domain:aerosociety.com
TheFooder
17hr 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.
I see you there, trying to put Scantron out of business.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Not doubting the reason for the pattern. But ‘why American kids don’t know about the Spanish-American war’ is because they get a day long lecture about it, once. In contrast American kids know about D-day, Pearl Harbor, the battle of the bulge, guadalcanal and midway, Auschwitz. Because each one of those gets as much class time as the Spanish American war in its entirely- in some cases considerably more.
I can imagine a high-IQ Trump inflected curriculum in which the civil war is mostly brushed over, but the Spanish American war and WWI get a starring role in addition to WWII because it’s about America’s rise on the world stage.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
I think that "write an effortpost on substack/LW/reddit/tumblr/..." might actually be a fun essay assignment (even if it would be hard to grade if the teacher lacks subject knowledge).
I think that one problem with essay assignments is that the student is typically aware that it is extremely well trod ground. Generations of students before them have written about theme X in book Y. The chance that they will make a point which will cause the teacher -- the one person who will (optimistically) read their essay (unless they also leave the grading to an LLM) -- to actually wake up and go "wait a minute, this is new" are very slim.
"Everything has been said before, but not yet by everyone" and all that.
It is like tasking someone to simulate having sexual intercourse with a sex doll and then being surprised if the person is not showing a lot of effort.
TheDemonRazgriz
17hr ago
Having gone through engineering school pretty recently, I would say that it is different, just perhaps not as different as you’d probably like it to be.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18hr ago
I expect you'll dismiss what I say as just another smug American chauvinist...but watching you express with great confidence that the geniuses at the US state department were about to crush the Chinese upstarts a few years ago, to joining the ranks of the resident Chinamaxxers should be enough to give anyone whiplash. If anything, it should make readers update their priors about trusting anyone with grand geopolitical narratives.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking. Nor is the CCP. And even if you took US IMO team and forced them to study geopolitics rather than theoretical physicists finance, their ability to influence the world would be minimal. The NWO-deep state-Masonic brotherhood conspiracy theorists believe manipulate world events to their benefit doesn't exist, simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate. I don't seriously believe that anyone can predict what will happen or who the paper tiger is.
Is China an unstoppable manufacturing behemoth about to steamroll the US navy on their way to Taiwan, or an aging and shrinking nation who imploded their property sector with loads of debt? Is America the global hegemon with the best military, largest concentration of talent and strongest economy in the world, or a sclerotic, internally-divided shitshow? Probably...all of the above? Who can say whether China's population bomb represents a hard cap to their ascension, or whether they can dominate every STEM and manufacturing field to a degree that dwarfs the rest of the world before they lose their dynamism? Or whether China does a Pearl Harbor next October and Americans of all stripes rally around the flag, erasing the problem of partisanship?
The uncertainty is part of the fun, I suppose. But I'm fairly confident that nobody can make meaningful predictions about what will happen consistently. And I'm certain that whatever happens, some asshole on TheMotte will write a novella about how fucking stupid Trump/Xi Jinping were for doing X when any retard could see that Y was the obvious course of action. Hindsight bias is a helluva drug.
It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy...They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization? The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons, from which they will inevitably recover? And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular? Look at how they act in the SCS, or fish the hell out of South American countries EEZ. Look at where the Thomas and Sabina shoals are on a map and tell me what business they have ramming Filipino ships. Look at the wolf warrior diplomacy bullshit they pulled before realizing how ugly pulling back the veil made them look. Now scale that up to hegemon-level.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
I've burned plenty of incense. It hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I've seen how miserable the people are who walk far enough down that path. Boomers gonna boom boom boom my friend.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
18hr ago
Is getting into 3D printing something you would recommend? I don't have any specific things I want to print. I am not into any figurines or any other such nerd table-top hobbies. I have some professional experience with microcontroller development and robotics but don't do it as a "hobby". But it feels like I would probably find interesting things I could do if I started digging into this
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.
While I can only speak for myself, I studied a STEM subject because I was genuinely interested in it. Sure, the fact that STEM people usually find well-compensated work was a consideration, but not the major one. I certainly did not research which subject would have the highest expected salary. I also embarked on a lengthy PhD for rather meager pay, but I was fine with that.
Some of the stuff I learned as a student I get to use in my job, while some other stuff I sadly/luckily do not have reason to use. And as usual, a lot of the relevant skills I picked up outside class.
I am also somewhat privileged in that my parents paid for my education (i.e. the cost of living in a small room for 5+ years -- universities themselves are almost free in Germany). But I never felt I was attending just for the signaling value of the diploma.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
18hr ago
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.
Throwaway05
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
19hr 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.
It is still one hour per group and week, plus whatever time you need for preparation (tutors do set and grade homework, to anchor the session and give the student feedback). For a large class this amounts to several full-time staff - and you also need a lot of small rooms, which tend to be scarce at universities. (Some supervisions wind up being held at random locations like local coffeeshops, or in the supervisor's private accommodation!)
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