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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)

link-archive link

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.

and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution

I disagree; I think uprooting and firing 90%+ of the current academic apparatus (it won't be economically viable to sustain them with 1/10th of the current enrollment rate) is very much a revolutionary idea, in the political sense.

Is that reform needed, considering how much money the education-managerial complex costs society? Sure, but as far as what it's going to actually give way to is completely unknown especially considering what demographic a complete collapse of that as a job will disproportionately affect (it might legitimately still be better for the young if the child sacrifice is permitted to continue).

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

Indeed- it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

what demographic a complete collapse of that as a job will disproportionately affect

Women?

I'm not being obtuse. That's the best I can come up with. What's wrong with a worse job market for women with no specific skills? It's probably better for society on the whole.

It's probably better for society on the whole.

Why, exactly? I've read you making these sorts of statements before, where you suggest that educating women is a mistake. Frankly, it baffles me, as it seems such a broad generalization that does not account for the multitudes of contexts women face, where typically your posts are very well-thought-out and articulated. Now i't possible you've thought this out as well, but I'm not getting the line of reasoning here.

Possibilities: It's not that you don't want women working jobs or getting educated. You want them well-educated and able to do jobs well, and jobs that they are capable of doing. (What that looks like to you I am not sure and I don't want to put words in your keyboard.) Or maybe you think women shouldn't be working at all but staying home, raising kids, taking care of hearth and home. Surely not all women can/will do this, though--what about an unmarried nulliparous woman of 40? Or any number of women who do not fit into that box?

I'm just making things up now, though.

Women who aren’t passionate about some specific field of study or career in a for real way should just get married and have babies instead of worrying about pretending to care about a career field.

Obviously I’m not talking about nurses here, or even teachers. That cat is out of the bag. But there is a massive proliferation of pink collar jobs in modern western societies which just don’t do anything except 1) raise the female employment rate and 2) generate more bullshit for everyone else to process. We shouldn’t have more administrators than we did back in the days before copying machines and all that.

And a high female employment rate has externalities- industrial societies work much better when men have, on average, much better economic opportunities than women, because it drives up the marriage rate. In the US you can see this in towns built around the military and extractive industry, particularly the former where soldiers are directly economically incentivized to just buy the ring already. I think we can fairly point to behavioral issues with unmarried women as well, such as high rates of debt and getting way too into social justice.

None of this is blaming individual women for going to college and getting a job. She’s gotta eat, 18 year old girls are kinda impressionable, yachta yachta yachta. But the mentality of society overall on the issue is not healthy- housewives should be higher status than girlbosses, and a lot of both the degrees and the careers involved are, at best, a waste of resources. Bachelors in psychology in America really don’t involve much actual learning.

The reason housewives aren't higher status is because they have no money and they do unpaid work. They have no independent ability to take care of themselves and make life decisions either, and are financially dependent on someone else. Unless that changes (due to AGI/UBI), things will remain the same.

Women being associated with very high status men causes them to gain in status, though. There’s clearly a parallel status ladder.

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