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Pasha

Defend Kebab

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joined 2022 September 05 06:58:22 UTC

				

User ID: 481

Pasha

Defend Kebab

1 follower   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 05 06:58:22 UTC

					

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User ID: 481

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)

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Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.

Some interesting highlights for me:

  • There is a consensus in the article even shared by the cheating students that writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.
  • It is not explored much what the students are doing with their time instead of writing these very important essays. There is one throw-away quote from a brain-rot girl about how she scrolls TikTok all day and has no time for essays. Perhaps all the students are getting one-shotted by dopamine addiction algorithms but perhaps they are not and many are socializing or learning actually interesting things instead of writing indigenous studies slop essays. This should be a major question but just left unexplored.
  • None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university if they are all so eager to cheat (and earlier pandemic-era mass cheating spree is mentioned as well). There is a whole paragraph dedicated to justifying seemingly pointless essays, never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises, and the importance of doing "hard things" (which is apparently writing pointless essays and never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises). But there is not a single example of a "hard thing" students are missing out on because of LLMs in the whole article. Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time. And a bizarre out of place paragraph about the need to "consider students more holistically" with a non-sense blurb from some academic.
  • Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.

As someone living the “not very well integrated brownish expat working a lot in high earning sector in the West” life it makes me rather nervous to see the calibre and the intentions of the people supposedly vouching for my interests in this debate.

The social contract I came here for is simple. I broadly like the society these people created. I don’t think a different people could/would create this society so I am happy people of broadly the same ancestry and culture stay in control of it. In exchange of living in it and having my children become a proper part of it I can pay a lot in taxes and generally be a modal citizen at the sidelines of the society.

I am aware of the costs I am imposing on the society here. I am pricing the residents out of the housing market, causing some wage suppression, watering down their culture and social cohesion and giving them mixed-race grandkids who doesn’t quite look like them.

The desirable scenario for me is that immigrants are not too high in numbers and generally similar in profile to me so that the tensions aren’t too big and our posterity assimilates without attracting too much negative attention.

The very undesirable scenario for me is that high profile individuals shout it to the regular people from the top of their lungs that their culture is worthless, their children are deadweights, and they will use armies of people who look somewhat like me to teach them a lesson.

This is a very dangerous game they are playing. Many PMC immigrants seem entirely incapable of sensing the zeitgeist and subterranean societal currents of the countries they are living in. The people from the subcontinent are especially bad at this

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.

Life announcement: I am going to become a father! (Typical caveats, if medically everything goes well etc)

It wasn’t planned, but we would probably try in 1-2 years with my partner anyway so it wasn’t an unpleasant surprise either.

Still a bit early so we haven’t told anyone outside of close family. Really weird to keep interacting with friends as if everything is normal and we are all ultimately careless young adults.

So dump on me any advise you can think of!

Sorry but I get a strong feeling you have never been exposed to any university system other than modern American liberal arts colleges. What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade. If you are doing a “hard” degree then for many major exams you are also responsible for subjects of previous semesters as well so you have to stay on top. This works perfectly fine. I don’t think American students are any lazier than their counterparts in continental Europe, I think they just got conditioned heavily by the only education they have ever experienced.

Also no I liked maths a lot and I have an engineering job using a decent amount of trig-calculus level maths regularly. But I also observed how nonsense the maths requirements were for most degrees.

Incidentally I found it amusing you chose the student using chatgpt to write personal introduction for an “ Ethics and Technology class” as a particularly egregious example. I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork. We were either forced to take such classes because of vague ideas about how it would make us more ethical or something or people did so for easy elective credits. The whole faculty had a jobs-program feeling to it. It would be absolutely my top course to cheat through with an LLM.

Forcing students who has absolutely no interest and need to do some mid-level maths courses for half baked pedagogic reasons was one of the biggest cheating incentivizers when I was a student. Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework. I guess that is some sort of “preparation for life”…

The same bizarre situation is going on in entire Western Europe. People talking about the need to decouple from the US, so we can defend Taiwan?? I think we are living through one of those periods confusion in history that will be sandpapered by near-term historians in accordance with the developments that takes place by then, only for some guy to open some dusty archives in 70 years and realize "wait a minute actual people 2025 had wildly idiosyncratic ideas that didn't fit at all into the 2039 galactic federation council's ideological splits!!"

Amusing that training your own employees more or less this way with apprenticeships used to be the norm until governments started using the public university system to subsidize the costs of educating the labour force. This allowed universities, a medieval guild system designed to groom young men for power positions (plus medicine) to spend a century LARPing at bringing enlightenment to lower classes by forcing them to write low quality essays on Nietzsche or whatever and then handing them middle class admission cards. It seems that the racket got too ridiculous to keep up by now and we are regressing back to apprenticeships.

A lot of this doom rhetoric just assumes things like democracy (olds controlling politics), welfare state (olds sucking up resources) or even high life expectancies (olds living long beyond retirement) will keep up. If even a fraction of the predicted problems hit these countries, world will change way beyond our current comprehension and most of these things likely will stop being problems in the currently predicted ways.

You will never get anywhere in such a discussion unless you’re willing to admit that race is much more than just the tone of your skin, and males/females of different races are indeed substantially more or less attractive than each other in certain dimensions.

Israel will never give citizenship to substantially more Arabs than its current ratio of around %20 Arab citizens. That would be totally suicidal, nobody in the country supports such a thing and it’s simply a fake solution made up by westerners (just like the “2-state solution”) to avoid thinking too hard about the unpleasant implications of the Israeli state.

Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.

Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.

Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.

I think Kulak is either insane or at least relatively good at acting the part of the mad prophet but in general I can’t help but think he is closer to the truth than most other people in these internet spaces.

Hey that is me sometimes.

Well sort of. I don't know what those Indians are smoking but as a Turkish guy living in Western Europe for a while at this point, I do sometimes get into discussions with friends of similar background to the tune of "here things aren't actually better sometimes huh?".

A lot of it comes down to all of us being potential upper-class candidates back home, way above average in education and social stature and earning good money etc. Very few things can really substitute for relative social standing. It is difficult to get any above-mediocre social standing in Europe as a first-gen immigrant. So some of what you are observing is snarky comments from bitter people, but they have good personal reasons for being bitter.

GDP is a fine indicator but it will hide a lot from you in terms of living standards if you are ignoring costs, housing and taxes. For example Turkish PPP is at 44k, while German PPP is 62k from quick googling (Greece 41k lol). That is not such a massive difference. Pretty much all Anglo countries and Western Europe is suffering from gigantic housing problems, especially in major cities, especially effecting people who by definition could not have gotten into the mortgage market 10 years ago (i.e. young immigrants you are most likely to come across in white-collar and university settings). High progressive taxation systems are crippling for people who feel they deserve an upper class lifestyle and are trying to build it up with high-value professional labour income. You are basically slaving away for funding the boomer retirees of your host country. These boomers aren't even your own family so you won't benefit from this even in the form of inheritances. This creates massive resentment.

Often the first-tier cities of decent third world countries are actually quite decent places to be. They tend not to have "progressive" policing structures so ambient crime can be less of an issue (big variance here). They often have ample housing, and recently built. The infrastructure is often much newer.

And lastly, don't underestimate how much cheap low-class labour can improve one's life quality and how difficult it is to get accustomed to living without it.

So the comparisons come from a mix of real and perceived advantages of the home country, as well as people expecting an upper-class lifestyle not finding it in their host country. Also India is definitely not it, but a lot of "emerging" countries "emerged" quite a lot in the last decades and sometimes the perceptions didn't quite catch up in the West (and GDP is just not very good for comparisons between service and industry based economies)

Theory time: Israel is pushing very hard to start a regional war with US involvement before US elections so the next president (the one that won’t be a zombie presumably) has no choice but to continue.

This missile attack is a dramatic warning that Iran can decimate oil production and other regime critical infrastructure in every single American ally in the region. Iranian leadership has been very consistently acting like they are aware that they won’t survive a war with the US.

Absolutely. If this was true France would have a revolution every second month. It’s really not that difficult to stop rioting and modern states got scary good at it.

I can’t make much in the way of an economic argument but it’s extremely obvious that Chinese have intentionally been using state support and dumping to strip and move entire industries from western countries to China. This has created a parasitic class of rich people in the west whose entire wealth comes from middle manning either the 1)importation of this production to the west or the 2)sale of western financial assets to China which are needed to sustain western trade deficits.

There is nothing organic and laissez faire about any of this. It’s very intentional and it has been very destructive for almost everyone involved. Western working classes are extremely wage suppressed and largely lost the discipline required for industrial production. Middle classes are corrupted into believing their laptop jobs (which usually simply supervise one of the two legs of this trade I mentioned above, or extract profits from it in some indirect way). Cheap credit due to massive Chinese demand for western financial products has destroyed any integrity and competency left in western political classes. Free money plugs every hole anyway so they just keep making disastrous decisions non-stop with no apparent consequences.

Large sections of the Chinese society seem to have benefited but overall it’s not good for humanity that economic “growth” comes from shifting labour and environment externalities around to world instead of technology. We only get richer if we have more robots. Substitution of one European worker and his advanced machinery earning 20x with 10 third worlders with no machinery earning 1x, is bad for humanity.

So I don’t know if tariffs are the right policy to stop this decay but it’s absurd to oppose them as an obvious wrong policy simply because they don’t fit in with some notion of free trade and markets invisible hand. None of this process is classic economics at all. It’s state policy and distortion all the way.

Assuming this is your real sentiment and not just trolling, have you ever been in a team attempting something truly difficult? Not just something that needs lots of structured man-hours and money, but something you don't even know if possible, and other people shy away from?

Leadership really REALLY matters then. It is not the only thing that matters, but you can have every other ingredient aplenty and it will never work without someone truly exceptional leading it.

Motte loves to talk about the things women (even relatively smart introspective women) don’t get about men psychology and dating.

Well, what are some things even the most insightful men don’t get about female psychology and dating?

I cycle through Amsterdam city center very regularly and any part of the city where you might visit as an outsider is totally not representative of a city with good cycling infrastructure (which is almost every Dutch urban area except center of Amsterdam). Narrow 17th century canals with uneven side-streets and rarely any sidewalks wider than 1.5 Americans. It is a city designed for boats and commerce, not for a million tourists strolling around unaware of their surroundings. Also the cars are blocked from the city not for pedestrians but for the bikes. The problems you describe arise because unlike many other old touristic European city centers, Amsterdam is not simply a tourist attraction and has a very dense population who live and work in it. These people go almost everywhere almost entirely by bike. Cyclists you come across aren't a separate breed of people, I have literally never met anyone in this country (except 2 American expats) who don't bike in their daily lives.

Also they shout at you because you are a tourist and they hate you.

As a very long-term but low profile mottizen, I feel like I have made a thread about quite a lot of important junctions in my life asking for advise. Here comes the next one:

I bought a house! Still not 100% official but will be soon. It is not in a perfectly pristine condition but did not seem too bad either. Needs some urgent renovations like a new floor and some semi urgent ones like a new kitchen.

I assume most people here are a bit older than me and have some experience with such things. So give me your best house owning tips please. Especially looking for websites/books/Youtube channels about DIY and house decoration and whatnot.

Kitty Genovese

I remember learning about this stuff in my English class as a teenager (in the context of some weird psychological mystery of how nobody helped etc) and the actual story went completely over my head. After some life experience of racialised underclass dynamics and now that I google and see photos of the perpetrator and the victim... the story suddenly clicks in my head very well

I remember the people dropping dead videos as well. Was one of the first things I have ever seen mentioning Covid when a friend shared one of those in a group chat. Entirely forgotten and memory holed

I don’t have any research to back this up at all, but as a generally bright student I always felt that the school tried to teach me too many things with the inevitable boredom and time waste as you forget all that stuff inevitably.

I believe very strongly in just encouraging/letting kids read and write as much as possible until a certain age of mental maturity (probably early teenager years). School should be almost entirely focused on this besides giving them some life skills they need as children (arithmetic, basic science facts, national identity building, how to cross the road etc). Vast majority of what I remember actually learning in primary school is from the books I read plus some maths classes, Turkish nationalism and earth-turns-around-the-sun-which-is-a-star type of facts.

It shouldn’t waste their time with busy work. A common failure mode is we desire to teach young kids things their brains aren’t yet capable of properly understanding, then end up having to teach them a dumbed down version which they will learn later was actually not correct. It’s profoundly useless.

If a kid is especially talented in a field at an early age, they can be directed to relevant books with some tutoring. If your kid is actually capable of understanding trigonometry at 9, they won’t need endless busywork homework sheets.

After around teenager years if the kid turns out to be smart and interested enough they can continue to get much deeper education in a limited number of subjects. Their brains are finally ready for it and they can have rapid progress without dumbing down the subjects. It’s also at this point that majority of kids should be funnelled towards practical/vocational education. It’s incredibly useless and akin to torture to force not very bright kids to sit down and pretend to learn highly g loaded subjects until they are 18.

It might be difficult to give such an experience to your kids if the education system where you live is set up with opposite assumptions (ie daycare and social mobility activism centers). In that case I personally think it’s ethically admissible to simulate this by relieving your child off the busywork as much as possible (ie help them cheat at bullshit homework)