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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.
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.
Come on. There's a difference between "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills" and "I am suggesting that people do this to justify my claims". Ethics classes are recommended in the former context. Your "recommendation" that Pasha study things himself was in the latter context. You should just explain it, since you are the one making the claim, not demand he study it himself.
People are supposed to back up what they say here. "I want you to do it on your own" is a filibuster, not an honest argument.
You have confused the former for the later. I may not have written well enough and so be partly to blame for your misconception, but unless you have developed internet mind reading skills that allow you to identify motives that I am unaware of, I am confident I know my motives, and my separate claims, better than you.
My claim is that Pasha should learn life skill do this because it can be interesting, and with later elaboration, useful. This could fairly be characterized as "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills (that can be interesting and are useful)."
My suggestion of how Pasha should go about it, with the reasoning as to why elaborated after the post, is a claim of a way to avoid (and thus respect) his distrust of the institutional actors who normally teach the subject matter. This could be fairly characterized as "I am suggesting a specific way to learn life skill (that differs from a ways that you have indicated contempt for).
I am not claiming Pasha should do the [this] that was the subject of what I quoted when replying to him-
My claim is not that Pasha should do [this] to learn life skills anyway. Nor am I making a claim that he should keep trying until he finds one by a non-dimwit professor. Or that the busywork he was assigned in the past was secretly meaningful and he just missed the point.
My claim is that self-driven study of certain sub-fields (professional ethics) is a way to get better value (interest and useful insights) in a way that isn't a disliked medium (ethics class) taught by distrusted instructors (dimwit professors) and or with make-work (busywork). The 'assignment' proposed- noting different lines of emphasis, and how some professions deal with the blanket moral prohibitions espoused by others- does not require any writing or feedback to anyone else. It exists not to provide something to do for a grade, but provide relevant insights for how different professional cultures interact.
One, if you do not consider 'this subject matter can be interesting and professional useful, and this learning way avoids your concerns' an explanation for why to self-study study material, I would suggest you are too used to the motte's tendency for essay-length responses.
Two, it is not a demand. It is a suggestion, hence 'if you get a chance,' which allows him full discretion to refuse on any grounds he wants. The emphasis on his discretion may not have been clear enough due to the words used and the filtering effect of internet, but even then demands have an 'or else [consequence]' attached to the back end. The only [consequence] for not partaking is that he might lose the benefits of [interesting and useful insights] of partaking.
No, it is not. On two fronts.
One, a short argument is not a filibuster.
The argument provided may have been too short of an argument. The argument may have been unclear, and used poor choices of word to seem more of a demand than it was. But recommendations with short supporting arguments and no time commitment are about as far from a filibuster argument as one can get.
Two, 'I want you to do it on your own' is an honest argument if it I honestly think he would enjoy and benefit more from doing it on his own and I want him to have that benefit.
Pasha seems highly skeptical of the university format- a format generally meant to guide students rather than have them do it on their own. Moreover, he has built this from personal experience. One can sincerely believe he would both enjoy the material more and be in a mindset to learn specific lessons if he engaged it on his own volition, in a more targeted nature, on their own spare time, rather than be compelled to (i.e. from a demand from dim-wit professors) in a time-constrained environment (university with competing classes).
Your argument is "to find out why it's useful, go do it yourself". That is neither short, nor has no time commitment. The sentence may be short, but reading the sentence is not enough to see the whole argument; the rest of your argument is hidden behind the time commitment.
Again, that's the difference between "do it to gain a benefit" and "do it to see the explanation". You are proposing that he go through an entire field of study in order to see the justification for your claim. This is unreasonable. If you make a claim, justify it. It doesn't matter how much he'd benefit from it, you should be willing to back up what you are saying.
It's also bizarre to suddenly give life advice in the middle of an argument with someone over the Internet. Clearly you told him to do that as part of the argument, not because you have a habit of giving random advice to strangers.
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