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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.
That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.
Even if it's busy work, using chatgpt to do something that would take literally 5 minutes is just a retarded move.
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
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You should look into Western Governor's University and their model. Basically you can finish your degree as fast as you can finish testing for each course.
I remember a well-known poster here (Tracing Woodgrains? Not 100% sure) having the same plan, then they took longer than a traditional degree to graduate because a large part of the university experience is social pressure and the WGU experience doesn't provide that part.
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If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
What they emphasize changes as you go from fields where harming anyone is proof of something going wrong and ethics is about avoiding it, to fields where people will be harmed regardless and ethics is about balancing it, to fields where harming people is the point and ethics is about managing it. The later can be all the more interesting for how they have to handle the simpler moral rejections that can suffice for the former.
Few classes / professors will ever frame these for you, which is why it will need to be self-driven. Bad professors can undercut even that. Still.
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm. Even if it's just the Aztecs cutting out hearts to prevent the universe from ending, or the Carthaginians burning babies alive in honor of Moloch, the overlaps and distinctions in what they think human sacrifice will accomplish can be enlightening.
And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.
One thing is for sure, though: I have a higher opinion of the moral and ethical foundations of Aztec priests cutting the still-beating hearts out of the chests of POWs than I do of the sorts of people who teach ethics classes. At least the Aztecs had the excuse of not having access to better information, something that cannot be said of someone who works in a modern university.
If you had good directions of where to start, I might just do that. It sounds interesting, and I expect some free time later this year. However, it is a bit harder to find structured reviews of them than, say, pointing three distinct but overlapping types of professionals.
Why don't you provide two good sources for the Aztecs and Carthaginians ethics? Good as in effectively and analytically characterizes their ethical systems. A bad work would be one that simply relegates Aztec morality to 'they conducted human sacrifice to keep the world from ending.' Yes, that is a utilitarian justification. It is not an ethical system.
If that was what you took away from my post, then congratulations- you demonstrated a point by missing it.
The value of studying different forms of professional ethics isn't to change your own mind on ethics. The value is understanding what others want, or expect, the ethics of a professional to be. This has relevant insights when it comes to dealing with specific professions in isolation, when multiple professions with different professional ethics engage each other, or even how the same profession's ethics across different cultures.
Understanding other people's ethical frameworks has never been endorsement, or required conversion, unless you subscribe to some universal morality theory.
If you think human sacrifice is good, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that. If you think that ethics classes are not "total non-sense taught by dimwit professors" as the above poster claims, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.
But please don't gesture vaguely in the direction of doing further research to nay-say the value judgements of those who have stronger opinions than you.
There is no amount of research that will convince me that human sacrifice is good. It's not because I'm stubborn or closed-minded, it's because I have a coherent moral worldview. Reading about it may be interesting but it will never change my mind.
If the best argument in favor of university-level ethics classes you can muster up is that I should do more research so that I can discover for myself an argument in favor of their existence, then that suggests that they are truly without any value whatsoever. It's a rare and pitiable thing to see a position so devoid of merit that even its defenders can't bear to speak in its defense. If nothing else the Aztecs were at least capable of making arguments to justify their actions.
And this exchange gets sillier and sillier.
I did. (And did not.)
I have made no position on ethics classes taught by dimwit professors. The only educator I have recommended to Pasha is Pasha himself, and I decline to accuse Pasha of being a dimwit. I will even offer a concurrence that bad teachers- dimwit or otherwise- can ruin valid material. Take this as a concession if you'd like.
What I did do was suggest for Pasha himself take an opportunity on their own to study a specific sub-set of ethics, professional ethics, with the supporting justification-
I.e., I believe they should review different professional ethic systems to understand how they differ in what they emphasize. Specifically between fields where one profession accepts human harms that another profession would reject. At the very least, it can be interesting to understand how they do so.
I even restated and clarified it in the post you are responding to, in case it was not clear enough-
I.e., the value of understanding how different ethic systems work, besides that it can be interesting, is that it is useful when professional-ethical systems interact in various ways. This can apply when you are dealing with a professional consensus, potential professional conflicts, or cross-cultural divergences where a consensus might be.
If noting there are implications of potentially clashing ethical systems seems vague and nonsensical to you, this is an excellent indication of why further study on the subject would be beneficial. If you do not trust a professor to be able to help you with it, that would be an excellent reason to educate yourself instead.
The only way a suggestion for Pasha teaching himself about ethics violates the value judgement of dimwit professors teaching ethics is if Pasha is a dimwit professor. Again, I decline.
I suspect Pasha may think the subject matter of ethics is itself is [pick your pejorative]. Regardless of the strength of his opinion, I believe it is useful, and recommend he examine it in certain ways to learn the utility for himself, in a way that respects his dismissal of formal instructors of the subject.
Before we continue this discussion, I believe you should read all 7 Harry Potter books. I also believe you should read the Bible and the Torah. I believe you should read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe you should have an AI translate all 7 Harry Potter books into Swahili and read them again. Learn Swahili first if you have to, time is apparently no object. I believe you should read every word ever written by Thomas Aquinas. I believe you should re-read them, but this time reinterpret them as the works of Thomas Aquinas's black trans lesbian housekeeper, plagiarized without credit.
I think you're operating under a misconception. You seem to think I disagree with the concept of reading things. I do not. My point of contention with you is that you are not making any actual arguments in favor of your position. Telling people to read more books is not an argument.
It's not that I don't know enough about ethics, or that I haven't considered the possibility that other people might believe different things than me. My point is very simple: If you're here to make an argument, then make it. If you're not here to make an argument then you should at least stop trying to give people homework.
The presumption that the only reason anyone might disagree with you is that they haven't done enough research is not charming.
Don’t be a tool.
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Since you seem to desire to continue this discussion regardless of your requested pause, I'll be happy to indulge you just once more before honoring your requested pause for the Swahili translation step.
Which surprisingly is the only one I haven't already done. (Well, mostly. I don't think there's an authoritative word count for Aquinas.)
I will start by noting that you have retreated from the earlier bailey. I am happy for you to abandon prior arguments about midwit professors, defending blood sacrifice, and other arguments I did not make. I will be interested if your next / last post in this exchange abandons any more strawmen arguments I did not make.
Disagree with the concept of reading? Heavens no. I just think you had a bit of a reading comprehension failure.
I suspect you believed it was advocating some sort view that ethics reading would/should change one's own ethics, hence you emphasis in response two that no reading would change your moral worldview, as if that was an objective.
I also think you also thought I was advocating dimwit-professor-led ethics classes, hence your repeated reference to the dimwits characterization, until response three after your (hopefully) accidental almost-insinuation against Pasha was teased.
I also think you completely missed the point that recommending self-pursued reading outside of a university class format is a complete non-advocacy for, well, university-level ethics classes.
Further, my conception of you is that you are doubling down in a you-won't-admit-it's-embarrassment defensiveness and are trying to claim some rhetorical moral high ground after your earlier mistakes were teased. You are attempting to reposition to an argument about making unreasonable demands, despite no demands having been made of Pasha, by using a ironic-equivalence of a raising learning Swahili as a precondition for further discussion. A language whose only relevance to the discussion is to demonstrate the difficulty of unreasonable demands. Since clearly learning Swahili is as relevant, and as unreasonable, a precondition for addressing provided arguments as...
...checks notes...
...recommending someone read about a potentially interesting and useful subject in a way that avoids a medium and format they have said they don't trust.
Checks out.
If your point was simply about homework, you would have talked about homework from the start, rather than spending the first two responses talking about blood sacrifices and the strength of your convictions and dimwit professors.
But hey. It's still the internet. Being called out can be embarrassing, even more so than leaving with out the last word. In fact, I'll even give you a hand with some counter arguments you could leave off with.
You could argue that you did not actually miss the argument, but that it was not long enough, even though there's no requirement for how long an argument needs to be in a short post. You could argue that you were requesting an elaboration of the argument, which I unfairly did not provide, despite you not asking for a longer argument. You could even argue that you didn't misunderstand the argument at all, truly.
But for your pending last word, I would suggest that 'you did not make an argument' falls a little flat after three iterations of the argument have been provided, and then had it's presence ignored even after being re-posted and bolded for emphasis. That would be just a tad embarrassing to end off on.
Especially if you were so predictable as to do it after being predicted you would try for the last word.
Farewell. I'll not respond until after I learn Swahili, so consider any last word yours.
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