I am neighbors with two school teachers, both of whom quit because they were so disgusted with what the schools had become. Mind you, these two are pretty ardent liberals. They hated their contemporaries, they hated the bureaucracy, and hated constantly having their hands tied in how they taught.
These two would never put two-and-two together that their ideology has created this mess, but they left all the same, and from what I see were competent. Soon the only people left are going to be incompetents who come in for a paycheck.
Cause and effect are almost totally divorced in the liberal mind, at least when it comes to their own beliefs and behaviour. It's quite something to observe.
That is not even considering the heavy liberal bias and all the other social justice things that have snuck into universities and are now common place.
This was a very pleasant interview to listen to. I also agree about Twitter. I think many of us are now coming back to Twitter in the Elon era and transforming it into a great information hub that it wasn't so much before.
I'm 45 minutes in. He is a guest with a great deal of value to offer. He's not on substack right? Is he twitter only?
On your experience at university: mine was similarly disppointing, though my subject area was much less demanding than yours. There are two reasons I can think of.
First, students themselves are mainly in it for the quals. Shows of facile intelligence in order to signal ready understanding in tutorials are common, but critical discussion of the subject area is generally considered sort of...socially maladept; nobody cares.
Second, arid hyper-empiricism has taken over in the soft (social) sciences to the extent that it's bceome purely a matter of observing and describing. Recognising patterns and trying to make explanatory generalisations, i.e. inductive/abductive reasoning, is regarded (by many, not all) with slight suspicion.
It's easy to interpret such trends as expressions of acceptable modes of thought among the elite--most obviously hostility to pattern recognition but also scrambling careerism, crypto anti-intellectualism and the '(he's not) having a normal one' mentality.
I think you're right. A huge amount of social signalling goes on in the universities, to the detriment of the research and the general experience, especially if you aren't inclined to behave in that way. Narrow specialisation is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of knowledge and access to knowledge, but even so, there's no reason why broader generalisation can't be an integral aspect of university research as well.
I am neighbors with two school teachers, both of whom quit because they were so disgusted with what the schools had become. Mind you, these two are pretty ardent liberals. They hated their contemporaries, they hated the bureaucracy, and hated constantly having their hands tied in how they taught.
These two would never put two-and-two together that their ideology has created this mess, but they left all the same, and from what I see were competent. Soon the only people left are going to be incompetents who come in for a paycheck.
Cause and effect are almost totally divorced in the liberal mind, at least when it comes to their own beliefs and behaviour. It's quite something to observe.
I was reading this substack post yesterday and I think it briefly touches on the disconnect between the ivory towers and the real world https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-not-heterodox-research
That is not even considering the heavy liberal bias and all the other social justice things that have snuck into universities and are now common place.
This was a very pleasant interview to listen to. I also agree about Twitter. I think many of us are now coming back to Twitter in the Elon era and transforming it into a great information hub that it wasn't so much before.
Nice. I'll check this out!
Satoshi somehow made people take BTC seriously. (resistance.money, esp. youtube.com/watch?v=mjN0SpxHA0w) Could we apply some of his strategies to parallel institutions?
I'm 45 minutes in. He is a guest with a great deal of value to offer. He's not on substack right? Is he twitter only?
On your experience at university: mine was similarly disppointing, though my subject area was much less demanding than yours. There are two reasons I can think of.
First, students themselves are mainly in it for the quals. Shows of facile intelligence in order to signal ready understanding in tutorials are common, but critical discussion of the subject area is generally considered sort of...socially maladept; nobody cares.
Second, arid hyper-empiricism has taken over in the soft (social) sciences to the extent that it's bceome purely a matter of observing and describing. Recognising patterns and trying to make explanatory generalisations, i.e. inductive/abductive reasoning, is regarded (by many, not all) with slight suspicion.
It's easy to interpret such trends as expressions of acceptable modes of thought among the elite--most obviously hostility to pattern recognition but also scrambling careerism, crypto anti-intellectualism and the '(he's not) having a normal one' mentality.
He doesn't have a Substack: my bad.
I think you're right. A huge amount of social signalling goes on in the universities, to the detriment of the research and the general experience, especially if you aren't inclined to behave in that way. Narrow specialisation is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of knowledge and access to knowledge, but even so, there's no reason why broader generalisation can't be an integral aspect of university research as well.
Sorry for stupid question; his website is in the description...