9 ms·

The Ends of Education

49 points by zwirbl 4y ago

nonrandomstring 4y ago
A good account of the ideological battle still playing out in the UK, particularly the one-dimensional anti-intellectualism of the vacuous financial classes now exclusively constituting the Tory party. Britain's descent from the powerhouse of world-changing ideas to one giant housing estate and Tesco superstore is almost complete.
- defrost 4y ago
  There's some nice highlighting of foot-shoot as a bonus: > The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back. > But it's ideologically suspect to gammons' eyes. Gammons—the Tory party membership, whose support Sunak is canvassing—are predominantly white males aged over 60 living in the South East of England, authoritarian by inclination and well-off but poorly educated.
  - soco 4y ago
    I'd say they are only misusing the power given to them by the apathy of the other categories.
- aqsalose 4y ago
  >Britain's descent from the powerhouse of world-changing ideas to one giant housing estate and Tesco superstore is almost complete. In my limited foreigner's understanding, Britain was "the powerhouse of world-changing ideas" during period that has fuzzy limits but starts maybe around Newton and continues until maybe Turing -- but after WW2, what was left the powerhouse was certainly eclipsed by the US, and after the 1980s, Asiancountries. Maybe one can stretch it bit further after the WW2 if one thinks that popular culture production like Beatles is a worthwhile substitute. [1] How was the education in Britain organized during that era? [1] I don't; AFAIK income distribution in popular culture production is very winner-takes-all top-heavy, much worse than the software income distribution often denigrated as favoring the 10X developers. 10X coders may make much more than a marginal software developer (I am imagining soon-to-graduate CS student who would-be entry-level dev who has difficulties getting the first interview), but I believe it easier for the marginal software developer land a software job that pays the bills than for a marginal would-be musician to land a music job that pays the bills.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > How was the education in Britain organized during that era? Mostly, intensive one-on-one tutoring starting at a very early age. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      That's generally accurate. The heavy hitters, with a few exceptions like Faraday, were of noble ancestry or otherwise privileged. We really need to look to the Americans, to Horace Mann and John Dewey who understood the wider non-functional ends of education; nation building, supporting democracy, living a happy life etc. That fed back into British society mainly post-war, driven by the need to rebuild a devastated society. Today, in our coddled complacency, that seems far away and 'optional'.
- melony 4y ago
  The Tory ministers consist overwhelmingly of PPE grads, I don't think they are truly anti intellectual.
  - moreati 4y ago
    PPE is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_econo... for anyone else unsure
  - n4r9 4y ago
    From what I've read, PPE is geared specifically towards people undertaking careers in politics or the civil service. It's way down on the list of courses whose intellectual value is separate from their economic utility.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rob_c 4y ago
  Hah, loving it. Except I grew up in part of the country with gun violence (yes a UK labour stronghold too), still got a degree, a post doc, a job and a decent income and would never vote labor or green due to their broken policies. (Selling/merging schools, anti nuclear, broken secterian policies to appeal to fringe groups, etc.) Anti intellectualism isn't being driven by tribal politics on this side of the pond so please refrain from spouting such nonsense.
  - n4r9 4y ago
    Anti-intellectualism is a central part of the ideology championed by a party whose ministers express statements like "The people of this country have had enough of experts" and who rail against "metropolitan elites". Your life story - interesting though it is - and a list of policies you disagree with are neither here nor there.
    - rob_c 4y ago
      Again Anti-intellectualism is centre piece in society and has risen to the point if being reveered across the pond asin "being too geeky" having negative connotations. Don't pretend this is a simple matter of party politics, you're not a hammer and this is not a nail. It's a large cross-partisan social ill which is only fixed by people working together not insisting "it's all his fault". The blue are guilty of their own politico-crimes, insider trading, favouritism/nepotism, classism and alike (we could go on), don't go making up justifications for them not being reputable they can do it on their own. Again, rampant anti-intellectualism is party policy of most parties. Greens (anti-nuclear given it's low carbon footprint), Labour (import more people rather than invest in the NHS in the good times by raising taxes), SNP (waa freedom), Brexit/GBP/???(whatever they call themselves, the backbencher OAPs calling for a return to the mythical 'good ol days'). There isn't a single party aspousing anything close to meritocracy. The closest we got to that was cummings who frankly has a lot to answer for, for trusting idiot 'data scientists' who luncheon with him in the boys clubs. He at least drove solid policy based on input from peers, even if it turns out his peers can't tell the difference between the black death and a sniffle.
- klelatti 4y ago
  Part of this is the end of British national capitalism as per David Edgerton [1]. Tory party donors run hedge funds and property portfolios - and have little or no interest in long term industrial and commercial prosperity. Allowing Arm to be sold to the highest bidder was probably the clearest recent expression of this. [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/11/how-britain-was-sold https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/11/how-britain-wa...
andrewclunn 4y ago
Wait, there are still people defending liberal arts degrees as "rounding out a person" in the age of the internet? How quaint. Your children will know more about the humanities, history, natural science, and the arts, and they will do so from watching videos on the internet for fun at no cost... or they'll be absorbed into either the vacuous consumerism of pop entertainment or the indoctrinated pseudo-intellectualism of academia. Personally, if I had to choose, I'd take the former, because at least those idiots aren't insufferably arrogant about their stupidity. The dumbest people I know have PhDs.
- closedloop129 4y ago
  >... in the age of the internet? Your children will *know* more ... Facts vs thinking. Where do you go to learn how to debate and how to structure knowledge?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    indeed. If you get your "facts" off of YouTube, critical thinking skills become ever more important.
  - sanxiyn 4y ago
    I learned how to debate in IRC, not university. These days, people seem to learn how to debate in Discord.
  - bregma 4y ago
    In modern society you're either a consumer or a worker. There is no space for "thinking": that leads to questioning authority and that is not to be tolerated. If you want to learn a useful skill, just attend the same country club your daddy did. That and the legacy is all you need. Education is a good place to drink and get laid but you're not going to need it.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      - Pol Pot from Cambodia - Mao from China's Cultural Revolution - Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey [1] - Joseph Stalin, author of the Great Terror - Adolf Hitler in Poland [2] - Ahmednejad in Iran [3] - And ISIS, in the smoking remains of the Middle East [4] * All agree with you [5] * [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517969 [2] https://www.dw.com/en/the-mass-murder-of-polish-intellectuals-and-the-german-nazis-who-got-away-with-it/a-50815653 https://www.dw.com/en/the-mass-murder-of-polish-intellectual... [3] https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ahmednejad_urges_purge_of_liberal_and_secular_intellectuals/ https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ahmednejad_urges_purge_of_... [4] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis---echoing-the-purges_b_6617588 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis---echoing-the-purges_b_6... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
komadori 4y ago
A 1923 aerospace engineering degree probably is less useful than a 1990 Computer Science degree because more time has elapsed, but I imagine that both would confer useful skills and fundamental knowledge still relevant today. The notion that computers are so fast moving that everything from more than 5 minutes ago is completely irrelevant is only true if you're working with technology at a very shallow level (e.g. "the buttons moved and I had to relearn everything!")
- psi75 4y ago
  I'm in graduate school now, and I took some CS courses in undergrad ~20 years ago, and fundamentals haven't changed as much as the superficial garbage that is all the rage in industry. There are new approaches and capabilities, especially around deep learning (largely because we've replaced the push toward higher clock speeds with a push for parallelism, and almost everything is close enough to a parallel problem that a neural net can do the job), but the fundamental ideas don't change that much because real computer science (as opposed to industry wankery which pays $500,000+ but rots your brain) only accepts ideas when there's at least some evidence they actually work. So, if you studied computer science in 1990 and kept the knowledge up, you'd still know a fair amount of what's relevant today. The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... the real CS is just in place to be an IQ test, a first-line hiring barrier.
  - wildmanx 4y ago
    > The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... You may be going a bit hard on the industry. I see where you're coming from, having a long academic past myself and seeing there is a lot of BS in industry. But there is also a lot of meaningful things in industry and academia is sometimes a little too arrogant about that. Given that you went back to graduate school and are likely a bit frustrated with industry, I can see why you have that stance, but neither extreme is good. Neither is everything in industry just trendy nonsense nor is everything in it the holy grail. There are real problems being solved in industry. That's what produces systems that people actually use, be it mobile phones or server infra or network gear or embedded systems, which after all is the whole point of all this. There is also a lot of trendiness and lots of people who just hack things and don't have a clue. It's not black-and-white. Similar with academia. There is a real benefit to the fundamentals being taught and researched in academia. And there is a lot of nonsense there too, tons of paper produced just to produce papers and get the next grant and stay employed. (If anything, the gatekeeping in academia is way worse than in industry.) Both worlds have their place and it's sad to see disparaging comments from either side about the other one.
yyyk 4y ago
>The stupidest aspect of this is that... he's going to trash arts education funding.... The UK arts sector... one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back. Is there any relationship between arts education funding and the 'arts export industry'? The arts existed long before university and the most successful don't appear to have been trained in a university. Stross himself went to CS and not the arts.
- frobozz 4y ago
  Many successful artists have not undertaken university-level training in their art. However, most of them will have been trained by someone who did. Reduce arts education funding at the highest level and the reduction trickles down to the lowest levels.
- psi75 4y ago
  The problem is that the relationship almost certainly exists, but is impossible to prove. It goes through so many levels of indirection. The people directly rewarded are rarely the ones who actually generate a societal surplus. That doesn't mean no good is being done, though. You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed. Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will. ---- [1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.
raverbashing 4y ago
I totally get what the author is saying, and I mostly agree with him. The arts, the social studies, the courses targeted by this are important At the same time, especially in the US, there's a whole industry dedicated to selling naive young people the idea that they totally should get a $100k student loan for their Harvard Basket Weaving Bachelor's. Or Mongolian Literature. Or for a Cinema Course in Ohio. And then just get another $100k for a subsequent Masters. The problem is of course not in the studies, but on how overpriced they are. And of course the tuition doesn't translate in higher salaries for the faculty (because of course they don't)
netfortius 4y ago
Theology seems to fit this criteria, i.e. highly profitable for those practicing it. No different than the brothers from across the ocean.
rob_c 4y ago
> You can't predict educational outcomes for future employment on the basis of priors ... What was that qualification in again? That's an absurd statement. Best case, I'm assuming the author means you "can't guarantee due to the human factor". But given the rest of the anti conservative jibes littered throughout I doubt it. Edit: loving the blame of all economic woes on Brexit. I don't know a serious supporter who didn't expect a contraction immediately after leaving due to at least market fear. But frankly the massive lockdowns of the last 2 year bare much more responsibility in this "new" reality.
mschuster91 4y ago
> All to a background of trying to push as many people as possible through the institutions of higher education in order to certify that the individuals were sufficiently tractable to obey orders, perform rote tasks, and conform to expectations—necessary prerequisites for employment. FINALLY a good article that mentions this point! Employers have been shifting the risk of selecting an "unfit candidate" - including discriminating against otherwise protected candidate classes, given that people protected by anti-discrimination laws tend to not have university degrees because they simply cannot pass the hurdles - and the cost of basic training to the candidates for decades. It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs.
- psi75 4y ago
  It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs. Under capitalism, it won't. You're right, of course. The purpose of the credentialism is to sustain class barriers. Most of these jobs are brain-dead simple, and quite a large number are unnecessary (see: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs). The reason employers hire overqualified people is actually quite complex. Classical nice-guy management theory ("Theory Y") would argue that it's bad for morale to hire smart people and put them on dumb work, but in practice it turns out that bosses can easily utilize this discomfort by selectively and politically offering more engaging assignments, so the morale hit is offset (from a careerist manager's perspective) by the enhanced power and importance accruing to managers. So, don't expect it to change. Workers will often work extra hard "to prove themselves" (i.e., for free) because they think it was benevolent bureaucratic mishap, rather than deliberate emotional manipulation, that got them placed on work several levels below their actual ability (and thus underpaid and easier to exploit). The truth, though, is that the system only works if the people at the bottom believe meaningful promotion is a real possibility... and indeed, it sometimes (rarely) can be, but for each person who wins, tens or hundreds have to lose, especially given that the few good jobs have already been allocated to progeny of wealthy or connected families. Companies can only get diligent, conscientious work out of people (as opposed to bare-minimum work, over which the associated middle management checking/correcting costs would render them uncompetitive) if they lead people to wildly overestimate their prospects. This requires a whole mythology wherein each hire has to be, at least, a longshot call option on an executive; companies want college graduates in call centers because they want call center managers to work like people who might one day be executives (even though, let's be honest, 99 percent of them won't be) rather than like people who would be better served by leaving at 5:00 on the dot. WFH is set to totally break this. When you WFH, you increase your per-hour productivity by about 150 percent and your total productivity by about 70 percent... but your chance of being promoted to an executive role drops to near zero. You go from spending 50 hours at the office to work a 10-hour week to working about 17 hours in 17 actual spent hours. You're now doing your job duties and probably doing them better than before, but you're snubbing the carrot of promotion into the executive clique. They can no longer entice you with your own office (as opposed to a depressing cubicle or, worse, a seat in an open-plan fartbox) if you already have a home office and a zero commute. So, once you go WFH, you're basically admitting that "work" is not some passion but the depressing trade of one's finite time for a very small amount of money, and this blunt fact about corporate work is so depressing that even executives hate to acknowledge that it is true. So, yeah: don't expect it to change, unless capitalism is overthrown. The corporate system runs entirely on empty, unrealistic promises. The mythology in which every loser paper-pusher might one day be a CEO can only hold if employers demand that even the loser paper-pushers have CEO-able degrees. If they hired at-level for menial jobs, they'd get people who'd probably do the jobs just as well, and for a lower price, but they wouldn't get people who'll do scut work with smiles on their faces and thereby make the bosses actually feel good about themselves.
thriftwy 4y ago
The english-speaking discourse now amusingly mirrors the popular Russian grumbles of 20 years back, such as mourning the collapse of the USSR (Brexit), complaining about George Soros and Bill Gates, and now about the end of the best in the world Soviet (British) high education.
choonway 4y ago
the educational system is there to sort people with something vaguely relevant in the current economy. that is all.
1ncorrect 4y ago
A broadly educated population is toxic to conservative ideologies.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Good education gives you agency. Regular education just gives you conformity and indoctrination by whoever controls education institutions.
aqsalose 4y ago
>Here's an illustrative thought experiment: imagine you have a time machine. Now pick a worker at random from some time and place in the past 5 centuries, and carry them forward by 30 years. will they be able to earn a living? I don't find Stross' thought experiment very convincing. One doesn't need to imagine time travel. A CS graduate from the 1990s who didn't timetravel directly to 2020s but got there regular way and didn't do anything to update their skills during those years would find themselves with equal difficulties in job market than the time-traveler. (edit: Or worse difficulties.) That is why it is a good idea to continuously develop ones skills. However, on much shorter timescales, say, 5 years, one can make a reasonable guess what kind of degree is more likely to result in gainful employment after graduation than other. A degree doesn't equip one for a job, but a useful one results in one enough understanding of some field that one obtains, should I say, a fighting chance or more to equip oneself for a job related to the field. And having a job often results in better chances to learn more and further equip oneself for one's next job. Then in a later part of the blog post Stross argues that as arts sector is today very profitable to the UK, it warrants continued government support for arts education. This strikes me a bit inconsistent with his earlier claim that prediction of the future need for skilled jobs from the current state is impossible. A better argument would be that it is possible that arts are going to be more useful than STEM in the future, and it would be unwise to cease arts degrees. It has certain ring of truth to it. However, I came under impression that Stross is in favor of keeping the number of arts degrees at the same level or increasing their amount, but if we take "impossibility of prediction" seriously, there is no telling the current amount -- or higher amount, or lower amount -- of arts degrees awarded is any better in 30 years either. I am not sure the education allocation is best done by the government giving commands how many artists and engineers are needed to be trained (or given subsidies to be trained, or whatever). If that choice is for each individual to decide without government planners intervening, they at least have some idea of their personal talents, wishes, and circumstances than either Rishi Sunak or Charlie Stross.
efitz 4y ago
I rarely say this and I like antipope but this analysis is ignorant. He’s right that university degrees have become a Ponzi scheme. Likely privatization of university had something to do with that, albeit indirectly. Anything financed by debt needs to have value that equals or exceeds the debt, for the life of the debt. The inflation in education prices has dramatically outpaced the value of the education, for many degrees, especially in the arts. He’s right that skills become obsolete much more quickly these days, but he’s wrong in assuming/implying that the degree still has value, esp value exceeding the debt, for any degree. No where is this more apparent as in arts degrees, particularly in the humanities. Graduates with these degrees end up with lower incomes (and lower rates of employment) than graduates with science degrees. It seems to me that with rising cost of degrees that many one involved with funding an education should look at future value of the degree as a significant decision criterion. Additionally, there is politics involved as many humanities departments have adopted increasingly left-of-center ideologies. So of course conservatives are going to criticize and target that. Note that I’m not interested in arguing the merits/correctness of such ideology, but I can understand why people who disagree with an ideology would be reticent to fund places that promote such ideology. So it’s not just “conservatives are bad and stupid” as TFA implies; and I don’t think that the article was either accurate or fair in its conclusions. [ed] s/find/fund/g
mihaic 4y ago
> Art, by its very nature, can't be conformist. So they hate it and have no use for it, and it's easy to rally them against "liberal arts" long-hairs. This places the blame entirely on the masses, while ignoring the harm that ivory-tower teaching has done to alienate the general population. The Academic style taught 100 years ago was beautiful by most people's standards, while today that's been abandoned. I agree that we need more general education, yet has failed to prove to the general public that it can provide this.
xtiansimon 4y ago
Sounds like Stross is calling ‘Nazi’ on Sunak.

49 points by zwirbl 4y ago

A good account of the ideological battle still playing out in the UK, particularly the one-dimensional anti-intellectualism of the vacuous financial classes now exclusively constituting the Tory party. Britain's descent from the powerhouse of world-changing ideas to one giant housing estate and Tesco superstore is almost complete.

defrost 4y ago
There's some nice highlighting of foot-shoot as a bonus: > The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back. > But it's ideologically suspect to gammons' eyes. Gammons—the Tory party membership, whose support Sunak is canvassing—are predominantly white males aged over 60 living in the South East of England, authoritarian by inclination and well-off but poorly educated.
- soco 4y ago
  I'd say they are only misusing the power given to them by the apathy of the other categories.
aqsalose 4y ago
>Britain's descent from the powerhouse of world-changing ideas to one giant housing estate and Tesco superstore is almost complete. In my limited foreigner's understanding, Britain was "the powerhouse of world-changing ideas" during period that has fuzzy limits but starts maybe around Newton and continues until maybe Turing -- but after WW2, what was left the powerhouse was certainly eclipsed by the US, and after the 1980s, Asiancountries. Maybe one can stretch it bit further after the WW2 if one thinks that popular culture production like Beatles is a worthwhile substitute. [1] How was the education in Britain organized during that era? [1] I don't; AFAIK income distribution in popular culture production is very winner-takes-all top-heavy, much worse than the software income distribution often denigrated as favoring the 10X developers. 10X coders may make much more than a marginal software developer (I am imagining soon-to-graduate CS student who would-be entry-level dev who has difficulties getting the first interview), but I believe it easier for the marginal software developer land a software job that pays the bills than for a marginal would-be musician to land a music job that pays the bills.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > How was the education in Britain organized during that era? Mostly, intensive one-on-one tutoring starting at a very early age. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    That's generally accurate. The heavy hitters, with a few exceptions like Faraday, were of noble ancestry or otherwise privileged. We really need to look to the Americans, to Horace Mann and John Dewey who understood the wider non-functional ends of education; nation building, supporting democracy, living a happy life etc. That fed back into British society mainly post-war, driven by the need to rebuild a devastated society. Today, in our coddled complacency, that seems far away and 'optional'.
melony 4y ago
The Tory ministers consist overwhelmingly of PPE grads, I don't think they are truly anti intellectual.
- moreati 4y ago
  PPE is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_econo... for anyone else unsure
- n4r9 4y ago
  From what I've read, PPE is geared specifically towards people undertaking careers in politics or the civil service. It's way down on the list of courses whose intellectual value is separate from their economic utility.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rob_c 4y ago
Hah, loving it. Except I grew up in part of the country with gun violence (yes a UK labour stronghold too), still got a degree, a post doc, a job and a decent income and would never vote labor or green due to their broken policies. (Selling/merging schools, anti nuclear, broken secterian policies to appeal to fringe groups, etc.) Anti intellectualism isn't being driven by tribal politics on this side of the pond so please refrain from spouting such nonsense.
- n4r9 4y ago
  Anti-intellectualism is a central part of the ideology championed by a party whose ministers express statements like "The people of this country have had enough of experts" and who rail against "metropolitan elites". Your life story - interesting though it is - and a list of policies you disagree with are neither here nor there.
  - rob_c 4y ago
    Again Anti-intellectualism is centre piece in society and has risen to the point if being reveered across the pond asin "being too geeky" having negative connotations. Don't pretend this is a simple matter of party politics, you're not a hammer and this is not a nail. It's a large cross-partisan social ill which is only fixed by people working together not insisting "it's all his fault". The blue are guilty of their own politico-crimes, insider trading, favouritism/nepotism, classism and alike (we could go on), don't go making up justifications for them not being reputable they can do it on their own. Again, rampant anti-intellectualism is party policy of most parties. Greens (anti-nuclear given it's low carbon footprint), Labour (import more people rather than invest in the NHS in the good times by raising taxes), SNP (waa freedom), Brexit/GBP/???(whatever they call themselves, the backbencher OAPs calling for a return to the mythical 'good ol days'). There isn't a single party aspousing anything close to meritocracy. The closest we got to that was cummings who frankly has a lot to answer for, for trusting idiot 'data scientists' who luncheon with him in the boys clubs. He at least drove solid policy based on input from peers, even if it turns out his peers can't tell the difference between the black death and a sniffle.
klelatti 4y ago
Part of this is the end of British national capitalism as per David Edgerton [1]. Tory party donors run hedge funds and property portfolios - and have little or no interest in long term industrial and commercial prosperity. Allowing Arm to be sold to the highest bidder was probably the clearest recent expression of this. [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/11/how-britain-was-sold https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/11/how-britain-wa...

andrewclunn 4y ago

Wait, there are still people defending liberal arts degrees as "rounding out a person" in the age of the internet? How quaint. Your children will know more about the humanities, history, natural science, and the arts, and they will do so from watching videos on the internet for fun at no cost... or they'll be absorbed into either the vacuous consumerism of pop entertainment or the indoctrinated pseudo-intellectualism of academia. Personally, if I had to choose, I'd take the former, because at least those idiots aren't insufferably arrogant about their stupidity. The dumbest people I know have PhDs.

closedloop129 4y ago
>... in the age of the internet? Your children will *know* more ... Facts vs thinking. Where do you go to learn how to debate and how to structure knowledge?
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  indeed. If you get your "facts" off of YouTube, critical thinking skills become ever more important.
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  I learned how to debate in IRC, not university. These days, people seem to learn how to debate in Discord.
- bregma 4y ago
  In modern society you're either a consumer or a worker. There is no space for "thinking": that leads to questioning authority and that is not to be tolerated. If you want to learn a useful skill, just attend the same country club your daddy did. That and the legacy is all you need. Education is a good place to drink and get laid but you're not going to need it.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    - Pol Pot from Cambodia - Mao from China's Cultural Revolution - Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey [1] - Joseph Stalin, author of the Great Terror - Adolf Hitler in Poland [2] - Ahmednejad in Iran [3] - And ISIS, in the smoking remains of the Middle East [4] * All agree with you [5] * [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517969 [2] https://www.dw.com/en/the-mass-murder-of-polish-intellectuals-and-the-german-nazis-who-got-away-with-it/a-50815653 https://www.dw.com/en/the-mass-murder-of-polish-intellectual... [3] https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ahmednejad_urges_purge_of_liberal_and_secular_intellectuals/ https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ahmednejad_urges_purge_of_... [4] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis---echoing-the-purges_b_6617588 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis---echoing-the-purges_b_6... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism

komadori 4y ago

A 1923 aerospace engineering degree probably is less useful than a 1990 Computer Science degree because more time has elapsed, but I imagine that both would confer useful skills and fundamental knowledge still relevant today. The notion that computers are so fast moving that everything from more than 5 minutes ago is completely irrelevant is only true if you're working with technology at a very shallow level (e.g. "the buttons moved and I had to relearn everything!")

psi75 4y ago
I'm in graduate school now, and I took some CS courses in undergrad ~20 years ago, and fundamentals haven't changed as much as the superficial garbage that is all the rage in industry. There are new approaches and capabilities, especially around deep learning (largely because we've replaced the push toward higher clock speeds with a push for parallelism, and almost everything is close enough to a parallel problem that a neural net can do the job), but the fundamental ideas don't change that much because real computer science (as opposed to industry wankery which pays $500,000+ but rots your brain) only accepts ideas when there's at least some evidence they actually work. So, if you studied computer science in 1990 and kept the knowledge up, you'd still know a fair amount of what's relevant today. The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... the real CS is just in place to be an IQ test, a first-line hiring barrier.
- wildmanx 4y ago
  > The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... You may be going a bit hard on the industry. I see where you're coming from, having a long academic past myself and seeing there is a lot of BS in industry. But there is also a lot of meaningful things in industry and academia is sometimes a little too arrogant about that. Given that you went back to graduate school and are likely a bit frustrated with industry, I can see why you have that stance, but neither extreme is good. Neither is everything in industry just trendy nonsense nor is everything in it the holy grail. There are real problems being solved in industry. That's what produces systems that people actually use, be it mobile phones or server infra or network gear or embedded systems, which after all is the whole point of all this. There is also a lot of trendiness and lots of people who just hack things and don't have a clue. It's not black-and-white. Similar with academia. There is a real benefit to the fundamentals being taught and researched in academia. And there is a lot of nonsense there too, tons of paper produced just to produce papers and get the next grant and stay employed. (If anything, the gatekeeping in academia is way worse than in industry.) Both worlds have their place and it's sad to see disparaging comments from either side about the other one.

yyyk 4y ago

>The stupidest aspect of this is that... he's going to trash arts education funding.... The UK arts sector... one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back. Is there any relationship between arts education funding and the 'arts export industry'? The arts existed long before university and the most successful don't appear to have been trained in a university. Stross himself went to CS and not the arts.

frobozz 4y ago
Many successful artists have not undertaken university-level training in their art. However, most of them will have been trained by someone who did. Reduce arts education funding at the highest level and the reduction trickles down to the lowest levels.
psi75 4y ago
The problem is that the relationship almost certainly exists, but is impossible to prove. It goes through so many levels of indirection. The people directly rewarded are rarely the ones who actually generate a societal surplus. That doesn't mean no good is being done, though. You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed. Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will. ---- [1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.

raverbashing 4y ago

I totally get what the author is saying, and I mostly agree with him. The arts, the social studies, the courses targeted by this are important At the same time, especially in the US, there's a whole industry dedicated to selling naive young people the idea that they totally should get a $100k student loan for their Harvard Basket Weaving Bachelor's. Or Mongolian Literature. Or for a Cinema Course in Ohio. And then just get another $100k for a subsequent Masters. The problem is of course not in the studies, but on how overpriced they are. And of course the tuition doesn't translate in higher salaries for the faculty (because of course they don't)

netfortius 4y ago

Theology seems to fit this criteria, i.e. highly profitable for those practicing it. No different than the brothers from across the ocean.

rob_c 4y ago

> You can't predict educational outcomes for future employment on the basis of priors ... What was that qualification in again? That's an absurd statement. Best case, I'm assuming the author means you "can't guarantee due to the human factor". But given the rest of the anti conservative jibes littered throughout I doubt it. Edit: loving the blame of all economic woes on Brexit. I don't know a serious supporter who didn't expect a contraction immediately after leaving due to at least market fear. But frankly the massive lockdowns of the last 2 year bare much more responsibility in this "new" reality.

mschuster91 4y ago

> All to a background of trying to push as many people as possible through the institutions of higher education in order to certify that the individuals were sufficiently tractable to obey orders, perform rote tasks, and conform to expectations—necessary prerequisites for employment. FINALLY a good article that mentions this point! Employers have been shifting the risk of selecting an "unfit candidate" - including discriminating against otherwise protected candidate classes, given that people protected by anti-discrimination laws tend to not have university degrees because they simply cannot pass the hurdles - and the cost of basic training to the candidates for decades. It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs.

psi75 4y ago
It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs. Under capitalism, it won't. You're right, of course. The purpose of the credentialism is to sustain class barriers. Most of these jobs are brain-dead simple, and quite a large number are unnecessary (see: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs). The reason employers hire overqualified people is actually quite complex. Classical nice-guy management theory ("Theory Y") would argue that it's bad for morale to hire smart people and put them on dumb work, but in practice it turns out that bosses can easily utilize this discomfort by selectively and politically offering more engaging assignments, so the morale hit is offset (from a careerist manager's perspective) by the enhanced power and importance accruing to managers. So, don't expect it to change. Workers will often work extra hard "to prove themselves" (i.e., for free) because they think it was benevolent bureaucratic mishap, rather than deliberate emotional manipulation, that got them placed on work several levels below their actual ability (and thus underpaid and easier to exploit). The truth, though, is that the system only works if the people at the bottom believe meaningful promotion is a real possibility... and indeed, it sometimes (rarely) can be, but for each person who wins, tens or hundreds have to lose, especially given that the few good jobs have already been allocated to progeny of wealthy or connected families. Companies can only get diligent, conscientious work out of people (as opposed to bare-minimum work, over which the associated middle management checking/correcting costs would render them uncompetitive) if they lead people to wildly overestimate their prospects. This requires a whole mythology wherein each hire has to be, at least, a longshot call option on an executive; companies want college graduates in call centers because they want call center managers to work like people who might one day be executives (even though, let's be honest, 99 percent of them won't be) rather than like people who would be better served by leaving at 5:00 on the dot. WFH is set to totally break this. When you WFH, you increase your per-hour productivity by about 150 percent and your total productivity by about 70 percent... but your chance of being promoted to an executive role drops to near zero. You go from spending 50 hours at the office to work a 10-hour week to working about 17 hours in 17 actual spent hours. You're now doing your job duties and probably doing them better than before, but you're snubbing the carrot of promotion into the executive clique. They can no longer entice you with your own office (as opposed to a depressing cubicle or, worse, a seat in an open-plan fartbox) if you already have a home office and a zero commute. So, once you go WFH, you're basically admitting that "work" is not some passion but the depressing trade of one's finite time for a very small amount of money, and this blunt fact about corporate work is so depressing that even executives hate to acknowledge that it is true. So, yeah: don't expect it to change, unless capitalism is overthrown. The corporate system runs entirely on empty, unrealistic promises. The mythology in which every loser paper-pusher might one day be a CEO can only hold if employers demand that even the loser paper-pushers have CEO-able degrees. If they hired at-level for menial jobs, they'd get people who'd probably do the jobs just as well, and for a lower price, but they wouldn't get people who'll do scut work with smiles on their faces and thereby make the bosses actually feel good about themselves.

thriftwy 4y ago

The english-speaking discourse now amusingly mirrors the popular Russian grumbles of 20 years back, such as mourning the collapse of the USSR (Brexit), complaining about George Soros and Bill Gates, and now about the end of the best in the world Soviet (British) high education.

choonway 4y ago

the educational system is there to sort people with something vaguely relevant in the current economy. that is all.

1ncorrect 4y ago

A broadly educated population is toxic to conservative ideologies.

hoseja 4y ago
Good education gives you agency. Regular education just gives you conformity and indoctrination by whoever controls education institutions.

aqsalose 4y ago

>Here's an illustrative thought experiment: imagine you have a time machine. Now pick a worker at random from some time and place in the past 5 centuries, and carry them forward by 30 years. will they be able to earn a living? I don't find Stross' thought experiment very convincing. One doesn't need to imagine time travel. A CS graduate from the 1990s who didn't timetravel directly to 2020s but got there regular way and didn't do anything to update their skills during those years would find themselves with equal difficulties in job market than the time-traveler. (edit: Or worse difficulties.) That is why it is a good idea to continuously develop ones skills. However, on much shorter timescales, say, 5 years, one can make a reasonable guess what kind of degree is more likely to result in gainful employment after graduation than other. A degree doesn't equip one for a job, but a useful one results in one enough understanding of some field that one obtains, should I say, a fighting chance or more to equip oneself for a job related to the field. And having a job often results in better chances to learn more and further equip oneself for one's next job. Then in a later part of the blog post Stross argues that as arts sector is today very profitable to the UK, it warrants continued government support for arts education. This strikes me a bit inconsistent with his earlier claim that prediction of the future need for skilled jobs from the current state is impossible. A better argument would be that it is possible that arts are going to be more useful than STEM in the future, and it would be unwise to cease arts degrees. It has certain ring of truth to it. However, I came under impression that Stross is in favor of keeping the number of arts degrees at the same level or increasing their amount, but if we take "impossibility of prediction" seriously, there is no telling the current amount -- or higher amount, or lower amount -- of arts degrees awarded is any better in 30 years either. I am not sure the education allocation is best done by the government giving commands how many artists and engineers are needed to be trained (or given subsidies to be trained, or whatever). If that choice is for each individual to decide without government planners intervening, they at least have some idea of their personal talents, wishes, and circumstances than either Rishi Sunak or Charlie Stross.

efitz 4y ago

I rarely say this and I like antipope but this analysis is ignorant. He’s right that university degrees have become a Ponzi scheme. Likely privatization of university had something to do with that, albeit indirectly. Anything financed by debt needs to have value that equals or exceeds the debt, for the life of the debt. The inflation in education prices has dramatically outpaced the value of the education, for many degrees, especially in the arts. He’s right that skills become obsolete much more quickly these days, but he’s wrong in assuming/implying that the degree still has value, esp value exceeding the debt, for any degree. No where is this more apparent as in arts degrees, particularly in the humanities. Graduates with these degrees end up with lower incomes (and lower rates of employment) than graduates with science degrees. It seems to me that with rising cost of degrees that many one involved with funding an education should look at future value of the degree as a significant decision criterion. Additionally, there is politics involved as many humanities departments have adopted increasingly left-of-center ideologies. So of course conservatives are going to criticize and target that. Note that I’m not interested in arguing the merits/correctness of such ideology, but I can understand why people who disagree with an ideology would be reticent to fund places that promote such ideology. So it’s not just “conservatives are bad and stupid” as TFA implies; and I don’t think that the article was either accurate or fair in its conclusions. [ed] s/find/fund/g

mihaic 4y ago

> Art, by its very nature, can't be conformist. So they hate it and have no use for it, and it's easy to rally them against "liberal arts" long-hairs. This places the blame entirely on the masses, while ignoring the harm that ivory-tower teaching has done to alienate the general population. The Academic style taught 100 years ago was beautiful by most people's standards, while today that's been abandoned. I agree that we need more general education, yet has failed to prove to the general public that it can provide this.

xtiansimon 4y ago

Sounds like Stross is calling ‘Nazi’ on Sunak.