic," rather than a ban. Paired with this, to discourage low-effort comments that only might be a 100% topic, I would also support locking/deleting the entire chain of comments that follow a low-effort TLC that doesn't get approved as a 100% topic. I think the resulting equilibrium would be a lot better than just having to have someone eat a ban every time for no real reason.
EDIT: Concerning the "first" incentive, why does that exist? I'd maybe guess it's because people think that whoever posts it first will get upvotes for whatever reason. Right now, I guess they trade that off with bans or something? We could develop a norm of just downvoting them. Make the report option say, "I have downvoted this low-effort comment, but c'mon, it's a 100% topic." Since the incentive to be "first" is so minor, this disincentive to be "first" will also be minor. At least, it'll be less harsh than eating a ban. You can do the needful, eat a -50, then actually participate in this and other discussion. And if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic, you eat the downvotes, eat the ban, and your topic disappears.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Aside from Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm pretty sure the climate is unsuitable for cocoa.
Thus the need for significant application of capital. :)
Get rid of migrant labor and cereal grains aren't going anywhere, but a lot of fruit might become too expensive to grow in the US.
Possibly so. There are obviously multiple interacting legal regime possibilities. The current administration seems(seemed?) keen on shutting down both imported labor and imported goods, with the simplest model being two binary variables. Shut down imported labor and keep imported fruit, perhaps there is no intersection of domestic supply/demand curves. Shut down imported labor and also imported fruit, maybe markets clear at a higher price, maybe quantity supplied still goes to zero and people just have less heterogeneity in their access to goods, maybe black fruit markets develop. Keep imported labor and also imported fruit is the status quo. Keep imported labor and shut down imported fruit, and the effects are probably again specific-dependent, but if it's a good that is already produced in reasonable quantity domestically, my guess would be minor increases in price and decreases in quantity supplied (goods that aren't produced in reasonable quantities domestically already may suffer a similar fate as above). Each of them has a corresponding MarketRateX for the labor involved, except possibly in cases where there is no intersection for domestic producers.
I take no position as to which of these cases are more/less desirable. Those questions get more complicated and require agreed-upon value functions to compute. For an example of the complications, see my comment here:
Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.
Some people may value domestic production very highly for its own sake, and they'd be willing to trade off access to a wider variety of goods. I'm not going to have some knock-down argument to say someone is wrong if they have such a value and are willing to prefer a world where cocoa simply is not accessible (at the moment, with the current set of ideas/technologies for how to use capital to produce cocoa in US climates) to a world where it is imported. I mostly care that everyone is clear about how the curves/terms work.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Possibly so. One would need further analysis on things like labor/capital required on any particulars. For example, how much raw cocoa is farmed in the US? I think almost none. Is this due to the labor supply curve? I'm not sure. My hunch is that, in the absence of any importation, capital could be applied to make some amount of suitable growing conditions... but that it might take quite a bit of capital. If that capital were invested, what would the labor supply curve look like to work in such facilities? I don't know.
Whereas most of the food products that are the subject of the current discussion already have proven growing capacity with acceptable capital expenditures, and we're mostly discussing the labor supply curve, much more in isolation. It is in that setting that I discussed the relative supply/demand curves and the use of the term "market rate". I admit that my example was perhaps not the most apropos, as anti-matter-powered light bulbs probably also require significant capex... and TBH, that's probably the real limiting factor there. I'm not sure there's really a way to just apply labor (at some higher price) with relatively-existing capital stock to get some supply of anti-matter-powered light bulbs.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it.
That's not really what "market rate" means. It doesn't really come free-floating, without reference to a population of suppliers/potential suppliers. Yes, there is a MarketRate1, where the set of suppliers/potential suppliers includes everyone who can walk across the border. Yes, MarketRate1 < MarketRate2, where MarketRate2 is with reference to the set of suppliers/potential suppliers who are legally authorized to work in the United States. But if we just lived in World2, there would be no talk about paying "well-above market rate (MarketRate2)", because MarketRate2 would just be the clearing price in World2.
Supply curve slope upwards. Demand curves slope downwards. For there to be no non-zero equilibrium, the supply price at zero quantity supplied must be higher than the demand price at zero quantity demanded. This may be true for some goods (say, anti-matter-powered light bulbs), but it seems highly unlikely that it is the case for food.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous.
I mean, we're talking about the possibility of a super intelligence that is going to tile the universe with paperclips, and you want to say that your own analogy is too galaxy-brained? Ok, buddy.
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is.
Correct. There was a scaling limit back when the Wright brothers first took to the air. It was still there when we went to the moon. At what point did we realize what the scaling limits actually looked like?
There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit.
Right now, there's not really that much reason to think that we're not, either. We have basically no theory here yet. No idea whether the scaling is truly exponential or something else or where we might be on the curve.
In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
If you ignore the exponential that comes from physics, then sure.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale?
No. It is "certainly not" that much more if we're thinking galactic scale. It's just underwhelming in general, in context of the exponential of the rocket equation. You can just look at the numbers and say, "Yeah, that's more, but it's not all that much more."
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere
It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I don't think it's a pure commons problem. In fact, I think it's probably just a problem that is inherent in their product, the means of monetization, and game theory of a two-sided market.
Their biggest product is the final credential. The awarded degree after a complete course of study1. But universities get paid on an annual basis. If universities could hold everything else constant, they would prefer that any given degree would take more years to complete, wringing out additional revenue from each successfully acquired customer2. Once a customer is acquired, they obviously want to retain them for as long as possible. If they could magically make the first three years of a program trivially easy, but make the fourth year so difficult that only high-quality students actually get the credential (maintaining their brand for employers), they would obviously love to do this.
...but it's a two-sided market and prospective students get to make choices, too. If they see a program with statistics such that they wring four years of tuition out of 99% of students, but only 20% survive year four and get the credential, they're gonna nope out of that. And since they can't actually just pass everyone (because that's likely to torch their credibility with employers), they have to get more sophisticated in their scheme.
The gov't requires that universities publish graduation rates, but they can hide a lot in unpublished data. This is probably what motivates the creation of "weed-out" courses. My guess is that the rest of the university's portfolio of degree offerings significantly affects when these courses happen. I took what was perhaps the most difficult STEM discipline in my undergrad uni, but they had shaped their first couple years such that they really could manage to put weed out courses in the junior year. I think this was only possible because they were confident that they could steer the vast majority of the failers into their other programs. First, they had these other programs, and they knew they were easier. Second, they already had you for three years of tuition, so they were riding high either way. They shaped their programs so that you could easily slide into one of the others while maybe only burning a semester or at most a year3. Thus, they set up the incentives so that a failer could either drop out entirely, wasting three years and a bunch of money, or agree to their suggestion to just slide into another program. If they can play this game right, they can hide this movement, preserve their stats, and get as much money as possible.
My guess is that programs that have a reasonable "fail down" pathway to other programs, but would require too much additional time (risking the stats) after conversion are likely to move their "weed-out" courses to earlier in the process (when it's less likely to burn as much time). My further guess would be that programs that have no reasonable "fail down" pathway probably just pass basically everyone (counting on employers to realize that those degrees are pretty worthless, but still trusting the signal of their other degrees).
That said, I did know at least one student who didn't get the hint, with barely passing grades. Once they persist past a certain point, then the incentives for the uni are absolutely to graduate them, and the best they can do is give them an atrocious GPA and hope that employers see that and don't hire them.
I imagine that smaller schools with a less expansive set of "fail down" options have to make somewhat different choices.
If you significantly buy a stronger version of signalling theory, there is a lens here in which large unis are primarily filtering/tracking products. On this theory, the actual course material is mostly window dressing; it's mostly a matter of just that some are more difficult and some are less difficult. Students come in, they get filtered down through the programs to their level of competence, and then the "major" on their credential basically tells employers how capable they are. It would be my dream if some economist got their hands on all this internal university data and made a model to test how much of this is real. Moreover, it would be really nifty if they could compare the quality of this filtering against things like just intake SAT or whatever.
This sort of model keeps employers happy, because they can ignore the bad degrees and hire from the good degrees; it keeps the uni's published stats up, because bad students still complete their trash-tier degrees; the only people who get screwed are the students who think they're going to get a valuable, high-tier degree, get thwacked by a weed-out course, then don't realize how the game works, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy thinking that they can still at least get a different degree, not really looking at how much more poor the employment prospects are. The cynical view would be that unis know that SAT is basically going to correlate with what programs the students get filtered down to, but they still 'over-admit' students purely for customer acquisition, trusting that they're likely to to be able to pull this one over on them.
1 - There could be reasons why this might be independent of the signalling v. educating debate. Also, I spent a little time thinking about how 'partial' products could be packaged, and it's kind of bleak at first glance.
2 - There are obviously limits to this, and it is probably a combination of historical, competition, and regulatory reasons for why almost all programs have converged on four years.
3 - Regulation is again important here. Unis generally have to publish statistics along the lines of what percentage of four-year-degree students graduate within six years, so they're happy to string them along for another year or so of tuition, so long as they get into another program and graduate before dinging the stats.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Fair enough. Though I think that as we move in the direction of stronger versions of the divide between rigor and critical thinking, I find myself thinking that it is unlikely that I am going to have access to any sort of measurement or indicator of the level of critical thinking. I think my previous comment could be interpreted as having an implicit, "I don't know how to measure/assess critical thinking, directly, so if I'm going to have any hope at coming to a view on this issue, I'm probably going to have to rely on the best proxy I can come up with that I have been able to access." And thus, the more we move toward thinking that rigor is just not a good proxy, the more I move toward thinking that critical thinking is just currently unobservable.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition.
I had said:
More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
Sure, I'd even agree to "a lot more". But "power" isn't necessarily the thing that we care about in rocketry. Nor are you seriously engaging with the exponential.
just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
My brother in Christ, we are not disagreeing; you're just not engaging with the exponential. If we had an order of magnitude or two increase, that could totally transform our spaceflight scene. The moon could be routine. Mars could be like going on holiday. Even further could be an expedition. But the exponential is still the exponential, and in context of the insanity of exponentials and the universe, mere orders of magnitude only push back the hard stop a "little".
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.
When I was in school, I had a few opportunities to glimpse that the standards I was being tested to were lower than those of the past. Primarily, this involved a few experiences where I got to actually see what were actually-given exams from not many years prior. One might temper this a bit, given that I did not see the scores of the prior students who took those exams, but my sense is that the profs in question had been using very similar exams for a decade or two, kept seeing lower and lower scores, and eventually gave up and revamped their curriculum. The entire style and approach was different, and I felt sad that I did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the old way, which I felt was more rigorous.
That said, I think there is a slight confounder as to how exactly we bucket the concepts of "critical thinking", "rigor", etc. It may not necessarily require critical thinking to learn how to repeat enough of the incantations of rigor, but I have the sense that requiring said rigor naturally provides far more opportunities for critical thinking to show its head (or lack thereof).
Perhaps another conceptual bundle in the mix is something like "skills and abilities" or just sheer "knowledge" or something. I think that my experiences also justified that something along these axes was already in decline when I was in school. Yes, yes, a major factor could just be composition effects, but I think that's probably the biggest lingering question - why the standards for rigor/skills and abilities/knowledge seemed to have declined, not that they did so.
If we can do the terrible thing and imagine clustering this conceptual bundle, apart from what might be considered "pure critical thinking", into one continuous time-dependent variable, I do have to think that there was a peak. Obviously, if we go back far enough, there was just nobody with the sort of specialized knowledge/skills and abilities/rigor within my very specialized academic focus. The continuous variable was approximately zero. Given my personal observation that it seems to have had a negative first derivative when I was in school, it would seem to imply that there was a maximum at some point in the past.
Of course, I should mention again that composition effects may be nearly the entire ballgame here. Tyler Cowen preaches the skills/abilities of very young people. There are probably absolutely outstanding ones. Therefore, I'm not sure I have much of an explanation that would fit my perception of generally-declining standards other than composition effects.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I have a vague recollection of a podcast. My Google fu isn't good enough. I think it was Conversations With Tyler. I think the guest was someone of means and a track record of disruption (Patrick Collison/Peter Thiel tier). The question came up about disrupting academia. In my continued jumble of vague recollections, the response was some form of, "We looked into it, but the academic cartel is too strong." They have piles upon piles of government subsidies. They have complete control of accreditation. I've seen, for example, a state uni system where the components also leverage control over the other components (one wanted to offer a new grad degree program, and the others cried to the state gov't to force an impossible requirement on them to "prove that there is a need", a la Certificate of Need requirements in the medical industry). If you were news-conscious around a decade ago, you saw the knives out for "for-profit universities". I'm sure there are all sorts of tactics-level games being played and tricks being employed.
They also suffer from a two-sided market. It's not enough to only convince employers; you have to convince prospective students, too. Thrown in here are difficult questions about the relative value of signaling in education. Various folks have various estimates (some quite high) for the amount of value in a degree simply being that the institution chose you and put their stamp on you, because they were able to choose from the best. If there is a significant amount of that, then the students might not actually care all that much whether you're really offering a better education; you just need to offer a better signal. If you're trying to recruit a top-crust student, you have to realize that all of the legacy institutions are already offering them a full ride (maybe even perks hidden as lifestyle amenities) and a time-proven signal. You have to compete with that... somehow. You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop (either top students realize that you haven't convinced employers already and will stop enrolling or top employers realize that you haven't convinced students already and will stop hiring).
@zeke5123a has a plausible idea of just paying students. But again, you're looking for top students; they're already effectively getting paid by the legacy unis. So, you're going to have to front significant cash. Since you can't subsidize this with the donations of wealthy aristocratic alumni, high tuition from a lesser tier student (since this will immediately devalue your budding brand), and piles of government assistance is likely not forthcoming, you will have to burn significant piles of cash for probably a significant number of years before you can start to turn the tide back to even breaking even.
If you're thinking that you could maybe you could stem the bleed by doing the typical thing of having your faculty also chase research grant money, you now have a three-sided market. How many academics out there can stomach the grant-chasing life, succeed at it, and also buy in to give the high levels of effort you're going to require to have super high educational standards? When you find one, they're going to be expensive, because they do just half that work for plenty of money and near infinite job security at a legacy.
Where along the way do you make sure you don't slip into the same mode of operation as the legacies, since you sure seem to be playing their same game now, just without the entrenched endowments? What's your mechanism to ensure that?
I wouldn't be surprised if whoever I vaguely recall on a podcast already went through this exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if they already tried to make an estimate of how much top students are already being effectively paid by legacies. I wouldn't be surprised if, with some reasonable assumptions on how long it would take to build the brand in both directions so that you could start to stop the bleeding, they just computed that it would just be an unreasonable pile of money.
The Thiel Fellowship seems to be an attempt that embraces a reasonably strong prior on the signaling theory, which allowed them to at least just give up on the educating part of the huge pile of money. $100k over two years, and starting with 20-30 students. That's with the Thiel Brand discount and no overt plan for how to turn it from a $2-3M/yr charity project into a revenue-neutral competitor to academia with any sort of scale.
This is not to say that they cannot be disrupted, but the challenge is pretty steep.
Sure. I think we are mostly agreeing. The only thing I'd add is that the only person who has posited that the only strategy available, the only strategy that we can consider when determining a chance of success, is just trying to have mostly left-leaning schoolteachers officially say that abstinence is a thing that exists... is you.
Honestly, I'm getting shades of the perennial weight loss discussion, where certain factions strawman the science of caloric balance as, "The only way this can be tried is to just suggest to people that they consume fewer calories." Naw dawg. You're strawmanning hard.
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