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I think the problem is pretty human. (or maybe I'm exposing my weaker moral character than the rest of you upstanding citizens). I think the vast majority of
by goldcd 6y ago
I think the problem is pretty human.
(or maybe I'm exposing my weaker moral character than the rest of you upstanding citizens).
I think the vast majority of people who have entered some program of learning, want to 'learn' - and will try to.
Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself backed into a corner. Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose?
What's strange is that the moment you leave academia, suddenly this behaviour is acceptable. From the "Fake it 'til you make it" in acclaimed books, to the "carefully positioned demo that wireframes over the chasms to focus on the bit that exists - but you fully intend to fix the rest if the budget appears"
There's some collective cognitive dissonance that imagines all are equal, they go through the same trials of education (ignoring what people can afford, whether they have to work another job, they're commuting in from miles away and a thousand other variables) - but they can all be compared by their meritocratic grade at the end.
(before they enter the cess-pit of the working world).
I've reached the point where I've even lost my own point. Maybe it's just that the person who managed to cheat themselves to a pass against a barrage of technology, unveiled at the last moment, is a more rounded and useful person than the one that swallowed the book and scraped a pass.
- salawat 6y ago>Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose? This is almost the critical pass/fail decision in my opinion, because in the real world, on actually difficult or unsolved problems the correct decision is to escalate, clearly communicate you have an issue, and either be directed to someone who can get you unstuck, or inform resource allocators that additional resources will be required to fulfill their request. There is nothing more destructive to organized, value producing work than to vouchsafe that it's a'ok hunky dory when it isn't. I'm pretty sure I made it through some of my own coursework by the skin of my teeth because I could at least describe in enough detail where I was coming up short that the instructor had confidence that with more time and experience I'd get it. At least, I think. I'm still a bit fuzzy on thoss last couple years of college from the sleep deprivation. I get bits and pieces of lucidity in between the recollections of "Oh God, I need sleep." Theoretical Comp Sci is still "that one class I'm not sure if I really got anything good out of besides intuition into what is and is not a candidate for being computible", and Linear Algebra was "I've killed more trees writing out the work for these problems than anyone should reasonably have to."
- ivan_ah 6y ago> "I've killed more trees writing out the work for these problems than anyone should reasonably have to." Lol... so true. Some procedures take forever. Like finding the eigenvectors of a 3x3 matrix, for example. First the eigenvalues calculation, then for each eigenvalue there is a nullspace problem. Some trees will be hurt for sure!
- salawat 6y agoI still look back on those notebooks sometimes, and contemplate doing a refresher problem or two. Then I realize I have no trees in my yard, and that I should correct that.
- wishinghand 6y ago> Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself backed into a corner. Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose? I wonder if the extreme cost of university in the USA worsens this? If education was cheaper they might lament the lost time as opposed to lost time and a lot more money.