domain:nytimes.com
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
24m 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
29m ago
Reminds me of this comic. Other places absolutely should have the manpower to copy it.
flabaduba
31m ago
Any time I could ever need to make a small custom object, it would have to be made of metal.
Dean
Flairless
39m 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
47m 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
1hr ago
Women being associated with very high status men causes them to gain in status, though. There’s clearly a parallel status ladder.
hydroacetylene
1hr 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.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Professors in the 21st century don’t grade homework in much of the world.
I always get frustrated in conversations like this where so many Americans assume that their rather peculiar system must be the norm everywhere.
The Complete Works of Saki. Pen name of H. H. Munro, a bitchy gay early 20th century British writer. Mostly wrote short stories, which are delightful.
SerialStateLineXer
1hr ago
this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians)
The problem with cross-sectional comparisons of different generations is that each generation is from a different wave of immigrants. This study was published in 1998, using data from students who were in eighth grade in 1988, meaning that the 3rd+ generation were from families that had been in the country since long before the 1965 reopening of the country to Asian immigrants. And 20% of 3rd+ generation were Pacific Islanders and 50% "other Asians"; who knows what that means?
Because the legacy Asians come from very different cultural and genetic backgrounds, you can't necessarily attribute to generational differences to assimilation.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It seems interesting to me that standards for finishing school may be lower, but before then they’re actually higher. Math and reading are much more advanced much faster than they used to.
I wonder if this is why everything seems to be graded on a curve these days.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever
I'm not sure I buy it. "Teaching how to think" may have been a self-congratulatory justification for a while, but people in the past weren't that shy about teaching morals.
Not gonna lie, I do find the idea appealing, but these days I wonder if it's even possible. The whole idea just smells like the pretense of neutrality that liberals emanate, as long as they have ways of ensuring they will always win the argument.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
I can't speak to the demographics of the student population referenced in the article.
Speaking with my friend who teaches at the local community college the students he'd fail would overwhelmingly be from 'disadvantaged' or minority backgrounds and would lead to uncomfortable conversations. I suspect some form of this plays a role in many schools.
I don’t mean pre-modern barbarism in the sense of living in a mud hut banging together stone axes, or in the sense that “they did a lot of bad things, therefore barbarism”. 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. Now obviously, both Communists and enlightenment era monarchies did a lot of sketchy things too, but there were a lot more mental gymnastics involved in getting there.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
No electronics other than sometimes a scientific calculator. No graphing calculators since they can be programmed with the relevant formulae; including fake screens that say all memory has been just now wiped.
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.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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.
The circle is now complete.
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