domain:noahpinion.blog
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5hr ago
Other places don't generally have the manpower to copy it, since Oxbridge tutorials/supervisions are one-on-1~3. US universities also already heavily rely on undergraduate TAs to keep up their scale, which is not allowed and would probably not be adequate in the Oxbridge model since a good supervisor needs to have more command of the material than a US TA checking against a grading rubric or drip-feeding model solutions.
On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”).
Fascists observably loved progress, mechanization, modernization and "rational" materialism. Their behavior was not generally recognized as pre-modern barbarism in advance, and its barbarity was not notably distinct in character from that of the Communists. Likewise, the communists were obsessed with both the industrial revolution and what is very easy to describe as "premodern barbarism"; arguably by the 30s, Fascism was pretty clearly the more "civilized" of the two in observable outcomes.
phailyoor
5hr ago
I guess that's why most ethics classes always go back to trolley problems and dying violinists. Nobody really cares but you still have to defend a variety of viewpoints.
phailyoor
5hr ago
Google never just gives you the answers, but instead helps you find human written (at least the old google) articles and resources that may be useful. And depending on the quality of the official course materials, the googled sites may be surprisingly useless.
Yes, cheating has always existed, and if you really want to cheat, instead of using google to find the answers, you can also find the older kid who saved all the homeworks from last year for you to copy from.
So I think in general Google is not cheating unless explicitly banned, and very different from ChatGPT. ChatGPT just does the homeworks and spits out the answer.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.
I would argue that WWI killed the enlightenment, and then WWII and the Cold War were struggles over what ideology should replace it.
On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”). Between 1940 and 1991, both of those proposed successor ideologies failed. It turned out that premodern tribal society with modern technology could get very bloody very fast. And after fifty years of experimentation, it turned out that, counterintuitively, so could enlightenment times ten.
So what that leaves us with is the Bretton Woods ostrich consensus, “let’s uhh... just pretend that whole WWI business never happened and keep muddling on as we were”, where WWII is severed from its connection to war that came before it, and is retroactively portrayed as the enlightenment’s ultimate triumph over the darkness. And as not the obvious result of the enlightenment’s catastrophic failure and collapse. I think it’s no accident that this ostrich consensus came primarily from the United States, the country least affected by either of the two wars.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
5hr ago
The Oxbridge tutorial system where the students have to intelligently defend their work orally on a weekly basis wins again. Other places should just copy it, smh
I actually wrote a long comment with my reasons for holding a similar opinion before: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/206072?context=8#context
edit: I have just realized this comment was a response to you actually
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Because college has turned into a four year vacation to get a certificate of completion at taxpayer expense, not an institute of higher learning. The goal here is to drive out people who just want taxpayer backed loans to be taken care of while doing nothing productive.
Privates in the army don’t live in conditions that are that bad anyways- I’ll flip the question on you, why do college kids need the one star resorts they live in?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6hr ago
Absolutely - and the same should apply for the new austere Harvard for the same reasons.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6hr ago
As someone who totally picked up this habit from my education, totally agree with you. I almost always learned tremendously more when I actually got myself to read the whole thing, except when it was badly written, and often it unfortunately was. I really hate the justification of poor educational practices with "corporate life also sucks, this prepares you for it". You don't need to pay for a degree to teach you basic life hacks. You can pick up the ability to realize a text is not important and skim through it in a couple weeks into any corporate job. The college degree was supposed to teach you to read deeply with high quality sources.
sockpuppet2
6hr ago
Imagine a country just like the US, with a constitution just like the US Constitution, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court, with this sole exception: people walking around in public must show the contents of their pockets, handbags, briefcases, etc. if a cop orders them to (with or without any degree of articulable suspicion). The cops still need to follow the US rules before they can touch or seize anything from a person, or perform any more invasive search, or enter a private area like a home. Would that be "tyranny"?
I don't think so. The impact on the average law-abiding person would probably round to zero. Cops probably wouldn't even ask most of the time. Under Pennsylvania v. Mimms, cops can legally order you to get out of your car during any traffic stop, but that's never happened to me.
Setting aside the question of the intangible value of privacy, there's the problem of spuriously incriminating findings and Beria-ism (the "Don't Talk to the Police" video, but the problem is the same).
ControlsFreak
6hr ago
As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.
When I was in school, I had a few opportunities to glimpse that the standards I was being tested to were lower than those of the past. Primarily, this involved a few experiences where I got to actually see what were actually-given exams from not many years prior. One might temper this a bit, given that I did not see the scores of the prior students who took those exams, but my sense is that the profs in question had been using very similar exams for a decade or two, kept seeing lower and lower scores, and eventually gave up and revamped their curriculum. The entire style and approach was different, and I felt sad that I did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the old way, which I felt was more rigorous.
That said, I think there is a slight confounder as to how exactly we bucket the concepts of "critical thinking", "rigor", etc. It may not necessarily require critical thinking to learn how to repeat enough of the incantations of rigor, but I have the sense that requiring said rigor naturally provides far more opportunities for critical thinking to show its head (or lack thereof).
Perhaps another conceptual bundle in the mix is something like "skills and abilities" or just sheer "knowledge" or something. I think that my experiences also justified that something along these axes was already in decline when I was in school. Yes, yes, a major factor could just be composition effects, but I think that's probably the biggest lingering question - why the standards for rigor/skills and abilities/knowledge seemed to have declined, not that they did so.
If we can do the terrible thing and imagine clustering this conceptual bundle, apart from what might be considered "pure critical thinking", into one continuous time-dependent variable, I do have to think that there was a peak. Obviously, if we go back far enough, there was just nobody with the sort of specialized knowledge/skills and abilities/rigor within my very specialized academic focus. The continuous variable was approximately zero. Given my personal observation that it seems to have had a negative first derivative when I was in school, it would seem to imply that there was a maximum at some point in the past.
Of course, I should mention again that composition effects may be nearly the entire ballgame here. Tyler Cowen preaches the skills/abilities of very young people. There are probably absolutely outstanding ones. Therefore, I'm not sure I have much of an explanation that would fit my perception of generally-declining standards other than composition effects.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6hr ago
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.
sockpuppet2
6hr ago
For future reference, what's a better way to ask "What's the evidence in support of [medical claim]?"
DelendaEst
6hr ago
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.
It would also be a problem because of scale. Back in the day when they had a lot of oral exams they didn't also have 100 person 101 weed out lectures either, and while you can certainly have the in class exams be the entire grade with those you certainly are not doing oral exams. Without large classes its not just that 90% would fail its also that the would either have to hire a lot more professors or cut class sizes (not to mention path dependent legacy issues such as having built a bunch of large lecture halls and fewer 20 person class rooms.
I believe they should review different professional ethic systems to understand how they differ in what they emphasize.
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.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
· Edited 6hr ago
people walking around in public must show the contents of their pockets, handbags, briefcases, etc. if a cop orders them to (with or without any degree of articulable suspicion). The cops still need to follow the US rules before they can touch or seize anything from a person, or perform any more invasive search, or enter a private area like a home. Would that be "tyranny"?
Mmm, there are edge cases, depending on definitions, where I'd say "yes". The key point is "if the police can negate your ability to live life without you having committed a crime, that's sufficient* to set up a full police state". The most obvious edge case that hits this criterion is "policeman does this search over and over for 3 hours every time you set foot outside your house".
*Not necessary, though, as "everyone is guilty of crimes and the police can fully use this" also qualifies. This is why "three felonies a day" + "no privacy" = "police state".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Good question. But it's at least part of the formal curriculum for AP US History, so the answer is hopefully nonzero even if some have forgotten since.
There is some advantage to knowing what (shared) curriculum can be pointed to. Even here, we have a somewhat understood corpus of "things I can refer to and expect readers to understand", but there is always some context dependence.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Even today, bright right-leaning politicians come out of left-wing institutions. Vance graduated from Yale Law in 2013, and multiple Republican-appointed SCOTUS and other justices have come out of Harvard.
I think the academics would consider a "based" take (I'm assuming you mean yeschad.jpg to colonization) to be a very facile response to an actually hard topic. A better response might be to examine the incoherence of the progressive views on the subject: "Can well-meaning maybe-benevolent (government) intervention improve lives? The Spanish missionaries in the New World certainly thought they were doing so, and there are some 'based' examples of them ending human sacrifice, for example."
Dean
Flairless
6hr ago
If you think human sacrifice is good, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.
And this exchange gets sillier and sillier.
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.
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-
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Both. I think the following things can be true- trucking is (understandably) highly regulated and it will take a long time to get major changes like self driving trucks into the mainstream, truckers are above-average drivers and so self-driving software will need to improve massively to replace them, driving a semi truck is a different problem from driving a car and needs beefier software, and liability reasons don’t affect the calculus much because the trucking industry is structured around making insurance companies pay for accidents anyways.
If you add it all up, I think this points to ‘robot Uber’ before it points to ‘self driving trucks’. After all, Uber drivers do not go to school and get a special license and take regular drug tests. These are also regular cars in a far less regulated field.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
While homeschooling had wide variances, I genuinely wonder how many public school educated kids could hold a coherent conversation about the Spanish American war.
guajalote
6hr ago
This is how engineering, science, and law are already tested at all decent universities. It's only the humanities that don't grade this way.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7hr ago
Yeah, that comic seems like a solid enough statement of the problem that it is going to join the ranks of "documents I point at to explain a problem".
Are either DUI or statutory rape regulatory offenses, or am I misreading the executive order and it's actually targeted at all strict liability crimes?
Hot take: calculators are for experimental physics exams. In mathematics, they should not be required. If the exam is about multiplying five digit integers, then a calculator would defeat the purpose of the task. If the exam is about integration, then you can easily make sure that there will not be a lot of five digit integers to multiply.
Granted, some math classes are mostly to enable students to use calculators for their science classes. So sure, if the point is to learn to calculate logarithms with a calculator, you require a calculator -- no point in having students learn to use a slide rule. Likewise, for basic probability theory, a calculator will make a lot more practical applications accessible.
For my last two years of high school, Texas Instruments had somehow convinced my school board that their graphic calculators were great and educational. Our final tests featured tasks such as "determine the approximate root of this function with the graphical calculator". We did not cover a lot of math in these two years. I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more (a smartphone can do anything such a calculator can do, but much better), but if they still are, I would implore any school board deluded enough to think they would help teach math to at least make it a priority that the devices they mandate come with a decent programming language (LISP, Python, Haskell, Perl, whatever) so that kids do not have to waste two years programming in TI BASIC instead of paying attention to class.
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