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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   3552 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

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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Two questions about American colleges:

  1. What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.

  2. Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?

Two important roles that universities successfully fulfilled in the past, still could, but don't:

  • The Liberal Arts College. Elite formation based on a combination of rigorous study of difficult subjects and directed socialisation with other young elites. The original reason why this stopped happening was grade inflation, but to bring it back you also need to fix wokestupid, and to end the rampant dishonesty about young elites imagining themselves as self-made meritocratic strivers. Potential gains: a more cohesive elite that knows important things and has a stronger sense of noblesse oblige.
  • The Research University. The type of curiosity-driven research which is too high-risk for professional (government or corporate) labs without tenure and too remote from practical application for VC-funded startups. Getting this back means fixing publish-or-perish incentives and the PhD overproduction which enables them. Potential gain: the base of pure science that makes spectacular applications low-hanging fruit.

wokestupid

Come on, that’s just lazy.

Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.

I don’t fully understand the incentives. Grad students remain cheaper than full-time employees; employing them on tangential research is a popular way to scout talent. It also interfaces into the reputation games of publishing, trendsetting, and attracting new students. Combine all these, and you get institutions which compete to be known for their pure science.

I have no idea what percentage of university research falls under this umbrella. My school probably had fuel for both media narratives somewhere on campus. But it is a lot closer to the ideal of a Research University than you might expect from a random state school.

Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.

I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.

The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.

* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.

Universities should be vastly reduced in size and should mainly consist of men. Any loan system should be abolished but the tuitions should be at a level regular middle class family can pay for their children, or, without family support, one should be able to afford with some part-time plus summer-full-time job. Bureaucracy for choosing research subjects and getting funding should almost entirely be abolished.

Until these things happen universities anywhere will simply be nothing more than rent seekers on a piece of paper that promises but rarely delivers upper-middle-class status, adult daycare, enforcers of bureaucratic power on the elite-minds, and speed bumps on actual science and technology development.

"vastly reduced in size" is antagonistic with preventing rent seeking

What's with the men-only part? I am sincerely asking for clarification because I am not sure of the rationale.

“Mainly consist” was the term I used. It’s a combination of a couple reasons:

  • Female heavy degrees are almost always fake subjects polluting scientific integrity and draining resources. I have witnessed many times in my university life that the worst and most pointless courses/degree specialisations in even the hardest science tracks were devised with the expectation to attract more females. Fields like sociology, psychology, art history etc speak for themselves. Closing down these faculties or only restricting them to rigorous academic work would immediately cut down female population in universities severely.
  • Keeping the intelligent female population of your nation in useless education until late 20s, wasting away the most fertile years of their life is just incredibly bad policy.
  • There are very few significant achievements in human history that doesn’t originate from a tight-knit group of competent men heavy on camaraderie and ambition. Adding females to the equation always erodes this spirit.
  • Endless education as a tool to escape “real life” is a problem afflicting both sexes but especially women fall very hard into this trap. Female brain is much more sensitive to approval from authority figures and the education system with its clear reward feedback loops seems to be almost addictive to a sort of high achieving woman.
  • Women typically makes a lot less use of their education even when they enroll in more sensible degrees. They are easily spooked by competitive environments, they are tricked by social validation that comes with many low value professions, and they take long maternity leaves and work part-time because they enjoy to be with their family more than at work.
  • Female style of office politics is absolutely poisonous to academia. When women takes over administrative positions at sufficient numbers, academic research just gives way to conformism and group-think.
  • The fact that almost every above-average women in the society spends their prime pair bonding years at university campuses, and afterwards develop a refusal to date anyone below their education status, makes university de-facto mandatory for any men with some ambition. There is no reason why someone needs to go through a 4-year degree to become a film director, computer programmer or sales manager. People historically didn’t go to uni for such jobs. But if you try this today you are very likely forfeiting your mate prospects. Even men who don’t want/need uni education to be very successful, have to enter a good one and drop out to gain enough social clout.

I can really just go on. All of these are obviously gross generalisations and often apply to many men in some degrees as well but in the end these effects add up in a big way.

I can't speak for OP, but for my part I assume the rationale is something akin to this.

To sum up the article in a paragraph, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. In academia, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver views considered "socially good". They are also more supportive of dismissal campaigns and more inclined toward activism. This roughly correlates with the increasing politicisation of the academy as a vehicle for activism, and while the author admits that it is certainly not the only factor contributing to the trend, it is also what you would expect to see when a group with a preference for emotional safety over academic freedom enters a space.

In other words, I don't think it's necessarily a prima facie ridiculous position if OP values academic freedom over censorship and thinks it carries more value for society than having women in academia does. Forcing a state of affairs where the academic environment is mostly comprised of men would be conducive to this goal, and in similar fashion forcing an academic environment that's uncompromising in terms of freedom of speech would disproportionately cause women to self-select out of the academy. Whichever way this goal is reached, greater academic freedom likely entails less women in academia.

This kind of generalization-based quantitative thinking is I think the undoing of the Motte in some ways. I don't disagree with the idea of academic freedom over censorship, but this bean counting assumption-driven basis of policy is to me patently bad policy.

I was trying to provide a steelman, not necessarily forward sets of policy preferences of my own (for my part, I don't think a policy proposal that enforces a mostly-male academic environment is doable in the first place, not because I think it would be bad for society but because it's effectively useless as it's too far out of the Overton Window - the second % female drops below a certain threshold, regardless of the reasons for it people will start taking umbrage at it). I also don't think there would have been an explanation I could've given that would have been satisfactory to your specific set of moral preferences.

In any case, I don't think there's anything wrong with applying quantitative thinking to social issues. Different groups of people are different on aggregate, and they shape societies in distinct ways aligned with their preferences. Trying to ignore that when policy-making is folly, in my opinion.

There is actually another reason to take a series of actions that just happens to make university mostly male, as opposed to doing it explicitly (unfair, gauche, and impossiible).

Actions are roughly as follows:

  • Get rid of mostly female degrees, getting rid of degrees that are academically useless will solve this problem anyways.
  • Make school and college in general less hostile to boys.

Reasons:

  • Stops giving women undeserved status of being "college educated" despite not being any smarter or more useful. It's just status laundering. Will do a lot of work to fix the dating markets.

I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.

I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.

I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.

High school attainment in 1950 was 34.3% and Bachelors was 6.2%, 2019 this was 90.1% and 36%.

Neither high school or undergrad are as selective as they were. I'd expect the quality of graduates to suffer.

I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.

Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.

Yes.

Although we appear to see a similar increase of students in high school, and a corresponding reduction in average quality of graduates. The inflation and lack of rigor in high school is partially why so many would need undergrad studies now.

What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason?

You know the saying "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month?" I feel like that about a lot of university research projects. They take some really tough research problem that the professor has been studying for his entire life. But then the people actually doing the research are students, who come and go. You've got undergrads doing it as a part-time job, grad students who just want to publish something so they can get their degree, and post-docs are only there 2 or 3 years max. There just isn't enough time for someone to stay, become a real expert, and become super productive in the research labs. In theory that's the professor, but more likely he's too busy teaching, supervising, and writing grant proposals to actually do hands-on research himself.

The way my mother tells stories about college in the late 70s it was essentially considered normal for a certain kind of girl to sleep with her professors for good grades, and everyone kind of knew and accepted it. That seems like a pretty degenerate state of affairs.

I'm not American but eh

What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t

Uhhh the most obvious one, give students the skills to work in the profession they are getting a degree for? It's like we all just bought the gaslighting of "oh no colleges are actually just for learning how to learn, you will actually learn on the job".. well then change the way colleges work until you learn in college! 4 years and a lot of money should not leave you with "learning how to learn".

Maybe I have a tech bias here, but it is astounding just how useless the average CS graduate is at any software engineering work. Some (most) of them can't even... code ! Similarly for most other professions. I understand no institution can probably impart those skills to most people, and IQ probably isn't the only limiting factor, but they should be honest about this.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other?

Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.

However, that which is moral doesn't tell you that which is optimal or conductive to producing happiness for individuals and society.

Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.

You are describing the minimum morality required by the law. Most universities have somewhat higher standards than that. A professor who only hires graduate students who consent to having sex with him or her would certainly not be selecting for professional quality as much as someone who hires on professional merit. Given that the funding which is paying for these students is commonly not his private property, I can see a university (as the principal) having a legitimate interest in enforcing certain standards (on what their agent does).

But I am sure that somewhere some unis go overboard with regulations.

the profession they are getting a degree for

Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?

I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.

This seems to come up as an explanation a lot, but I don't think it really holds water. We don't have a huge number of people who are experts in pushdown automata or computational complexity or type theory, but can't code. For the most part, the people who didn't learn to code in school also didn't learn any of the theory either.

Why throw up our Pepe hands and pretend this is an unsolvable problem?

You are telling me no college out there knows that students are enrolling into their CS programs for cushy tech jobs and not to learn about automata theory..... Hell, you are telling me no student or worse, no employer knows this?

The problem goes back to Griggs vs Duke Power and related employment law cases.

Universities are the only ones who can do respected credentialization because any system will inevitably have a racially disparate result and universities are the only institution that judges respect too much to destroy for producing a "racist" result.

Any other system you try to set up is living on borrowed time until the judiciary decides to whack it.

If what you say is true, why hasn’t the judiciary destroyed Google for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers there are black?

I was going to say "borrowed time", but looks like the majority of the answer may be "Universities"? The first stats I found showed black people making up 4.1% of Google tech employees vs 7% of Computer field employment. That's barely more than the ratio of underrepresentation that white people have among Google tech employees. (which might also be a factor? "you picked too many whites" can become a lawsuit even without allegations of racial animus, but I'd expect "you picked too many Asians" to raise eyebrows in any crowd less racist than a Harvard admissions committee)

Edit: I initially misread that 7% as being "CS degrees", rather than employment in the field as a whole. It sounds like the gap among new graduates has narrowed, if "In computer science fields, Black students earned 9% of bachelor’s degrees, 13% of master’s degrees and 7% of all research doctorates over the 2017-2018 school year." Comparing Google's cumulative hiring stats over decades to new graduate stats a few years old is a bit apples-to-oranges, but if I were one of Google's legal compliance people I'd now definitely be looking for some apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges numbers before I felt safe.

This isn’t true; the military, certain unions, and even many private companies get away with racist results all the time.

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