domain:worksinprogress.co
Throwaway05
10hr ago
It is still entirely unclear what you are going for with this and what your motivation is. My original post's reference and your own link are both supportive of treating insomnia with CBT-I.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10hr ago
Very difficult to prove but I would be really surprised if many TAs and lecturers already didn't use LLMs to do some forms of assessment for them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
If you were pointing to the fascists' claim of the trappings (and it really does seem to me to be the trappings, not the substance) of national history and tradition, I could understand the reference to "premodern modes of thinking". But you tie it directly to centralized power and authority to "protect the tribe", and "very loose rules of conduct for what you can do to the outgroup", and both of these describe the Communists (and the ur-Enlightened French Revolution) perfectly.
I'm not sure what to make of the claim that the Communists or the French Revolution used "a lot more mental gymnastics" to get to the core idea of "we are right, hurt people who seem to be getting in our way". The concept of a Revolutionary Conscience does not seem particularly complicated to me. To the extent that Communist theory is more elaborate than Fascist theory, a claim I'm skeptical of, I don't see why that should matter unless the theory were actually load-bearing in some meaningful way, and my assessment of the historical record is that it wasn't. Marx very clearly preached mass-slaughter of the outgroup, and mass-slaughter of the outgroup was the explicit plan of Lenin and his associates going into the revolution.
quiet_NaN
10hr ago
Have private businesses operate the dorms and cafeterias (plural, they need to compete) and let students live off-campus the moment they want.
This is how we generally do things in Germany, to a large degree.
Okay, almost. The "Studentenwerk" (a government-sponsored citywide institution) typically runs a canteen on campus and also provides low-end housing significantly below market value (typically off-campus, though), but they are legally distinct from the university, and students are not required to interact with them in any way (besides paying a minimal fee, perhaps). Plenty of students rent private rooms or flats and prefer private food vendors.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10hr ago
Amusing that training your own employees more or less this way with apprenticeships used to be the norm until governments started using the public university system to subsidize the costs of educating the labour force. This allowed universities, a medieval guild system designed to groom young men for power positions (plus medicine) to spend a century LARPing at bringing enlightenment to lower classes by forcing them to write low quality essays on Nietzsche or whatever and then handing them middle class admission cards. It seems that the racket got too ridiculous to keep up by now and we are regressing back to apprenticeships.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
Yes, as we all know all complaints of decadence and corruption are frivolous. No society has ever gone into decline. No empire has ever fallen. Things only stay the same or improve.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10hr ago
Using the word "modern" in any such discussion without exactly specifying what it is supposed to mean is usually a massive source of confusion. The comment you are replying to seems to use it with the meaning of post-1945-liberalism, and with such a comparison of course historical fascism is not "modern". post-1945-liberalism was pretty explicitly theorized to be a complete refutal of historical fascism.
Lizzardspawn
10hr ago
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all?
Wanna have some fun times - think about whether it is different in medical and engineering schools nowadays.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
I did finally start optimizing those DB queries, but didn't get a lot of tinkering time last week.
How are things on your side @Southkraut?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10hr ago
Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.
Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.
Rov_Scam
10hr ago
To piggyback on what @FCfromSSC said, your view is interesting, if only it weren't ahistorical. The reason Communism gained purchase on the left in the postwar years wasn't because it was enlightenment times ten, but because it was seen as an alternative to the enlightenment liberalism that ultimately led to fascism. Logic, efficiency, sceintific progress, and economic development didn't change our basic nature, it just meant that we could commit atrocities at an industrial scale while keeping detailed records of how much gold was extracted from the deceased Jews' teeth. Fascism wasn't a rejection of the enlightenment but the ultimate culmination of it. The Germans may have got there first, but this was the inevitable result unless the power structures were radically changed.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I mean sure, but I don’t think most people wou be materially hampered because they didn’t get exposed to philosophy or history or art history. There might be the odd tool (personally, I think formal logic is a very powerful tool for understanding the world, and the same is true of probability and statistics and so on) but unless such things are related to daily work in some way, it’s mostly a vestige of the leisure class view of college as finishing school and at that point, you can make a case for teaching manners and dance as part of making a person suitable to the upper class. But this, again is silly, and really doesn’t lead to gains for anyone. It’s a waste of time, and to be fair, most of this is something that could be done for nearly free using resources available cheaply online.
But it’s mostly about the grift. You have to pretend that you’re now a better person because you know some history of Asia, or read a bit of Kant, or wrote an essay on indigenous peoples.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10hr ago
The circle is now complete.
I really don't think they have the manpower now. Whether they would have the money (and talent pool) to hire that sort of manpower is another question - I think the answer would probably be yes, at least on the margin. (Manifestly, while Oxbridge primarily draw from their pool of active staff and graduate students, they do have a number of external full-time supervisors who can make a comfortable living off what they are paid (on the order of £20-30 an hour, back in the days, I think?), who in the instances I knew were local grad school dropouts.)
On the other hand, US colleges are famously stingy even with adjuncts, who are hired in far smaller numbers and teach at a greater ratio. I was not under the impression that they are massively profitable businesses, either - whatever money they take in from tuition clearly gets used up in other ways. How much of those other ways could/should be slashed is a whole thread's discussion under itself, but my impression was that discussions around it tend to have the same nature as discussions about government spending, where everyone has a different notion of what are the important things that should absolutely not be cut while everything else can go.
But a lot of naziism does seem like a conscious attempt to try and return to premodern modes of thinking, where the chief’s or king’s obligation is to Protect the Tribe and there are very loose rules of conduct of what you can do to the out group.
This is consistent with Enlightenment-derived movements and thinking, however. While this begs (as always) what the nature of the enlightenment was, it's generally accepted that both the slave-holding American and the Europe-conquering French revolutions were expressions of it, and the idea of a national / social contract model which ties the ruler to the people, and vice versa, was absolutely a part of both. So was the relative partition of 'us' versus 'them' that led to looser rules of conducts to the out groups including, well, slavery and conquest. You even had the shared rationalizations of tearing down an unjust surrounding political order to all the people (tribes, if you will) express themselves. Naturally we remember this as good because they won and we liked them winning, but the French revolution wasn't exactly shy about exporting the revolution.
For all that the nazis were warmongers who wanted to conquer and colonize others, that too was consistent with the enlightenment civilizations. The status quo powers had just already conquered and colonized enough of the world between them that they didn't want to continue- but they were enlightenment-derived nations when they did so. That is the primary 'pre-modern' thinking- modernity was the status quo, not that post-enlightenment states didn't conquer or do terrible things.
There is always a tension in the enlightenment between it's generally positive connotation and the bad-to-terrible things that Enlightenment-states did. But the French Revolution has about as much a claim as anyone else attempts to separate the french revolution and Napoleon from it runs into typical problems of trying to define away the morally bad stuff, which returns it to the moral connotation argument. The Nazis aren't non-enlightenment just because they did bad things, unless bad things are incompatible with Enlightenment influence.
Which seems pretty unlikely, unless you start moving back the enlightenment a few hundred years to after the Nazis and European de-imperialization.
ThenElection
11hr ago
Palantir recently started offering a "Meritocracy Fellowship" (https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/7fa0ceca-c30e-48de-9b27-f98469c374f3) to tackle this from another angle: cut out the middleman directly. Recruit smart students straight out of high school based on objective measurements, pay them, and hire them directly after the program.
The big risk for the student: what if they don't get hired by Palantir? Will they, after four successful years there as a FTE, have enough prestige to get competitive market offers?
For Palantir, it's near a pure win. Get to rely on an IQ-proxy, pay them a relative pittance for several months, and then select the best X% of performers from that to make low ball offers to.
Tenaz
11hr ago
Reminds me of this comic. Other places absolutely should have the manpower to copy it.
flabaduba
11hr ago
Any time I could ever need to make a small custom object, it would have to be made of metal.
Dean
Flairless
11hr ago
I think your distinction of 'critical thinking' versus 'rigor' is more important than a 'slight' confounder. Which is to say- I think you could be even more right than you realize.
I can fully get on board with arguments that universities have, in fact, lowered rigorous standards and this is a bad thing. I'd even consider systemic contributions for this, ranging from the commercialization of higher education (students are customers, as opposed to wards), to political preference systems (we can't let [X] do worse than [Y]). The economic incentives to, say, not fail the rich-sons of benefactors has changed to different 'we may/may not relax standards.' The cluster of distinctions can support that. If you relax standards in one way, that can lead to also relaxing standards in another. Rigor and critical thinking do correlate.
But- and an important distinction of clusters- they are not the same thing. Working hard, working diligently, and working smartly are three different things. Critical thinking and rigorous thinking are not the same either. They more correlate, but they don't have to. More importantly, they aren't causal.
They also may have ambiguous / shifting definitions.
Take your point on 'maximum' point in the past. Is the maximum the [% pure critical thinking] of the students, a ratio? Or is the maximum measured by [#critical thinking] = [% PCT]x[# of students], a volume?
In the former, the downgrading of standards lowers critical thinking. Each student is less pure/capable at critical thinking as part of the correlation 'all boats decrease.' In the later, the downgrading of student standards increases critical thinking. If lower standards allow more students, then more students, even if less capable, provide more critical thinking overall.
And this gets changed by non-stable equilibrium. Universities are constantly changing in composition. Slowly, in the case of professors (usually), but constantly. Even if there is an optimal setup for Maximum Critical Thinking, the very conditions that set it up may lead to it's decline in a natural ebb-and-flow.
Say you need particularly good professors, but the professor dies/retires and gets hired with a cheaper one. University MCT goes down, even if all other things stay constant. Say you need a particular political balance of professors to encourage MCT, to encourage both a healthy consensus but a vibrant and occasionally persuasive minority, but the winners (or losers) of the ratio upset that balance. Say there are temporary MCT buffs if you have something like a politically controversial-but-persuasive movement who increase MCT as a byproduct of their activities to get people to change their mind in critical thinking-compatible ways, but total MCT goes down after the agitators stop convincing people to change positions but instead are enforcing a new status quo.
I think these factors would support a natural ebb-and-flow of critical thinking MCT%, even as it obscures specific contributions (artificial highs) with cluster-visible effects (lower standards lowering the cluster). 'You' (ControlsFreak) are accurately seeing cluster-wide effects at a time of your presence, but cannot see events that happened / were set in progress before your arrival.
But it does suggest both that things could get better in the future, but also that previous/accustomed levels were an aberration reverting to a historical norm, as opposed to a sustainable new norm.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
I remember reading Sowell's "Vision of the Annointed". "Nuance" would not have been a word I'd use to describe it, and it seems to me that nuance, as typically deployed, often obscures rather than reveals. Sometimes, things can in fact be relatively straightforward.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Women being associated with very high status men causes them to gain in status, though. There’s clearly a parallel status ladder.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
It’s not hard to find very intelligent right wingers that went to Ivy League schools recently enough for this to be a concern. They do not, generally, express things in a maximally based way- they use more nuanced phrasing to express a broader point.
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.
Since you seem to desire to continue this discussion regardless of your requested pause, I'll be happy to indulge you just once more before honoring your requested pause for the Swahili translation step.
Which surprisingly is the only one I haven't already done. (Well, mostly. I don't think there's an authoritative word count for Aquinas.)
I will start by noting that you have retreated from the earlier bailey. I am happy for you to abandon prior arguments about midwit professors, defending blood sacrifice, and other arguments I did not make. I will be interested if your next / last post in this exchange abandons any more strawmen arguments I did not make.
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.
Disagree with the concept of reading? Heavens no. I just think you had a bit of a reading comprehension failure.
I suspect you believed it was advocating some sort view that ethics reading would/should change one's own ethics, hence you emphasis in response two that no reading would change your moral worldview, as if that was an objective.
I also think you also thought I was advocating dimwit-professor-led ethics classes, hence your repeated reference to the dimwits characterization, until response three after your (hopefully) accidental almost-insinuation against Pasha was teased.
I also think you completely missed the point that recommending self-pursued reading outside of a university class format is a complete non-advocacy for, well, university-level ethics classes.
Further, my conception of you is that you are doubling down in a you-won't-admit-it's-embarrassment defensiveness and are trying to claim some rhetorical moral high ground after your earlier mistakes were teased. You are attempting to reposition to an argument about making unreasonable demands, despite no demands having been made of Pasha, by using a ironic-equivalence of a raising learning Swahili as a precondition for further discussion. A language whose only relevance to the discussion is to demonstrate the difficulty of unreasonable demands. Since clearly learning Swahili is as relevant, and as unreasonable, a precondition for addressing provided arguments as...
...checks notes...
...recommending someone read about a potentially interesting and useful subject in a way that avoids a medium and format they have said they don't trust.
Checks out.
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.
If your point was simply about homework, you would have talked about homework from the start, rather than spending the first two responses talking about blood sacrifices and the strength of your convictions and dimwit professors.
But hey. It's still the internet. Being called out can be embarrassing, even more so than leaving with out the last word. In fact, I'll even give you a hand with some counter arguments you could leave off with.
You could argue that you did not actually miss the argument, but that it was not long enough, even though there's no requirement for how long an argument needs to be in a short post. You could argue that you were requesting an elaboration of the argument, which I unfairly did not provide, despite you not asking for a longer argument. You could even argue that you didn't misunderstand the argument at all, truly.
But for your pending last word, I would suggest that 'you did not make an argument' falls a little flat after three iterations of the argument have been provided, and then had it's presence ignored even after being re-posted and bolded for emphasis. That would be just a tad embarrassing to end off on.
Especially if you were so predictable as to do it after being predicted you would try for the last word.
Farewell. I'll not respond until after I learn Swahili, so consider any last word yours.
This pattern of spending 70%+ class-time on the national lore and the rest of random tid-bits of history nobody quite remembered anyway was also present when I went through K12 education in Turkey. Every single detail of Ataturk's life and 1918-1923 history of Turkey drilled again and again in increasing detail for us instead of course. I wonder if there is any national curriculum anywhere with an alternative history that avoids this trap. But then what would you teach? History sounds very difficult to grapple with kids without some sort of narrative.
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