3 ms·

NPR Syndrome

10 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

parfe 15y ago
Care to include any examples? You wrote a long winded rant without any substance. I took a look around the http://www.npr.org/sections/news/ http://www.npr.org/sections/news/ and didn't find anything that came close to your straw man. Meanwhile your characterization of http://www.npr.org/music/ http://www.npr.org/music/ is a complete joke. Just glance at the categories of music NPR covers in the various colored tabs. I suppose a kind reading of your writing would be that you misunderstand what you are hearing when your local classical station syndicates NPR content.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  The point is that we listen to NPR because it is a way of posturing, not that the music is only classical. The argument is about cargo cult intellectualism. NPR is great for what it is -- but the discussion here is about the way it fits into society, not the types of music it offers. I'm not sure exactly what your question is. Am I to provide examples of social posturing and signalling? Aren't they fairly well-understood phenomenon?
  - parfe 15y ago
    You made the claim NPR Syndrome exists yet provide no examples besides hearing classical music discussed and a made up straw-man news story about Global Warming and puppies. Then tell me I should just assume NPR Syndrome exists because you need it to for the rest of your piece to hold up? I don't think so. Especially when finding examples hosted on NPR's own website should be trivial. Not to mention your vomit inducing caricature from Good Will Hunting generalized to a liberal arts education; reminds me of people claiming Steve Jobs and Bill Gates represent great role models for college freshman to follow and go drop out to strike out on their own. You basically set up the article just so that you can argue against what you believe is the liberal intellectual poser who only exists in your head because it fits your political world view.
- StuffMaster 15y ago
  It may be his local affiliate that plays the classical music.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    Indeed. Where I live I have three public radio/NPR stations. One has several music shows, one has a couple, and one has none (maybe Soundprints at 3am Monday mornings).
pavel_lishin 15y ago
Not particularly relevant, but I've stopped listening to NPR in fear that Diane Rehm will come on and attempt to slowly murder me with her murder voice.
- rhizome 15y ago
  It's called Spasmodic Dysphonia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia
_pius 15y ago
I like much of your writing Daniel, but I found this piece to be way off the mark. You're conflating political liberalism and liberal arts ... with disastrous results.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Thanks for the comment. Can you elaborate? Like most mistakes, the person making it is always the last to see it. My point was that the facade that a liberal arts education brings is many (not all) times associated with a set of behaviors: NPR, certain websites, ability to reason about economics, etc. My point is that to most people dropping 80K or more on an education, the only thing they're getting is a pre-canned set of attitudes and opinions, which is not supposed to be the goal of a liberal arts education at all. So yes, I am conflating them, but that's by design, not accident. Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer?
  - rhizome 15y ago
    Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer? You could get a good jump on this by excising all of the sentences where you talk about what you're not doing.
    - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
      The problem here is that there is a larger political argument, which I acknowledge but really don't want to participate in, which goes something like college only exists to indoctrinate young liberals. As you can see from one of the other commenters on this article, people take it like that whether I mean it that way or not. I find this statement to be true, but an oversimplification, and it's not my point at all. I think what we're really seeing is a sociological phenomenon: teaching people to appear as if they've learned something instead of actually teaching them anything. I find this deeper point to be much more important. You might find the same thing at right-leaning universities -- perhaps. (Although there is an interesting inverse relationship on the right. Perhaps at right-leaning universities you would find students who pose as tolerant and worldly yet have no idea why they do so? It bears study.) Not an excuse for not doing a rewrite, but I wanted to point out that there is a fine line here, hence the "I'm not saying" text. (Still needs a rewrite. Your point is well made. Thank you.)
wyclif 15y ago
We're teaching people to put on the affectation of being smart, of having the right opinions, being upset at the right things, listening to the right radio stations, hanging out with the right crowd -- with actually being smart. I think you meant without rather than with, and I believe your argumentation could be cleaned up a lot. Overall though, I agree that there has been a loss of content in liberal education. One can observe this in any English or Philosophy department at liberal universities, where it's de rigeur to assign a commentary on Plato rather than read his writings, or instead of becoming familiar with the political and religious views of Lady Jane Grey herself, we read a discourse by someone invested in enforcing gender tallying and political correctness. Not exactly a new observation, but one confirmed by books such as The Closing of the American Mind.

parfe 15y ago

Care to include any examples? You wrote a long winded rant without any substance. I took a look around the http://www.npr.org/sections/news/ http://www.npr.org/sections/news/ and didn't find anything that came close to your straw man. Meanwhile your characterization of http://www.npr.org/music/ http://www.npr.org/music/ is a complete joke. Just glance at the categories of music NPR covers in the various colored tabs. I suppose a kind reading of your writing would be that you misunderstand what you are hearing when your local classical station syndicates NPR content.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
The point is that we listen to NPR because it is a way of posturing, not that the music is only classical. The argument is about cargo cult intellectualism. NPR is great for what it is -- but the discussion here is about the way it fits into society, not the types of music it offers. I'm not sure exactly what your question is. Am I to provide examples of social posturing and signalling? Aren't they fairly well-understood phenomenon?
- parfe 15y ago
  You made the claim NPR Syndrome exists yet provide no examples besides hearing classical music discussed and a made up straw-man news story about Global Warming and puppies. Then tell me I should just assume NPR Syndrome exists because you need it to for the rest of your piece to hold up? I don't think so. Especially when finding examples hosted on NPR's own website should be trivial. Not to mention your vomit inducing caricature from Good Will Hunting generalized to a liberal arts education; reminds me of people claiming Steve Jobs and Bill Gates represent great role models for college freshman to follow and go drop out to strike out on their own. You basically set up the article just so that you can argue against what you believe is the liberal intellectual poser who only exists in your head because it fits your political world view.
StuffMaster 15y ago
It may be his local affiliate that plays the classical music.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Indeed. Where I live I have three public radio/NPR stations. One has several music shows, one has a couple, and one has none (maybe Soundprints at 3am Monday mornings).

pavel_lishin 15y ago

Not particularly relevant, but I've stopped listening to NPR in fear that Diane Rehm will come on and attempt to slowly murder me with her murder voice.

rhizome 15y ago
It's called Spasmodic Dysphonia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia

_pius 15y ago

I like much of your writing Daniel, but I found this piece to be way off the mark. You're conflating political liberalism and liberal arts ... with disastrous results.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Thanks for the comment. Can you elaborate? Like most mistakes, the person making it is always the last to see it. My point was that the facade that a liberal arts education brings is many (not all) times associated with a set of behaviors: NPR, certain websites, ability to reason about economics, etc. My point is that to most people dropping 80K or more on an education, the only thing they're getting is a pre-canned set of attitudes and opinions, which is not supposed to be the goal of a liberal arts education at all. So yes, I am conflating them, but that's by design, not accident. Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer?
- rhizome 15y ago
  Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer? You could get a good jump on this by excising all of the sentences where you talk about what you're not doing.
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    The problem here is that there is a larger political argument, which I acknowledge but really don't want to participate in, which goes something like college only exists to indoctrinate young liberals. As you can see from one of the other commenters on this article, people take it like that whether I mean it that way or not. I find this statement to be true, but an oversimplification, and it's not my point at all. I think what we're really seeing is a sociological phenomenon: teaching people to appear as if they've learned something instead of actually teaching them anything. I find this deeper point to be much more important. You might find the same thing at right-leaning universities -- perhaps. (Although there is an interesting inverse relationship on the right. Perhaps at right-leaning universities you would find students who pose as tolerant and worldly yet have no idea why they do so? It bears study.) Not an excuse for not doing a rewrite, but I wanted to point out that there is a fine line here, hence the "I'm not saying" text. (Still needs a rewrite. Your point is well made. Thank you.)

wyclif 15y ago

We're teaching people to put on the affectation of being smart, of having the right opinions, being upset at the right things, listening to the right radio stations, hanging out with the right crowd -- with actually being smart. I think you meant without rather than with, and I believe your argumentation could be cleaned up a lot. Overall though, I agree that there has been a loss of content in liberal education. One can observe this in any English or Philosophy department at liberal universities, where it's de rigeur to assign a commentary on Plato rather than read his writings, or instead of becoming familiar with the political and religious views of Lady Jane Grey herself, we read a discourse by someone invested in enforcing gender tallying and political correctness. Not exactly a new observation, but one confirmed by books such as The Closing of the American Mind.