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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I would wager that this has something to do with the field of education in general. There is a reason that the Jason Arday character was able to become an Oxford professor in education. I imagine that there just isn't a ton of great competition, and the existing one is supportive of DEI.

Similarly for marketing departments, which are most likely stacked with women, that are ambitious, rule-following and socially-adjusted enough to show up consistently and suck up to the higher-ups.

Thinking about this, most of the existing products of knowledge are locked behind walls and walls of the 'librarian' type, which is an overwhelmingly female, administrative type of person, which is probably not concerned primarily with the efficiency of accessing and intellectually using knowledge as much as with following the proper procedures of gatekeeping it.

We have institutionalized 'Those who can't do, teach' and therefore the teaching is bad and nobody really has a culture of good teaching.

This might be a consequence of the web 1.0, google and wikipedia ethos of 'knowledge should be free'. Because knowledge cannot be properly monetized, agentic people, adventurers, industrialists, etc have turned away from selling knowledge as a good product.

Gone are the days when a single man was enough to revolutionize knowledge, so the men of Science of this day have to battle the librarians probably as much as they actually do Science.
ex: Augustin Pyramus de Candolle who singlehandedly described 37,000 plant species and established botanical nomenclature. I bet that guy could give you a good presentation. But maybe not.

Possibly giving talks or watching talks at the boys club of the day was a lot more fun than what we get now, where a pin-up shirt gets you in trouble.

Perhaps the angle of 'knowledge should be free akshually' is the better one. We can see this cannibalization of productive people's skills happening right now. Stackoverflow used to be a bunch of nerds answering other nerds' questions. And they would do it around the office too, when 'just google it' wasn't an appropriate answer. Now all the nerds just ask a LLM which was previously fed by stackoverflow, and they less often learn how to explain something to somebody else.

Actually it's about ethics in video game journalism.