7 ms·

The cynical anti-intellectualism in this thread is bracing. All part of the zeitgeist I guess. News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything

by knowuh 6y ago

The cynical anti-intellectualism in this thread is bracing. All part of the zeitgeist I guess. News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent. How do we have productive disagreements going forward?

antepodius 6y ago
Or: Objective reality might exist, but it's not necessarily present in the universities, which are mostly there as an IQ test by proxy with a filter for the most lazy, with some social indoctrination thrown in. Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day.
- zarathustreal 6y ago
  >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way
  - zepto 6y ago
    This is a crucial argument. Do you have a link to something that supports your statement that “this is not objectively true”? I think it would help a lot in these debates.
    - tahdjri 6y ago
      >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. gravity exists independent of social order
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      Yeah it's called "The Barstool Experiment". Look it up :-) The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly: Only that science or truth that is doesn't contravene the current social order is allowed air, allowed to be talked about without reprisal and shunning. The degree to which this is true is a canary for how totalitarian and neurotic your micro-society is. The micro-society of universities generally seems to be becoming more, rather than less, rabid and paranoid. A lot of it is like Bostrom's idea of the decentralized electroshock dystopia: even though a significant proportion of people are witches, everyone's afraid of reprisal for not actively hunting witches, so the witches-in-hiding hunt their own when they're unmasked. But this is the way of things; this wave will pass, eventually, as well. And like the soviet scientists who kept their heads down and mouthed the party line, the secret iconoclasts will survive till the current order is replaced by the next, with its own peculiar tabboos.
RNCTX 6y ago
> News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent. How do we have productive disagreements going forward? Funny you describe it that way. I'd argue that young people in STEM fields, including IS/CIS/CompSci undergrad programs, think everything can be objective when that clearly is not the case. You don't need to go to college to press buttons, fill out spreadsheets, or input code until you get the output you seek. You need to go to college to make the subjective decisions, which don't have a clear right/wrong answer.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I can't word this in a non-snarky way, but it's a genuine question: Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Because moral philosophy and epistemology have been a thing for well over 4,000 years, and college could easily teach the basics.
    - RNCTX 6y ago
      This. The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students. College is not vocational training (unless you're a law or medicine student), it's for learning how to think.
      - tankenmate 6y ago
        If you study the International Bacalaureat (IB), a high school curriculum taught around the world that is based on the French system, you are required to study Theory of Knowledge; effectively an introduction to philosophy.
      - lol768 6y ago
        > The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students. I'm not sure how much weight this argument holds.. The whole "gen ed" thing is a rather US-centric concept. I don't know of any universities in the UK that require a PHIL intro course of students. When you go to university, you overwhelmingly study the one course ("major") that you picked beforehand. There's often a small amount of room on many courses for optionals from other fields, if you want to take them, but this is by no means mandatory and I'd say the proportion of folks doing philosophy modules studying a different degree at my alma mater was slim.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
Productive disagreement? I think to begin, we need to vet people we might have disagreements with. I don't think productive dialogue can be commodditized. Maybe it can after the fact via podcasts etc, but dialogues themselves are, I think, inherently analogue and highly personal. I think, given the realities of the attention economy, that we need to be much more selective about whom we let in to a conversation that might change our own mind. And this needs to be on a case-by-case basis, with everyone setting and updating their own standards on whom they'll let into dialogue. I think people like the one you're responding to would agree and increasingly think that association with institutions of higher learning send a strong signal to avoid dialogue. It doesn't necessarily look like anti-intellectualism to me, any more than filtering out people who didn't graduate high school is necessarily elitism. I could see myself rationalizing either, depending on the kind of conversation I wanted to have.
mikecoles 6y ago
Anti-college is not anti-intellectualism. Quite the opposite. Higher education is no longer about education; it's about profit. Pieces of paper are pointless for anything other than wallpaper. Free-range education through meeting and collaborating with others is more beneficial to expanding your knowledge than handing over money to some college. Save those tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life. Spend that time and money being an apprentice, creating your own curriculum, or taking specific training.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > Anti-college is not anti-intellectualism. Quite the opposite. Higher education is no longer about education; it's about profit. In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know...
  - Junk_Collector 6y ago
    While there are some truly staggering examples of US college loan debt, the average loan debt at the end of a 4 year degree in the US is $26k or about the price of a new mid range car. For the majority of people, their total college loan debt is below a single year of their first year annual income out of college and certainly not 5-10x. [1]http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know... Yes. In the UK. I had a relationship with someone who specifically learned German in school, and went to Germany to tutor in a cross-education outreach program after she graduated to go scout for Universities she wanted to attend in order to avoid having to take out massive loans like her siblings did back home. Very smart girl. She and I enrolled into online classes, I had already complete my Bsc but wanted to do this with her; but she felt she was missing on the 'campus life' part of the University experience and went into Pedagogy to the Masters level and now teaches back in the UK. In a post Brexit World, that is just not possible. The EU is still pretty favourable in terms of University costs being hidden and obfuscated via VAT for the students, but many Industries within it's local economy (PIIGS, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia in the Eurozone, and just about most of the periphery member nations) cannot provide adequate jobs let alone a career to its graduates within their sectors so they have to go to Germany, UK, Holland and as things have gotten worse France to a much lesser degree than when I was there. The ideal being landing a job in the US or China where they can make obscene amounts of money in certain fields like Tech or Medicine with little to no debt, and subsidized advance degrees. Which still opens it up to the work visa lottery, and uprooting your life during some the most critical years of your entire Life (late 20s to early 30s) in the hopes it pans out. The best thing that can happen is to disrupt it entirely and level the playing field and re-structure it in such a way that its both affordable and accessible to all motivated to want to go in and meet its requirements. And incentivize them to stay in their home towns a build a solid community and tie it to the needs of its actual needed labor force: hopefully doing away with the notion of studying Civil Engineering for Oil Rig drilling if you're from Iceland kind of thing. As it makes no sense, and doesn't reflect the value system or the job prospects of your community let alone the job prospects of a Nation that is entirely dependent on renewable geo-thermal. How exactly the Lab portion of STEM gets solved is still a mystery. I propose the building auxiliary wet-labs in Libraries within their communities. The net benefit here being that students should be required to teach children and adults of their community the topic or subject they are studying as a graded portion of their grade for the privilege of having such a model and build community in the process. Or perhaps that should be the only real on-campus (at both Universities and Community Colleges) component to what is an otherwise entirely Online system? Just look at this example, which having to attend my midterm and practicals during one of the largest fires in San Diego History (I was literately trapped in my car on my way back home to OC for 7 hours after they closed campus when we were sitting down for the exam as the classroom filled with smoke) and during my finals during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, I can understand this from both sides: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-after-refusing-leniency-to-black-students-on-final-exams/ https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-af... That hot button issue could be entirely mitigated, whether you're pro or against the BLM protests is irrelevant. On just a practical and logistical matter you could just overcome this with the current technology that we have and avoid the certain backlash to the professor, department because of it from the irate student body and opportunistic Media. I saw a rant from a UCLA professor pretty much lining out how he, and his entire profession have not seen a single decrease in pay since he left University in the late 80s as a TA and saw how the CSU/UC extortion system was being assembled in what was once the envy of the entire US' university system--which followed the EU's model pretty well, and was low to no cost if you were local, but had the ability to employ its graduates as the California Economy could support it. Which was a net benefit that significantly contributed to CA becoming the 8th largest economy in the World. I can't seem to find it and really wish I had saved it as the very employees in the system are to the point where they know it went too far. And are perhaps even afraid of what may happen at what an angry mob can do these days.
zo1 6y ago
>"How do we have productive disagreements going forward?" We are barely having any of those right now in the greater society. As long as we can't argue facts, objective-reality and do so without feelings, we'll continue descending into anarchy and divisiveness.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  US is "the greater society" now??
  - zo1 6y ago
    I'm not from or residing in the US. My comment was aimed as commentary on what I can see happening globally.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 6y ago
Your post lacks nuance. Some news is fake, some isn't. Some science is fake, some isn't. Schools are barriers, but for many elements of a school, the fact that it's a barrier is a good thing--we don't want ignorant people performing in roles that where knowledge is required. The problem is that many elements of schools are barriers which are poor at achieving their purpose, or are directly counterproductive to their purpose. > How do we have productive disagreements going forward? That's a complicated question, but oversimplifying the opinions of people we disagree with and then labeling it ("cynical anti-intellectualism") isn't the answer.
dart600 6y ago
Could you please define anti intellectualism by your standards? To me, anti intellectual notions would be just if the initial intentions of a discussion were based on a very rich topic and were dissolved in some manner. I beg a brief and graceful peer review for the poor submissions that likely seek solace in the isolation of a virus infected planet. And at end. In my intention to post, I was solely being altruistic, informing whomever reading that if they were to read this article and consider getting a degree from U of the P that they should consider the risk. Just a gesture. However, I think my writing style might have been misunderstood as some semblance of pseudo intellectual attempt or such. Do know, for the record,that as the 1st to reply to the post, my intention was to inform. But I am intrigued and inspired. How about we both try to post an article that invites our versions of intellectualism! Ready set go.

by knowuh 6y ago

antepodius 6y ago

Or: Objective reality might exist, but it's not necessarily present in the universities, which are mostly there as an IQ test by proxy with a filter for the most lazy, with some social indoctrination thrown in. Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day.

zarathustreal 6y ago
>Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way
- zepto 6y ago
  This is a crucial argument. Do you have a link to something that supports your statement that “this is not objectively true”? I think it would help a lot in these debates.
  - tahdjri 6y ago
    >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. gravity exists independent of social order
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    Yeah it's called "The Barstool Experiment". Look it up :-) The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.
- antepodius 6y ago
  Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly: Only that science or truth that is doesn't contravene the current social order is allowed air, allowed to be talked about without reprisal and shunning. The degree to which this is true is a canary for how totalitarian and neurotic your micro-society is. The micro-society of universities generally seems to be becoming more, rather than less, rabid and paranoid. A lot of it is like Bostrom's idea of the decentralized electroshock dystopia: even though a significant proportion of people are witches, everyone's afraid of reprisal for not actively hunting witches, so the witches-in-hiding hunt their own when they're unmasked. But this is the way of things; this wave will pass, eventually, as well. And like the soviet scientists who kept their heads down and mouthed the party line, the secret iconoclasts will survive till the current order is replaced by the next, with its own peculiar tabboos.

RNCTX 6y ago

> News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent. How do we have productive disagreements going forward? Funny you describe it that way. I'd argue that young people in STEM fields, including IS/CIS/CompSci undergrad programs, think everything can be objective when that clearly is not the case. You don't need to go to college to press buttons, fill out spreadsheets, or input code until you get the output you seek. You need to go to college to make the subjective decisions, which don't have a clear right/wrong answer.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I can't word this in a non-snarky way, but it's a genuine question: Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Because moral philosophy and epistemology have been a thing for well over 4,000 years, and college could easily teach the basics.
  - RNCTX 6y ago
    This. The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students. College is not vocational training (unless you're a law or medicine student), it's for learning how to think.
    - tankenmate 6y ago
      If you study the International Bacalaureat (IB), a high school curriculum taught around the world that is based on the French system, you are required to study Theory of Knowledge; effectively an introduction to philosophy.
    - lol768 6y ago
      > The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students. I'm not sure how much weight this argument holds.. The whole "gen ed" thing is a rather US-centric concept. I don't know of any universities in the UK that require a PHIL intro course of students. When you go to university, you overwhelmingly study the one course ("major") that you picked beforehand. There's often a small amount of room on many courses for optionals from other fields, if you want to take them, but this is by no means mandatory and I'd say the proportion of folks doing philosophy modules studying a different degree at my alma mater was slim.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

Productive disagreement? I think to begin, we need to vet people we might have disagreements with. I don't think productive dialogue can be commodditized. Maybe it can after the fact via podcasts etc, but dialogues themselves are, I think, inherently analogue and highly personal. I think, given the realities of the attention economy, that we need to be much more selective about whom we let in to a conversation that might change our own mind. And this needs to be on a case-by-case basis, with everyone setting and updating their own standards on whom they'll let into dialogue. I think people like the one you're responding to would agree and increasingly think that association with institutions of higher learning send a strong signal to avoid dialogue. It doesn't necessarily look like anti-intellectualism to me, any more than filtering out people who didn't graduate high school is necessarily elitism. I could see myself rationalizing either, depending on the kind of conversation I wanted to have.

mikecoles 6y ago

Anti-college is not anti-intellectualism. Quite the opposite. Higher education is no longer about education; it's about profit. Pieces of paper are pointless for anything other than wallpaper. Free-range education through meeting and collaborating with others is more beneficial to expanding your knowledge than handing over money to some college. Save those tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life. Spend that time and money being an apprentice, creating your own curriculum, or taking specific training.

BossingAround 6y ago
> Anti-college is not anti-intellectualism. Quite the opposite. Higher education is no longer about education; it's about profit. In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know...
- Junk_Collector 6y ago
  While there are some truly staggering examples of US college loan debt, the average loan debt at the end of a 4 year degree in the US is $26k or about the price of a new mid range car. For the majority of people, their total college loan debt is below a single year of their first year annual income out of college and certainly not 5-10x. [1]http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know... Yes. In the UK. I had a relationship with someone who specifically learned German in school, and went to Germany to tutor in a cross-education outreach program after she graduated to go scout for Universities she wanted to attend in order to avoid having to take out massive loans like her siblings did back home. Very smart girl. She and I enrolled into online classes, I had already complete my Bsc but wanted to do this with her; but she felt she was missing on the 'campus life' part of the University experience and went into Pedagogy to the Masters level and now teaches back in the UK. In a post Brexit World, that is just not possible. The EU is still pretty favourable in terms of University costs being hidden and obfuscated via VAT for the students, but many Industries within it's local economy (PIIGS, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia in the Eurozone, and just about most of the periphery member nations) cannot provide adequate jobs let alone a career to its graduates within their sectors so they have to go to Germany, UK, Holland and as things have gotten worse France to a much lesser degree than when I was there. The ideal being landing a job in the US or China where they can make obscene amounts of money in certain fields like Tech or Medicine with little to no debt, and subsidized advance degrees. Which still opens it up to the work visa lottery, and uprooting your life during some the most critical years of your entire Life (late 20s to early 30s) in the hopes it pans out. The best thing that can happen is to disrupt it entirely and level the playing field and re-structure it in such a way that its both affordable and accessible to all motivated to want to go in and meet its requirements. And incentivize them to stay in their home towns a build a solid community and tie it to the needs of its actual needed labor force: hopefully doing away with the notion of studying Civil Engineering for Oil Rig drilling if you're from Iceland kind of thing. As it makes no sense, and doesn't reflect the value system or the job prospects of your community let alone the job prospects of a Nation that is entirely dependent on renewable geo-thermal. How exactly the Lab portion of STEM gets solved is still a mystery. I propose the building auxiliary wet-labs in Libraries within their communities. The net benefit here being that students should be required to teach children and adults of their community the topic or subject they are studying as a graded portion of their grade for the privilege of having such a model and build community in the process. Or perhaps that should be the only real on-campus (at both Universities and Community Colleges) component to what is an otherwise entirely Online system? Just look at this example, which having to attend my midterm and practicals during one of the largest fires in San Diego History (I was literately trapped in my car on my way back home to OC for 7 hours after they closed campus when we were sitting down for the exam as the classroom filled with smoke) and during my finals during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, I can understand this from both sides: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-after-refusing-leniency-to-black-students-on-final-exams/ https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-af... That hot button issue could be entirely mitigated, whether you're pro or against the BLM protests is irrelevant. On just a practical and logistical matter you could just overcome this with the current technology that we have and avoid the certain backlash to the professor, department because of it from the irate student body and opportunistic Media. I saw a rant from a UCLA professor pretty much lining out how he, and his entire profession have not seen a single decrease in pay since he left University in the late 80s as a TA and saw how the CSU/UC extortion system was being assembled in what was once the envy of the entire US' university system--which followed the EU's model pretty well, and was low to no cost if you were local, but had the ability to employ its graduates as the California Economy could support it. Which was a net benefit that significantly contributed to CA becoming the 8th largest economy in the World. I can't seem to find it and really wish I had saved it as the very employees in the system are to the point where they know it went too far. And are perhaps even afraid of what may happen at what an angry mob can do these days.

zo1 6y ago

>"How do we have productive disagreements going forward?" We are barely having any of those right now in the greater society. As long as we can't argue facts, objective-reality and do so without feelings, we'll continue descending into anarchy and divisiveness.

tripzilch 6y ago
US is "the greater society" now??
- zo1 6y ago
  I'm not from or residing in the US. My comment was aimed as commentary on what I can see happening globally.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kerkeslager 6y ago

Your post lacks nuance. Some news is fake, some isn't. Some science is fake, some isn't. Schools are barriers, but for many elements of a school, the fact that it's a barrier is a good thing--we don't want ignorant people performing in roles that where knowledge is required. The problem is that many elements of schools are barriers which are poor at achieving their purpose, or are directly counterproductive to their purpose. > How do we have productive disagreements going forward? That's a complicated question, but oversimplifying the opinions of people we disagree with and then labeling it ("cynical anti-intellectualism") isn't the answer.

dart600 6y ago

Could you please define anti intellectualism by your standards? To me, anti intellectual notions would be just if the initial intentions of a discussion were based on a very rich topic and were dissolved in some manner. I beg a brief and graceful peer review for the poor submissions that likely seek solace in the isolation of a virus infected planet. And at end. In my intention to post, I was solely being altruistic, informing whomever reading that if they were to read this article and consider getting a degree from U of the P that they should consider the risk. Just a gesture. However, I think my writing style might have been misunderstood as some semblance of pseudo intellectual attempt or such. Do know, for the record,that as the 1st to reply to the post, my intention was to inform. But I am intrigued and inspired. How about we both try to post an article that invites our versions of intellectualism! Ready set go.